Bacon to Kant

History and Theory of Psychology: An early 21st century student's perspective

In Section 2 we are jumping past the so-called "Dark and Middle ages" to consider events occurring between the early years of the 17th through to the end of the 18th century. We are zeroing in on the period (surrounding the Reformation up through just prior to the first industrial revolution) because it was an era of renewal and innovation in philosophy, science and society comparable to that of the Presocratic era covered in Section 1.

It wouldn't be completely fair to say that intellectual pursuits stagnated after Aristotle, but there are various historical reasons why it was thought for a long while that Aristotle had already said pretty well everything that was needed to be known about secular matters. If you wanted to know how many teeth were in a horse's mouth, you referred to Aristotle. If it wasn't there, it was either considered as a question that wasn't important or was simply not resolvable. Aristotle was considered for a long time to be the authority on all worldly concerns while the Church in Rome provided authority on the matters of moral conduct and the afterlife.

There are various names for the long period of time between Aristotle and the late 16th century (e.g., the Dark Age, the Middle Ages). Yet since this is a course on the history and philosophical aspects of psychological inquiry, it should suffice to say that there was not all that much occurring (intellectually speaking) during this entire intermediary period that is of any particular interest to us (cf. Watson & Evans, 1991). One notable exception is Galen (the 1st century physician) who revised the Stoic doctrine of "pneuma" (on logical grounds) and made a more definitive connection between mind and brain (by way of comparative anatomical observation and practical investigation). But with regard to the specific development of modern and contemporary psychology most of the intermediary philosophical figures (e.g., Epicurus, Zeno of Citium, Plotinus, or Augustine) were not very important except that some of them constituted that which would have to be argued against in order to kick-start scientific inquiry again.

Even Thomas Aquinus, who was not exactly the quintessential kind of medieval European Scholastic philosopher but rather a representative of the wider 12th-13th century revival of Aristotelian thought (after nearly a millennium of Neoplatonist dominance), can be noted as the sort of clerical authority being argued against during the 17th-18th century rise of scientific endeavor. Although Aquinus was an exceptionally open-minded, inclusive, and empirical thinker (see Tolman, 1995) he was also a product of his theologically preoccupied times.

Aquinus subordinated philosophy to theology; natural law to the revelations of Christ; human society to the official dogma of the Church, and further argued that such subordination was good for all concerned. The combined requirements of expanding commercial trade and the Reformation would challenge the tenability of this long-standing subordination. Similarly, the traditional Idealist authorities (Plato, Aristotle, and the Scholastics) did not hold the answers to the kinds of secular concerns of the era and most of the early scientific developments (empirical, theoretical, and mathematical) were initially proposed as explicit counter-arguments to their views.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), an influential English statesman and jurist as well as philosopher, was a contemporary of not only Galileo and Descartes, but also Hobbes. Bacon stands out among these peers, however, as the one figure who best expressed two of the characteristic aspects of the dawning modern scientific spirit: The determination to avoid problematic presuppositions based on traditional authority; and an optimism about the utility of secular scientific methods for the betterment of human kind. With regard to the specific methods he proposed for extracting theoretical knowledge from nature, Bacon pleaded eloquently for the collection of facts by way of both induction and practically guided experiments.

In other words, modern psychology -which has a specific conventional starting date of 1879- has obvious roots, but they are not in Aquinus. They are not in anything that went on between Aristotle and Francis Bacon. There are, however, very obvious roots in Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and Kant. So it is to this latter era of innovation that we will now turn to for elaboration of these roots.

I suppose it all started with Marco Polo (or someone like that), who decided it was not much fun sitting around an old feudal kingdom and that it would be more interesting to venture off somewhere, buy some goods, wander back and sell them. This sort of trade led to increased exploration, building of better ships (for trade and war), and ultimately it occurred to someone that maybe they should not have to go all the way to China to buy fine cloth or pottery but should just learn to make it locally. In this apocryphal story, we have some of the makings of the first industrial revolution.

This first revolution in technological know-how and trade relations had a tremendous impact on life in Europe because for one thing it led to the establishment of an influential social class that never existed before. This was a class of traders, independent craftsmen, and entrepreneurs with a new set of secular concerns and knowledge requirements that did not previously exist on anything but a very limited basis.

During feudal times (the extended intellectually uninteresting era we have skipped), land was basically parceled off to feudal Lords. Each of those Lords had a group of peasants working the land whom, in return, were afforded military protection. So there was relatively little travel except for the purposes of religious pilgrimage, regional war, or occasional crusades.

But eventually, due to basic improvements in agriculture, food was being stocked and citizens were more free to travel abroad, to manufacture and to trade goods. Initially, travel for trade was a huge problem. Imagine, for instance, you are an early tradesperson who wants to go by land from France to Rome with your goods. Assuming you are granted leave, you might start out well enough but you'd soon find few roads to use and to the extent there were roads, they were usually utilized to simply connected one feudal kingdom to another. This means that on your journey you would have to pay a toll in each of those kingdoms in order to be granted safe passage. By the time you got to Rome, you would have given all your goods away!

This kind of situation led to all sorts of social conflicts most notably the Christian Reformation which had a lot to do with the fact the Church in Rome was one of the largest feudal landowners in Europe. Not only was it one of the largest landowners (and therefore standing in the way of this kind of activity), it was also providing ideological support for other large landowners whose privileged status was now being rivaled by that new class of traders.

The Church in Rome functioned as an enemy of the rising middle class. The European Reformation was one attempt to free this rising class from those and other aspects of Papal authority. It was argued, for instance, that an individual's relationship to God did not need to be mediated by Church clerics but could be a more direct relationship between that individual and God. Why reform? Because its traditional intermediary role afforded the Church the kind of power already much abused during the years of the Inquisition -in which secular knowledge and beliefs were punished severely. So the Protestant Reformation in England was a movement that shifted power away from the centralized Papal authority of Rome.

Trade and commerce requires information of a secular sort. They needed to know how big they could build ships, how to make reliable mechanical clocks, how to manufacture more cloth, etc., but Papal authority was otherworldly in its concerns and teachings. When approached on such secular matters, it could not give the required answers even by referring to such traditional secular authorities as Aristotle. So, this Enlightenment period was characterized by a move away from both traditional and Papal authority regarding questions of secular knowledge and individual conduct.

But when we turn away from one kind of authority, we must always find another source of authority to replace it with! For Bacon, Galileo, Descartes and others covered in this Section, the source of knowledge was not the dogmas (doctrines) of the Church or the traditional writings of Aristotle but "reason." Despite being unanimous on this point, however, there were two fundamentally competing kinds of reason upon which these various figures differed in their emphasis:

The former kind can be very Ivory Tower and abstract (as we saw in Plato) but the latter kind is very practical indeed. Pure reason relies on an idealist methodology. It starts from the individual mind and works outward. Instrumental reason leans heavily upon a materialist methodology to investigate, guide, and analyze the outcomes -including personal outcomes- of secular concerns. It starts from the outside and works inward.

In short, the ancient methodological dispute between the Presocratics and the Sophists -as to where reason is to be found- recurs in this early scientific period. That is, should we look to nature or start within the realm of the individual mind for our inquiries? With regard to issues of perception specifically, a disappointing and degenerative cycle of argumentation -from a naively held direct access to objects, followed by various appeals to a supposed "barrier of the senses," followed by outright solipsism- will be noted. Similarly, the ancient debate regarding motion or causation (this time expressed as freewill vs. mechanical determinism) is also repeated in an updated fashion.

Revisiting these recurring issues (of methodology, perception, causation) as they are expressed or updated in early science and modern philosophy, will be very handy indeed when we cover the disciplinization of psychology and subsequent schools & systems era. For the task at hand is one of finding a way to carry out a principled assessment of the respective origins, strengths, weaknesses, and potential of those schools or systems as part of the future elaboration of psychology.

The culmination of Bacon's optimistic comments on the proper motives and goals of science can be found in the preface to The Great Instauration (1620):

Notice that Bacon is not advocating attainment of knowledge for its own sake, but rather for the benefit and use of life (and more specifically for the common good). The scientist he is portraying is no Platonist sitting around in the Ivory Tower -holding opinions about the world and doing nothing about it. Rather, the scientific imperative proposed is one of improving the common good, and by this it is clear that Bacon is considering the possibility of bringing about the good life for all.

