Chapter 1: The Principle of Determinism and a Psychological Theory of Thinking

The purpose of this work is to set out a general outline for a psychological theory of thinking. We will preface the theory of thinking with a few general considerations about the construction of a psychological theory. A theory of any phenomena, including mental ones, is intended to uncover the laws that control those phenomena. Every theory is therefore based on a certain understanding of the determination of the phenomena in question. The concept of determinism is often associated with the doctrine of mechanism that dominated science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It derived from the concept of cause as an external impetus that directly determined an effect that it produced in another body or phenomenon. This mechanistic theory of determinism only apparently, with some approximation, could be applied in classical mechanics to the mechanical motion of a point, but it turned out that in that form it was not always applicable to quantum mechanics. The mechanistic theory is clearly unable to provide an adequate explanation of the phenomena of organic life, where a single stimulus yields different effects in relation to organisms with different properties and in relation to the same organism in different conditions. The effect of an external stimulus depends on the internal state of the organism on which the stimulus is acting. This postulate, which pertains to all organic phenomena, is even more valid in regard to mental phenomena. We will follow the path of a dialectical-materialist interpretation of determinism. Its basic formula may be summed up as follows: external causes act through the instrumentality of internal conditions. Thus the antithesis between external causation and internal, spontaneous development is removed. It is their internal interconnection that forms the basis for