Lecture 3 - 17th/18th century developments

Question 1

When was Rene Descartes around?
Was he an empiricist or rationalist?

Answer 1

1596-1650
Rationalist

Question 2

What prompted to Descartes to question what we know?

Up until flashcard 6, we will be a bit hypothetical to get you thinking like descartes. Theres a summary on flashcard 7.

Answer 2

He said that other philosophers say the weirdest shit, and that our knowledge is based on shaky foundations

So he began to doubt what we know.

Question 3

What do you really know for sure?

Answer 3

Descartes believed that if you can doubt something, it can’t be true.

He began to doubt everything, even the mind because if I can dream something, then if something enters my mind it can be doubted.

Question 4

So if you can say “I doubt” to everything, what can be true?

Answer 4

Well if you doubt everything, the statement “I doubt” is true.
From this, you get…
“I think, therefore I am”

Question 5

If you are designed to think, and you can doubt your body, what does this lead you to?

Answer 5

If you are a substance which its nature is to think, and that for its existence there is no need for any place, nor does it depend on any material thing.
Thus, that substance, which is you, it is entirely distinct from body, and won’t disappear if the body does.
We can call this ‘thing’ the soul.

Confusing I know, but try and pretend youre a 17th century frenchman

Question 6

Therefore, if my soul doesn’t need a body, what does this imply?

Answer 6

That the soul/mind exists separately from the body, therefore, Dualism is a thing.

Question 7

Summary of Descartes thinking

Answer 7

• I doubt
• So there is something that is doubting
• I call that something “the mind”
• I cannot doubt the existence of this mind
• The mind is not material. After all, you can doubt anything that is material
• The mind thus must exist separately from the body: Dualism

Question 8

How does Descartes substantiate the existence of God?

Answer 8

Since we know we are not perfect, but we have the idea of perfection.
We can make less perfect things, but not more perfect things,
The idea of perfection must have been placed in me by something more perfect than me
Whoever place that idea in me must have all the perfection we have ideas of.
This must be God.

Confusing again i know, they didn’t wash their hands, get used to it

Question 9

Since we cannot perceive God, what does this mean?

Answer 9

The idea of God must be innate
↳Therefore Descartes is a Plato fanboy, not an aristotle fanboy.

Because God is perfect, God will not fool us: The world we perceive outside of us, exists!

Question 10

Where did Descartes believe the mind connected to the body?

Answer 10

The Pineal Gland.

Question 11

What is Dualism?

Answer 11

The belief that the mind/soul is separate from the body, and it has no physical location.

Question 12

What does Descartes believe the body is?
What problem arises from the interaction of mind and body?

Answer 12

He believed the body is a machine.
The problem is, how does the immaterial mind interact with the material body if they are separate?

Question 13

What does physics have to say about Dualism?

Answer 13

It doesn’t follow the laws of physics.
The mind must set something in motion to control the brain, but the mind itself is immaterial and doesn’t fall under the laws of physics.

This means that the mind adds energy out of nothing, which violates the Law of Conservation of Energy

Question 14

Do we have the answer to the mind-body problem?

Answer 14

It is still an open problem.
Descartes’ dualism is widely rejected,
however, there is no agreement on the alternative, whether you go to materialist, and then go hardcore to reductionism.
We will get into them later on.

Slide 22 for Alex teehee

Question 15

Who are the three main British Empiricists that respond to Descartes/Rationalism?
When were they around?

Answer 15

John Locke (1632-1704)
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
David Hume (1711-1776)

So only Locke was alive when Descartes was

Question 16

What were John Locke’s beliefs?

Answer 16

He finds rationalism and its innate idea theories unacceptable
He tries to refute them with psychological observations (e.g. with newborn children)

Question 17

What did Locke say about universal moral principles?

Answer 17

Rationalists rely on them, Locke tries to refute them.
We don’t find these “universal” principles in children. You find different principles in different cultures.

He believed all knowledge is obtained through experience..

Question 18

Whats the biggest idea associated with Locke and experience?

Answer 18

The tabula rasa (blank slate)
I won’t explain cus I think you guys know it already.
Interestingly, he used it as a way to justify “natural rights”, aka human rights. He said that since we are all start with a tabula rasa, then everyone deserves the same rights.

Thus, the idea of the tabula rasa has political implications (wowie).

