The positivist repudiation of Wundt

TLDR

Abstract

Near the turn of the century, younger psychologists like Külpe, Titchener, and Ebbinghaus began to base their definition of psychology on the positivist philosophy of science represented by Mach and Avenarius, a development that was strongly opposed by Wundt. Psychology was redefined as a natural science concerned with phenomena in their dependence on a physical organism. Wundt's central concepts of voluntarism, value, and psychic causality were rejected as metaphysical. For psychological theory this resulted in a turn away from Wundt's emphasis on the dynamic and central nature of psychological processes toward sensationalism and processes anchored in the observable periphery of the organism. Behaviorism represents a logical development of this point of view.