Abstract
We begin our analysis by considering the philosophical school of empiricism in early modern thought. In a sentence, a central feature of this philosophical approach was the epistemological contention that all knowledge has its origin in simple sensory experience. This claim raises the following psychological question: given that complex mental phenomena (such as an abstract train of thought) obviously are not direct and simple deliverances of sense, what is their nature and where do they come from? Associationism was the name given to the increasingly elaborate account developed to answer this query.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Danziger, it is precisely the “rise of an empiricist philosophy at the end of the seventeenth century” to which the “origins of the modern concept of introspection [was] closely tied” (Danziger 2001, p. 7889).
- 2.
In Robinson’s words, “[i]t was Hobbes’ belief that a science of society could be established with the same rigor and sureness enjoyed by Mechanics” (Robinson 1986, p. 303).
- 3.
In full, Leviathan Or the Matter, Forme and Power of A Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil.
- 4.
It is an open question whether Hobbes’ mechanism was substantially shaped by his political philosophy or not. In an analysis that draws broadly upon Hobbes’ work, Gray (1978) argues that Hobbes should be seen as a truly systematic mechanist.
- 5.
In reality, in Hobbes’ view, those qualities are “seeming and apparitions only;” “the things that really are in the world without us, are those motions by which these seemings are caused. And this is the great deception of sense …” (Hobbes 2008, p. 26).
- 6.
A model with which he was personally familiar. During his years at Christ Church College in Oxford, for example, Locke became well acquainted with many of the great scientists of the seventeenth century—including Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Thomas Willis, John Wallis, Robert Hooke, David Thomas, and Richard Lower. He collaborated in experimental work with several of these great figures (Rogers 1978, p. 223).
- 7.
Strictly speaking, as Yolton reminds us, “no idea comes from experience on Locke’s program since it is ideas of all sorts which make up or constitute experience” (Yolton 1963, p. 53).
- 8.
See Klein (1970, pp. 360–368) for a discussion of why Locke was opposed to innate ideas but not also to congenital experiential content derived from the exercise of the senses in the womb.
- 9.
On a robustly Newtonian account, these are sorts of “atoms” (Smith 1987, p. 125).
- 10.
The relevant passage from Ryle reads as follows: “Locke … described the observational scrutiny which a mind can from time to time turn upon its current states and processes. He called this supposed inner perception ‘reflection’ (our ‘introspection’), borrowing the word ‘reflection’ from the familiar optical phenomenon of the reflections of faces in mirrors. The mind can ‘see’ or ‘look at’ its own operations in the ‘light’ given off by themselves. The myth of consciousness is a piece of para-optics” (Ryle 2000, p. 153).
- 11.
In Book IV Locke makes certain, arguably more Cartesian, statements that seem at odds with the earlier body of work in the Essay. Klein argues that “[m]any chapters separate Book I from Book IV, and considering that 20 years elapsed before the Essay was completed, the books were probably also separated by many years. As a consequence, by the time Locke set to work on Book IV he may no longer have been vividly aware of the details of the arguments presented in Book I. At all events, it is difficult to reconcile what he [says about intuitive knowledge of one’s own existence] with his earlier repudiation of innate ideas” (Klein 1970, p. 373). No position is taken on this issue in the present work. We are here concerned with the familiar Lockean view from the first books of the Essay.
- 12.
- 13.
Locke treats “ideas” as something of a mental catch-all. “Whatsoever the Mind perceives in it self, or is the immediate object of Perception, Thought, or Understanding, that I call Idea (Locke 1979, p. 134). In one examination of Locke’s uses of “idea” in the Essay, the term was found to apply to what today might be called percepts, concepts, belief, knowledge, and also qualia (Nathanson 1973, pp. 29–36). “Idea” is here conceived of as an object of thought, as opposed to an act or a disposition (McRae 1965, p. 175).
- 14.
Concerning the simple ideas from sensation or reflection, Anderson explains that “both kinds of simple ideas are, as it were, given to the mind. That is, the mind can neither make new simple ideas nor can it destroy those it has” (Anderson 1965, p. 206).
- 15.
- 16.
Other than sensation.
- 17.
Book II, chapter XXXIII. This chapter was added to the fourth edition of the Essay in 1700 (Ferg 1981, p. 173).
- 18.
Apparently, the “Idea of this remarkable piece of Household-stuff, had so mixed it self with the turns and steps of all his Dances that though in that Chamber he could Dance excellently well, yet it was only whilst that Trunk was there …” (Locke 1979, p. 399, italics removed).
- 19.
Setting aside, here, some cases in which they may be difficult to distinguish, such in sleep, fever, madness, bouts of violent emotions, or instances in which “our impressions are so faint and low, that we cannot distinguish them from our ideas” (Hume 1978, p. 2).
