Chapter 5
From the Renaissance to the Dawn of Science
Remember, this outline follows chapter 5 closely and adds material to help you learn and understand it. Please report any problems with the page by e-mailing me. Again, this is another long chapter covered by one test.
All links worked as of 2023-12-28 8:39 PM. Please report any problems you encounter by emailing me at epkardas@saumag..edu
Modified: 2024-03-06 6:55 PM CST
ZEITGEIST (p. 137)
- Roman Catholic Church in Crisis
- Rich
- Popes fought in wars
- Bishops bought their sees
- Priests kept concubines
- Protestant Reformation
- Led by Luther
- 30 Years War
- Catholic Counter Reformation
- Led to two Europes, Catholic and Protestant
- Large Scale Historical Events
- Explorations of New World and Asia
- Commerce and Credit
- Islamic threat to Europe recedes
- Huntington's Clash of Civilizations
- Thesis that the West is facing new challenges from China and Islamic countries
- Not universally accepted, however
- Enlightenment
- New disciplines emerge, including psychology
(by mid1800s)
- American Revolution (1776)
- French Revolution (1789)
- Martin Mersenne
- Astronomy and Science Emerge
- Copernicus
- Brahe
- Kepler
- Galileo
- Newton
- Philosophy
- Descartes
- Mind-Body problem
- Rationalist view of philosophy
- British reaction to Descartes's Rationalism
- Observation first
- Francis Bacon
- Thomas Hobbes
- John Locke
- George Berkeley
- David Hume
- English Civil Wars
- British major external event
- 30 Years War
- European major external event
PREVIEW (p. 138)
- The astronomers in this chapter uncovered laws of nature.
- Later, psychologists would attempt to find laws of psychophysics and behavior expressed via mathematics.
- Related to mathematics was the idea of measurement.
- Brahe’s quadrants and sextants, Galileo’s and Newtons’s telescopes, and Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes collected data beyond the power of human senses.
- This era saw the rise of the doctrine of mechanism, the idea that everything has a natural cause.
- All of these 17th century innovations would carry forward into psychology and become part of its toolkit too.
- The Enlightenment represented a sea change in European thinking about methods of inquiry.
- The slow moving separation between theology and philosophy finally split the two disciplines and gave birth to the new philosophy.
- Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum exercise, his interactionist mind-body solution, laid the foundation for future rationalist philosophers.
- Bacon unlike Descartes believed in empiricist methods.
- Bacon's Idols attempted to ensure reliability and validity for sensory observations as was his emphasis on induction.
- Bacon separated science into components of theoretical and applied.
- The English Civil Wars also played a major role in shaping the future of empirical philosophy showing how the state of nature and the social contract could suddenly change.
- Hobbes used materialism in order to dispense with the thorny problem of how mind and body affected each other.
- Locke posited his tabula rasa as a powerful empiricist metaphor and his doctrine of associationism.
- Bishop Berkeley invoked God in his idealism in order to deal with otherwise intractable issues surrounding the mind-body problem.
- Hume removed God from philosophy while searching for more precise ways to understand empiricism.
- His analyses of resemblance, continuity, and cause and effect were different and seminal. He reversed the relationship between emotion and rational thought, putting the passions first.
INTRODUCTION (p. 140)
- This chapter covers about 400 years of history. The following events highlight that era. All are discussed below.
- Renaissance
- Protestant Reformation
- Counter Reformation
- Astronomy
- Science
- Modern philosophy
- Rationalism vs Empiricism
- Era of European exploration
- Commerce and banking
- Islam recedes from Eastern Europe
- Siege of Vienna ends (1683)
- Enlightenment and Revolutions
- Secularism
- American (1776) and French (1789) Revolutions
heliocentrism-the astronomical model in which the planets revolve around the Sun in elliptical orbits.
Learning Objective: Describe some of the large scale societal changes that have taken place during the lifetimes of you and your parents. (Hints: pay phones, cell phones, map apps, you get the idea.)
THE RENAISSANCE (p. 141)
- Begins in late 1300s in Florence
- Spreads quickly from South to North in Europe
- Art, education, architecture change
- Printing press fueled the Renaissance
- Created:
- Masses of printed matter
- Bibles in vernaculars
- Readers
- Printing press then was more influential than WWW now (so far, at least)
- Erasmus (the prototypical "Renaissance Man")
- Orphaned and sent to Augustinian monastery
- Became priest and secretary to bishop of Cambrai
- Studied theology at University of Paris
- Developed antipathy to Scholasticism (see chapter 4)
- Learned Latin and Greek
- Anti-scholastic (efficacy of prayer)
- Long scholastic debate about the type of prayer
- Scholastic question: "Does God prefer one long prayer or many short prayers?" Obviously, there is no way to answer that question.
