Page 12 - History of Psychology

Berkeley denies the existence of the material world, saying instead that all that
exists is perception. Hume agrees with Berkeley that the only things we experience

directly are our own subjective experiences, but disagrees with Berkeley's belief
that our perceptions accurately reflect the physical world. Hume made the law of
association the cornerstone of his philosophy. He postulated three such laws: the
law of proximity, which states that events experienced together will be
remembered together; the law of resemblance, which states that remembering
one event tends to give rise to memories of similar events; and the law of cause
and effect, which states that we tend to believe that circumstances that
consistently preceded an event caused that event. According to Hume, it is
passion (emotion) that governs behavior, and because people differ in their
emotional patterns, individual behavior is different. Hartley tried to combine
empiricism and associationism with a rudimentary conception of physiology and
showed how the laws of association could be used to explain learned behavior.
James Mill pushed empiricism and associationism to their logical conclusion by
saying that all ideas can be explained in terms of experience and associative
principles.

Like the British empiricists, the French sensationalists believed that all ideas came
from experience. Sensationalists are materialists who deny the existence of
mental events, or they are mechanics who believe that all mental events can be
explained in terms of simple sensations and laws of association. Gassendi believed
that Descartes' division of a person into a material body and a nonmaterial mind
was ridiculous. Helvétius applied empiricism and sensationalism to education,
saying that by controlling experience, you control the content of your thoughts.

With the widespread success of science, some people believe that science can
solve all problems and answer all questions. Such belief is called scientism.
Accepting scientism, Comte created a position called positivism, according to
which only scientific information was considered valid. Comte suggested that
cultures developed through three stages in their attempt to explain phenomena:
theological, metaphysical, and scientific. Comte did not believe psychology could
be a science because studying the mind required using unreliable methods of
introspection.

Discussion Questions

Discuss and compare the empiricism, sensationalism, and positivism!
How did Helvetius apply empiricism and sensationalism to education?
Compare Mach's verson of positivism with Conte!

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