Chapter 5: Empiricism, Sensationalism, and Positivism Flashcards
Alexander Bain
The first to attempt to relate known physiological facts to psychological phenomena. He also wrote the first psychology texts, and he founded psychology’s first journal (1876). Bain explained voluntary behavior in much the same way that modern learning theorists later explained trial-and-error behavior. Finally, Bain added the law of compound association and the law of constructive association to the older, traditional laws of association
Jeremy Bentham
Said that the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain governed most human behavior. Bentham also said that the best society was one that did the greatest good for the greatest number of people
George Berkeley
Said that the only thing we experience directly is our own perceptions or secondary qualities. Berkeley offered an empirical explanation of the perception of distance, saying that we learn to associate the sensations caused by the convergence and divergence of the eyes with different distances. Berkeley denied materialism, saying instead that reality exists because God perceives it.We can trust our senses to reflect God’s perceptions because God would not create a sensory system that would deceive us
Auguste Comte
The founder of positivism and coiner of the term sociology. He felt that cultures passed through three stages in the way they explained phenomena: the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
Maintained that all human mental attributes could be explained using only the concept of sensation and that it was therefore unnecessary to postulate an autonomous mind
Julien de La Mettrie
Among the first philosophers to suggest “you are what you eat,” believed the body influences the thought processes, believed the universe was nothing but matter and motion, sensations and thoughts were nothing but movements of particles in the brain.
Pierre Gassendi
Saw humans as nothing but complex, physical machines, and he saw no need to assume a nonphysical mind. Gassendi had much in common with Hobbes
David Hartley
Combined empiricism and associationism with rudimentary physiological notions
Claude Helvétius
Elaborated the implications of empiricism and sensationalism for education. That is, a person’s intellectual development can be determined by controlling his or her experiences
Thomas Hobbes
Believed that the primary motive in human behavior is the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The function of government is to satisfy as many human needs as possible and to prevent humans from fighting with each other. He believed that all human activity, including mental activity, could be reduced to atoms in motion; therefore, he was a materialist
David Hume
Agreed with Berkeley that we could experience only our own subjective reality but disagreed with Berkeley’s contention that we could assume that our perceptions accurately reflect the physical world because God would not deceive us. We can be sure of nothing. Even the notion of cause and effect, which is so important to Newtonian physics, is nothing more than a habit of thought. Hume distinguished between impressions, which are vivid, and ideas, which are faint copies of impressions
John Locke
An empiricist who denied the existence of innate ideas but who assumed many nativistically determined powers of the mind. He distinguished between primary qualities, which cause sensations that correspond to actual attributes of physical bodies, and secondary qualities, which cause sensations that have no counterparts in the physical world. The types of ideas he postulated included those caused by sensory stimulation, those caused by reflection, simple ideas, and complex ideas, which were composites of simple ideas
Ernst Mach
Proposed a brand of positivism based on the phenomenological experiences of scientists. Because scientists, or anyone else, never experience the physical world directly, the scientist’s job is to precisely describe the relationships among mental phenomena, and to do so without the aid of metaphysical speculation
James Mill
Maintained that all mental events consisted of sensations and ideas (copies of sensations) held together by association. No matter how complex an idea was, he felt that it could be reduced to simple ideas
John Stuart Mill
Disagreed with his father James that all complex ideas could be reduced to simple ideas. He proposed a process of mental chemistry according to which complex ideas could be distinctly different from the simple ideas (elements) that constituted them. He believed strongly that a science of human nature could be and should be developed
Associationism
The belief that the laws of association provide the fundamental principles by which all mental phenomena can be explained
