The emergence of modern science began as a move from theological-based reasoning to observational- a

5 Empiricism, Sensationalism, and Positivism

Descartes was so influential that most of the philosophies that developed after him were reactions to some aspect of his work. The British and French philosophers denied Descartes’s contention that some ideas are innate, saying instead that all ideas are derived from experience. These philosophers attempted to explain the functioning of the mind as Newton had explained the functioning of the universe. That is, they sought a few principles, or laws, that could account for all human mental experience.

German philosophers made an active mind central to their conception of human nature. Instead of envisioning a mind that simply recorded and stored sensory experiences, they saw the mind as actively transforming sensory information, thereby giving that information meaning it otherwise would not have. For these German rationalists, knowing the operations of this active mind was vital in determining how humans confront and understand their world.

Scattered throughout Europe, the romantic philosophers rebelled against the views of the empiricists and rationalists. According to the romantics, both of these philosophies concentrated on one aspect of humans and neglected others. The romantics urged a focus on the total person, a focus that included two aspects the other philosophies minimized: human emotions and the uniqueness of each individual.

After Descartes, and to a large extent because of him, the philosophies of empiricism, rationalism, and romanticism took center stage. In this chapter, we focus on British empiricism and French sensationalism. We will review German rationalism in
Chapter 6
and romanticism in
Chapter 7
.

BRITISH EMPIRICISM

An empiricist is anyone who believes that knowledge is derived from experience.
Empiricism
, then, is a philosophy that stresses the importance of experience in the attainment of knowledge. The term experience, in the definition of empiricism, complicates matters because there are many types of experience. There are “inner” experiences such as dreams, imaginings, fantasies, and a variety of emotions. Also, when one thinks logically, such as during mathematical deduction, one is having mental experiences. There is general agreement, however, to exclude such inner experiences from a definition of empiricism and refer exclusively to sensory experience. Yet, even after focusing on sensory experience, there is still a problem because the implication is that any philosopher who claims sensory experience to be vital in attaining knowledge is an empiricist. If this were true, Descartes could be called an empiricist because, for him, many ideas came from sensory experience. Thus, acknowledging the importance of sensory experience alone does not qualify one as an empiricist.

What then is an empiricist? In this text, we will use the following definition of empiricism:

· Empiricism … is the epistemology that asserts that the evidence of sense constitutes the primary data of all knowledge; that knowledge cannot exist unless this evidence has first been gathered; and that all subsequent intellectual processes must use this evidence and only this evidence in framing valid propositions about the real world. (
D. N. Robinson, 1986
, p. 205)

It is important to highlight a number of terms in Robinson’s definition. First, this definition asserts that sensory experience constitutes the primary data of all knowledge; it does not say that such experience alone constitutes knowledge. Second, it asserts that knowledge cannot exist until sensory evidence has first been gathered; so for the empiricist, attaining knowledge begins with sensory experience. Third, all subsequent intellectual processes must focus only on sensory experience in formulating propositions about the world. Thus, it is not the recognition of mental processes that distinguishes the empiricist from the rationalist; rather, it is what those thought processes are focused on. Again, most epistemological approaches use sensory experience as part of their explanation of the origins of knowledge; for the empiricist, however, sensory experience is of supreme importance.

Thomas Hobbes

Although he followed in the tradition of William of Occam and Francis Bacon,
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
is sometimes also referred to as the founder of British empiricism. Hobbes was educated at Oxford and was friends with both Galileo and Descartes. He also served as Bacon’s secretary for a short time. Hobbes was born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, England. He often joked that he and fear were born twins because his mother attributed his premature birth to her learning of the approaching Spanish Armada. Hobbes’s father, an Anglican vicar, got into a fight in the doorway of his church and thereafter disappeared. The care of his children was left to a prosperous brother who eventually provided Hobbes with an Oxford education, but Hobbes claimed that he learned little of value from that venture. Hobbes noted that Oxford had a strong Puritan tradition but also had an abundance of “drunkenness, wantonness, gaming, and other such vices” (
Peters, 1962
, p. 7). Hobbes lived a long, productive, and influential life. He played tennis until the age of 70, and at 84 he wrote his autobiography. At 86 he published a translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey just for something to do. Prior to his death, he amused himself by having his friends prepare epitaphs for him. Hobbes achieved great fame in his lifetime: “Indeed, like Bernard Shaw, by the time of his death he had become almost an English institution” (
Peters, 1962
, p. 16).

Humans as Machines. Hobbes did not become serious about philosophy until the age of 40, when he came across a copy of Euclid’s Elements. This book convinced him that humans could be understood using the techniques of geometry.

