Faculty Psychology

Faculty psychologists (or philosophers) are those who refer to various men- tal abilities or powers in their descriptions of the mind. Through the years, faculty psychology has often been misunderstood or misrepresented. Fre- quently, it has been alleged that faculty psycholo- gists believed that a faculty of the mind was housed in a specific location in the brain. Except for the phrenologists (see Chapter 8), however, this was sel- dom the case. It was also alleged that faculties were postulated instead of explaining a complex mental phenomenon. People perceive, for example, because they have the faculty of perception. However, it was seldom the case that faculty theorists used the fac- ulties to explain mental phenomena. Most often the term faculty denoted a mental ability of some type, and that was all:

The word “faculty” was in frequent use in 17th century discussions of the mind. Locke himself used it freely, being care- ful to point out that the word denoted simply a “power” or “ability” to perform a given sort of action (such as perceiving or remembering), that it did not denote later associationists as they sought to recon- cile rationalism and empiricism with respect to moral philosophy. In time, Reid’s work became the foundation for what has been called the “Scottish School” of psychology, a prominent movement within the universities and among Protestant theologians. In part because they wrote in English, advocates of this tradition also provided the basis of the earliest American aca- demic views on psychology.