H. P. Grice, "Wundt on gestures"

wundt: philosopher that Grice, who calls himself a ‘philosophical psychologist,’ often quotes. “As the founder of scientific psychology, Wundt was influential in my embracing ‘philosophical psychology,’ as a revenge.” Although trained as a physician (“like Vitters”), Wundt turns to philosophy and in Leipzig’s downtown established the first recognized psychology laboratory. For Wundt, psychology deals with conscious experience, a definition soon overtaken by Ryle’s behaviourism. Wundt’s psychology has two departments: the so-called physiological psychology (Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, Grice preferred ‘philosophical physiology’), primarily the experimental study of immediate experience broadly modeled on Fechner’s psycho-physics; and the Volkerpsychologie (Volkerpsychologie, -- or ‘folkpsychology,’ as Grice prefers – ‘philosohical psychology is a folk-science’ -- which circulated at Oxford as “The Language of Gestures,” the non-experimental study of the higher mental processes via their products, conversation, language, myth, and custom. Although Wundt is a prodigious investigator and author, and was revered as psychology’s founder, his theories, unlike his methods, exerted little influence, except on Grice and a few intelligent Griceians. A typical scholar of his time, Wundt, like Grice, also explored across the whole of philosophy, including logic and ethics. .