That is, starting with a few undeniable premises, a number of undeniable conclusions could be drawn. The question was what premises to begin with, and the answer came from Galileo. After visiting Galileo in 1635, Hobbes became convinced that the universe consisted only of matter and motion and that both could be understood in terms of mechanistic principles. Why, asked Hobbes, could not humans too be viewed as machines consisting of nothing but matter and motion? Galileo was able to explain the motion of physical objects in terms of the external forces acting on them—that is, without appealing to inner states or essences. Are not humans part of nature, wondered Hobbes, and if so, cannot their behavior also be explained as matter in motion? This became the self-evident truth that Hobbes needed to apply the deductive method of geometry: Humans were machines. Humans were viewed as machines functioning within a larger machine (the universe): “For seeing life is but motion of limbs.… For what is the heart but a spring; and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body” (
Hobbes, 1651/1962
, p. 19).

It is interesting to note that although Hobbes was a close friend of Bacon and had himself a considerable reputation, Hobbes was never asked to join the prestigious British Royal Society (founded in 1660). The reason was that the society was dominated by Baconians, and Hobbes had nothing but contempt for Bacon’s inductive method. He accused the Baconians of spending too much time on gadgets and experiments and of preferring their eyes, ears, and fingertips to their brains. Instead, Hobbes chose the deductive method of Galileo and Descartes. With Hobbes, we have the first serious attempt to apply the ideas and techniques of Galileo to the study of humans.

Government and Human Instincts. Like many of the philosophers we will see in this chapter, Hobbes’s primary interest was politics. He was thoroughly convinced that the best form of government was an absolute monarchy. He believed that humans were naturally aggressive, selfish, and greedy; therefore, democracy was dangerous because it gives too much latitude to these negative natural tendencies. Only when people (and the church) are subservient to a monarch, he felt, could there be law and order. Without such regulation, human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes, 1651/1962, p. 100). Hobbes’s infamous conclusion, Homo homini lupus (Man is a wolf to man), was later quoted sympathetically by Schopenhauer (see Chapter 7) and Freud (see Chapter 16).

It is, according to Hobbes, fear of death that motivates humans to create social order. In other words, civilization is created as a matter of self-defense; each of us must be discouraged from committing crimes against the other. Unless interfered with, humans would selfishly seek power over others so as to guarantee the satisfaction of their own personal needs: “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” (1651/1962, p. 80). The monarch was seen by Hobbes as the final arbitrator in all matters of law, morals, and religion, and the freedom of a person consisted only in those activities not forbidden by law. The laws are determined and enforced by the monarch. Hobbes offended all types of Christians by saying that the church should be subservient to the state and that all human actions could be explained mechanically (and therefore free will was an illusion). Hobbes’s most famous work, Leviathan (1651), was mainly a political treatise, an attempt to explain and justify rule by an absolute monarch. Hobbes began Leviathan with his views on psychology because it was his belief that to govern effectively, a monarch needed to have an understanding of human nature.

Leviathan became viewed as the work of an atheist, and in 1666 a motion was made in parliament to burn Hobbes as a heretic. The plague of 1665 and the great fire of London the following year were believed by many to be God’s revenge on England for harboring Hobbes. King Charles II came to his rescue, however, and, as mentioned before, Hobbes went on to live a long, productive life. He died at the age of 91.

Hobbes’s Empiricism. Although Hobbes rejected Bacon’s inductive method in favor of the deductive method, he did agree with Bacon on the importance of sensory experience:

The [origin of all thoughts] is that which we can sense, for there is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original. (Hobbes, 1651/1962, p. 21)

Although Hobbes accepted Descartes’s deductive method, he rejected his concept of innate ideas. For Hobbes, all ideas came from experience or, more specifically, from sensory experience.

Following in the tradition of Democritus, Hobbes was also a materialist. Because all that exists is matter and motion, Hobbes thought it absurd to postulate a nonmaterial mind, as Descartes had done. All so-called mental phenomena could be explained by the sense experiences that result when the motion of external bodies stimulates the sense receptors, thereby causing internal motion. What others refer to as “mind,” for Hobbes, was nothing more than the sum total of a person’s thinking activities—that is, a series of motions within the individual. Concerning the mind-body problem, Hobbes was a physical monist; he denied the existence of a nonmaterial mind.

Explanation of Psychological Phenomena. Attention was explained by the fact that as long as sense organs retain the motion caused by certain external objects, they cannot respond to others. The availability of mental imagery, for Hobbes imagination, was explained by the fact that sense impressions decay over time, as did memory; “So … imagination and memory are but one thing which for divers considerations hath divers names” (1651/1962, p. 24). Dreams then have this same origin: “The imaginations of them that sleep are those we call dreams. And these also, as all other imaginations, have been before, either totally or by parcels, in the sense” (Hobbes, 1651/1962, p. 25). The reason that dreams are typically so vivid is because during sleep there are no new sensory impressions to compete with the imagination.