This is a great vision, a mission statement for science to follow. Bacon is suggesting that empirical methods have utility, he is implying that scientific inquiry is the means for establishing the dominion of "man over nature" ("regnum hominis"). The role of any individual scientist, therefore, is one of doing their part in the labors that remain toward establishing this dominion.

Bacon's concern with getting things done and his impatience with idealism were also reflected in his writings on educational reform. It is to these that we now turn, briefly, before returning to the details of his great outline of the methods and "impediments" of scientific practice.

Bacon's The Advancement of Learning (1605) had already informed ensuing educational policy by expelling Scholasticism and Alchemy which entailed both appeal to authority and elements of mysticism. In their place, he proposed to "bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries" (Bacon, Works VIII, 108-9; see also S. Warhaft, 1967, p. 8). He found the gentlemen of this era as "good for nothing" and proposed to make them "good for somewhat" by giving them such training in the practical arts as befitting an industrious seafaring people and an epoch which economists now call the first industrial revolution.

Here (and elsewhere) Bacon condemns traditional learning because in all of these hundreds of years "it has failed to make us richer by one poor invention." For instance, in "Prais of Knowledge" Bacon attacks scholasticism and alchemy because they were not practical: "The one never faileth to multiply words, and the other ever faileth to multiply gold" (Bacon, Works VIII, 123-6). He proclaims the necessity for what he calls "a marriage" between the mind of man and the nature of things.

Further elaboration is found in De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) [Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning] which is an expansion of his 1605 work and in "The Masculine Birth of Time" (1603) where Bacon writes:

Packed into this great paragraph are criticisms of Plato (figments of the brain), of Aristotle (shadows thrown by words), of scholasticism (adulterated religion) and the "fanciful" pursuits of various Renaissance philosophies. Bacon is proposing to throw out all of the authorities of the past, to start out on his own new heading, and the appeal here is to nature itself (see B. Farrington, 1951; 1964, p. 62). Parenthetically, regarding what would now be considered as the sexist language contained therein, see Alan Soble's paper "In Defense of Bacon" (1995).

Bacon viewed the "work" of science as not merely theoretical and empirical, but also practical. Neither ancient speculative wisdom, nor philosophy based merely on the deductive syllogisms (found in the Organon of Aristotle), were the proper means toward such practical discoveries. He therefore turns to induction and experiment as the proper methods of "extracting" knowledge from nature.

Bacon's account of scientific method, which he sets forth in The Great Instauration, is composed of two aspects: the deconstructive ("pars destruens") and the constructive ("pars construens"). The latter it should be mentioned, however, had two parts (induction and experimentation).

The deconstructive (critical) aspect of his account serves the purpose of alerting the reader to four kinds of prejudices and errors (called "idols") which tend to pervade inquiry:

With regard to the fourth kind of idol, Bacon was merciless in his criticism. He writes that Scholasticism and alchemy (the "received systems") "are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation." Further, he suggests that various "principles and axioms in science," such as Aristotle's suggestion that natural movements of earthly bodies are rectilinear and that of heavenly bodies is circular have "by tradition, credulity, and negligence" come to be received (Bacon, 1620, Novum organum [New Instrument], Aphorism 44).

This latter illustration, we should note, indicates that Bacon is siding unequivocally with a new group of scientists against the received philosophical and religious systems of the past. This group of scientists most certainly included Galileo -whose discovery that a projectile moves in a parabola (circa 1609) shocked his Aristotelian colleagues. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo had to combat both the a priori system of Aristotle and the Bible in establishing the view that the earth is not the center of the universe but rotates once a day and goes round the sun once a year.

Bacon suggests correcting these errors by adopting two empirical methods of looking to nature: A new form of logical induction; and experimentation. Deductive philosophy such as Plato's invention of abstract universals "flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axiom." Inductive science, "derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent." It discovers axioms. While the one "glances at experiment and particulars in passing," the other dwells duly and orderly among them (Bacon, 1620, Novum organum, Aphorism 19).

With respect to the specific process of inductive observation being proposed, Bacon explicitly rejects simple enumeration (mere list taking) as "childish" because it makes too much of "too small a number of facts." Then, by way of reference to three metaphorical or actual "tables" upon which initial facts can be placed, he elaborates how taking note of both negative and affirmative occurrences as well as matters of degree might aid in the "formation of notions" about some aspect of nature as well as the "discovery" of "axioms" (the laws regulating that aspect of nature).

The facts placed on this third table, in combination with those on the other tables, lead to questions of difference and transition which can be investigated further by way of experimentation. Could it be that sunlight is warm because that particular star is close whereas nightly starlight is imperceptible because those stars reside a great distance from the earth?; Could it be that the light of the moon and that of other planets like Mars is reflective?; and Why is the sun hotter in the summertime?; etc.

"Induction" (of this orderly, systematic sort), is a naturalistic (object oriented) method which follows directly from Bacon's materialist ontology and methodology. It is, however, portrayed by Bacon as merely the initial method by which he and we might extract or discover truths from the world. For Bacon explicitly recognized that such inductive analysis constitutes an intellectual catalyst for the kinds of deeper questions asked in "experimental" forms of inquiry.

With specific respect to experimentation itself, Bacon outlines two kinds: ("Experimenta lucifera" and "Experimenta fructifera") which, though they different in their motive, share their reliance upon initial induction for the very formulation of the questions they investigate.

In Experimenta fructifera (to seek "fruit") investigations are motivated by practical concerns. For example, mechanics might be trying to finding the best pump for removing water out of a particular sort of mine. This kind of experimentation is carried out for a particular practical use or end. "For the mechanic, not troubling himself with the investigation of truth, confines his attention to those things which bear upon his particular work, and will not either raise his mind or stretch out his hand for anything else."

In Experimenta lucifera (to seek "light") investigators are motivated by more theoretical concerns. For example William Harvey's roughly contemporaneous conclusion that the heart is a "pump" (1628) came from carrying out basic observational investigations of the heart ventricles and blood vessels to see if, as Galen had claimed 1000 years earlier, blood is consumed as fuel. Despite the practical conclusion drawn from it (regarding the circulation of the blood), the actual motive of the investigation was to "settle" the original question either way.

Bacon certainly recognized that practical and theoretically motivated inquiries tend to play-off each other in a cycle of science:

The various quibbles between practical-minded and theoretically-minded individuals who carry out experimental investigations assumes a false dichotomy between their respective concerns. Pure scientists must act like mechanics while undertaking their investigations so there is no sound basis for intellectual snobbery to enter the fray (in either direction).

Accordingly, the seeming difference between those practicing each form of experimental inquiry can, in Bacon's terminology, be labeled as mere Idols of the Cave. Prejudice regarding which one is more important is to be avoided because both are important. Experimental activity of both kinds are related because they utilize inductive methods to inquire about nature upon which subsequent deductive implications or conclusions ("new axioms" for the "service of life") can then be based.

Bacon was the first in a long line of scientifically minded philosophers with practical concerns. He was also, however, seeking a changed world for the betterment of humanity and it is in this sense that he claimed "Knowledge is Power." Yet this era of inquiry which starts with great optimism ultimately ends with some very problematic and discouraging positions indeed (particularly with regard to issues of cause & motion, perception, and mind-body relations). If we are to understand why this is so, we should stay mindful of the list of "Idols" provided by Bacon. The motive for doing so is not merely theoretical or historical but also practical. By weeding out the problematic positions in this era we can become both aware of their expression in modern psychology and receptive to other more progressive trends existing therein.

As the most accomplished scientific practitioner and mathematician of his generation, Galileo is best remembered for: astronomical discoveries made with the aid of the telescope; support of the heliocentric view of the planets which he was forced to recant by the Church; empirical-mathematical investigations on falling bodies which yielded a mathematical law of acceleration; and the parabolic law regarding the motion of missiles (e.g., canon balls) which proved that Aristotle's rectilinear theory regarding the motion of earthly bodies was wrong.

For Aristotle, the lesser observable earthly manifestations of the cosmos were considered, to some degree, as disturbances due to chance of purer eternal celestial forms. The various peculiarities and changing situations (characteristic of the terrestrial realm) were considered as something fortuitous that disturbs and obscures our understanding of the essential nature (the form) of the object or process under consideration.

Along with his intellectual predecessors (Copernicus and Kepler), and successor (Newton), Galileo helped to establish that the physical universe (including the celestial bodies) is subject to mechanical laws. In doing so, he also helped promote a shift away from the over-reliance upon the traditional teleological world view (of the bible and other textual authorities such as Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle) toward an empirical-mathematical way of investigating nature.

