Faculty psychology is the idea that the mind is separated into faculties, or sections, and that each of these faculties are assigned to certain mental tasks. Some examples of the mental tasks assigned to these faculties include judgement, compassion, memory, attention, perception, and consciousness. Thomas Reid mentions over 43 faculties of the mind that work together as a whole. Additionally, faculty psychology claims that we are born with separate, innate human functions. The views of faculty psychology are explicit in the psychological writings of the medieval scholastic Theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, as well as in Franz Joseph Gall's formulation of phrenology, albeit more implicitly. More recently faculty psychology has been revived by Jerry Fodor's concept of modularity of mind, the hypothesis that different modules autonomously manage sensory input as well as other mental functions. Faculty psychology resembles localization of function, the claim that specific cognitive functions are performed in specific areas of the brain. For example, Broca's Area is associated with language production and syntax, while the Wernicke's Area is associated with language comprehension and semantics. It is currently known that while the brain's functions are separate, they also work together in a localized function.
Historical change
It is debatable to what extent the continuousmention of faculties throughout the history of psychology should be taken to indicate a continuity of the term's meaning. In medieval writings, psychological faculties were often intimately related to metaphysically-loaded conceptions of forces, particularly to Aristotle's notion of an efficient cause. This is the view of faculties which is explicit in the works of Thomas Aquinas: By the 19th century, the founders of Experimental Psychology had a very different view of faculties. In this period, Introspection was well-regarded by many as one tool among others for the investigation of mental life. In his Principles of Physiological Psychology,Wilhelm Wundt insisted that faculties were nothing but descriptive class-concepts, meant to denote classes of mental events which could be discerned in introspection, but which never actually appeared in isolation. He took caution in insisting that older, metaphysical conceptions of faculties must be guarded against, and that the scientist's tasks of classification and explanation must be kept distinct: It was in this and the ensuing period that faculty psychology came to be sharply distinguished from the act psychology promoted by Franz Brentano -- whereas the two are barely distinguished in Aquinas, for example.