Hobbes argued that external objects not only produce sense impressions but also influence the vital functions of the body. Those incoming impressions that facilitate vital functions are experienced as pleasurable, and the person seeks to preserve them or to seek them out. Conversely, sense impressions incompatible with the vital functions are experienced as painful, and the person seeks to terminate or avoid them. Human behavior, then, is motivated by appetite (the seeking or maintaining of pleasurable experiences) and aversion (the avoidance or termination of painful experiences). In other words, Hobbes accepted a hedonistic theory of motivation. According to Hobbes, we use terms such as love and good to describe things that please us and terms such as hate and evil to describe things to which we have an aversion. By equating good with pleasure and evil (bad) with pain, Hobbes was taking a clear stand on moral issues: “Having insinuated this identity, Hobbes had both stated and explained moral relativism: there were no objective moral properties, but what seemed good was what pleased any individual or was good for him” (Tuck, 2002, p. 65).

In Hobbes’s deterministic view of human behavior, there was no place for free will. People may believe they are “choosing” because at any given moment one may be confronted with a number of appetites and aversions and therefore there may be conflicting tendencies to act. For Hobbes, will was defined as the action tendency that prevails when a number of such tendencies exist simultaneously. What appears to be choice is nothing more than a verbal label we use to describe the attractions and aversions we experience while interacting with the environment. Once a prevalent behavioral tendency emerges, “freedom” is simply “the condition of having no hindrance to the securing of what one wants” (Tuck, 2002, p. 57).

Complex Thought Processes. Hobbes also attempted to explain “trains of thought,” by which he meant the tendency of one thought to follow another in some coherent manner. The question was how such a phenomenon occurs, and Hobbes’s answer, reintroduced the law of contiguity first proposed by Aristotle. That is, events that are experienced together are remembered together and are subsequently thought of together. All the British empiricists who followed Hobbes accepted this concept of association as their explanation as to why mental events are experienced or remembered in a particular order.

To summarize Hobbes’s position, we can say that he was a materialist because he believed that all that existed was physical; he was a mechanist because he believed that the universe and everything in it (including humans) were machines; he was a determinist because he believed that all activity (including human behavior) is caused by forces acting on physical objects; he was an empiricist because he believed that all knowledge was derived from sensory experience; and he was a hedonist because he believed that human behavior (as well as the behavior of nonhuman animals) was motivated by the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Although, as we will see, not all the empiricists that followed Hobbes were as materialistic or mechanistic as he was, they all joined him in denying the existence of innate ideas.

John Locke

John Locke (1632–1704) was born at Wrington in Somerset, England, six years after the death of Francis Bacon. His father was a Puritan, a small landowner, and an attorney. Locke was a 17-year-old student at Westminster School when, on January 30, 1649, King Charles I was executed as a traitor to his country. The execution, which Locke may have witnessed, took place in the courtyard of Whitehall Palace, which was close to Locke’s school. Locke was born 10 years before the outbreak of civil war, and he lived through this great rebellion that was so important to English history. It was at least partially due to the Zeitgeist, then, that Locke, as well as several of his fellow students, was to develop a lifelong interest in politics. Indeed, Locke was to become the most influential political philosophers in post-Renaissance Europe.

In 1652 Locke, at age 20, obtained a scholarship from Oxford University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1656 and his master’s degree in 1658. His first publication was a poem that he wrote, when he was an undergraduate, as a tribute to Oliver Cromwell. Locke remained at Oxford for 30 years, having academic appointments in Greek, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. He also studied medicine, and on his third attempt, he finally attained his doctorate in medicine in 1674. It was through his medical studies that Locke met Robert Boyle (1627–1691), who influenced him greatly. Boyle was one of the founders of the Royal Society and of modern chemistry. Locke became Boyle’s friend, student, and research assistant. From Boyle, Locke learned that physical objects were composed of “minute corpuscles” that have just a few intrinsic qualities. These corpuscles can be experienced in many numbers and arrangements. Some arrangements result in the experience of primary qualities and some in the experience of secondary qualities. We will see shortly that Boyle’s “corpuscular hypothesis” strongly influenced Locke’s philosophy. Locke became a member of the Royal Society, and as a member performed some studies and demonstrations in chemistry and meteorology. Newton was only 10 years old when Locke arrived at Oxford, but in 1689 the two men met and Locke referred to him as the “incomparable Mr. Newton.” Locke corresponded with Newton for the rest of his life, primarily on theological matters.