Galileo, in his early career phase of mathematically guided thought experiments (designed to promote reconsideration of established facts) and in his successive excursions into empirical-experimental research, indicated not only that: (1) the celestial realm was not perfect or immutable but also that (2) the mechanical laws of the universe, when properly understood, applied equally well to the terrestrial realm.

Further, he gradually came to view scientific laws as general statements by which to understand and study particulars, including apparent exceptions. For him, all aspects and all parts of the universe are lawful -heavenly and earthly bodies, frequent and infrequent events, particular and general (shared) aspects of a situation. Modern physics would eventually embrace this understanding of the unity (a.k.a., homogeneity) of the physical universe.

While the Copernican and Aristotelian views of the cosmos had been taught side by side for some years, it was Kepler (by way of both calculation and direct observation) who first advanced the theoretical standing of the heliocentric view by showing that rotational movements in the heavens were "not perfect" -not circular but elliptic and did not take place at a uniform speed. This initial extension of Copernicanism constituted a direct challenge to the Aristotelian doctrine that the heavens were "perfect and invariable" (admitting no change), quite unlike the mutable earth (see J.H. Randall, 1940). It was then left to Galileo to further extend and drive these astronomical points home by carrying out detailed observations through the newly developed telescope.

Prior to the period in which his attention was turned increasingly toward astronomical topics, Galileo had already published a theoretical work on the motion of the earth (De Motu, 1590) and was serving as a professor of mathematics at Padua (1592 onward) where he performed various mathematically informed investigations into falling bodies and ballistics (up to 1609) as described below.

In 1604, a new star (the supernova of Ophiuchus) had been discovered by astronomers to have appeared in the heavens. This occurrence indicated to all open-minded thinkers of the era, including Galileo, that changes did take place in that realm. So, in 1609, Galileo started using the telescope. In his Sidereus Nuncius [Starry Messenger] (1610), he reported viewing mountains on the moon, four satellites around Jupiter, and also provided calculations regarding both the relative rotational phases of Venus as well as the monthly cycle of "blemishes" (sunspots) on the sun's surface.

These latter observations and calculations aroused a storm of controversy for two reasons. They brought new evidence to bear against established Aristotelian doctrine regarding the long-standing qualitative separateness between "sublunary and celestial" realms. They also relied upon a new sort of scientific technology (the telescope).

While some of Galileo's contemporaries continued to engage him actively along sincere (yet traditional) theoretical lines, others simply refused to even look through the newfangled device: "As I wished to show the satellites of Jupiter to the Professors in Florence, they would see neither them nor the telescope. These people believe there is no truth to seek in nature, but only in the comparison of texts" (see Randall, 1940). It would take another century, up to the time of Newton, for the heliocentric view to be accepted outright and thereby open up new vistas for ongoing empirical inquiries.

One object lesson we can take away from this brief intellectual career sketch is that scientific advance often takes generations to become established. Further, we should note that the recognition of advances in the theoretical aspects of science often follow very far behind advances in the empirical (measurement, statistical) aspects of inquiry. Many years of conservative counter-arguments, institutional obstacles, and misuses of potentially progressive (empirical or theoretical) trends typically stand between their first proposition (application or refinement), and their eventual acceptance or incorporation into established doctrine.

Such is the general importance of Galileo to the history of science. There are, however, two aspects of Galileo's work that are more specifically significant to our understanding of later developments in philosophical and psychological thought: His sharp distinction between the physical vs. psychological aspects of sound -which implied an indirect perceptual theory (later known as the doctrine of primary & secondary qualities); and the particular kind of scientific laws he sought (the contrast between what is now known as the Galilean vs. Aristotelian view of "lawfulness").

The first aspect of his work had a de facto negative impact on later developments in philosophy because it was one of the first applications of the problematic "Representationalist theory of perception" which dominated Western thought right up into the 20th century. The second aspect regarding lawfulness in nature has at least the potential of a more progressive impact on psychology but has yet to be adopted on more than an occasional or sporadic basis.

That pitch is dependent upon the length of a plucked string was well known to the early Greeks. Galileo, however was the first to establish experimentally a mathematical relation between pitch (as a particular number of physical vibrations) and the subject's experience (R.I. Watson, 1979).

While reporting the outcome of his studies on the speed of the transmission of sound and measurement of the relative string vibration frequencies associated with different pitches, Galileo (1623) was careful to demarcate the boundaries of the physical aspects of his inquiry. He did this, however, by excluding the work of the senses in a fashion which would later be called by Locke the doctrine of "primary" and "secondary" qualities:

According to Galileo's above demarcation, both motion and singleness reside in the string but sound resides in our senses. By treating the physical aspects as real (as in objects) and the other aspects (of not only sound, but also vision and touch) as spurious, he is sometimes said to have been the first to have narrowed the boundaries of subsequent psychology to contentual subjectivity.

Be that as it may (for "psychology" came along a very long time after Galileo indeed), what we want to emphasize here is that the implied theory of perception being utilized is a three-moment indirect theory which was picked up and made explicit by other figures to be covered in this Section (including both Rationalists such as Descartes and Kant, and Empiricists like Locke, Berkeley, and Hume).

Along with other problematic positions, we will follow the subsequent development of this indirect theory of perception in due course. Our immediate concern at this juncture, however, is to simply state outright that it is a "static" (mechanical, point-to-point, passive) theory which has been problematic because it suggests that the only direct access we have as observers is to transduced sensations (retinal image, cochlear vibration, or proprioceptive cell firings).

To illustrate, how the adoption of this Indirect theory of perception can work to mislead initial conclusions drawn from both naturalistic observation and commonsense, let's take a quick look at one of Galileo's successors in this respect, Isaac Newton (1642-1727).

Newton first described these and other phenomena of light in a report called An hypothesis explaining the properties of light which was sent to the Royal Society in 1675. In the following extract, both his naturalistic style of argumentation and the controlled structure of his experiment (which included a second observer) are important to note. In this early account Newton draws an analogy to vibrations of sound (as did Galileo) and indicates quite rightly that light itself does not enter the sensorum but is transduced in a manner similar to that of sound vibrations. But he also seems to indicate that there is a direct correspondence between the varied refracted physical light rays which are ordered according to their size of vibrations and the ultimately perceived set of colored bands recorded. Further he indicates an important role for the second observer in the experiment which was repeated "diverse" times:

This early account is completely consistent with a Direct Realist correspondence view of perception which while recognizing transduction in the organism also suggests that what is being picked up is a common referential property of light itself -in this case, as differentially refracted through a prism. Indicative of this point, Newton (1675) reported that the actual boundaries between these bands (appearing in the above diagram) were recorded by a second observer who was naive to Newton's "hypothesis."

Also indicative of Newton's early realism is the content of his argumentation. From the perspective of naturalistic observation of light, Newton argued that colors are not "modifications" of light derived from refractions or reflections of natural bodies (as was generally believed), but "original properties" of sunlight, which under experimental conditions were drawn out and separated. One of his arguments for this position was that once any one sort of ray had been well separated, it obstinately retained its color, notwithstanding his various endeavors to change it by way of interception -with colored films or with intervening air between two compressed plates of glass.

Simply stated, Newton's (1675) argument is that separated sunlight retains its color. Similarly, he noted that when blue and yellow powders are mixed together, they appear green, but when the resulting mix is subjected to microscopic investigation the particles therein are seen to retain their blue or yellow hue.

It is the early naturalistic line of reasoning (from Newton's 1675 account) that allows the text -from which the above engraving was obtained- to claim that the experimental situation being shown "proves" that "light in its pure form is colored." This is the conclusion of the Direct Realist correspondence view (with the "correspondence" being between the physical vibrations of light -now known as wavelengths- and resulting transduction in the "sensorum" by which the colored spectrum is perceived at various times, by various observers, and on various papers).

There is, however, a significant historiographic hitch when one attempts to apply this belief unequivocally to Newton himself because many years and many experiments later, his initial statements regarding the physical components of sunlight were eventually qualified along more "philosophical" lines.

In the Definitions section of his Opticks (1704) he explicitly denies that color is located within light rays:

This time, Newton indicates a belief that color is not in the light but is located in us. Here we see a position very similar to both that proposed by Galileo (regarding sound) and to Locke's recently proposed formal doctrine of "primary and secondary" qualities. Notice also that the second observer originally described as a "friend" -who while naive to Newton's specific hypothesis was otherwise competent and in fact superior at discerning the boundaries of the resulting light band separation- is now downgraded to the status of a "vulgar" participant.

