Empiricism

The Authority of Experience

Empiricism
 It is often thought that British empiricism and French
sensationalism developed specifically as a reaction to
the deductive, nativist position of Descartes.
 I.e. Rationalism ‘came first’
 However it doesn’t really work out this way
 Locke never mentions Descartes in Essay
 Bacon came before Descartes, and targeted
scholasticism if anything
 There are sometimes elements of both in some
thinkers
Some distinctions
 Empiricism vs. Rationalism
Specific distinction is somewhat variable depending upon
the time period in question
 Started with Hippocratic ‘empirici’ vs. Pythagorean mystics
 Empiricism
 We have noted Aristotle as a mere observer of an empirical
sort, however now (in the Renaissance) we have those
wanting control and manipulate nature
 This movement (starting with Bacon, well, perhaps Roger
really but as far as Empiricism goes Francis) coincides with
the scientific movement itself
 However Bacon and other empiricists could even be seen as
rejecting the largely magical (Hermetical)
empiricism/’science’ of the Renaissance, and
 His atheoretical approach is in contrast with current scientific
methodology
Empiricism
 The empiricists attempted to explain the functioning
of the mind as Newton explained the universe -
sought principles or laws that could account for
human cognitive experience.
 Importance of experience in the attainment of
knowledge.
 Epistemology that asserts that the evidence of senses
constitutes the primary data of all knowledge
 That knowledge cannot exist unless this evidence has
first been gathered
 All subsequent intellectual processes must use this
evidence and only this evidence in framing valid
propositions about the real world
Rationalism
 Rationalism
 Stems primarily from the philosophical perspectives of
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz
 Certain truths exist, and when reason explores the universe a
small set of truths can be deduced which form the basis of all
other knowledge
 Primary data are the laws of thought
 All knowledge is the result of a rational analysis of sense and that
this very evidence can’t be gathered without an a priori guiding
principle
 Something innate to make clear the confusion of sensory
information
 Note that both rationalism and empiricism share an assumption of
mentalism (contra later behaviorism), thoughneither position itself
would suggest that there is only mind (though some supposed
proponents of the position might, e.g. Berkeley’s idealism)
Francis Bacon
 1561-1626
 Novum Organum
 Demanded that science be based on
induction
 More strictly, science should include no
theories, no hypotheses, no
mathematics, and no deductive methods

 Science should include only facts of

observation
 What is deemed worthy of a scientific (or
any) undertaking should be estimated in
terms of its worth to humanity
 Renaissance humanism perspective and
in a sense against Luther’s Reformation
which denounced ‘works’
Francis Bacon
 Generalizations could be made from many observations with
their similarities and differences noted and could be used to
describe classes of events or experiences
 For Bacon, science should improve the world for the betterment
of mankind
 Skinner and behavior analysis adopted the Baconian inductive
method and the view that the main goal of science is to improve
the human condition
 However Bacon also distinguishes two forms of experiments:
experimenta lucifera (those that shed light) and experimenta
fructifera (those that bear fruit)
 One can liken this to our current exploratory and confirmatory
distinction in methodology (though this is quite muddied these
days)
 The exploratory will inform the other, which will be of the
type by which humans will specifically benefit
Francis Bacon
 Although admired Aristotle and other Greeks, suggested that blind
adherence to them impedes progress
 Against astrology, alchemy, magic etc. some of which the blame could
be laid on Aristotle’s notion of final causes
 Clearly separates the physical and metaphysical (and puts
mathematics w/ the latter in anti-rationalist fashion)
 Also distinguishes psychology as its own discipline (perhaps for the first
time)
 “We come therefore now to that knowledge whereunto the ancient
oracle directeth us, which is the knowledge of ourselves; which
deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us
more nearly. This knowledge, as it is the end and term of natural
philosophy in the intention of man, so, notwithstanding, it is but a
portion of natural philosophy in the continent of nature”
 Clearly suggests psychology involves questions of an experimental
nature, and even gets into talk of ideas that would fall under the
headings of social psychology, operant conditioning, and innate vs.
environmental determinants of personality
Francis Bacon
 In terms of his psychology, Bacon is actually a very
modern blend of nativistic/rationalist and empirical
views
 Some characteristics are innate (think Galenic
temperaments) or determined by outside forces
beyond our control (e.g. born rich or poor)
 However these can be affected, and even changed
by experience (e.g. reward and punishment)
 Though inherited characteristics would limit the effects
of experience
John Locke
 1632-1704
 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
 The ‘tabula rasa’
 For Locke all ideas come from sensory
experience
 No innate ideas, strict anti-rationalism
 An idea is a mental image employed while
thinking and comes from either sensation (direct
sensory stimulation) or reflection (reflection on
remnants of prior sensory stimulation)
 Thinking = Perceiving
 Thus, the source of all ideas is sensation, and
these ideas can be acted upon by operations of
the mind giving rise to new ideas
 Associationism (cognitive i.e. not just
Pavlovian)
 Nominalist
John Locke
 Simple ideas cannot be divided further into other
ideas while complex ideas are composites of simple
ideas and can be analyzed into their parts (simple
ideas)
 Complex ideas are formed through operation being
applied to simple ideas through reflection (comparing,
abstracting, discriminating, combining and enlarging,
remembering, and reasoning)
 Knowledge is the perception of associations
 Also noted that knowledge is a construction, and that
our concepts our ‘representations’ depend entirely on
context
 Early ‘situated action’