SUMMARY

A group of British philosophers opposed Descartes’s notion of innate ideas, saying that all ideas were derived from experience. Those who claimed that experience was the basis of all knowledge were called empiricists. Hobbes insisted that all human activity was ultimately reducible to physical and mechanistic principles; thus, he was a materialist and a mechanist as well as an empiricist. He believed that the function of a society was to satisfy the needs of individuals and to prevent individuals from fighting among themselves. He also believed that all human behavior was ultimately motivated by the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

Locke was an empiricist who distinguished between the primary qualities of objects, which caused ideas that actually resembled attributes of those objects, and secondary qualities, which caused psychological experiences that had no counterpart in the physical world. Locke believed that all ideas are derived from sensory experience but that existing ideas could be rearranged by the mind into numerous configurations. Like most of the other empiricists, Locke believed that all human emotions are derived from the two basic emotions of pleasure and pain. Locke’s views on education were compatible with his empirical philosophy and were highly influential.

Berkeley denied the existence of a material world, saying instead that all that exists are perceptions. Although an external world exists because God perceives it, we can know only our own perceptions of that world. We can assume that our perceptions of the world accurately reflect external reality, however, because God would not allow our senses to deceive us.

Hume agreed with Berkeley that the only thing we experience directly is our own subjective experience but disagreed with Berkeley’s faith that our perceptions accurately reflect the physical world. For Hume, we can never know anything about the physical world because all we ever experience is thought and habits of thought. Hume made the laws of association the cornerstone of his philosophy. He postulated three such laws: the law of contiguity, which states that events experienced together are remembered together; the law of resemblance, which states that remembering one event tends to elicit memories of similar events; and the law of cause and effect, which states that we tend to believe that the circumstances that consistently precede an event cause that event. According to Hume, it is the passions (emotions) that govern behavior, and because people differ in their patterns of emotions, individual behavior differs.

Hartley attempted to couple empiricism and associationism with a rudimentary conception of physiology. Hartley was among the first to show how the laws of association might be used to explain learned behavior. According to his analysis, involuntary (reflexive) behavior gradually becomes associated with environmental stimuli, such as when a child’s grasping becomes associated with a favorite toy. In accordance with the tradition of empiricism, Hartley believed pleasure and pain govern behavior, and it was his disciple Priestley who saw the implications of Hartley’s hedonism for educational practices.

James Mill pushed empiricism and associationism to their logical conclusion by saying that all ideas could be explained in terms of experience and associative principles. He said that even the most complex ideas could be reduced to simpler ones. John Stuart Mill disagreed with his father’s contention that simple ideas remained intact as they combined into more complex ones. He maintained that at least some simple ideas underwent a fusion and that the complex idea they produce could be quite different from the simpler ideas that make it up. J. S. Mill’s idea of fusion was called mental chemistry. J. S. Mill believed that a mental science could develop that would eventually be on par with the physical sciences. According to J. S. Mill, the primary laws governing behavior are already known; what is needed to make mental science an exact science is an understanding of the secondary laws that determine how individuals act under specific circumstances. He accepted Bentham’s utilitarianism—the ethical position that the best action is the one that produces the greatest good.

Alexander Bain was the first to write an entire book on the relationship between the mind and the body, to use known neurophysiological facts in explaining psychological phenomena, and to found a psychology journal. He explained voluntary behavior in terms of spontaneous behavior and hedonism, and he added the laws of compound association and constructive association to the list of traditional laws of association.

Like the British empiricists, the French sensationalists believed that all ideas are derived from experience. The sensationalists were either materialists (like Hobbes) denying the existence of mental events, or they were mechanists believing that all mental events could be explained in terms of simple sensations and the laws of association. Gassendi believed that Descartes’s division of a person into a material body and a nonmaterial mind was silly. All so-called mental events, he said, result from the brain, not the mind. Like Hobbes, Gassendi concluded that all that exists is matter, and this includes all aspects of humans. In his book Man a Machine, La Mettrie proposed that humans and nonhuman animals differ only in degree of complexity and that both could be understood as machines. If we viewed ourselves as part of nature, said La Mettrie, we would be less inclined to abuse the environment, nonhuman animals, and our fellow humans. Condillac, using the example of a sentient statue with only the sense of smell, the ability to remember, and the ability to feel pleasure and pain, proposed to show that all human cognitive and emotional experience could be explained; thus, there was no need to postulate an autonomous mind. Helvétius applied empiricism and sensationalism to the realm of education, saying that by controlling experience, you control the content of the mind.

With the widespread success of science, some people believed that science could solve all problems and answer all questions. Such a belief was called scientism. Accepting scientism, Comte created a position called positivism, according to which only scientific information should be considered valid. Anything not publicly observable was suspect and was rejected as a proper object of study. Comte suggested that cultures progressed through three stages in their attempt to explain phenomena: the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific. Comte did not believe psychology could become a science because studying the mind required using the unreliable method of introspection. Years following Comte, Mach proposed another type of positivism based on the phenomenological experiences of scientists. Like Comte, Mach wanted to rid science of metaphysical speculation.