- Inner religion over outward manifestations
- e.g., subtance over appearance
- Translated Bible from Greek into Latin
- Eramus's Bible had both languages displayed side by side
- In Praise of Folly
- His major work
- Made him famous and wealthy
- Poked fun at Catholic clergy and their practices
- But, he hoped to heal the Church from within
- He studied the Bible's origins
- Not supported by his colleagues
- Note how such an effort is a humanist idea
- The study of the Bible is called hermeneutics
- Conflict with Luther
- Disagreed with him over:
- Original Sin
- Free Will
- God's grace
- Moved from Basel (Protestant city) to Freiburg (Catholic city)
- Part of the zeitgeist following Reformations (see Kepler below)
- Religion could get you killed
- Humanist
- Tried to understand God via:
- Analysis of critical texts of the church's fathers
- Led to modern biblical scholarship
- Helped to put the final nails in Scholasticism's coffin
Learning Objective: Explain the differences between representing knowledge on the printed page vs. doing so on a web page.
THE REFORMATIONS
(p. 143)
- Older revolts suppressed by the Catholic Church
- Pope Leo X distracted by his building projects at the Vatican
- Lutheranism was one of several competing new Protestant religions
- Counter Reformation
- End of Western Chrisendom
- Today there are over 3,000 Christian denominations
- Martin Luther
- Augustinian monk
- Became a monk after surviving a storm
- Taught theology a University of Wittenberg
- Against the sale of indulgences (including for those already dead)
- Luther's parishioners asked him if they were legitimate
- Luther said they were not
- Luther publishd his 95 Theses
- Published in Latin and German!
- Widely distributed thanks to printing press
- Summoned to Rome
- Instead, Luther remained in Saxony
- Debated Eck at the University of Heidelberg
- Eck got him to admit that Jan Hus was not a heretic
- Church declared Luther a heretic after that
- Diet (parliament) of Worms
- Luther attended because he had a safe conduct pass
- Did not recant, instead he said:
- "Here I stand; I can do no other."
- Protected by Friedrich the Wise
- Translated Bible into German while at Eisenach Castle
- Lutheranism emerged:
- Justification by faith
- Good works do not lead to salvation
- Priests could marry
- People could read and interpret the Bible
- Transsubstantiation (e.g., body and blood?)
- Luther was not a humanist (Christian fundamentalist)
- The Counter Reformation
- Belated Roman Catholic response to Luther and others
- Sale of indulgences prohibited
- Bishops no longer alowed to live outside their sees
- Priestly celibacy promoted
- Better education for parish priests
- But no real concessions to Protestants
- Index of Prohibited Books
- A list of written materials that Catholics should not read
- Spoiler Alert: Many of the authors below will have had works placed on that list.
- The Inquisition
- Run by the Dominican Friars
- Find and root out heretics
- Burned many
- Thirty Years War
- 1618 to 1648
- Fought mostly in Central Europe
- Peace of Westphalia ended it
- Led to two Europes:
- Catholic (Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland)
- Protestant (England, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Germany)
Learning Objective: Identify some modern examples of intolerance, religious or otherwise.
THE RISE OF SCIENCE
(p. 147)
- Gregorian calendar
- The old Julian calendar had lost 12 days, was out of sync
- Other calendars: Jewish 2024 = 5784, Islamic 2024 = 1445
- Time and globalism
- Knowing the exact time is now very important
- What time is it?
- I ask that question in class and have volunteers tell me what time they have on their phones and watches.
- Time is a complex concept.
- Notice our time zones and use of daylight savings time.
- Arkansas discussed adopting daylight savings time year round
- Copernicus
- Polish Astronomer
- Asked by Pope Gregory to revise the calendar
- Copernicus refused, said he needed to collect more information
- Wrote On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres
- Published just before his death with preface
- Put Sun in the middle of "universe"
- Circular orbits by planets
- Kepler made the model more accurate with eliptical orbits (see below)
- More elegant than Ptolemy's system but no better at making astronomical predictions
- Implications
- The older level of the fixed stars impossible
- Universe much larger than previously supposed
- Eighth Heaven (the former fixed stars) could change
- Placed on Index in 1616
- Beginning of heliocentric model
heliocentrism: the astronomical model in which the planets revolve around the Sun in elliptical orbits.