Such is the methodological function of the Indirect theory of visual perception in the case of Newton's later account of light. It produces a philosophical account where there was originally naturalistic description; it produces doubt or at least potential variance of opinion where there was once common reference; and it produces apparent divisions between the status of participants in such experiments where there was originally a relative equality.

As we proceed, this Indirect theory of perception will become our first clear case of what Bacon meant in his warning to avoid the "Idols" of the Marketplace or Theater: limitations of current terms used in scientific discourse, or set up by a priori systems of thought. In other words, various versions of indirect perception have dominated from the time of Galileo right up into the 20th century when they were initially called into question by "Direct Realist" philosophers holding to a correspondence theory of perception similar to Newton's initial account (e.g., E.A. Burtt, J.H. Randall) and then by a psychologist called J.J. Gibson -who put forward an alternative Direct theory of perception. This latter "ecological" theory" of Direct Perception recognizes the physiological role of transduction by the sensory organs as did the correspondence view but further argues that what is observed by the organism is not sensations in the classical sense but rather "stimulus information" (the active pickup of variance and invariance from the environment over time).

We now turn to a contrast between so-called "Aristotelian vs. Galilean views of lawfulness" and introduce their respective implications for subsequent empirical method used in psychological science. We are considering this issue of lawfulness, not for its own history of science sake, but rather because, as Kurt Lewin (1931/1935) puts it, early experimental psychology had come to "resemble" Aristotelianism in both its structure of empirical research and views of lawfulness. It was producing the kinds of arguments "against which Galilean physics had to struggle" (1935, p. 18).

Throughout the 20th century era of competing "schools & systems" (such as Behaviorist, Freudian, and Gestalt analysis), one of the major differences is the kinds of psychological laws sought after by those respective outlines of psychology. So, the consideration of this issue is a self-serving one for our eventual sorting out of progressive and regressive trends in the intellectual legacy of our science from the time of Galileo up to the relative present.

In the interest of disentangling these progressive trends, there is one important proviso to be mentioned upfront: What would later be called the Aristotelian view of lawfulness (for example by Lewin, 1931/1935) actually reflects only one of two aspects of Aristotle's approach to the study of nature.

In other words, just as we distinguished between what would later be called "Aristotelian" (either/or) Formal logic from the more inclusive kinds of cause (Formal, Material, Efficient, and Final) utilized by Aristotle in his biological investigations (see Section 1), so too must we distinguish his actual approach to method (which included both deductive "demonstrative" and observational or inductive "discovery" aspects) from what would later be called the Aristotelian view of lawfulness.

In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle explicitly distinguished between the demonstrative (deductive or descriptive discourse) and discovery (empirical) aspects of inquiry. Each had their own starting-point and role in inquiry (see table right).

These two overlapping aspects of inquiry (discourse regarding nature and empirical investigation of nature) are clearly reflected in Aristotle's treatment of apparently diverse cosmological topics such as: his postulation of a fifth element; his denial of the void (vacuum of space); and his theory of falling bodies. As in all serious inquiry, there is a constant interplay between observable facts, the logical assumptions being made, and the conclusions eventually drawn from inquiry. The actual structure of empirical observation (where we look or what procedures are used to look) and outcome of inquiry (what is learned from looking) depend upon the interplay between facts and assumptions.

According to Aristotle, everything in the imperfect transitory terrestrial realm is composed of compounds of "earth, water, air and fire" (Aristotle, On Coming-to-be and Passing-away). Every particular tangible terrestrial body is compounded of these four substances and can be characterized (classified) by observing the respective manifestations of opposing qualities (dry vs. wet, hot vs. cold) contained therein. But the heavenly bodies, he suggests, consist of a fifth element "aither" (ether) which is not subject to these opposing forces. His varied motives for proposing the existence of this fifth element are instructive for our understanding of the reciprocal interplay between logical discourse and empirical aspects of inquiry.

The problem, as Aristotle put it in Meteorology, was to account not only for the distinctly eternal, unvarying, circular movements of heavenly bodies but also for the very possibility of their movement as well. The natural movement of the four terrestrial elements is either upward or downwards (away or toward the center of the earth). Fire and air, for instance, naturally rise while water and earth naturally fall as long as nothing "artificially" impedes their movement. But an object which moves naturally in a circle, he argued, can not logically be presumed to be made up of one or any combination of the opposing terrestrial elements.

Relatedly, terrestrial elements are in a constant state of conflict and relative balance. If these elements filled the vast celestial distances between earth and farthest stars, the earth would be overwhelmed and destroyed. The very fact of the existence of the earth seemed to imply the existence of either a void or some other element in the celestial region.

Aristotle's implied theory of moving or falling bodies ties in here because it tipped the balance of his judgment against the existence of a void. First of all (in his Physics) he observed that for a greater weight to be moved the same distance in a shorter time, more force had to be employed. The commonplace examples he used included ships being hauled through the water. Movement increased with the number of men hauling and ships can be hauled more easily when unladen with cargo. Given that sufficient force to move an object has been attained, that required force was obviously inversely proportional to the weight of the body moved.

Further, he observed that speed of fall (or movement) seemed to be inversely proportional to the "density" of the medium through which the object was moving. Objects tend to move more quickly through air vs. water (Aristotle On the Heavens, Physics). But having thus assumed that motion necessarily takes place through a medium he may be said to have stayed "too close, rather than not close enough, to the data of experience" (Llyod, 1970, p. 114). For Aristotle, the lack of any medium logically implied the lack of any possibility of motion, and he therefore denied that motion through a void is possible. In other words, since we do observe regular movement in the celestial bodies, they must be traveling through some sort of medium.

As Lloyd (1970) points out, if there is a lesson to be learned from the empirical aspects of Aristotle's diverse cosmological views, it is not that he blindly ignored the observable facts to base his theories on mere a priori principles, but rather that his theories are hasty generalizations based upon superficial observations and classifications. What it comes down to is that Aristotle emphasized "becoming" and "observation" in the discovery aspects of science (particularly in his biological investigations) but both his analytic and discursive concepts (those used in the demonstrative aspects of his cosmological inquiries) were static like Plato's:

So, according to Lloyd, much of the fault for any over-reliance upon the universal and mathematical aspects of method (of the kind which we will see excludes the account of particular cases) lies on the doorstep of Plato and not Aristotle per se. But just as the Aristotelian doctrine that the heavens were perfect and invariant was a logical implication of his semi-absolute Idealist position, so too was at least part of his conception of lawfulness "colored" by this position. In other words, Aristotle's logical rejection of particulars in favor of perfect "forms" was ultimately reproduced in his discursive views on "lawfulness" -which in turn imposed limitations on the structure and conclusions drawn from the various empirical or observational (discovery) aspects of his work.

Kurt Lewin's (1931/1935) analysis of the transition from so-called Aristotelian to Galilean mode of physics was aimed at providing a viable exemplar (regarding the issue of lawfulness) for psychological science to adopt. In this analysis, however, Lewin was "less concerned with the personal nuances" of Galileo vs. Aristotle per se than with specific "ponderable differences" in the "modes of thought" utilized by the "medieval Aristotelians and... the post-Galilean physicists" (1935, pp. 1-2).

Put more plainly, there were two distinct sets of approaches to lawfulness running loose in psychology at the time and Lewin's main concern was to indicate the different methodological implications (for theory and research) of adhering to one versus the other. As adapted from Lewin's (1931) article (reprinted as Chapter 1 of A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935), the respective characteristics of the "Aristotelian and Galilean" approaches to lawfulness are as follows:

The main methodological contrast, here, is between the Aristotelian view which separates lawful events from chance events -with lawfulness itself being defined abstractly in terms of amount (frequency or regularity of occurrence); and the Galilean view which claims that everything is lawful and seeks not an abstract but a concrete conception of the events (objects or processes) under investigation -including peculiar or occasional cases thereof.

		Aristotelian	Galilean
1	The regular is	lawful	lawful
	The frequent is	lawful	lawful
	The individual case is	chance	lawful
2	Criteria of lawfulness	regularity & frequency	not required
3	That which is common to all cases is	an expression of the fundamental nature of the thing or process	a descriptive incidental

The Aristotelian approach to empirical discovery focused upon the commonly held surface features of various observable classes of objects (events, processes, or organisms) and was aimed at working out an account of their decontextualized shared attributes. The individual (particular or peculiar) cases of a class, and/or occasional occurrences of an event, were considered as noise or error in our efforts to ascertain the ideal forms to which those particular manifestations might belong.

