Are Individual Persons Motivated to Construct Categories or Do They Merely Intend Meanings?

Abstract

The problem of explanation in the psychology of personality has been what to do with the irreducible matter of the individual’s experience of the world. If such experience is solely individual, it is central to the definition of the individual, but impossible for others to study directly. Accordingly, in the name of scientific psychology, the related problems of how a person selects the objects of his experience, and what originates the selection have been separated and cast in what Max Meyer described as the “psychology of the other one” (Woodworth, 1918). In such a psychology, the onlooker can observe an impetus (stimulus) presumably impinging on the mental act of selection, and infer further from the behavioral outcome of the impetus. The experience of originating and constructing a mental object is in a separate province, locked within the walls of the individual.