Learning Objective: Modify your thinking about sunrises and sunsets and determine which direction the earth is spinning relative to the sun. In other words, don't talk about "sunrise" and "sunset" and, instead, talk about "earth spin"
- Tycho Brahe
- Nobleman
- Should not have been doing science
- Nobles did other things:
- Soldiering
- Diplomacy
- The Church
- Astronomer (no telescope, had not yet been invented)
- Supernova of 1572, published account
- Other astronomers had missed it
- He showed that it did not move, thus it was like a star (a nova is a star that blew up, they are rare)
- Hven observatory
- Tremendously large grant of entire island and its inhabitants
- Brahe's Instruments: Quadrants and sextants
(scroll down page to see photos)
- Used to sight stars repeatedly with the naked eye
- Had to leave Hven and moved to Prague
- Was poor administrator
- Worked under Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II
- Created database of visible stars and planets
- Met and hired Kepler (because he needed help with his observations)
- Died suddenly (of DISH diffuse ideopathic skeletal hyperostosis) and Kepler kept Brahe's data
- Brahe compiled one of the first scientific databases
- Johannes Kepler
- German and a Lutheran
- Worked at University of Graz where he:
- Studied astronomy
- Taught mathematics
- Cast horoscopes (a common practice then)
- Was a Copernican
- Nesting 3-D shapes (Platonic)
- Kepler liked the Euclidean simplicity of that model
- FYI: New book that I ordered for the library in 2023 argues that esthetics do not science make. It's the data scientists collect that makes the difference.
- His mixing of mathematics and physics not done then
- Mathematics was yet part of science
- Forced to leave Graz (religious reasons)
- Graz was a Catholic city, Kepler and his family were Protestants
- They had to either convert, leave, or die
- Brahe hired him as an assistant in Prague
- At first Brahe only let him work with his data on Mars
- Later, he gave him data from all planets he had observed
- Note: Kepler was the first scientist to benefit from a large, reliable dataset
- Kepler's Laws
- 1st: elliptical orbits
- 2nd: equal areas over equal times
- 3rd: square of time for orbit proportional to cube of distance from Sun
- He sent his book to Galileo
- But, there is no record of Galileo responding to him
- Galileo
- Italian and Catholic
- His father was a musician
- Decided not to become a monk
- Became a mathematician at the University of Pisa (then, mathematics was low status subject, academically)
- Researched Falling bodies
- Discovered that Aristotle was wrong (Leaning Tower experiment probably apocryphal)
- Objects of different weights fall at the same speed
- Aristotle stated that heavier objects fell faster
- Moved from Pisa to the University of Padua in Venice
- Telescope
- He improved the design of the recently invented telescope
- Used it to look at night sky
- He discovered:
- Moons of Jupiter
- Oops! New heavenly bodies.
- Spoiler Alert: that discovery gets him in trouble with the Catholic Church. The Bible did not include any new "heavenly bodies"
- Craters on the moon
- Stars invisible to naked eye
- Military technology (sector, telescope, design of fortifications)
- Galileo sold telescopes and other techonology to Doge of Venice
- Back to Florence as a research professor (did not have to teach)
- Went to Rome in 1616 to defuse controversy about Copernican theory
- That got him in trouble
- He should not argue THEOLOGICAL questions
- The Church warned him not to "hold and defend" Copernican theory
- He used theological arguments, bad idea at that time
- Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) book was condemned
- He had thought he had permission to publish
- Made Pope look stupid because it seemed one of the characters, Simplicio, was the pope.
- Forced to Recant
- It read (in part):
- I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error, heresy, and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Holy Church, and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me.
- Placed under house arrest
- But visited by Hobbes and Milton
- Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to the Two New Sciences
- Secretly published in Holland
- Covered technology, motion, materials science, acceleration
- Post-Aristotelian physics
- Heresy charges withdrawn by Roman Catholic Church in 1992
BORDER WITH MATHEMATICS (p. 156)
- Point Blank
- Galileo improved on the sector (see Photo 5.1), an early military instrument.
- When the cannon was pointed directly at the target, the sector read 0 or “point blank range.”
- Galileo added an adjustable foot, a hinged pivot, and new scales.
- Galileo’s sector evolved into an early mathematical computing device capable, “of solving all the practical mathematical problems of the day” (Drake, 1976, p. 113).
- Galileo’s sector was the forerunner to slide rules, mechanical calculators, and today’s electronic devices. Science and measurement have been linked ever since.
BORDER WITH BIOLOGY (p. 157)
- Microbiology
- The technology of telescopes, when inverted, created the compound microscope.
- Leeuwenhoek used single lens microscopes to discover bacteria, single-celled animals, and blood cells and reported to the Royal Society
- Robert Hooke replicated and confirmed them with a compound microscope of his own design and puiblished a book, Micrographia.
- The book inspired others to study the world of things too small to see with the naked eye.
- Once again, new instruments had revealed new facts, this time in biology.
Learning Objective: Appraise the differences in collecting data with the naked eye to doing so with instruments such as telescopes and microscopes.