 Feelings of pleasure and pain accompany simple and

complex ideas, other emotions are derived from
these two basic feelings
John Locke
 We four means by which we can know things:
 Identity
 What something is and is not
 Relation
 Some things are related, others not
 Coexistence
 Some properties are intimately associated with various objects,
concepts
 Real existence
 The realism of which we have spoken of before, that some things do
exist (factual knowledge)
 Locke also suggest that knowledge is of three types:
 Intuitive
 Immediately knowable (Black is not white)

 Demonstrative
 Provable (e.g. mathematically)

 Both intuition and demonstration produce certainty

 Sensitive
 The knowledge of particulars by means of senses
John Locke
 Primary vs. Secondary qualities
 Primary qualities
 Correspond to actual physical attributes of objects:
solidarity, extension, shape, motion, and quantity
 Inherent in the object
 Secondary qualities
 Do not correspond to the objects in the real world:
color, sound, temperature, and taste
 Inherent in the perceiver
 The connection between the secondary (liquidity) and
primary qualities (H2O) in an object is something we
cannot know
 Introduction of the ‘hard’ problem of subjectivity in the
study of consciousness
John Locke
 Association was used to explain faulty beliefs (which
he called “a degree of madness”) which are learned
by chance, custom, or mistake (associated by
contiguity)
 Memories can also fade over time (trace decays a la
60s cognitive psychology) or we may simply lose the
ability to retrieve
 Many ideas are clustered in the mind because of
some logical connection among them and some are
naturally associated, these are safe types of
associations because they are naturally related and
represent true knowledge
 Knowledge exists which we can be certain
John Locke
 Morality
 Consists of complex ideas which, being rooted in the
physical world from which simple ideas arise, can be
deemed true
 Regarding government
 Social contract between state and citizens
 Rights available to all (life, liberty, property),
 Essentially nativistic view to balance what might lead to a
moral relativism from his empiricism
 Played an early role in child development
 Regarding education of children, parents should increase
tolerance in their children and provide necessities for good
health
 Teachers should always make the learning experience
pleasant and recognize and praise student accomplishments
George Berkeley
 1685-1753
 Treatise Concerning the Principles of
Human Knowledge
 “To be is to be perceived”
 Berkeley opposed materialism because
it left no room for God, and his work can
essentially be seen as a response to the
mechanistic views implied by the likes of
Locke, Hobbes, etc. (even Descartes)
George Berkeley
 Berkeley’s theory of distance perception (New Theory
of Vision) suggests that for distance to be judged,
several sensations from different modalities must be
associated
 For example, viewing an object and the tactile
sensation of walking toward it
 In contrast to Cartesian geometric theory of optics,
which suggested a calculation based on the angles of
the triangle formed between eyes and object
 Emphasis on the experience/sensation of the object
rather than the perception of ‘distance’ which itself
can’t even be seen
 Depth as a result of (earlier) experience with the

environment
George Berkeley
 Like depth, objects of experience depend on the observer
 One thing to note, that in Berkeley, we do not have ‘only mind’
per se
 What we do have is the subjective experience placed at the
forefront, that we cannot talk about the object without the
perception of it
 Therefore, only secondary qualities exist because they are,
by definition, what is perceived
 For example, objects in motion can only be understood as
such relative to one another
 In a sense predates Einstein’s relativity

