British Empiricism developed in the 16th-17th centuries. It was a reaction to political, religious and scientific dogma. Society has based on tradition. But the class system was under pressure. It had not fallen apart but cracks were appearing on the seams.
England was the major power in world affairs. It was reaping the benefits of more trade. It was rich and getting richer. Following Portugal’s lead, England shipped slaves, spices and political influence. The Crown was still in charge but the strains that led to the execution of Charles I weee present. China’s Ming dynasty falls, Japan was unifying, and the American colonies were becoming established.
in the 17th century, the Mayflower sailed to America, Portugal gains independence from Spain, and England and Scotland unite. 1603, Queen Elizabeth dies.
The rich were very rich. They lived in mansions built of stone. Country estate houses with a dozen bedrooms were constructed. Louis XIV built the Palace of Versailles as a hunting lodge in 1682.
As the rich got richer, the poor got somewhat less poor. Workers are mining coal and are employed in iron works. There is an increase in glass blowing and brick-making. Workers live in 1-2 room houses made of wood and plaster. They have cloth windows soaked in oil, until glass prices come down. If they have furniture, it is heavy and made of oak. Chairs are too expensive but there are stools to sit on. There is no running water or indoor plumbing. Candles are used for light.
Hunting and industrial accidents were common. As more people moved to the cities, epidemics smallpox, tuberculosis and bubonic spread quickly. Families weee large, often 8-10 children. If you survived childhood, life expectancy was under 40 years.
In addition to polo Al and social change, religion and science were on the brink of great shifts. Rote learning was common. The Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church and the Church of England were well established as national religions but many believers identified as Lutheran, Baptists and Puritans.
Science was poised to become much more popular and accessible. Knowledge was increasing rapidly. There was always something new being discovered. Newton was watching apples fall from a tree, the Mississippi River was discovered, and Juan de Ornate established a colony for Spain in what is now New Mexico. Dutch settler Peter Minuit Buys Manhattan.
For most British Empiricists, the choice between inductive and deductive reasoning is a false dichotomy. It is more a matter of emphasis. After all, they used deduction to generate their theories. They didn’t go out in the world and stumble over them. They sat in their armchairs and thought about it.
Locke, John (1632-1704)
Born and raised near Bristol, England, Locke was educated at Oxford. After getting an undergraduate and a masters degree in humanities, he entered medical school. Locke not only trained and worked as a physician, he thought of himself as primarily being a physician. Of course, he is best known for his philosophy. In 1589, he published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which he worked on for nearly two decades.
Locke’s parents were Puritans. They were displeased with what they saw as the politicalization and corruption of the Church of England. Puritans wanted a reformed Anglican Church. The Church of England believed salvation came from taking sacraments and following church teachings. Puritans we’re more Calvinistic, emphasizing personal conversion, Calvin taught that God selected (elected) who would be saved. Evidence of having been elected tended to be personal wealth and holiness. Anglicans rejected Calvinism as being too “works” oriented, not enough grace.
Locke’s personal faith developed as his philosophical insights developed. He rejected rote education, and rote theology. The truth of beliefs shouldn’t be determined by mindless following. Faith worth having is faith that can be questioned, explored and personalized.
Like Descartes, Locke was a dualist (mind and body exist separately). They both believed in God. They both believed in science. And they both tried to reconcile their religious upbringing with their adult thinking.
Unlike Descartes, Locke disputed the’emphasis on innate ideas. It was commonly held in Locke’s time that morality was instilled in people by God. That is, people are born with knowing right from wrong. In contrast, Locke proposed that the mind is as a blank slate (tabula rasa) and that ideas come from experience.
For Locke, ideas were simple, immediate and derived from sensations. Simple ideas could be combined into more complex ideas. Reasoning is the process of combining ideas.
Similarly, knowledge is perception-based. It is the attraction or repugnance of an idea. Locke differentiated three types of knowledge : inductive, demonstrative and sensitive. Induction is the immediate acquisition on an idea. Demonstrative knowledge is slower. You use reason to judge them. Sensitive knowledge is external. It is real, not dreaming. It is the sun during the day, not the sun when you can’t see it.
When faced with uncertainty, Locke recommends applying the principles of evidence, probability and proportionality. Basically, when in doubt, collect evidence, calculate the probability it is true, and determine the firmness of your belief. Act accordingly.
Borrowing from his teacher Robert Boyle, Locke differentiated between primary and secondary qualities. Qualities are idea producers. Primary qualities are inseparable from the object, and generate in us ideas of solidity, shape, and movement. Secondary qualities (such as color and taste) do not correspond to the physical world but are psychological in nature.