- British early scientist
- Cambridge University and Black Plague (1665)
- Annus mirabilis
- while back at home at Woolsthorpe Manor during the Plague he created the calculus and researched optics, gravity (apple falling really happened)
- Lucasian Chair of Mathematics
- Newton was the first to hold that chair at Cambridge
- Admitted to the Royal Society
- Because of his reflecting or Newtonian telescope
- In his book De motu he calculated the inverse square law showing
elliptical planetary orbits
- Laws of motion:
- 1st Law: objects remain at rest or continue in motion
- 2nd Law: motion and force are proportional
- 3rd Law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction
- He wrote Principia mathematica
- Enormous influence to ALL sciences
- Reaction to Descartes' whirlpool model of planetary motion
- Warden of the Mint
- Dealt with counterfeiters and "clippers"
- Controversy with Leibniz and calculus
- Most likely they each invented it independently
- Newton and Social Science
- Mjøset (2001) provided four different models for social science theories
- Each is different from the Newtonian physical science model
- Models:
- Law-oriented
- Idealizing
- Constructivist
- Critical
- Explanation for Mjøset's theories
Learning Objective: List the progression of astronomical knowledge and equipment from Brahe to Newton.
Rationalism-the primary basis for human knowledge comes from the exercise of reason and not from sense perception
Empiricism-experience, especially sense experience, is the primary way that humans acquire knowledge.
Rationalism vs Empiricism (video)
Learning Objective: Explain how modern psychology uses empiricism and rationalism to explain human behavior.
BORDER WITH SOCIAL SCIENCE (p. 162)
- Archeology, Anthropology, and Political Science
- Not possible to stretch the origins of psychology back to the Renaissance
- Ciriaco de’ Pizzicolli founded archeology
- Lorenzo Valla founded linguistics and began the interest in cultural differences
- Machiavelli founded realpolitik while ceding the primacy for the study of practical politics to Aristotle. These very early manifestations of social science did not fully bloom into well-developed disciplines until the 19th century
RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE (p. 162)
- Giordano Bruno
- Bruno was a Dominican friar who had long been suspected of heretical views he saw Copernicus as a modern day John the Baptist
- Bruno was invited to Venice by a nobleman, Giovanni Mocenigo, to teach him about memory and invention. But, Mocenigo denounced Bruno on multiple charges to the Venetian Inquisition.
- The Venetian inquisitors learned that Bruno had once been a friar, that he had met with Protestants, read forbidden books, and had himself written books deemed as heretical.
- He confessed his errors and promised to halt such behavior in the future (Finocchiaro, 2017).
- The Roman Inquisition then demanded the opportunity to question him as well. After seven years of imprisonment and questioning, the Roman Inquisition branded him a heretic.
- Aquilecchia (2017, p. 6) offered, “Giordano Bruno can legitimately be considered not only as a Renaissance philosopher, but as the (original italics) Renaissance philosopher par excellence.”
- Michael Servetus
- Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553 on Calvin’s orders.
- Servetus was a Spanish physician who had published books attacking the Trinity.
- But, he could not resist writing Calvin and arguing with him, via correspondence, about the nature of Christianity.
- Calvin kept all of Servetus’s letters and confided to others that if Servetus were to come to Geneva, “I will not suffer him to get out alive” (Ozment, 1980, p. 370).
- The Inquisition caught Servetus in France, but did not have enough evidence to convict him until, somehow, his letters to Calvin mysteriously showed up in France.
- He was promptly declared a heretic but managed to escape. He crossed the border into Switzerland and appeared in Geneva at one of Calvin’s sermons.
- He was promptly arrested, tried, and burned. (His effigy was also burned by Catholics, in absentia, in France (Cattermole, 1997).
Thus, intolerance was not solely the property of one version of Christianity. Both Catholics and Protestants were highly intolerant of deviations from their versions of orthodoxy. Thus, throughout most of Europe, philosophy was a dangerous occupation.
THE EARLIEST NEW PHILOSOPHERS (p. 164)
- Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon broke from Scholasticism (see chapter 4) but did so differently
- Descartes searched for secure, universal knowledge that was independent of sensory observations.
- Bacon promoted the role of sensory observations in his philosophy and proposed a radical form of empiricism called induction.
- Modern philosophy and psychology are still affected by their competing visions.
- Rene Descartes
- French philosopher
- Celebrated Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's moons while in school
- Soldier
- Mathematician
- Inspired by his dreams to reform learning and knowledge acquisition
- But, he was afraid to offend the Church
- He wrote: Discourse on Method (plus Dioptrics, Meteorology, and Geometry)
- Refraction (air/water)-Snell's law video
- Helped convince Descartes that senses could not be trusted
- His Rationalism depended on the mind, not observations
- Descartes' physics did not pass test of time
- Believed nerves were hollow tubes filled with fluid
- Meditations
- Descartes wanted to find a foundation for his philosphy
- When he realized he was thinking he inferred there must be a thinker, he himself. He said:
- Cogito, ergo sum or "I think, therefore, I am."