Question 19

Did Locke believe that humans had a completely blank slate with nothing there?

Answer 19

No, he did think that there were some basic innate mechanisms like language.
He thought of the mind as as complicated, information-processing mechanism able to convert experience into coordinated human knowledge

Question 20

What did George Berkeley believe/think?

Answer 20

He agrees with Locke that all knowledge enters through the senses, thus we can only be certain of our perceptions, not a material external world.
But, what causes our perception of this external world?

Question 21

How did Berkeley explain the idea of material objects?

Answer 21

There is no material substance
There are only spirits/minds that perceive
The most superior spirit is God
The objects that are perceived are not material; they are ideas
These ideas are cause by God

Question 22

What is Idealism?

Answer 22

The belief that all properties of reality depend on the mind: esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived), and that this doesn’t necessarily correspond to an outside world.
The truth of knowledge depends on the coherence with the rest of the knowledge in the social group.

Usually contrasted to realism (Discussed on flashcard 25 so we don’t interrupt the train of thought)

Question 23

So, how do we explain things we aren’t actively perceiving? (aka the world around us)

Answer 23

↳The part of the world that we experience as “objective” is a projection of God’s mind.

The world is not material, but it is real, the sun also exists when we close our eyes.

Question 24

Since Berkeley is all about God, can he still be considered an empiricist?

Answer 24

Yes, because he believes all knowledge enters us through perception. We cannot deduce the ideas of God through reasoning, we only have perception of them

Question 25

What is realism?

Answer 25

The view within philosophy that human knowledge tries to reveal real properties of the outside world; the truth of knowledge is determined by the correspondence of the knowledge with the real world

Question 26

Berkeley vs Descartes

Answer 26

Similarities
* Both formulate a proof of God, and reason about the foundation of knowledge.

Differences
* Descartes says there is a physical external world. Berkeley says that God causes the ideas directly within us.
* Descartes led to Dualism, Berkeley led to Idealism
* Descartes says reason is source of knowledge, Berkeley says perception

Question 27

What did David Hume believe?

Answer 27

Hes a very important philosopher, he put the problem of induction on the map.

Empirical knowledge is generated through the ‘copy principle’
Experiences result in impressions in the mind. When two things occur together frequently, their impressions in our mind will be associated.

Question 28

What do we mistakingly do with that association according to Hume.

Answer 28

The association can be seen as a correlation, but we reason beyond that.
We begin to use the idea of causation “The spark caused the explosion”

Question 29

Hume’s analysis of causality

Answer 29

1. Proximity of cause and effect.
   They need to be near each other in time and space
2. Cause precedes effect
3. Necessary connection between cause and effect

Question 30

Can we confirm a necessary connection of an interaction?

Answer 30

We can’t confirm this, because we can’t observe every single occurrence of this interaction. (e.g. with billiards, we can’t see every single hit)
- Remember counterexamples from SSR.

Because of this, we can’t confirm causality, we can only make a generalisation about the event from specific individual occurrences.
This is the problem of induction.
Inducing causal relations from a habitual observation between two objects, e.g. we always see the effect of gravity on objects, so we make the causal relation of gravity.

Question 31

So what is Induction, and what is it’s problem

Answer 31

Induction is the generalization of observed cases to all cases.
Inferring causality also relies on induction.
However, induction is a logically invalid form of reasoning: the conclusion does not follow from the premises.

So according to Hume, anything from induction and causation is flawed, we can only trust what we observe in the moment.

Question 32

Hume believes that all knowledge comes from experience, what does he say ab causal relations based on this?

Answer 32

He believes that according to his criteria, causal relations cannot come from experience alone.
Thus, causal relations should not play a role in our description of empirical reality

Question 33

Is Hume’s induction problem a threat?

Answer 33

It is a threat for all kinds of knowledge.
After all, almost all science and philosophy is based on generalization.
Laws are nothing more than habits in which we came to see necessity.
E.g. gravity, we say it is a law, but we can never be certain (take that newton).

If general laws cannot be proven, then nothing is certain anymore…
(philosophers didn’t like this, as we will see with Kant)

Question 34

I shall attempt to summarise whatever the fuck I wrote about Hume in the last couple flashcards, cus damn.

