Chapter 6-Rationalism

Question 1

Compare and contrast rationalism and empiricism

Answer 1

They both postulated in mind but they differed in the type of mind they postulated

The empiricists tended to describe a passive mind, a mind that acts on sensations and ideas in an automatic, mechanical way. The rationalist tended to postulate a much more active mind, a mind that acts on information from the senses and gives it meaning that it otherwise would not have

For the rationalist, the mind added something to sensory data rather than simply passively organizing and storing it in memory. Typically, the rationalist assumed innate mental structures, principles, operations, or abilities that are used in analyzing the content of thought. And they tended to believe in the existence of truths that could not be discovered through sensory data alone

For the empiricist, experience, memory, Association, and hedonism determine not only how a person thinks and acts but also his or her morality. For the rationalist, however, there are rational reasons that some acts or thoughts are more desirable than others.

The empiricist tends to emphasize mechanistic causes of behavior, whereas the rationalist tends to emphasize reasons for behavior

Whereas the empiricist stresses induction, the rationalist stresses deduction

Question 2

What did bacon and Descartes have in common?

Answer 2

Although bacon was an empiricist and Descartes was a rationalist, both had the same load of: to overcome the philosophical mistakes and bye sis of the past. Mainly those of Aristotle and his scholastic interpreters and sympathizers.
Both thought objective truth that withstood the criticism of the skeptics, they simply went about their search differently

Question 3

Equated God with nature and said that everything in nature, including humans, consisted of both matter and consciousness. His proposed solution to the mind-body problem is called double aspectism. The most pleasurable life is one lived in accordance with the laws of nature. Emotional experience is desirable because it is controlled by reason; passionate experience is undesirable because it is not. His deterministic view of human cognition, activity, and emotion did much to facilitate the development of scientific psychology

Answer 3

Baruch Spinoza

Question 4

Summarize Spinoza’s philosophy with respect to the nature of God

Answer 4

God not only started the world in motion but also was continually present everywhere in the nature. To understand the laws of nature was to understand God. God was nature. He embraced pantheism, or the belief that God is present everywhere and in everything. With this, he embraced a form of primitive animism.

Question 5

The belief that God is present everywhere and in everything

Answer 5

Pantheism

Question 6

Describe Spinoza’s philosophy with respect to the relationship between mind and body

Answer 6

Assumed that the mind and body were two aspects of the same thing-the living human being. The mind and the body were like two sides of the coin, even though the two sides are different, they are two aspects of the same coin. The mind and body are inseparable; anything happening to the body is experienced emotions and thoughts; and emotions and thoughts influence the body. This is been called double aspectism

Question 7

Summarize Spinoza’s philosophy with respect to free will

Answer 7

He denied free will because God is nature and nature is lawful, and because humans are part of nature, their thought and behavior are lawful or determined

He insisted that the best life was one lived with a knowledge of the causes of things and that the closest we can get to freedom is understanding what causes our behavior and thoughts

Question 8

Summarize Spinoza’s philosophy with respect to clear and unclear ideas

Answer 8

He was a hedonist because he claimed that what are commonly referred to as good and evil or nothing else but the emotions of pleasure and pain.

My pleasure he meant the entertaining of clear ideas, ones that are conductive to the mind’s survival because they reflect an understanding of causal necessity, or a knowledge of why things are as they are

When the mind entertains unclear ideas or is overwhelmed by passion, it feels weak and vulnerable and experiences pain

Question 9

Summarize Spinoza’s philosophy regarding emotions and passions

Answer 9

Starting with a few basic emotions such as pleasure and pain, he showed how as many as 48 additional could be derived from the interactions between these basic emotions and various situations encountered in life

He made an important distinction between emotion and passion: The experience of passion is one that reduce is the probability of survival. Unlike an emotion, which is linked to a specific thought, passion is not associated with any particular thought

Because passion can cause non-adaptive behavior, it must be harnessed by reason because behavior and thoughts guided by reason or conductive to survival, but behavior and thoughts guided by passion or not

Question 10

Describe Spinoza’s influence on the development of psychology

Answer 10

Spinoza’s belief in psychic determinism is a principal that stimulated a scientific analysis of the mind, which assumes that the processes of the mind are too subjects to natural laws, and that these laws can be consequently investigated and study

He thought had similarities with psychoanalytic thinking. And had a strong influence on two individuals who were instrumental in launching psychology as an experimental science: Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt.

Question 11

Believed that we could trust our sensory impressions to accurately reflect physical reality because it makes commonsense to do so. Attributed several rational faculties to the mind and was therefore a faculty psychologist

Answer 11

Thomas Reid

Question 12

Describe Reid’s views regarding common sense

Answer 12

The position that we can assume the existence of the physical world and of human reasoning powers because it makes commonsense to do so- common sense philosophy

We are naturally endowed with the abilities to deal with and make sense out of the world

Question 13

The belief that sensory experience and presents physical reality exactly as it is. Also called naïve realism

Answer 13

Direct realism

Question 14

Describe Reid’s views regarding conscious and unconscious perception

Answer 14

He did not believe that consciousness was formed by one sensation being added to another or to the memory of others. Rather, we experience objects immediately as objects because of our innate power of perception. He believed in direct realism, because he believed that our sensations not only accurately reflect reality but do so immediately

Question 15

The belief that the mind consists of several powers or faculties

Answer 15

Faculty psychology

Question 16

Describe Reid’s views regarding faculty psychology

Answer 16

In elaborating the reasoning powers of the mind, he discussed several faculties and thus he can be described as a faculty psychologist.