- From that point forward he could build a philosophical system
- Matter and Mind
- He divided the world into two parts: mind and body
- He said they interacted
- Cartesian dualism or interactionism
Interactionism-the belief that there exists a separation between the physical world and the mental world and that each can affect the other.
- External world (size, shape, position, and motion of objects) vs. Internal world (color, sounds, smells, and tastes)
- Cartesian interactionism is only one solution to the mind-body problem
- In this and the next chapter we'll look at other solutions
- Many of those arose because of the problems with Descartes's solution
- For example:
- How and where do mind and body interact
- Descartes assumed a benevolent God, so he could not rule out that his cogito, ergo, sum was really correct
- Descartes's system relied on God. Most later philosophers sought to completely separate religion from philosophy
- Descartes' Later Life and Legacy
- Moved to Netherlands and then to Sweden (to escape Inquisition)
- Founder of modern philosophy
- All works placed on the Index
BORDER WITH COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE (p. 164)
- Analytic Geometry
- Legend has it that the inspiration for analytic geometry came to Descartes while he was in bed watching a fly buzz around a room.
- True or not, modern analytic geometry did not spring fully fledged from Descartes’s mind. Instead, he showed that some problems in geometry could be solved algebraically.
- Later mathematicians developed the now familiar x, y, & z coordinate system using his notation.
- His contribution to mathematics was profoundly important to the later development of the calculus by Newton and Leibniz.
- In the 19th century, the x, y, & z coordinate system was named “Cartesian” in his honor (see Figure 5.5).
FYI: DESCARTES AND THE REFLEX (p. 168)
- Descartes attempted to explain reflex action using a hydraulic model.
- To him, nerves were hollow tubes filled with liquid, animal spirits (see Figure 5.6).
- When the heat from a fire became too intense the spirits pushed on the pineal gland, which in turn, sent animal spirits down another nerve tube, moving the affected body part.
- The moving statues moved by water and hydraulic tubes at at St. Germain inspired his model of nerve action.
- Descartes sought to explain reflexes mechanistically in both humans and animals.
- He assignined a mind only to humans. To him, animals had no minds and behaved exclusively as the result of mechanistic principles.
BORDER WITH SOCIAL SCIENCE (p. 169)
- The Mind-Body Problem and Scientific Progress
- The synergy between physics, mathematics, and the mind-body problem proved advantageous to physical science.
- Sciences whose subject matters could be studied by measuring the primary qualities (those unaffected by perception, see Locke, below) only quickly prospered.
- Physics and chemistry developed quickly. Both only needed to examine the physical universe.
- Descartes saw natural philosophy (aka, the "hard sciences) as a tree, with metaphysical roots, a philosophical trunk, and branches of medicine, mechanics, and morals.
- For Descartes, psychology and the other social sciences would emerge from moral philosophy.
- That branch of his tree was concerned with passions, their control and methods for directing the will toward good and away from evil.
- Unlike natural philosophy, moral philosophy required study of both mind and body.
- Paradoxically, physics and the other “hard” sciences have had a smoother historical path; they have only had to cope with the body, the external and physical half of the mind-body problem.
- The social sciences, on the other hand, have had to cope with both halves of the problem, a more difficult and bumpy road.
Francis Bacon
- British
- Classic education at Cambridge University
- Trained as lawyer
- Became Lord Keeper of the Seal under James I
- Advancement of Learning (first philosophy book written in English)
- Theology and Philosophy separate
- Faculties of mind: history, imagination, and reason
- Sensory information is reliable provided care is taken (control)
- Idols
- Tribe: errors in perception, small samples, personal bias
- Cave: culture and individual differences, families, schools, religions, gender, social class
- Market Place: social interactions and miscommunication, slang, jargon, unreal (crystalline spheres, phlogiston)
- Theatre: against Scholasticism, suspension of belief, theology and philosophy confounded
- Unbiased Observation (a new kind of induction)
- Reliable databases (e.g., Google vs. PsychINFO)
- Which would you trust more? Why? (Peer review)
- Tables of facts
- Think of modern databases such as:
- Scientific collaboration
- He contributed, indirectly, to the founding of scientific societies
- Royal Society
- The Royal Society in England was an early example
- Psychology has many such groups at all levels
- APS Wikipedia Initiative
- APS striving to improve Wikipedia
- Notice how I am using Wikipedia entries throughout these pages
- Theoretical and Applied Science
- Physics is theoretical while engineering is applied
- Those two disciplines depend on each other
- Psychology, too, ranges from theoretical to applied
- Printing, Gunpowder, and Compass (technologies)
- Bacon pointed out how those technologies had widespread effects
- Radical empiricist
- In Bacon's case that means he was more beholden to data than he was to theory
- Spoiler Alert: Later you will see how John B. Watson (chapter 9) and B. F. Skinner (chapter 10) were psychological radical empiricists
Learning Objective: Describe how the annual meetings of contemporary scientific societies reflect the interactions between individual scientists that began in Mersenne’s cell.