Answer 34

Hume believed that humans mistakenly infer causality from experiencing the co-occurence of phenomena, because we can never directly observe the cause.
There is no guarantee for such an assumption. The link could arise entirely from the mind alone (idealism).
This fucks with science, because it breaks every damn law we have.

Question 35

What did Kant believe?

Answer 35

He wanted to save Newton, so he combined empiricism with rationalism.
He agreed with Berkeley and Hume that we cannot have direct knowledge of the outside reality through perception, but he thought that
a) Perception is much richer than postulated by Berkeley ad Hume
b) Such perception can only exist in a world of things that is not in contradiction with it.

Question 36

How did Kant combine empiricism with rationalism?

Answer 36

He said that perception of reality combined with a priori knowledge together result in experience.
Experience gets its content from the external world but its understanding from the mind.
These two cannot be separated.
“Thoughts without content are empty, perceptions without concepts are blind” → empiricism and rationalism merged.

Question 37

How did he structure a priori knowledge?

Answer 37

He did this with the idea of a priori categories, which structure perception through concepts such as space, time, and causality
He believes these categories are universal principles of thinking, and that experiences are rationalised through them

Question 38

Do these a priori categories (causality, time, order, unity) exist?

Answer 38

That is what modern research is aiming to investigate with baby and animal research.
The idea is that if babies or chicks are susceptible to causal relationships, the category “causal” must be inborn.

Question 39

What is one factor that increased the interest in psychology?
When did it start?

Answer 39

Individualisation in western society
It started sometime around the end of the middle ages.

Question 40

What factors played a role in increasing individualisation?

Answer 40

• Increased complexity of society
• Increased control by the state
• Individuality promoted by Christianity
• Increased availability of mirrors, books, and letters

Question 41

What is epistemology?
When did it become popular?

Answer 41

The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge.
The seventeenth century

Question 42

Who is Thomas Reid and what did he argue for?

Answer 42

He was a Scottish philsopher (1710-1796), and he argued that Berkeley and Hume’s idealism had gone one step too far and that it was time for a return to ‘common sense’

He thought that the decoupling of mind and reality had gone too far and we should return to the view of perception as a direct interaction between the perceiver and the real object.

Question 43

When did Psychology start to become studied?

Answer 43

Towards the end of the 18th century.

Question 44

Who is Christian Wolff?

Answer 44

A Polish-German mathematician and philosopher (1679-1754). He was a leading figure of the German Enlightenment and he kickstarted the interest in psychology as a subject.

Question 45

What is rational psychology

Answer 45

Wolff defined axioms from fundamental disciplines that could be used as a basis for rational psychology, like Aristotle did for theoretical knowledge.
These axioms would lead to the demonstration of new knowledge, and guaranteed true conclusions about the human soul.
These conclusions would be deeper than if done by simple observation.

Question 46

What is empirical psychology?

Answer 46

Wolff agreed with Bacon that pure reason without observation is risky.
Psychology needed a close interaction between reason and observation, aka empirical psychology.

Wolff based empirical psychology on introspection

Question 47

What is introspection?

Answer 47

A research method in psychology consisting of a person looking inward and reporting what he/she is experiencing; usually done under controlled circumstances.

According to Wolff, this information can be used to build a science of psychology.

Question 48

What other part of psychology did Wolff define?

Answer 48

He suggested psychology should aim for mathematical demonstrations.
He called this approach ‘psychometria’, or psychometrics (im sooooo happy that its back, can’t you tell from my extremeeee happiness -.-)

Question 49

Why is Kant a poopy-pants and what did he reason about whether psychology can be a natural science?

Answer 49

1. The outcome of introspection cannot be formulated in mathematical terms because there are no aspects of substance or space in inner observations, only time.
2. Inner observations cannot be separated and recombined at will, as is possible with outside objects.
3. The act of introspection by itself changes and displaces the state of the observed mind.
4. As a result, psychology can never become a natural science (let alone a proper natural science). It can at most be a historical doctrine of nature, a collection of systematically ordered empirical facts.

It’s ok though, cus he also said chemistry wasn’t a natural science, loser

Question 50

Who else denied with the scientific status of psychology?

Answer 50

Auguste Comte, the proponent of positivism and the founder of sociology.
He viewed introspection as unscientific, because a paradox is created when one tries to be an observer and observee at the same time.

Question 51

How could the human mind be studied scientifically according to Comte?

