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Purposivism contends that mental life is hormic or goal-seeking. McDougall, the foremost Purposivist, maintains that the driving forces for consciousness are innate urges or tendencies, chief of which are the submissive and self-assertive tendencies.
Opposing behaviourism, McDougall argued that behaviour was generally goal-oriented and purposive, an approach he called hormic psychology. The term “hormic” comes from hormḗ (ὁρμή), the Greek word for "impulse" and according to Hilgard (1987) was drawn from the work of T. P. Nunn, a British colleague (Larson, 2014).
William McDougall (1871–1938) was one of the giants of early psychology, yet his legacy has gone largely unheralded, and his name is seldom recalled outside students of the history of psychology. His brand of psychology, termed “hormic” psychology, serves as one of the foundational frameworks for understanding the wide range of human ...
Purposivism means the primacy of striving or seeking, rather than the primacy of foresight. Sometimes the broader word, horme (hor-may, a Greek word meaning urge), is substituted for purpose, and purposivism rechristened the hormic psychology.
Anticipating a little the course of history, I shall here assume that the purposive nature of human action is no longer in dispute, and in this article shall endeavour to define and to justify that special form of purposive psychology which is now pretty widely known as hormic psychology. But first a few words in justification of this assumption.
Purposivism contends that mental life is hormic or goal-seeking. McDougall, the foremost Purposivist, maintains that the driving forces for consciousness are innate urges or tendencies, chief of which are the submissive and self-assertive tendencies. This purposivism is exercised in goal-seeking.
the functionalist meaning of purposivism by reviewing McDougall's elaboration of the concept. McDougall and Purposivism The British-born Harvard psychologist William McDougall ex panded on James's reasoning by describing seven ways to infer purpos iveness from an animal'sbehavior: 1. Initiation of activity without any obvious external ...