BORDER: Marin Mersenne-The incident between Descartes and the fly took place in Mersenne's cell. Mersenne corresponded with or knew: Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi, Fermat, Huygens, Hobbes, Pascal, and Torricelli. L'Academie des Sciences founded afterwards.
Learning Objective: Appraise how Bacon and Descartes each contributed to the rise of the new philosophy.
THEN AND NOW (p. 172)
- APS Wipedia Initiative
- That Baconian ideal has taken a new turn in the 21st century as the Association for Psychological Science (APS), as part of its APS Wikipedia Initiative, has urged its members to:
- Ensure that articles about psychological research and theory are accurate, up-to-date, complete, and written in a style appropriate for the general public
- Ensure that articles are based on independent reliable secondary sources
- Represent scientific controversies and scientific consensus fairly, writing articles in a neutral style
- Improve and review articles to Good Article and Featured Article quality
- Assess psychology-related articles and tag them appropriately when there are problems
- APS members may, thus, give away psychology through one of the Internet’s most read sources while helping to assure that Wikipedia’s articles on psychology are reliable and timely.
- Marentette (2014) described an assignment she gave her students. They had to achieve ‘good article’ status from Wikipedia’s editors.
- They succeeded but found that had to learn and hew to Wikipedia’s standards of: neutral point of view, verifiable sources, and the avoidance of primary research. Bacon would be proud.
THE ENGLISH CIVIL WARS (1642-1651) AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES (p. 173)
- Affected all of British Isles
- England, Scotland, and Ireland
- Affected Hobbes and Locke
- Both were forced into exile
- Led to beheading of Charles I
- Oliver Cromwell
- Became Lord Protector
- James II disinterred his body, hanged it in chains, and beheaded it
- Brutal period but not as bad as Thirty Year's War on continent
Learning Objective: Discuss how the English Civil Wars (e.g., big history) affected the intellectual zeitgeist of Great Britain.
THE BRITISH EMPIRICISTS (p. 173)
- The philosophers who follow below reacted negatively to Descartes and his rationalist philosophy
- Over time, British Empiricism emphasized materialism, hedonism, and suggested mechanisms for how the environment shaped human behavior.
Thomas Hobbes
- Born when Spanish Armada tried to invade Britain in 1588
- Cavendish family, grand tours
- Worked for the Cavendish family
- Gave their sons their grand tours
- Today, extramural travel is often part of a college education
- On his third grand tour, Hobbes met Gassendi and Mersenne and learned of Descartes
Grand Tour-the traditional finishing point of an English gentleman's education consisting of a lengthy (several years) guided tour of European cities conducted by a knowledgeable tutor.
- Translator
- Materialist (anti-dualist)
- He opposed Descartes's dualism
Materialism-the belief that everything in the universe must consist of matter, including minds and mental states.
- Minimized sensory experience
- State of Nature
- A primordial era when no laws existed and all were equal (including women)
- The state of nature was relativistic, chaotic, and relativistic
Relativism-the belief that no universal values exist and that instead values vary by individuals, groups, or historic era. NOTE: this has now become a current problem. Think of the removal of John C. Calhoun' portrait from Yale, the flap over the Confederate flag, and the moving of Confederate memorials in New Orleans, the US Capitol, and other public places.
- In Leviathan, Hobbes described life as:
- "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"
- Social Contract
- The social contract was Hobbes's solution to the state of nature
- People gave up their individual rights to a ruler, who in turn protected them with laws
- Hobbes's version of the social contract was modified by Locke (see below)
Social Contract-an agreement between the governed and the government to provide security, welfare, and laws agreeable to both. (Modern examples in the USA include: WIC, Social Security, and Welfare.
- Anti-relativist
- Exile (English Civil War)
- Hobbes was a royalist and a follower of Charles I
- As such, it was not safe for him to remain in Britain
- He returned after the English Revolutions had subsided
- He wrote his major book:
- Leviathan
- De Facto Theory
- This was Hobbes's way out:
- The theory held that any government in power that provided for public safety was legitimate regardless of its form
- Hobbes was unpleasant in print and was denied Royal Society membership
- Did not believe in experimentation
- Contributions
- Passion over reason
- Social psychology of government
- Thinking = Computation
John Locke
- His father fought on Parliament's side during the Civil Wars
- Scholastic education at the University of Oxford but fell in with early scientists
- Worked for Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper)
- Learned about government
- Authored the constitutions of the Carolinas
- Obtained medical degree
- Visited French Protestants
- Exiled in Holland
- Locke inspired writers of Declaration of Independence
- Essay on Human Understanding
- Include human understanding as a science
- Against Descartes' innate knowledge
- Ryle (1967, p. 3) emphasizes Locke’s influence when he wrote:
"If we could fly back in a time-rocket to England in 1700, we could already breathe its air, and we could already converse with our new acquaintances without feeling lost. In the England of, say, 1600, we should gasp like fishes out of water."