The label of "lawful" was reserved for events which displayed the required stability of occurrence. All particularities were systematically relegated to the realm of chance because the emphasis of empirical inquiry was to discover the common features of a class. Those common features, in turn, were interpreted as an expression of the fundamental nature of that class.

The Galilean approach to empirical inquiry accepted classes of events (or objects) as part of our understanding (as an important descriptive, observational parceling out of nature) but went further by way of adopting experimental manipulation upon the whole situation (including the varied circumstances and settings upon which occurrences of the events, objects or processes under study depend).

Lewin (quite rightly I believe) favors the latter Galilean view of lawfulness and suggests that psychology both recognize the theoretical implications and adopt the empirical methods which that view allows. So, at this point in the course, we'll augment his account with illustrative details from Aristotle and Galileo. In subsequent Sections, too, we'll return periodically to the points raised as they apply to various systems or schools of psychology.

A leading characteristic of Aristotelian discourse regarding nature was that it described transitory and particular events by way of reference to supposedly eternal, universal "forms" which were decontextualized and static. A similar decontextualizing trend is recognizable in the discovery aspects of Aristotelian inquiry (in the empirical investigation into nature). In Aristotle's cosmological and biological inquiries any particular aspect of nature was analyzed according to that which is common to the general class of objects, processes or organisms to which it belongs. Despite its assumed or ultimate overlying discursive reference to abstract form potentials, Aristotelian empiricism (in and of itself) is still a fairly superficial sort of inquiry. You simply count the concrete cases of occurrence and relate them to the generalized class of events to which they might belong.

The Galilean method of research, however, is directly opposed to this decontextualizing procedure. The aim of observation, descriptive analysis, experimentation, or theoretical generalization, is not to reduce experiential events to "pure" elements (or static externals) but to reflect the important situational aspects of occurrence.

This contextualizing trend (toward understanding particulars) is present in both Galileo's early career phase of argumentative thought experiments (1584-1592) and in his subsequent experimental investigations into falling bodies and the parabolic path of projectiles (1602-1609). In each of these kinds of inquiry, Galileo is attempting to either conceive of or actually physically construct situations which will elucidate the contextualized dynamics of the event or process under investigation.

In considering motion Aristotle followed the largely typology centered (though partly teleological) view that each class of objects must find their own natural place. There were two directions for terrestrial objects to move: "up" (air, fire) and "down" (earth, water). Light a match, and the flame points upward; drop a rock and it will fall. Once the various differential (imperfect) manifestations of earthly motion were suitably decontextualized and parceled out into various abstract typologies (the generalized classes or forms), that was the end of the matter.

Galileo's De Motu (1590), however, was a spirited attack on Aristotle's views of motion. It attempted to consider both generalized classes of objects and the concrete conditions in which they travel. His De Motu is notable not only because it was motivated by his faith in the role of mathematics over crude reporting of surface experience (see Shea, 1972); but also because in proposing his (admittedly flawed) counter-theory Galileo takes an important methodological half-step out of the former typology centered considerations toward the post-Galilean situation centered consideration of motion (cf. William R. Shea, Galileo's Intellectual Revolution: Middle Period, 1972).

With regard to the counter-theory proposed therein, Galileo (1590) came up with a forerunner of Newton's (1686) theory of gravitation. He argued that everything must tend to move toward the center of the earth, and that any observed upward motion is due to that thing being surrounded by a denser medium which pushes it up just as a cork will rise to the top of a tub of water:

Stated more plainly, he was not arguing that all bodies fall at the same speed regardless of their weight (as later laid out in Newton's general law of gravitation), but rather that the speed of a falling body is proportional to the difference between its specific gravity and the density of the medium in which it falls. Having based his contention on mathematically informed thought experiments regarding established facts of motion, he reaches the erroneous conclusion that bodies of the same material but of different sizes fall at the same rate, while bodies of the same size but of different materials do not.

Galileo's "error," however is one of the details of his theory (a theory which reflected the limitations of the knowledge of the day) and not of the methodology being employed per se. The overall structure of research being employed (even during this early period; cf. Shea, 1972), was not in error because his search is not for decontextualized classes of static eternals (e.g., circular vs. rectilinear forms of motions) but is aimed instead at discriminating and isolating the basic situational dynamics of motion which can then be applied to varying (and particular) conditions of occurrence.

As Lewin (1935) pointed out, while the situational and dynamic considerations of later physics (including that of Newton) were incidental and foreign to the Aristotelian mode of thought they were highly characteristic of Galilean thought. It was this appreciation of situational aspects of motion, for instance, which would eventually allow Galileo (1638) to propose his hypothesis of the uniform acceleration of objects in the void of celestial space.

Despite various historiographic equivocations (made by Koyre or Shea) regarding the applicability of this point to Galileo's early career, an appreciation of situational aspects was most certainly highly characteristic of the structural details of the empirical research into falling bodies and the parabolic path of projectiles which Galileo conducted during his middle career.

Situational and measurement aspects of Galileo's experimental investigations

Galileo's early discursive orientation was aimed at indicating that crude observation and mere production of typology centered object classes (those unaided by careful mathematical considerations) might lead to hasty generalization. But between 1602-09, he entered his middle career phase by, among other things, carrying out careful experimental investigations into falling bodies and the path of projectiles. It is here that the full expression of the Galilean situational methodology of research (which was aimed at establishing a general foundation of dynamics) first emerges.

In these experiments, Galileo did not investigate heavy versus light bodies themselves (as had been done under the Aristotelian tradition and in his own early career phase), but rather the process of free fall -movement on an inclined plane. In other words, the mathematical law of movement on an inclined plane (as shown in the resulting graphical representation appearing above) was not established by taking the average of as many cases as possible of natural stones rolling down actual hills and then considering this average as the most characteristic case. It was established instead upon the simplified laboratory case of relatively frictionless rolling of brass marbles down a straight and hard wooden plane, -that is, upon an artificial situation which even the laboratory can only approximate and which is most improbable in daily life. Galileo was striving for a kind of general validity and concreteness, yet used an empirical method which, from the point of view of the preceding Aristotelian epoch, would have been regarded as peculiar or exceptional.

As Lewin (1935) puts it, in investigating the process of free fall (which is itself too rapid for direct observation) by way of manipulating slower movements along an inclined plane, Galileo presupposes that the dynamics of the event under investigation are "no longer formally tied to the isolated objects as such," but are understandable by way of investigating its dependence upon the whole situation in which the event occurs. This was a full-fledged break with Aristotelian methodology and signifies a transition toward a search for concepts which can only be defined with reference to given sorts of situations -in this case the presence of a wooden plane with a given inclination and of an unimpeded vertical extent of space through which to fall.

The goal of these experimental procedures was to discover and approximate the situational aspects of occurrence. The goal of the law was to allow its application to other situations no matter how varied they might be in particular. For Galileo, the orbits of the planets, the free falling of a stone, the movement of a body on an inclined plane and the oscillation of a pendulum, -which if classified merely according to their varied surface features belong to distinct or antithetical types of events- might prove to be simply various expressions of the same law.

Similarly, as Ernst Cassirer (1932) points out, the parabolic path of the projectile could not have been discovered by just looking:

Observation to be sure, but also other methods -including experimental simplification and mathematics- had to be applied in order to isolate the relevant aspects of the event and to state them in a generalizable manner. Galileo had to analyze the conditions of the simplified laboratory case (the strength of initial impulse, the force of gravity), produce mathematical statements for them, and then combine each in a summary mathematical statement which could be applied productively to other quite different situations.

The resulting parabolic path law is "general" (in the sense that it applies to all cases). But, since the law also isolates (or rather highlights) the underlying situational dynamics of the measured phenomena, it can be utilized to explain apparent exceptions by relating them to the "peculiar conditions" of an individual exceptional case -such as the size of the ball, the strength of the charge, or the length of the canon.

According to Stillman Drake (1975/1999), the parabolic path was probably discovered by Galileo rather serendipitously "no later than 1608" and the mathematical proof was worked out by "early 1609" (see Drake, 1999, Vol. 2). But while Galileo both lectured upon the law and was long recognized for its discovery, he did not mention it formally in print until 30 years later (see the last part of Discourse on Two New Sciences, 1638). By then a similar proof had already been published and a short-lived but bitter exchange over priority of discovery had occurred in which Galileo wrote that no one knows better than he how hard it had been to make the initial discovery and yet how easy it was to produce the mathematical proof once the shape of the trajectory was already known.

