Chapter 5 - Empiricism, Sensationalism and Positivism

Question 1

What is empiricism?

Answer 1

knowledge derived from experience

Question 2

Who am I?

• founder of British Empiricism
• influenced by Galileo
• materialist: mind was a series of motions within the person (a physical monist)
  
  • attention –> sense organs retain the motion caused by certain external objects
  • imagination –> sense impressions decay over time
  • dreams –> can be vivd because there is no other sensory impression to compete with the imagination
• proposed a hedonistic theory of motivation
• there is no free will (strict deterministic view of behaviour)

Answer 2

Thomas Hobbs

Question 3

Who am I?

• tabula rasa
• there are no innate ideas (as Descartes proposed)
• all ideas come from sensory experience (either direct sensory stimulation or a reflection of some past sensory perception
• operations of the mind include perception, thinking, doubting, reasoning, knowing and willing (these OPERATIONS are innate)

Answer 3

John Locke

Question 4

What are some other beliefs John Locke had?

Answer 4

• ideas and emotions
  
  • simple ideas: cannot be analyzed further
  • complex ideas: composed of simple ideas; can be analyzed in smaller components
    
    • when operations of the mind are applied to simple ideas, then complex ideas are formed
    • mind cannot create or destroy ideas but can arrange them
• feelings of pleasure and pain accompany simple and complex ideas; other emotions are derived from these two basic feelings
• primary and secondary qualities
  
  • primary qualities: create ideas in us that correspond to actual physical attributes of objects
    
    • solidarity, extension, shape, motion and quantity
  • secondary qualities: produce ideas which do not correspond to the objects in the real world (ex. colour, sound, temperature, taste).
• paradox of the basins
• associationism (used to explain faulty beliefs, which he called “a degree of madness”, which are learned by chance, custom or by mistake)
• education of children

Question 5

Who am I?

• opposed materialism because it left no room for God
• mentalism (idealism)
  
  • esse is percipi (to be is to be percieved)
  • only secondary qualities exist because they are by definition percieved
• association of sensations
  
  • all sensations that are consistently together (contiguity) become associated
  • theory of distance of perception suggest that for a distance to be judged, several sensations from different modalities must be associated (ex. viewing an object and the tactile sensation of walking towards it)

Answer 5

George Berkeley

Question 6

Who am I?

• create a science of human nature
• focused on the use of the inductive method of Bacon to make careful observations and then carefully generalize
• contents of the mind come from experience
• distinguished between impressions and ideas
• 3 laws of association

Answer 6

David Hume

Question 7

What is an impression (according to Hume)?

Answer 7

strong, vivid perceptions

Question 8

What is an idea (according to Hume)?

Answer 8

weak perceptions, faint images in thinking and reasoning

• simple ideas cannot be broken down further (like Locke)
• complex ideas are made of other ideas
• once in the mind, ideas can be rearranged in an infinite number of ways by the imagination

Question 9

What are Hume’s 3 laws of association?

Answer 9

1. law of resemblance
2. law of contiguity
3. law of cause and effect

Question 10

According to Hume, what was the most that the mind was?

Answer 10

No more than the perceptions we are having at any given moment

Question 11

Who am I?

• synthesized Newton’s conception of nerve transmission (vibrations in nerves) with versions of empiricism
• ideas are diminutive vibrations (vibratiuncles) and are weaker concepts of sensations
• contiguity, associationism, repetition

Answer 11

David Hartley

Question 12

Who am I?

• follower of utilitarianism
• the mind was sensations and ideas held together by contiguity
• complex ideas were made of simple ideas
• associationism
• the mind is a machine

Answer 12

James Mills

Question 13

Who am I?

• son of James Mills
• mental chemistry
• complex ideas not summations of simpler ideas
• ethology

Answer 13

John Stuart Mills

Question 14

What is ethology?

Answer 14

science of the formation of character

Question 15

Who am I?

• first to be considered a full-fledged psychologist
• goal was to describe the physiological correlates of mental and behavioural phenomena
• the mind had three components:
  1. feelings
  2. volition
  3. intellect
• formed 2 other laws of association

Answer 15

Alexander Bain

Question 16

What is mechanism?

Answer 16

the doctrine that natural processes are mechanically determined and are capable of explanation by laws of physics and chemistry

Question 17

Who am I?
- goal was to replace Descartes’ deductive, dualistic philosophy with an observational, inductive science based on physical motion

Answer 17

Pierre Gassendi

Question 18

Who am I?

• universe is made of matter and motion
• man is a machine
• humans and animals differ in degree of intelligence

Answer 18

Julien do La Mettrie

Question 19

Who am I?

• explored the implications that contents of the mind come only from experience
  
  • if you control the experience, you control the mind of the person
    
    • therefore, moral behaviour, social skills and genius can be taught by controlling experience

Answer 19

Claude Helvetius

Question 20

What is positivism?

Answer 20

recognizes only natural phenomena or facts that are objectively observable; knowledge = empirical observations

Question 21

Who am I?

• proposed the law of 3 stages (meaning societies and disciplines pass through stages defined by the way members explain natural events)
  
  • 1st stage: theological, based on superstition, and mysticism
  • 2nd stage: metaphysical, based on unseen essences, principles, causes, and laws
  • 3rd stage: scientific description, prediction, and control of natural phenomena

Answer 21

Auguste Comte