- Tabula Rasa
- Empirical metaphor
- Graphic: notice how experience fills the slate of the mind
- Simple and Complex Ideas
- Simple ideas come from sensation
- Association turns those simple ideas into complex ones
- Spoiler Alert: it was not until Pavlov came up with classical conditioning that a mechanism for association was found (see chapter 9)
- Qualities of Objects
- Primary Qualities
- mass
- location,
- movement
- texture
- solidity
- In other words, these properties belong to the object (and can be measured objectively)
- Secondary
- These properties come from the perceiver
- What color is a tennis ball? Do diet drinks have an aftertaste?
- Tennis balls are perceived as green, yellow, or a color in between green and yellow
- Some people detect an aftertaste in some diet drinks, others do not.
- Spoiler Alert: Berkeley (see below) will eliminate primary qualities in his philosophy.
- Locke on knowledge
- Intuitive: existence, and even Locke admitted that some knowledge pre-existed learning
- Demonstrative: must be learned
- Example: the theorems of mathematics
- Once learned, however, they were unchangeable
- Sensitive: ideas, the largest category
- He had a probabilistic vies of empirical knowledge
- Example: there is a 60% chance of rain tomorrow
- He explored language too:
- Words were ideas
- Ideas could be:
- particular (e.g., this web page)
- abstract (e.g., beauty)
- Locke's Social Contract
- People may transfer some rights to government but reserve others to themselves
- Early step forward towards psychology
- He believed: He had swept away the "rubbish" of Scholasticism
- He prepared the grounds for an empirically based psychology
George Berkeley
- Anglican churchman (Bishop Berkeley)
- Believed materialism led to skepticism and later atheism
- Wrote: Esse est percipi (to be is to perceive)
- Attacking both Descartes' dualism AND Hobbes' materialism
- All of the primary qualities came from perception
- He claimed that only ideas existed and they existed in God's mind
- No primary qualities existed
- Understanding idealism
Idealism-the monistic belief that reality is only found in the mind through the act of perception. Consider how idealism might work: only through your mind, through a vast conspiracy, or through God's mind.
- Moved philosophy closer to psychology (e.g., via Sensation & Perception)
- BTW, and in a strange juxtaposition, Berkeley, CA is named after him
David Hume
- Matriculated at U. of Edinburgh at age 12
- Did not get a degree
- Commonplace occurrence then
- Worked as a clerk as shipping house
- Wrote: A Treatise on Human Understanding
- Was 26 years old
- Wrote in France at La Fleche, Descartes old school
- Book did not do well
- Later, as a librarian, he wrote a history book that sold well
- History of England was the book
- Gave him lifetime income
- Never had a academic position (too controversial)
- His published views on philosophy were too controversial
- Especially his negative views on religion
- He hosted Jean Jacques Rousseau for a while
- That relationship ended badly
- Goals for his philosophy
- Rid philosophy of metaphysics
- Improve the empiricism of Locke and Berkeley
- Create a science of human nature
- But, he left little room for consciousness or pre-existing mental categories
- To improved empiricism, he added
- Impressions
- vivid
- precursors of ideas
- ideas were secondary but still simple and complex
- New mechanisms
- Resemblance
- Continuity
- Both were extension of Locke's views
- Cause and Effect
- New and different way of looking at it
- It came from perception not from a priori knowledge
- It was a kind of pattern recognition
- In other words, cause was inferred AFTER a series of events
- Spoiler Alert: Skinner's definition of reinforcement is essentially Hume's (see chapter 10)
- Definitions:
- must be reducible to simple ideas or they are false.
- Thus, metaphysical terms were false because they could not be so reduced
- Mitigated Skepticism
- Impressions or ideas always true
- Beliefs may be wrong
- E.g., water hitting window
- (See text (p. 182): water WAS hitting the window, but it was not raining (the mistaken belief). Observation showed that someone outside was hosing off the window
- Passions
- Have priority over rational thought (Unlike Descartes)
- Innate
- Direct
- Indirect
- pride
- shame
- love
- hate
- But the above were still related to pain/pleasure and good/evil
- Moral Judgments
- based on experience, not reason
- from pursuit of pleasure or avoidance of pain
- Benevolence over Self-Interest
- Benevolence part of human nature but differed by society
- Did not want to use self-interest to explain social behavior
- Wide ranging interests: economics, history of ideas, esthetics, religion
- Anti-religious
- Laid foundation for empirical, materialistic, and behavioral psychology predicated on primacy of perception
- Inspired Immanuel Kant to argue against him (see chapter 6)
Learning Objective: Assess the contributions of the British empiricists to foundational issues in psychology.