Drake, has devoted considerable efforts into historically reconstructing the details of Galileo's laboratory investigations. He uses an echo of this statement (appearing in the Discourse) to dismiss those historians who portray Galileo as stuck in the Platonic mode of argumentative discourse:

In other words, Galileo started out his career by proposing critically argumentative thought experiments; subsequently dove into empirical and experimental inquiries during the middle phase of his career; and only returned to the discursive style later on.

Having spun-off on this historiographic tangent, I want to now reiterate a related and rather central aspect of Kurt Lewin's (1935) argument because it will become especially important when we return to the specific issue of its implications for psychology per se. In his contrast between Aristotle's emphasis (on forms or typological categories of material objects) and Galileo's eventual emphasis (upon the situational dynamics of forces), Lewin is careful to highlight a point regarding the relative merits of mathematical exactitude and extent of lawfulness as demarcating aspects of Galileo's methodology.

In Galilean Physics, says Lewin, the use of mathematical tools and the tendency to exactness, important as they are, "cannot be considered the main substance of the difference from Aristotelian physics." Rather the main progress was one of a change in the content rather than merely a change in the empirical measurement tools used during investigation. The increased emphasis in modern physics on quantitative considerations is not derived from the tendency to logical formality but rather from the tendency to a fuller description of concrete actuality, even that of particular cases.

In other words, while Galileo's adoption of mathematical exactitude was a necessary ingredient, -in that it helped dislodge over-reliance upon untutored analysis of observable surface characteristics- the truly revolutionary part of his methodology and the one that made room for the advent of modern empirical science, is his position on the extent (inclusiveness) of scientific lawfulness. Why was Galileo's position on lawfulness so revolutionary? Because it altered both the very structure or content of the research conducted and the practical generality of the results of that research.

For Galileo, the trajectory of every ink-splattered brass ball rolled down an inclined plane and every bullet or cannon ball fired is lawful. Even though the details of observed results may vary from case to case (with different bullets, different powder, or different cannons), the results are lawful because we can specify the situational conditions of this variance. The function of (and modus opperendi) of the mathematically exact derivation (the law) is intended to be able to account for the exceptional aspects as well as the shared regularities of an individual case.

Lewin (1935) suggested that psychology has lagged far behind the other sciences in not having adopted this commonsensical "Galilean" approach to scientific lawfulness. By the mid-1930s a problematic logical opposition between individual cases and lawfulness had become customary in both experimental psychology and in various applied individual differences research subdisciplines. The examples Lewin mentions including early studies of motivation, I.Q. testing, and personality research are instructive. Each of these subdisciplines had adopted outright the classic Aristotelian view of lawfulness which required both regularity and frequency to be demonstrated before calling some event lawful or generalizable. Note that Lewin's main bone of contention is not with empirical investigation itself but rather with the unwarrantable limitations on research and interpretation which the adoption of the Aristotelian (exceptionless) conception of generalization has set up.

Recall that the Aristotelian view of generality requires the analytical deletetion of concrete detail because its emphasis is upon describing what is "common" to all cases. In psychology, this sort of deletion of exceptions is carried out by way of the statistical techniqes and the very structure of the questionairre or test batteries used in research. Just like Plato's abstract "ideals" or Aristotle's "form" categories, these investigatory tools are ways of systematically stripping away exceptions ("outliers" or "error variance") and leaving only statistically derived "average" cases or commonly grouped "factors" to consider.

This artificial opposition between individual cases and generalizable statistical statements has to some extent persisted in psychology even up to the present and the subdisciplines in question are just now beginning to move beyond the formidable limitations on research or theory which that original methodological adoption set up. In other words, this sort of critique does not belong to a bygone era of quaint argumentation or rough science but is a matter of ongoing disciplinary concern. So let's try to understand and illustrate its main features by way of example.

The very psychological statistics courses which you have taken, are taking, or soon will take, tend to portray proper empirical research in just this Aristotelian manner -as a technique by which one pulls out or searches for regular and frequent patterns in a set of data. Whether these sought after patterns consist of quantitatively derived regularily obtained factors, or frequently observed significant differences between group "means" (averages), the assumption that they must be regular and frequent in order to be "lawful" rather than mere chance change is always made. But under the Galilean view, the statistical average per se is merely a descriptive incidental which may or may not have any fundamental (underlying, essential, -you pick the term) relation to the more central aspects of the event under study (be it human intellect, personality, motivation, learning -or whatever).

Similarly, such courses portray the proper kind of empirical generalization as one which sets up and stays at the "abstract" or nomothetic rather than particular or idiographic level of description. To paraphrase another "critical" German psychologist (Klaus Holzkamp), -who was speaking this time from the historical vantage-point of the late 1980s- "Generalization" in its typical psychological usage is not the analysis of appearance in terms of essential determinants (the concrete Galilean way of describing the trajectory in terms of gravity and initial impulse). It is more often defined as nothing more than to draw conclusions from a distribution of similar elements (attributes) about a larger or infinite numbered distribution of like elements (statistical generalization from samples to populations). Even the most complicated statistical procedures in psychology (including those of the multivariate kind) rely upon this "uninspired" concept of abstract generalization according to which one merely moves between various large piles of surface data (see Holzkamp, 1991a&b).

Put more plainly, the kinds of questions being asked by Holzkamp here are: "Can you see yourself in those resulting piles of data? If not, why not?" As I have argued more obtusely elsewhere the empirical generalizations produced by psychometrically driven subdisciplines -such as those which ultimately promoted the widespread use of personality inventories and successive IQ or standardized school testing booms- have failed to rise above the scientific level of Initial (a.k.a., abstract) generalization in that they reveal mere superficial aspects of their subject matter (see Ballantyne, 1995; 2002). In order to become more concrete (reveal essential or necessary interrelations), each of those subdisciplines must begin to address (and reconstruct) the general developmental transformations of the subject matter they are purported to be dealing with. In other words, they must become more Galilean and more developmentally oriented in order to become more explanatory.

To illustrate, let's briefly consider the rise, the disciplinary function, and the present knowledge claims of modern personality inventories in this respect. During the first quarter of the 20th century the concept of personality was first differentiated from the older concept of "character." Various early, clinically based, dynamic and qualitative personality typologies (including those of Freud, Jung, and Lewin) were put forward in Europe. In America, however, it was personnel questionnaires and statistical personality inventories that were developed, applied, and psychometrically refined on a massive scale. All modern personality inventories were worked out by way of factor analysis -a statistical technique which hunts out common groupings of data points along various lines of best fit.

Although occasional subdisciplinary transition figures (e.g., Allport and Vernon, 1930) recognized the need to situate the psychometrically based "trait" view within the broader sociocultural context (e.g., historical events, cultural values), such concerns were subsequently dropped as a matter of subdisciplinary convenience (see Section 5). The abstractness of subsequent trait views of personality can be seen in their tendency toward "methodolatry," a shift of concern away from elaborating some dynamic causal process toward concern over statistical outcome (Danziger, 1990, pp. 111-112; Bakan, 1967, pp. 157-159). In other words, a recurring shift into and out of nominalist argumentation (naming without claiming) is characteristic of psychometric trait analysis research reporting.

In this purified trait approach, the question of whether traits (a.k.a., personality attributes or variables, etc.) exist as anything more than empirical convenience was replaced with the question of how many psychometric factors or quantitative dimensions are produced by which statistical method (Cattell vs. Eysenck vs. McCrae & Costa). Cattell (1957, 1966) reduced Allport's list of 200 terms to 16 personality "factors." He had his subjects rate their acquaintances and this data was factor analyzed producing 12 factors to which Cattell added the extra four on the basis of his own authority. Similarly, Eysenck (1953) came up with 2 "dimensions" (stable-unstable, introverted-extroverted) and McCrae & Costa came up with the now famous "big-five" factors (neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness).

These sorts of descriptive nominalistic categories, -that is the knowledge products which these inventories produce- were initially used for personnel selection in contexts of business or the military and only then obtained widespread cachet in the psychiatric community by way of appearing in successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

In the test battery now called the "big-five," for instance, your specific pattern of answers to questions is compared to generalized norms -themselves produced by the cumulative and partitioned out averages of scores along five hypothetical "dimensions" (neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness respectively). The resulting psychometric profile is a static, snapshot of a pattern of decontextualized relative nomothetic (and nomonalistic) rankings on various subscales claimed to be correlated with human personality per se. In other words, this pattern of psychometric labels does not really tell you about your personality, instead it tells you how your score pattern fits into a statistically standardized distribution of hypothetical prerequisites (or correlates) of personality.

