British Empiricism

Evidence of senses constitutes the primary data of all knowledge

Thomas Hobbs

- Man is a machine functioning within a larger machine (universe)

- Used the deductive method (same as Galileo and Descartes)
- Was a materialist – mind is a serious of motions within the person (a physical monist)
- There is no free will (deterministic view of behavior)
- Thought process explained by law of contiguity (the sequential occurrence or proximity of
stimulus and response, causing their association in the mind)
- Attention
o Sense organs retain the motion caused by certain external objects
- Imagination
o Sense impressions decay over time.

John Locke

- All ideas come from sensory experience -The source of all ideas is sensation
- There are no innate ideas.
- At birth the human mind is a “tabula rasa” or a blank slate.
- Perception of the objects
o Primary qualities create ideas in us that correspond to actual physical attributes of
objects
 Solidarity, extension, shape, motion, and quantity
o Secondary qualities produce ideas which do not correspond to the objects in the real
world
 Color, sound, temperature, and taste
- Ideas
o Simple ideas cannot be divided further into other ideas
o 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).
George Berkeley

- Perception is the only reality

o -Esse is percipi “to be is to be perceived,”
o We exist only in being perceived by another
o Therefore, only secondary qualities exist because they are, by definition, perceived
- Applied the principal of association to explain the process of learning and experiencing.
o Simple ideas
o Complex ideas
- Explained cognitive process in term of association of sensation
o We experience certain sensation with association like depth visual perception is
associated with our experience
o Walking toward reaching object, sensation from eyes produce the perception of depth

David Hume

- Wanted to combine the empirical philosophy of his predecessors with principles of Newtonian
science to create a science of human nature.
- Published Treatise on Human Nature and An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding
- The mind is only a name given to the flow of ideas, memories, imagination and feelings
o Contents of the mind come from experience
- Impressions
o Strong, vivid perceptions
- Ideas
o Weak perceptions
o Faint images in thinking and reasoning

-Simple ideas cannot be broken down further (like Locke)

-Complex ideas are made of other ideas.

- imagination: ideas in the mind can be rearranged in an infinite number of ways

- Impression and ideas are connected with sensations.

Three laws of association:

- Law of resemblance
- Law of contiguity
- Law of cause and effect- Causation is not in reality, not a logical necessity; it is a psychological
experience.

- All humans possess the same passion (emotions), differ in degree of specific emotions. The passions
determine behavior. Therefore, we respond differently to situations.
David Hartley

- Ideas are diminutive vibrations (vibratiuncles) and are weaker copies of sensations.
- Simple ideas become associated by contiguity to form complex ideas
- Hartley’s fundamental law of association:
- contiguity, memory, reasoning, emotions, voluntary and involuntary actions, ideas and
sensations occur together simultaneously or successively and become associated so that the
occurrence of one is connected with the occurrence of other.
- Laws of association can be applied to behavior to describe how voluntary behavior can develop
from involuntary behavior.
o Proposed that excessive nerve vibration produced pain and mild to moderate vibration
produced pleasure.
o Objects, events, and people become associated with pain or pleasure through
experience, and we learn to behave differentially to these stimuli.

James Mills

- A follower of utilitarianism (Concept of hedonism).

-The mind was sensations and ideas held together by contiguity

- ideas

- 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 is determined by:

- Vividness of the sensations or ideas

- Frequency of the associations

John Stuart Mill

- mental chemistry
o impressed by the fact that chemical often combine can produce something entirely
different form of element, such as hydrogen and oxygen combine to produce water,
same kind of thing happened in the mind.
o 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.
- Ethology -“science of the formation of character”,
o Mill argued for the development of a “science of the formation of character”, which he
called ethology.
o His ethology would explain how individual minds or characters form and how a specific
individual act under specific circumstances.
- He was a social reformer who took up the causes of freedom of speech, representative
government, and the emancipation of women.
Alexander Bain

- referred to as the first full-fledged psychologist

- goal was to describe the physiological correlates of mental and behavioral phenomena.
- Three components of mind:
o Feelings
o Volition
o Intellect
- Intellect
o is explained by the laws of association, primarily the law of contiguity which applies to
sensations, ideas, actions, and feelings.
o Contiguity supplemented by the law of frequency. The laws had their effect in neuronal
changes in the nervous system.
- Two other laws of association
o Law of compound association
 Single ideas are not associated, rather an idea is usually associated with several
other ideas through contiguity or similarity.
o Law of constructive association
 Mind can rearrange memories of experiences into an almost infinite number of
combinations, accounts for creativity.
- Voluntary behavior explanation
o When a need arises, spontaneous or random activity is produced.
o Some of those movements will produce approximate conditions necessary to satisfy the
need, other movements will not.
o Activities which produce need satisfaction are remembered.
 When in similar situation again, the activities which previously produced need
satisfaction will be performed.
 This is essentially Skinner’s selection of behavior by consequences.
French Sensationalism

Pierre Gassendi

- observational inductive science based on physical monism instead of Descartes’s deductive, dualistic
philosophy

- Human is complex physical machine

- no need for nonphysical mind

Julien do La Mettrie

- A strict materialist

- The universe is made of matter and motion

- Sensation and thoughts are movements of particles in the brain.