 In the way that objects exist to us (in our perceiving them, in our
mind), so does everything to God
David Hume
 1711-1776
 Treatise on Human Nature
 Hume’s goal was to combine the
empirical philosophy of his predecessors
with principles of Newtonian science to
create a science of human nature
 Establish the limits of human
knowledge
 He focused on the use of the inductive
method of Bacon and the newly emerging
science to make careful observations of
human nature and then cautiously
generalize
David Hume
 Contents of the mind come from experience and can be
stimulated by either external or internal events
 He distinguished between impressions (strong, vivid
perceptions) and ideas (weak perceptions, faint images in
thinking and reasoning)
 Impressions are further divided into sensations, and
reflection (combination of sensations, i.e. once removed
from initial sensation)
 How the sensations (qualia) are produced, he is unsure

(as we are today)

 No innate ideas (at least that can be confirmed by
experience)
 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
 David Hume
 For Hume there were three laws of association –
resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect
 Not worrying with the problem of mental vs. physical*,
but what causes us to perceive the situation as such,
and assume, in the Berkeleyian sense, that objects of
sense must be there?
 We assume the existence of the material world
due to constancy and coherence, and in doing so
can come to some estimation regarding causality
 Causation is not in reality, not a logical necessity, it is
a psychological experience
 For Hume, the mind is no more than the perceptions
we are having at any given moment

“’tis vain to ask, Whether there be a body or not? That is a point which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.”
David Hume
 All humans possess the same passion (emotions) but differ in
degree of specific emotions
 The passions determine behavior, therefore, we respond
differently to situations
 In fact feelings are innate
 Furthermore, these passions are independent of reason,
produced by a history of associations
 Belief is a feeling about our knowledge i.e. knowledge is
conviction
 Both animals and humans learn to act in particular ways through
experience with reward and punishment
 Like others of the time, morals are a fundamentally human
notion and established based on experience
 We are moral in so far as such action produces a satisfying
state of affairs
 Right and wrong are not ‘in’ things/events themselves
Thomas Reid
 1710-1796
 ‘Common Sense’ movement
 Required the findings of philosophy to adhere to
what we fundamentally know to be true
 The world is real, senses are affected by that

reality, perception is a result of that process (world)

 A tough fit as far as the Empiricist/Rationalist camps
go, believed this ‘common sense’ to be innate, and
feels that reason and sense came ‘both out of the
same shop’
 Not innate ideas, but that we come equipped to deal
with our surroundings
 ‘Natural faculties’
 Admonished the empiricists for failing to distinguish
sensation from perception and so their ‘ideas’ were a
vague notion
 The common sense of Reid continued in various
forms and could be said to have culminated in the
pragmatism of Dewey, Peirce, and James
Utilitarianism
 Utilitarianism’s key theme
 Rightness and wrongness of actions are determined solely
by their consequences
 No right or wrong inherent in things or events (old idea)
 For this time period we can say it started with Bentham (1748-
1832), but roots can be traced to Epicureanism
 Emphasis on pleasure seeking, pain avoidance
 The connection to empiricism is more historical
 Due to the political upheaval witnessed during these times,
e.g. French and American revolutions; British civil war in the
time of Locke, the empiricists often provided their own
political/social philosophies, ones that weren’t necessarily in
keeping with their empiricist philosophy/psychology
 Ideas would pervade moralistic, political and educational
philosophies, its ‘consequentialism’ spawn behaviorism, and its
general approach incorporated by the pragmatic psychologists
James Mill
 1773-1836
 Chief ally and proponent of Bentham’s ideas,
father of J.S. Mill
 For James Mill, the mind was sensations and
ideas held together by contiguity and complex
ideas were made of simple ideas
 When ideas are continuously experienced
together, the association may become so
strong that they appear as one idea
 Strength of associations are determined by the
vividness of the sensations or ideas and by
the frequency of the associations
John Stuart Mill
 1806-1873
 J. S. Mill proposed a mental chemistry in which
complex ideas are not made up of aggregates of
simple ideas but that ideas can fuse to produce
an idea that is completely different from the
elements of which it is made
 Proposed a science of human nature
(psychology) which has a set of primary laws that
apply to all humans and can predict general
tendencies in human thought, feeling, and action
 However, the science does not have knowledge
of how the primary laws interact with secondary
laws (individual characteristics and
circumstances) to predict specific thoughts,
feelings, and actions
 Staunch proponent of women’s rights, due in
large part to his relationship with Harriet Taylor