On the Lvov School and Methods of Psychological Cognition

Abstract

The Polish academic psychology derives from the descriptive (Franz Brentano) as well as the experimental and physiological psychology (Wilhelm Wundt), which dominated Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. These trends were encountered by the first Lvov psychologists—Władysław Witwicki, Stefan Baley, Stefan Błachowski, Mieczysław Kreutz—they chose their academic paths consistently following their Master and the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School, Kazimierz Twardowski. Following a short description of major academic achievements of the aforementioned representatives of the Lvov School (in the context of subsequent stages of its development), the chapter focuses on presentation of preferred methods of psychological cognition. Introspection was considered to be the direct and obvious source of knowledge about mental life, as sensations and experiences are always ‘someone’s’ and are felt by ‘someone’. Attempts were made to mitigate introspection constraints via applying the experimental method and the object method, consisting in interpreting facts of somebody else’s mental life. These methods, which referred to Twardowski’s theory of actions and products, constituted the basis on which the Lvov psychological laboratory was functioning. One of the principles followed in its work was the conservative and critical approach to the test-mania that infested the world in the first decades of the twentieth century. This saved Poland from being flooded with tests, and at the same time it changed the attitude of academic psychologists to psychological practice, and initiated actions aimed at establishing the psychologist profession and specifying a model of communication between a psychologist and his or her patients. Methodological achievements of the Lvov School of Psychology also include skilful application of the analytical method according to the idea that any phenomenon should first be clearly, explicitly and reliably described before it can be explained. The result of the methodological soundness of the Lvov School was the ethos consisting in an inquisitive approach to the subject and the tools of psychological cognition.