Practice question · Multiple choice
Structuralism asked what consciousness is made of; functionalism asked what consciousness is for. Why is it a mistake to treat these as rival answers to a single question?
Hints
- Take a wristwatch. Listing its parts and saying what it is for are two different jobs.
- Ask whether a full answer from one school would make the other school's question go away.
Show the answer
A. Because they are different questions: composition and purpose.
Why
The two schools were not competing to answer one question; they disagreed about which question psychology should ask. An exhaustive inventory of sensations would leave James's question untouched, and a full account of what consciousness accomplishes would leave Titchener's, mechanism and function are complementary levels, as Tinbergen's four questions say in another vocabulary.
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