What does this kind of psychologized, statistical typology really tell you about how you became the way you are, or for that matter what you might do about it in the future? Not a whole hell of a lot! The psychometric labels which modern personality inventories produce are merely descriptive Aristotelian categories -obtained by way of the law of averages and frequency- and nothing more.

Contrast this highly abstract statistical approach of so-called "personality assessment" with that of Freud's old psychoanalytic approach and the limitations of inventories jump right out at you in sharp relief. In Freud's elaboration of the "oedipal complex" and other psychical stages (including the "oral, phallic, anal, and latency" phase), we can see how these developmental categories might have applied to us at different stages of our lives. Anyone who has taken the step of becoming a parent in this complex western civilization can also observe how these stages are played out in their own children.

What Freud was trying to do was to provide a generalized set of dynamic concepts so that any person can understand and account for the origin or inner-workings of their own specific personality characteristics. Further, it was explicitly realized by Freud (and by the early psychoanalytic tradition of therapy itself) that the way those characteristics are expressed in any particular human being might not match up with the way they are expressed in anyone else (hence the need for a psychoanalytic dream analysis, etc., to guide the client through such analysis).

Despite their apparent lack of respective empirical rigor: Is it surprising that any reasonably intelligent person with a disturbed psyche (be it regarding relationship issues, career aspirations, depression, etc.) would seek help from the host of self-help books (or personal power programs) currently on the open market? In our continuing quest for self-understanding and improvement, classic psychoanalytic or even "popular psychology" books or programs tend to strike a meaningful cord with us in ways that no psychometric test ever has!

It is by referring to these (albeit rather simplified) kinds of comparisons that we can obtain some gleanings about what both Lewin and Holzkamp are on about: They are struggling with the issue of how to make it possible for psychologists to go from the particular case to the general without losing the human being in the resulting general statement of a psychological law. They are attempting to find a way to produce concrete (rather than abstract) general statements in psychology. They are also raising issues of the empirical and theoretical maturity of various subdisciplines; of the relevance of various knowledge products produced by those subdisciplines; and of the unity and relation between psychological subject matter as a whole. Galileo and Freud, as well as many others to be mention throughout this course, provide good exemplars in this respect.

To his credit, Lewin explicitly recognized that the initial slip into Aristotelian descriptive classification was at least in part due to the fact that the experimental aspects of psychology were a fairly new disciplinary development. Early empirical inquiry would inevitably be carving out seemingly separate and distinct "subfields" rather than having a firm grasp upon how each subfield (or aspects therein) falls into a united whole of subject matter (see further Ballantyne, 1992; 1995). Lewin, therefore, called for a concerted, communal, disciplinary effort to "harmonize" the whole field of psychology (comparable to Galileo's unified cosmos) so as to promote the future practical generality of psychological research. As Lewin put it, just as Galileo's methodology had altered the very relation between the world and the task of research for subsequent physics, psychology now had the potential of doing the same.

Reading between the lines, it is clear (at least to me) that Lewin's call for unity would not be found in the abstract mental reductionist kind of homogeneity characteristic of associationism (a term which we will explore shortly). Suffice it here to say that associationism (with its emphasis upon exceptionless connection between ideas or sensations; its emphasis upon frequency of connection; and its exclusion of so-called accidents from its discourse) was a direct outcome of Aristotelianism. Nor would the desired unity of subject matter be of the kind adopted by the first late 19th century structuralist system of psychology. Wundt, for instance imposed severe restrictions upon experimental investigation and afforded extravagant valuation to repetition (he considered frequency of occurrence as a fundamental criterion and expression of psychological lawfulness). Nor, would it be achieved through adopting the varied psychologized forms of the more Logical-positivist aspects of early 20th century physics (a.k.a., operationism) just then asserting itself in the discipline while Lewin was writing his critique.

I don't expect you to grasp the fuller implications of this issue of generality of research at this early stage of the course. Instead, the above list of problematic influences is intended merely to give you a heads-up on matters to be covered in detail later on. For now, though, we must return to the roughly chronological developments surrounding Descartes' 17th century Mind-Body dualism and Rationalism; as well as to the rise of 18th century Empiricism and Associationism.

Initially educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, Descartes (or "Cartesius" -the Latin form of his name) first served with various armies during the Thirty Years' War and, after 1628, settled down in Holland to a relatively quieter life of mathematical scholarship and philosophy. Despite sharing Galileo's heresies regarding the earth's rotation and infinity of the universe, Descartes remained a practicing Catholic throughout his life.

His two major works (Discourse on Method 1637; Meditations 1641) were published in the vernacular French language rather than in Latin. By virtue of his method of inquiry Descartes can legitimately lay claim to being the father of modern philosophical Rationalism.

His direct participation in the Thirty Years' War (between Protestant and Catholic nations) as well as the ideological tolerance of Holland likely played no small part in his creation and adoption of this novel rationalist method of philosophical inquiry. For as Russell (1946) put it:

But there are also other, more immediate disciplinary reasons for Descartes to have carried out his philosophical "quest for certainty" by way of a rationalist method and its procedure of systematic "Cartesian" doubt. These disciplinary reasons include his concern over the ethical implications of contemporary mechanically reductive materialist positions (including that of Hobbes); and his own initial overemphasis upon the fallibility of the senses. Descartes created a new rationalist system of philosophy in order to bridge the gap between his own idealist starting-point and his continuing ambition to make logically defensible contentual or mathematical statements about the world.

With respect to psychology, among the most relevant pronouncements Descartes made include his opinion that animals are living automata (whose actions are dictated by the dispositions of their bodily organs); and his outline of an "interactive" mind-body dualism with regard to human kind. The particulars of Descartes' elaborate theory regarding what is now termed bodily reflex, however, were both as mechanistic as that of Hobbes (a contemporary figure covered below) and as speculative as the fanciful stage-plays which Bacon had already warned against. Descartes, therefore, was merely one among many speculative precursors and not a "founder" per se of later physiological psychology.

Although the details of Descartes physiological theories were speculative rather than scientific (observational or experimental in the Baconian sense), his interactive mind-body dualism can be considered relatively progressive given the 17th century intellectual context in which it was proposed. Accordingly, we will be highlighting two aspects of Descartes' efforts which retain equal historiographical cogency for psychologists and philosophers alike. They include: (1) the anti-reductive motives for his adoption of interactive dualism; and (2) the rationale for his decision to throw out ontological materialism while retaining the representationalist theory of perception.

With regard to Descartes and his eventual mind-body dualism, I think it is useful to mention that the notion of mechanical bodily reflex and even the view of animals as living automata is not unique to Descartes. Other people were wrestling with the issue of voluntary and involuntary action around the same time. The fully-fledged formulation of his interactive dualism is surely unique, but the recognition of the basic mechanical mechanism under debate was part of the practical and intellectual context of the 17th century.

Practically speaking, Descartes simply drew a direct analogy between: (a) the mechanical structure of existing automata (in clock towers or the French Royal Gardens) -which moved, made sounds and played musical instruments; and (b) that of the physical workings of the human body. According to this analogy, the tubes in the robot's body correspond to nerves; the springs and motors to muscles and tendons; and the hydraulic action of water to the action of "animal spirits" (vital fluids):

Intellectually speaking, mechanical terminology had been utilized by Galileo with regard to the physical world and by physicians for some time. But most importantly, when we get to Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) we have a very good example of someone who looked at the supposed mental faculties and concluded that they could all be accounted for by way of reference to reflex mechanisms. In Hobbes' Human Nature: Or the fundamental elements of policy, (1650); and Leviathan, (1651), we have a very strict and reductive materialist monism being expressed. All these things which we call mental faculties, capabilities, whatever, are in his words "nothing but the passing of external motion through this body like they are passing through a machine."

Descartes was obviously uncomfortable with that particular formulation of the issue. He was as enthusiastic about the mechanical sciences of his time as anybody, but was also disturbed about the position that all mental faculties are reducible to physical or physiological mechanisms. Hobbes achieved his materialist monism through a methodological procedure called reductionism. In our consideration of the late 19th and 20th century disciplinary debates we will talk about forms of nonreductive materialism (including functional and dialectical materialism) but it is important to note that these options were not available to Descartes back in the 17th century.