Mill, John (1773-1836)
According to Mill, the vividness and frequency of associations between sensations glues simple sensations into complex ideas. Mill’s “mental mechanics” accentuated the composite nature of ideas. The concept of a window, for example, is made of smaller ideas (glass, wood, etc.). For Mill, the mind is predictable and passive. He was a enthusiastic follower of utilitarianism. As proposed by Mill’s friend Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), personal and governmental decisions should be based on the usefulness (utilitarianism) of the outcome. Essentially a hedonistic view of the world, utilitarianists sought to maximize personal and corporate pleasure. Right and wrong were replaced with pleasure and pain. Mill’s greatest contribution was not in generating new insights but in providing a thorough summary of associationism. In 1829, he published Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (revised by his son, John Stuart Mill, in 1869).
Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873)
Although psychology was more of a hobby than a vocation for James Mill, his son, JS Mill was a major proponent of the systematic study of human nature. Like his father, JS was an elementalist. Like his father, JS Mill accepted contiguity as a law of association, but also believed that similarity and intensity were important. Unlike his father, JS held that the mind is active, and that the process of thinking was more like “mental chemistry” than mental mechanics. According the JS, ideas can fuse together, creating something new out of simple sensory elements.
Hume, David (1711-1776)
Born and educated in Eddinburgh, Scotland, Hume studied law and business but never received a degree. As was true of his life, Hume maintained that all knowledge comes from experience. Like Berkeley, Hume noted that we cannot experience the physical world directly. You can’t prove that a table exists after you leave a room. However, for Hume, not all perceptions are equal. He distinguished between impressions (strong perceptions) and ideas (caused by weak perceptions. Hume also proposed 3 laws of association: contiguity, resemblance, and causality. Like Locke and Berkeley, Hume noted that events which happen together in time and space associated together. Another factor impacting association is resemblance (similarity). To these, Hume added a third factor: causality (the ability to associate a wound with the pain that follows).
Berkeley, George (1685-1753).
Born in Kilkenny, Ireland, Berkeley waseducated at Oxford, spent several years in Italy and America, and served for 18 years as the Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, Ireland.
In psychology, he is best known for his work on vision, his emphasis on associations and his belief that complex perceptions are composed of simple mental elements. In philosophy, he founded idealism and challenged Newton’s concepts of time and space. In 1866, Berkeley, California was named in his honor.
Berkeley’s 1709 book on vision explained how we perceive 3 dimensions with eyes which can only see in two dimensions. According to Berkeley, we perceive depth by associating the convergence of the eyes with other sensations (e.g., the size of an object is smaller as distance increases). His interest in perception also tied to Berkeley’s philosophy. He maintained that perception is the essence of being. In an attempt to counter what he perceived to be attacks on God, Berkeley proposed an imaginative argument against dualism and materialism.
Materialists reasoned that matter is all that exists so God cannot exist. Dualists maintained that this world is a bad copy of a separate world of ideas. Berkeley started with the premise that God exists and argued that without Him nothing would exist. Berkeley’s argument rested on 2 premises: (a) nothing can be perceived without a mind and (b) there are things the human mind can’t perceive. His conclusion was that there must be a mind that perceives everything seen and unseen: God. It is not so much that we perceive therefore we are (to paraphrase Descartes) but that we are, therefore someone is perceiving us. Although Berkeley’s philosophy was not widely accepted, his criticism of materialism and dualism founded a new approach called idealism.
Bacon, Francis (1561-1626)
It was be easy to reduce Francis Bacon to a Mippet character doing a series of jokes on ham and bacon. Or he could be thought a typical lawyer-politician: greedy, corrupt, and disgraced. Bacon was habitually in debt. He was charged with 23 accounts of corruption, and was expelled from Parliament.
You could focus on the great discoveries of Bacon, but there aren’t any. Francis Bacon isn’t well known for the things he did but the things he inspired other people to do. Voltaire called him the father of the scientific method. Many people were inspired by Bacon to build libraries, make knowledge more accessible, and be more systematic in data collection, more skeptical of assumptions, and more reliant on reasoned explanations.
Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903)
Born in working class Derby, England, Spencer was a working man. With no formal schooling, at age 17 he got a job on the railroad. Then, when he turned 28, he set off for London to become a journalist. After a stint as an assistant editor for The Economist, Spencer became a success working the freelance market. Spencer liked the idea of evolution. Basing his ideas on Lamarck, then on Darwin, he proposed evolution is an on-going process of differentiation. Life grows in complexity, and learning occurs by contiguity. For Spencer, when associations occur often enough, they can be passed on to the following generation. Like Bain, Spencer was a hedonist. They believed that pleasure increased the frequency of behavior. Known as the Spencer-Bain principle, it says that the probability of a given behavior occurring increases if it is followed by pleasure, and decreases if that behavior is followed by pain. In 1852, Spencer coined his best known phrase “survival of the fittest.” It was term Darwin later used himself.
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Hobbes, Galileo & Descartes
Want to jump ahead?
- Philosophical Roots of Psychology
- Waves & Schools of Psychology
- Old Philosophers, New Ideas
- Hobbes, Galileo & Descartes
- Experimental Physiology
- American Psychology
- Japanese Psychology
- German Psychology
- Russian Psychology
- Five Paths To Truth
- Birth of Psychology
- British Empiricism
- British Psychology
- French Psychology
- Wundt