Faculty psychologists are those who refer to various mental abilities or powers in their descriptions of the mind

He believed the faculties were aspects of the mind that actually existed and influenced human behavior and thought. All the faculties were thought to be innate and to function in cooperation with other faculties. He referred to you as many as 43 faculties of the mind, including abstraction, attention, consciousness and so on

Question 17

Believed that experiences such as those of unity, causation, time, and space could not be derived from sensory experience and therefore must be attributable to innate categories of thought. He also believed that morality is, or should be, governed by the categorical imperative. He did not believe psychology could become a science because subjective experience cannot be quantified mathematically

Answer 17

Immanuel Kant

Question 18

Those innate attributes of the mind that Kant postulated to explain subjective experiences we have that cannot be explained in terms of sensory experience alone-for example, the experiences of time, causality, and space

Answer 18

Categories of thought

Question 19

Describe Kant’s beliefs regarding The nature of phenomenological experience

Answer 19

Believed our sensory impressions are always structured by the categories of thought, and our phenomenological experience is therefore the result of the interaction between sensations and the categories of thought. This interaction is inescapable

Question 20

Describe Kant’s beliefs regarding perceptions of time and space

Answer 20

The concept of time is added to sensory information by the mind. For example, on the sensory level, we experience a series of separate events, such as the image provided by horse walking down the street. We see the horse at one point and then at another and then at another and so forth.

By looking at the isolated sensations we conclude that one sensation occurred before or after another and because there is nothing in the sensations themselves to suggest the concept of time, the concept must exist a priori or innately. The experience of time could be understood only as a creation of the mind

Also believed that our experience of space was provided by an innate category of thought. We never experienced a physical world directly, but he observed that it certainly seems that we do. We experience a display of sensations that seem to reflect the physical world. The sensations very in size, distance, and intensity and seem to be distributed in space, not in a retina’s or brains. Sensations are all internal, exist in the mind alone

Question 21

According to Kant, the moral directive that we should always act in such a way that the maxims governing our moral decisions could be used as a guide for everyone else’s moral behavior

Answer 21

Categorical imperative

Question 22

Specify Kant’s influence on the development of psychology

Answer 22

He influenced a lively debate in psychology concerning the importance of innate factors in such areas as perception, language, cognitive development, and problem-solving.

Although his influence was clearly evident when psychology emerged as an independent science, he did not believe that psychology could become an experimental science because the mind itself could never be objectively study because it is not a physical thing and the mind cannot be studied scientifically using introspection because it does not stand still and wait to be analyzed, it is constantly changing and therefore cannot be relied we studied. The process of introspection influences the state of mind, just limiting the value of what is found through introspection

He believe there was a way of studying humans that wasn’t scientific, but could still be useful. It this way was to study how people actually behave, a discipline called anthropology

Question 23

Likened ideas to Leibniz’s monads by saying that they had energy and a consciousness of their own. Also said that ideas strive for consciousness. Those ideas compatible with a persons apperceptive mass are given conscious expression, where those that are not remain below the limen in the unconscious mind. Considered to be one of the first mathematical and educational psychologists

Answer 23

Johann Friedrich Herbart

Question 24

Describe Herbart’s positions regarding psychology’s status as a science

Answer 24

Believe that psychology could never be an experimental science, but he believed that the activities of the mind could be expressed mathematically; in that sense, psychology could be a science

The reason he denied that psychology could become an experimental science was that he believed experimentation necessitated dividing up its subject matter and because the mind acted as an integrated whole, the mind could not be fractionated

Question 25

The term used by Herbart to describe how ideas struggle with each other to gain conscious expression

Answer 25

Psychic mechanics

Question 26

Describe Herbart’s positions regarding psychic mechanics

Answer 26

Believed that ideas had the power to either attract or repel other ideas, depending on their compatibility. Ideas tend to attract similar or compatible ideas, this forming complex ideas. Similarly, ideas expend energy repelling dissimilar or incompatible ideas, thus attempting to avoid conflict

All ideas struggle to gain expression in consciousness, and they compete with each other to do so. Ideas can never be completely destroyed, but they can vary in intensity or force

Question 27

According to Herbart, the cluster of interrelated ideas of which we are conscious at any given moment

Answer 27

Apperceptive mass

Question 28

Describe Herbart’s positions regarding educational psychology

Answer 28

Many consider him to be the first educational psychologist. He applied his theory to education by offering the following advice to teachers:

Review the material that has already been learned, prepare the student for new material by giving an overview of what is coming next (creates a receptive apperceptive mass), present the new material, relate the new material to what has already been learned, show applications of the new material and give an overview of what is to be learned next

Question 29

Summarize Herbart’s influence on the development of psychology

Answer 29

His insistence that psychology could at least to be a mathematical science gave psychology more status and respectability then it had received from Kant.

Despite his denial that psychology could be an experimental science, his efforts to quantify mental phenomena actually encouraged the development of experimental psychology

He’s concepts of the unconscious, repression, and conflict and his belief that ideas continue to exist in tact even when we are not conscious of them found their way into Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.

His concept of the limen or threshold was extremely important to Gustav Fechner whose psychophysics was instrumental in the development of psychology as a science

Influenced Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of psychology as a separate scientific discipline. Wundt relied heavily on his concept of apprehension

Question 30

The philosophical position postulating an active mind that transforms sensory information and is capable of understanding abstract principles or concepts not attainable from sensory information alone

Answer 30

Rationalism