Answer 51

He believed that the human mind could only be studied scientifically via biology, and observation of the products produced by the mind (sociology).

Question 52

Textbooks of psychology

Answer 52

For some random reason, the book talks about different textbooks in history.
I think it does this to illustrate how the approach towards psychology as a science shifted, and it shows what topics were considered important.

This stuff is debatable on its usefulness, so read and smile :D

Question 53

Who are the 4 authors of the textbooks, and what did they discuss?

Answer 53

• Kant: anthropology as a collection of observed facts about humans
• Herbart: attempt to make psychology scientific by introducing mathematical laws
• Upham: claim that intellectual (mental) philosophy is a science worthy of study
• Bain: introduction of the nervous system and other physiological information in a textbook of psychology

List is in chronological order.

Question 54

The book talks about scientific studies of ‘psychological’ functions. I’m confused on how to do flashcards for it so I’ll just try and summarise what on earth they yap about.

Answer 54

The two main categories are
Human perception
and
The speed of signal transmission in the nervous system and mental chronometry

Question 55

Human perception experiments

Answer 55

They give experiments about how we learnt the limits of perception.
Hooke: Determined the minimal visual angle that could be discriminated -.-
Weber and Fechner: Found the two-point threshold, the distance at which you can’t distinguish between two or one objects poking you; Found the minimal difference perception of weight
This lead to psychophysics, a part of psychological research dealing with the relationship between physical stimuli and the corresponding sensation.

If this interests you, go ahead and read

Question 56

The speed of signal transmission in the nervous system and mental chronometry experiments

Answer 56

Astronomers realised there was differences in how fast people could time a star moving across the sky, and this led interest in the time needed to transfer information in the nervous system and to perform simple mental operations.

A german (von Helmholtz) found out the signal speed in frogs isn’t instantenous, rather its only 30 metres a second, he then found the signal speed in humans.
Then a dutch guy (Donders) found out how fast people could differentiate stimuli, forming the basis of mental chronometry: using reaction times to measure the time needed for various mental tasks.

Question 57

Evolutionary theory

Answer 57

Yippee Charles Darwin is backkkk.
(Also hes definitely gay, the reason why he went on a bunch of expeditions around the world to study different species was cus the captain was lonely and required a “gentleman companion”.

It talks about his findings in the book, and I’m not gonna go over them, but if you need a recap on natural selection and cross-fertilisation, let me know :)

Question 58

Francis Galton

Answer 58

Yup mr racist is back, they talk about how he tried to show that intelligence is hereditary, and white people are smarter because of that. he found no such correlations.

Question 59

Summary of evolutionary theory.
I’m gonna put the copy of the summary in the book, cus its quite random, and it isn’t that complex

Answer 59

• Proposed by Darwin.
• Several developments made the theory likely in the nineteenth century: interest in diversity and correspondence between species, discovery of fossils, cultivation of new flower types.
• Darwin discovered that random variations at birth, together with limited availability of resources, could explain evolution on the basis of natural selection.
• Theory published in The Origin of Species (1859).
• Darwin could not explain how new randomly generated organisms could come to dominate the existing organisms (absence of knowledge of genetics).

Question 60

Summary of Common misunderstandings of evolutionary theory

Answer 60

• The mistaken belief that there is a direction in the genetic changes that cause the initial variation.
• The mistaken belief that evolution results in better or stronger organisms.

Question 61

The contribution of statistics

Answer 61

Psychology and physics are different as physics produces the ~same results each time you do the experiment, whereas psychology is all over the place. This led to statistical analyses being developed, as you need lots of observations to remove the noise.
Stats also helped to design proper studies, e.g. Fisher being asked to figure out whether an experimental fertiliser is better, and to deal with the random details like weather, harvesting technique, etc., he split the fields into small chunks and randomly used the experimental fertiliser or the normal fertiliser.
This is basically what we do nowadays, but with people not crops. (and we call the random details confounding variables)

Question 62

The status of medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Answer 62

• Most medical care was done by practitioners who learned the trade as apprentices.
  
  • In addition, there were university-educated doctors whose training often only included theoretical knowledge.
• Effective medicines against the prevailing diseases were lacking and practitioners oftenresorted to bloodletting, laxatives and purgatives.
  
  • Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a movement emerged which saw the practitioner as a GP listening to his patients and giving advice about how to cope with the illness (the patient-as-a-person movement).