SUMMARY (p. 183)
- The Renaissance was the result of many historical forces coinciding: Humanism, the growth of cities, increases in commerce and population.
- European explorers encountered unexpected peoples, animals, and plants.
- European colonizers spread their ideas, technology, and religions around the world.
- Erasmus, an Augustinian, melded Humanism and religion. He criticized the excesses of his own Catholic church and hoped to reform it from within, unsuccessfully.
- Martin Luther, a fellow Augustinian, also believed that the Roman Catholic Church had lost its way.
- The sale of indulgences caused him to attack their sale and publish his 95 Theses; those successfully birthed the Protestant Reformation.
- Luther and other Protestant reformers disagreed with each other over doctrine, but all wished to leave the Catholic Church.
- By the time the Catholic Church launched its own Counter Reformation the battle lines between all of the Christian churches had hardened.
- The long and violent Thirty Years War followed and left Europe permanently divided into two parts based on religion.
- Astronomy became the first science during the 16th century.
- The ancient Julian calendar was wrong but Copernicus refused to work on the problem because he believed the basic knowledge required to fix the calendar had to be understood first.
- Working alone Copernicus developed a new, radical view of the universe swapping the positions of the earth and sun causing others to investigate his new model.
- Brahe observed a visible supernova and determined how far away it was. His observations showed it was much farther away than the older Ptolemaic theory predicted.
- Brahe carefully measured the positions of nearly all the visible stars and planets, without a telescope, creating the first scientific database.
- Kepler's approach was to discover the mathematical rules that he believed God had used to create the universe.
- Kepler worked for Brahe and worked out the details of Copernicus's model had replacing circular planetary orbits with elliptical ones; he worked out the first laws of planetary motion.
- Galileo used the telescope to discover new facts finding that Jupiter had moons.
- Galileo's writings were opposed by the Inquisition and he was forced to recant his views. He lived his last years under house arrest.
- In England, relatively untouched by the Inquisition, members of the Royal Society met regularly to discuss scientific topics and publish their results.
- Isaac Newton was admitted to the Royal Society after he demonstrated his reflecting telescope.
- Newton’s Principia Mathematica opened the door to a new way of thinking about the world combining the data from observations with the calculus, a new mathematical description of the forces.
- Newton’s book caused others to think about the world in a new way; the scientific revolution had begun. Very quickly, others would extend the new scientific approach to a wide variety of academic disciplines.
- In time, psychology, the scientific study of behavior and mental processes, would also become a science
- Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon were among the earliest of the new philosophers.
- Descartes interactionist dualist approach via his clear statement of the mind-body problem liberated natural philosophy from its classic roots.
- But, interactionism also created problems: How the mind control the material body? His reflex action was too simplistic and physiologically false.
- Francis Bacon unlike Descartes focused on the collection of unbiased data, his idols, and divided science into pure and applied domains.
- Hobbes objected strenuously to Descartes’s dualism and proposed a strictly materialist philosophy.
- He defined the social contract a major concept in modern sociology.
- Locke, too, disagreed with Descartes’s ideas. Locke, believed all knowledge was learned through experience.
- Locke was a radical empiricist, stressed the primacy of perception but defined primary qualities. Those were part of nature and not learned.
- Berkeley went beyond Locke proposing a completely idealistic yet empirical philosophy. Berkeley agreed that everything was learned but that Locke’s primary qualities did not exist. For Berkeley, it was the mind of God that created everything that humans perceived.
- Hume wanted a philosophy free of metaphysics. Disagreeing with Descartes and Berkeley Hume wanted to explain everything without having to resort to God.
- Hume's skeptical approach added mechanisms such as resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect.
- Hume placed emotions and passions above reason; those were the source of social behavior.
GLOSSARY
Enlightenment: the period spanning the midpoints of the 17th and 18th centuries characterized by radical changes in thinking about science, politics, and the arts.
heliocentrism: the astronomical model in which the planets revolve around the Sun in elliptical orbits.
rationalism: the universe, including physical events, can only be explained through the action of human thought.
empiricism: the view that holds that all knowledge comes from experience, especially from sensory experience.
interactionism: the belief that there exists a separation between the physical world and the mental world and that each can mutually affect the other.
grand tour: the traditional finishing point of an English gentleman’s education consisting of a lengthy (e.g., several years) guided tour of European cities conducted by a knowledgeable tutor.
materialism: the belief that everything in the universe must consist of matter, including minds and mental states.
relativism: the belief that no universal values exist and that instead values vary by individuals, groups, or historical era.
social contract: an agreement between the governed and the government to provide security, welfare, and laws agreeable to both.
idealism: the belief that reality lies within an abstract and nonphysical realm accessible only through introspective analysis.
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