- Man is a machine.

Etienne Bonnot de Condillac

- The power of mind develop as a natural consequence of sensation

Claude Helvetius

-Explored the implications of the empiricist and sensationalist proposal that contents of the mind come
only from experience.

-Proposed that if you control experience you control the mind of the person

-Thus social skills, moral behavior, and genius can be taught by controlling experience.

-Empiricism became radical environmentalism

Positivism

Auguste Comte

- only thing we can be sure of is that which is publicly observable

- knowledge is empirical observations

- law of three stages- societies and disciplines pass through 3 stages for explaining natural events

1. Theological- superstition and mysticism

2. Metahpysical -based on unseen essences, principles, causes, and laws

3. Scientific- description, prediction, and control of natural phenomena.

-Proposed a religion of humanity which was a utopian society based on scientific principles and beliefs.

Humanity replaced God; scientists and philosophers would be the priests in this religion

- arranged sciences in a hierarchy

from the first developed and most basic to the most recently developed and most comprehensive

Mathematics → astronomy → physics → chemistry → physiological biology → sociology

Ernst Mach

- second brand of positivism

- we can never experience the physical world directly
Rationalism

Spinoza

- God, nature, and mind were aspects of the same substance

o - God, nature, and mind were inseparable.
- Pantheism
o God was nature
 To understand nature is to understand God.
 God is present everywhere and in everything.
- Double Aspectism
o The mind-body issue was dealt with by assuming that the mind and body were two
aspects of the same thing

- Pleasure
o comes from entertaining clear ideas, which are conducive to the mind’s survival
o When the mind entertains unclear ideas, it feels weak and vulnerable.
- Passion is a general upheaval not associated with a particular thought.
- Emotion is linked to a particular thought.

Nicolas de Malebranche

- God mediated mind – body interaction.

- Occasionalism
o When a person has a desire to move a part of the body, God is aware of this and moves
the body part.

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

- Disagreed with Locke, believing ideas do not come from experience.

o Ideas are nonmaterial and cannot be caused by material activity such as sense activity
o Ideas must be innate – which means the potential for an idea.
- The universe consisted of an infinite number of life units called monads.
o A monad is like a living atom; all monads are active and conscious.
 Monads differ in clarity of consciousness in a hierarchy
 In general the hierarchy goes from God, the highest, to humans, then to
animals, followed by animals, plants, and nonliving matter.
Thomas Reid

- Common Sense Psychology

o Because all humans are convinced of the existence of physical reality, it must exist.
o We can trust our impressions of the physical world because it makes common sense to
do so.
- Direct Realism
o Sensations are an accurate reflection of reality immediately, not after the mind has
operated on them.
- Reasoning powers of the mind include several faculties.
o More than a classification (as other faculty psychologists).
o Mental faculties were active powers of the mind
o They actually existed and influenced people’s thoughts and behavior.

Immanuel Kant

- mind must add something to sensory data before knowledge can be attained; something was
provided by a priori category of thought.
- Categories of thought:
o unity, totality, time, space, cause and effect, reality, quantity, quality, negation,
possibility-impossibility, and existence-nonexistence.
- mental experience
o Always structured by the categories of thought.
o Our phenomenological experience (mental experience) is an interaction of sensations
and the categories of thought.
 Can never know the true physical reality just appearances (phenomena) that are
controlled by the categories of thought.
- The mind adds the concept of time and space to sensory information. They are both provided by
an a priori category of thought.
- Categorical Imperative
o The rational principle which governs or should govern moral behavior
o Similar to older moral precepts such as the “golden rule”.
- Anthropology
o A nonscientific way of studying how people actually behave

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

- The Absolute
o Universe is interrelated unity
o True knowledge is attained by relating isolated instances to the “whole.”
- Our understanding progresses toward the absolute by the dialectic process,
o First have a thesis (a point of view) and an antithesis (opposite point of view),
o Then have a synthesis (a compromise between the thesis and the antithesis), which is a
new point of view.
 This new point of view now becomes the thesis for the next dialectic process.
Johann Friedrich Herbart

- Did not believe psychology could be an experimental science

- Believed that experimentation necessarily divided up its subject matter
o The mind acts as an integrated whole therefore it could not be fractionated.