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
Hume also attacked the notions of the self and personal identity (most notably in Hume 1978, pp. 251–263). James points out how this follows from the associationism shared by Hume and other subsequent empiricists (such as James and John Stuart Mill, whom we will consider shortly). They “have thus constructed a psychology without a soul by taking discrete ‘ideas,’ faint or vivid, and showing how, by their cohesion, repulsions, and forms of succession, such things as reminiscences, perceptions, emotions, volitions, passions, theories, and all the other furnishings of an individual’s mind may be engendered. The very self or ego of the individual comes in … as their last and most complicated fruit” (James 1952, p. 1, italics removed).
- 23.
We should note the tension between Hume’s commitment to (1) a Newton-inspired psychology and (2) the skeptical project that (especially on a Logical Positivist interpretation) calls into question the very meaningfulness of items such as invisible causal forces (e.g. gravity), imperceptible entities (e.g. physical atoms), and so on.
- 24.
The claim is not that these three early empiricist thinkers all equally embraced what later became the mature doctrine of associationism. Drever, for example, contends that Locke was “equivocal” on elementism while Hume “spoke as if no other view [than elementism] was possible” (Drever 1965, p. 126). The point is that there was a substantial prefiguring of associationism in Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. In the writings of Hartley, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill, as we shall see, the doctrine becomes fully elaborated.
- 25.
Boden (2006, p. 125) uses the phrase “atomistic” for Hume’s notion of mental associations.
- 26.
It is anachronistic to impose terminology developed several centuries later in modern philosophy of science on these notions. It might be pointed out, however, that the form of reductionism discussed here is similar to methodological reductionism in its emphasis on explaining the macroscopic by means of the microscopic—i.e. on its general methodological strategy of finding more minute entities (in this case, mental entities) to explain the grossly observed data. It is similar to ontological reductionism in its general conviction that, within the domain of the mental, everything is to be understood as consisting of the posited mental elements, their aggregated collections, and their causal interactions (leaving open whether there are ontologically real forces causing these interactions or whether the aggregations are ultimately to be understood as brute statistical regularities).
- 27.
This is not meant to suggest a strong commitment to materialist corpuscularianism on Locke’s part; the interpretation of Locke’s psychology advanced here is not necessarily at odds with a reading of Locke as a defender of phenomenal explanations in experimental physical science (a view advanced in Gaukroger 2009).
- 28.
It is logically possible to be a decompositional reductionist without also being an elementist. For example, someone could think that the decomposition, while theoretically possible, never bottoms out at terminal elements but continues as an interminable series. Also, even if one grants a terminal point to the reduction, this may be conceived not as an atomic unit but, say, as a field. Finally, one might (as we shall see John Stuart Mill in fact does) introduce the idea of mid-level fusion events, allowing one to retain elementism while only embracing a slightly attenuated form of decompositional reductionism.
- 29.
Because repeated use of the terms “reduction” and “reductionism” will be made in the following analysis, a disclaimer should be offered. The broad concept of reductionism has attracted much attention in philosophy of science and philosophy of biology circles in recent decades, while little agreement has been reached, on even a basic definition. As Nagel put it several decades ago, “[a]lthough the term ‘reduction’ has come to be widely used in philosophical discussions of science, it has no standard definition. It is therefore not surprising that the term encompasses several sorts of things which need to be distinguished” (Nagel 1970). This is still largely true. The present work takes no position on the general question of reductionism in science. It is merely concerned with the specific, decompositional form of reductionism characterized above. The terms “decompositional reductionism” and, simply, “reductionism” will henceforth be used interchangeably but always in close connection with the doctrine of elementism.
- 30.
Sensationism is a strong philosophical claim about the nature of human (mainly sensory-perceptual) awareness. The claim is that this awareness is to be understood in terms of discrete and atomic sensory units. Psychophysics studies the relationship between stimulus magnitudes and the magnitudes of conscious effect. One widely used notion in psychophysics is that of the just noticeable difference (JND), understood as the smallest difference stimulus magnitude that a percipient can reliably detect. This is an experimentally established response relationship that, by itself, leaves open a wide range of theoretical positions on the ultimate nature of human psychology. Modern signal detection theory (SDT) has emphasized the role of decision-making factors (e.g. response bias) in psychophysical detection tasks, and those findings do tend to speak strongly against interpreting JNDs as simple sensory “atoms”.
- 31.
One of the most familiar distinctions in Lockean epistemology is the one between the primary qualities (e.g. occupying space, being in motion or at rest, having solidity and so on) that the object has independent of us and the secondary qualities (color, taste, smell and so on) that are produced in us by the objects. Within associationistic thought, however, the primary qualities tend to migrate into the category of secondary qualities. And so, as we shall see, James Mill reduced even primary qualities such as hardness, extension, and weight to simple sensations and suggests that motion, time and space itself may also be subject to such a reduction.
- 32.
Logically speaking, of course, one can be an elementism without also being a sensationist; sensationism is one possible way of fixing the identity of the smallest mental constituents.
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Beenfeldt, C. (2013). Early British Associationism. In: The Philosophical Background and Scientific Legacy of E. B. Titchener's Psychology. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00242-2_1
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