History of Psychology 2008

Lecture 6

Professor Cupchik TA: Michelle Hilscher

Office: S634 Office: S142C

Email: cupchik@utsc.utoronto.ca Email: hilscher@utsc.utoronto.ca
Office hours: Wed 1-2; Thurs 12-1 Office hours: Wed 12-2 pm

Course website: Textbook:

www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik Benjafield’s History of Psychology
Hume was heavily influenced by empiricists John Locke and
George Berkeley, along with various Francophone writers such
as Pierre Bayle, and various figures on the Anglophone
intellectual landscape such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke,
Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Joseph Butler.

He was Berkeley’s successor. Like Berkeley, he was precocious

and developed in relative isolation. He was extremely ambitious,
a perfectionist with a restless and nervous personality.

At the age of 28 he published three volumes titled A Theory on

Human Nature.
Definition:
- An idea is the experience we have in the absence of its object.
- An impression is the experience we have in the presence of its
object.

Both ideas and impressions are different kinds of experiences

and were included by Locke under the term idea.

What is the difference between impressions and ideas?

The difference lies in their relative vivacity.

The impressions (sensations, passions, and emotions) are more

vigorous, lively, and violent compared with ideas. Ideas are
relatively weak and faint and are used for reasoning and
thinking.
But: The faintest impression may be weaker than the strongest
idea. He was aware that ideas in dreams, madness and violent
emotion may approach the intensity of impressions. But he said
that generally they are different in intensity. He also saw them as
qualitatively different. He said that ideas are faint copies of
impressions.
In addition, both impressions and ideas may be simple or
complex.
- A simple idea always resembles a simple impression.
- A complex idea, since it may be constituted of simple ideas in a
novel manner, need not resemble an impression.
- He regarded impressions as causing their corresponding ideas.
So the world of real objects cannot be more tangible that the
ideas which constitute man’s belief in it.
If we reject innate ideas and primary or secondary qualities,
what is left? Nothing but an ordered array of mental
contents.
What does he mean by causal relations?
Hume thought of association as an attraction or “gentle force”
among ideas whereby they unite or cohere. This is a form of
mental mechanics.
Two laws of association:
1. Resemblance
2. Contiguity in time or space
Cause and effect are always contiguous in time or space.
The perceived cause is always prior to the effect.
If all knowledge comes through the senses, through what sense
is the notion of causality perceived? He did not want a
subordinate rational faculty.
Necessary connection is a result of constant pairing of cause and
effect… a “constant conjunction” of the two events.
The perception of cause and effect is therefore based on
psychological experience. Causality is a mental habit!

Philosophically this is also related to a kind of skepticism. The

world of real objects cannot be formally certified as anything
more tangible than the ideas which constitute man’s belief in it.
This led to doubt about the existence of g-d, the external world,
or the personal ego.

There can be no experience of a continuous entity called the self.

The self is an abstraction from particular experiences. We have

only data and not constructs. We, as empiricists, can only
believe those constructs that represent sensory impression
(perceptions of hot-cold, light-shade, pain-pleasure and each
quality is experienced in isolation).
RECALL:
* Rationalism goes back to Plato and particularly to Aristotle’s
doctrine of the rational “soul” as something above the nutritive
and sensory functions of the individual.
Rationalists believe in a special mental substance with its own
inherent properties and which cannot be reduced to matter.
* Christian theologians kept the idea alive during the Middle Ages.
However, they emphasized destiny rather than nature and its
attributes.
* Descartes also described a thinking substance, res cogitans,
which was distinct from physical matter. I am speaking of a non-
material rational principle that reveals itself in the facts of
experience.
* The Empiricists had asserted that Aristotle’s five senses were
the sole source of knowledge.
RECALL:
* Opposed to this are mental faculties or functions or activities
which can be classified and which imply pre-existing mental
capacities.
* They are revealed in experience but not created by experience. A
faculty psychology does not deny the importance of observation.
Rather, we must have a complete inventory of psychological
functions.