Psychic Mechanics

- Ideas
o Ideas had a force or energy of their own and the laws of association were not
necessarily to bind them.
o Ideas have the power to attract or repel other ideas, depending on their compatibility.
o Ideas attempt to gain expression in consciousness and compete with each other to do
so.

Apperceptive Mass

- The group of compatible ideas that are in consciousness to which we are attending at given
moment.
- Ideas outside the apperceptive mass (incompatible ideas) will be repressed by the powers of
the ideas in the mass.

- Limen

- The threshold between conscious and unconscious

- Goal was to mathematically express the relationships among the apperceptive mass, the limen, and the
conflict among ideas.

- Applied his ideas to educational psychology by offering suggestions on how to teach effectively:

- Review material already learned

- Prepare students for new material by giving overview of upcoming material

- Present new material

- Relate new material to what has already been learned

-Show applications of new material

- Give an overview of next material to be learned.

Romanticism

Emphasized the irrational components of human nature

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

- Father of Romanticism
- Rousseau emphasized feelings in contrast to reason as the important guiding force in human
nature, the best guide for human conduct is a person’s honest feelings and inclinations.
- For Rousseau, humans are basically good – born good but are made bad by societal institutions.
Humans are, by nature, social animals who wished to live in harmony with other humans.

The general will is what is best within a community

- Should be sharply distinguished from an individual’s will.

Suggested that education should take advantage of natural impulses rather than distort them.

- Educational institutions should create a situation in which a child’s natural abilities and interests
can be nurtured.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe viewed humans as being torn by the stresses and conflicts of life.

- Life consisted of opposing forces, love and hate, life and death, good and evil.
o The goal of life should be to embrace these forces rather than to deny or overcome
them.

Insisted that intact, meaningful psychological experience should be the object of study, rather than
meaningless isolated sensations

- Was an early phenomenologist.

Goethe proposed a theory of evolution before Darwin

Used a form of what is now called behavior therapy.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Equated Kant’s noumenal world (things in themselves in nature) with “will” – a blind force which cannot
be known.

- In humans, this force manifests itself in the will to survive. This will to survive causes an
unending cycle of needs and need satisfaction.
- Most human behavior is irrational
o An unending series of pains due to unsatisfied need which causes us to act to satisfy the
need, followed by a brief experience of satisfaction (pleasure) followed again by another
need to be satisfied, and on it goes.
Existentialism

Stressed the meaning of human existence, freedom of choice, and the uniqueness of each individual.

The most important aspects of humans are their personal, subjective interpretations of life and the
choices they make in light of those interpretations.

Søren Kierkegaard

The first modern existentialist.

Was an outspoken critic of organized religion and believed the most meaningful relationship with God
was one that was personal and not dictated by the church.

Truth is always what a person believes privately and emotionally.

- Truth cannot be taught logically, truth must be experienced.

- Truth is subjectivity – your subjectivity.

The approximation of personal freedom occurs in stages.

- Aesthetic stage
o People are open to many types of experiences, and do not recognize their ability to
choose.
o Live on a hedonistic level.
- Ethical stage
o People accept responsibility for making choices but use as their guide ethical principles
established by others.

Religious stage

- People recognize and accept their freedom and have a personal relationship with God. The
nature of the relationship is personal.
o People at this stage see possibilities in life that usually run contrary to convention, and
tend to be nonconformists.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Nietzche proposed two aspects of human nature:

- Appollonian aspect
o Rational side
o Desire for tranquility, predictability and orderliness.
- Dionysian aspect
o rrational side
o Attraction to creative chaos and to passionate, dynamic, experiences.

He believed the Western philosophy had emphasized the intellect and minimized the human passions

Result was lifeless rationalism

Urged a fusion of the two aspects

- Not a totally irrational, passionate life but a life of reasonable passion.

Believed that because of human actions, we had, in essence, made God “dead.”

Philosophers and scientists who killed God took purpose from the universe and stripped humans of any
special place in the world.

Convictions are thought to reflect truth, but cause fanaticism

o Opinions are tentative, challengeable, and easily modified in light of new information.

All people have a will to power

To control one’s life, tendency to gain mastery over one’s self and one’s destiny.

Supermen are people who are approaching their full potential because standard morality does not
govern their lives

This was misused by the Nazi party who claimed that the German people were these supermen.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as Psychology

For both men, Hegelian philosophy was a favorite target, and both men preached reliance on direct,
personal experience.

The major difference between the two was that Kierkegaard accepted the existence of God, whereas for
Nietzsche God did not exist.