In recognizing that Descartes was disturbed with the contemporary reductionist account of mentality, we can begin to understand his motivation for proposing a dualism with respect to human beings. Descartes' mind-body dualist position is a resistance to reductionism. It is an attempt to formulate a way of saying that the mental abilities of human beings are not just mechanical acts dictated by the bodily organs and that we therefore need a special theory to account for human mentality. All later anti-reductionist formulations are developmental and/or evolutionary. But in the 17th century there was, as yet, no firm concept of evolutionary development. So, given the intellectual context of the times, the only way by which Descartes could reasonably resist reductionism was by adopting some sort of mind-body dualism.

What I am suggesting, therefore, is that in some ways, Descartes' dualism is very appropriate response to something which is quite disturbing -the implications of mechanistic materialism for freedom, ethics, and personal conduct. Some historiographic sources (e.g., O.J. Flanagan, 1984) imply that Cartesian dualism was a self-serving concession to the pressures of the Church and that beneath the dualism Descartes was really a mechanist. But given that he was operating primarily within the atmosphere of Dutch tolerance, -a Protestant country where the subordination of Church to state was well underway- this portrayal does not stand up. In other words, Descartes was more concerned with the intellectual constrains posed by other philosophers than he was with the occasional "vexatious attacks of Protestant bigots" (see Russell, 1946, pp. 543-44).

For Descartes to preserve anything that is vaguely human and to retain a conception of humanity that is consistent with the facts of civil society, this kind of dualism seemed necessary. That said, it must also be recognized that his selection of the pineal gland as the location of interaction, was due as much to rational reflection and speculation on the possible physiological implications of his theory as it was to any rough observational considerations.

In the 21st century, mind-body dualism is very inappropriate. There are now much better ways of preserving the status of human mentality and of distinguishing it from both animal mentality or the mechanisms of machines (see Appendix 3). But back in Descartes' time, his interactive mind-body dualism was very progressive, modern and appropriate.

Up to this point in Section 2 we have considered various 16-17th century ontological and methodological materialist positions (including those of Bacon, Galileo, and even Hobbes). Ontologically, they considered matter to have a primacy over mind. Methodologically, these materialist thinkers (for the most part) turned to nature as the new authority. Descartes, however, is our first clear break in this line of philosophical development. He not only emphasized the fallibility of the senses, but also adopted an Idealist ontology and Rationalist method of inquiry from the get-go. In other words, he turned not to nature but to individual reason as the primary source of knowledge about the world.

Descartes recognized that the former philosophical marriage between the representationalist theory of perception and materialism was a very bad marriage. It undermines itself. It doesn't work. According to materialist ontology, objects are considered mind-independent. But the representationalist theory of perception (a form of indirect realist epistemology shared by all of these prior materialist figures) did not seem to allow us a way to account for how we might unequivocally propose our knowledge of this independence. Acceptance of representationalism put a snag in the materialist project because if one has to go through the senses to get to nature, and if the senses lie, then one has to turn somewhere else for certainty about the world.

At the very outset Descartes was faced with two choices: Either find an alternative to the representationalist theory of perception or reject materialist methodology. Descartes made the latter choice. He turned to reason (rather than to nature) as a methodological starting-point for his inquiries and Descartes was not the only 17th century philosopher to do so. Similar rationalist methods of inquiry were adopted by both Spinoza and Liebniz, as well as Immanuel Kant (an important late 18th century figure). In fact, with Descartes we see the beginning of a shift in 17th-18th century ontological assumptions and methodology toward idealism -i.e., toward an assumed primacy of thought.

The "rationalist form" of Descartes' representationalist argument, however, allowed him to move very quickly to assert the external existence of things in the world so we must classify his overall position as an objective idealism. This quickness of assertion distinguishes his position from later "empiricist forms" of representationalism proposed by Berkeley and Hume who also appealed to sensation but had considerable trouble getting beyond its confines -and which will therefore be labeled as "subjective" idealisms. Descartes has no intention of remaining within the confines of his own thoughts and doubts. His initial skeptical attitude is a mere starting point to be overcome by way of careful rational argumentation:

Broadly speaking, Descartes used his deductive rationalist method to move outward from the certainty of his own doubt, to the certainty of God, back down again to the certainty of the existence of his own body and the world (Descartes, Discourse). This was all fine and good for Descartes (who both emphasized the fallibility of senses and was a devout 17th century Catholic), but from the perspective of the 21st century, there are considerable vulnerabilities in the substance and practical applications of the resulting Cartesian system to consider.

Some of those vulnerabilities are found directly in the substantive details of his motives and arguments. These include: (i) why he felt compelled to seek out the first "I think therefore I am" step in this line of reasoning (his a priori opinions that knowledge gained by way of the human senses are confused and shared with animals); (ii) the supposedly "general" criteria of truth which he immediately proposed ("clarity" or "distinctness" to the mind); and (iii) the dependence of these and of the latter worldly endpoint of his argumentation on the intermediary assumption of a benevolent deity (who provides innate ideas to accompany ideas gained from sensation, invention, or imagination). In other words, if we don't go along with his initial motive for doubting "everything," or even if we refuse to accept only his intermediary assumption regarding God, his whole system comes crashing down.

Further, even if we overlook the intermediary reliance of his system on God, other vulnerabilities present themselves indirectly when we try to apply (utilize) his idealist criteria of truth. This is a very important point because it raises the issue of what the practical value of the criteria of truth in Descartes' rationalist system might be. Was it really an advance, for example, over the criteria used by 17th century materialists which it was attempting to replace?

Every philosophy (without exception) maintains some sort of theory of truth. The materialist theory of truth, for example, is a very straightforward correspondence theory. It deals with discovering the correspondence (or lack thereof) between propositions and the objects, processes or events to which they refer. Not so with Descartes' system! His criterion for truth is a decidedly more complicated idealist one: He proposes that things which we can conceive "clearly and distinctly" are true. Notice that his criterion for truth does not involve a direct correspondence with a worldly object but is rather an issue about what is inside the head. Like Plato, Descartes believed the path to this clarity was presented to the mind (given) by way of innate ideas. These ideas are "clear" because a benevolent deity (who is "good" and therefore would not fool us) has provided them to the human mind.

If we have a disagreement with each other over an issue, we must attempt to establish which of us is allowing fallibility with regard to will or passions over reason to enter our pursuit of truth. The special precautions Descartes describes -i.e., to have the thinker pursue clarity to the mind as a guide- are his effort to provide a rationalist platform for making such choices between competing theories. Yet, in practice, if a difference of opinion persists after having made such an analysis, then one is ultimately left with restating one's own opinion because there is no other ultimate referent of appeal available.

The adoption of this roundabout rationalist method and mind-dependent "clarity" criteria of truth is due to the fact that Descartes depends upon appeal to an indirect (representationalist) theory of perception:

Note the important similarity of Descartes' (1641) account with that of Galileo's (1623) account of sound. This indirect theory of perception is hegemonic at the time. With respect to Descartes, it can be argued that not only his ontological dualism (basic distinction between res extensa and res cogitans) but also the appeal to reason itself (and its truth criteria of clarity to the mind) are in part due to the adoption of this epistemologically indirect theory of perception. While all the other figures covered so far were materialists, it was an admittedly problematic materialism. So we can understand the rationale for why an idealist path might have been tried out by Descartes and other 17-18th century philosophers.

In contrast to the relatively progressive anti-reductive motives of the interactive aspect of his mind-body dualism, Descartes' rationalist methods are not an improvement. His objective idealist criteria for truth is both more complicated and ultimately more dogmatic than the correspondence theory put forward by contemporary materialists. It is also less practical. This last point can be appreciated by considering its lack of utility when faced with a persistent difference of opinion with some opponent. For, if after having carried out the suggested Cartesian cleansing procedure of "systematic doubt" on one's own opinions, no alteration in one's own position or change in the opponent's position has been made, then not final appeal to the nature of the object is possible to account for or resolve the conflicting positions.

We must now account for the systematic rise and fall of 18th century empiricist philosophy. Empiricism is usually defined in its original Lockean manifestation as: "the doctrine that all our knowledge is derived from experience." There were, however, various successive empiricist doctrines proposed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Both the methodological similarities and contentual or practical differences between these versions are highly instructive.

One thing all of these empiricists have in common is their opposition to Descartes. Like Descartes, however, all of the empiricists thinkers covered below adhered to an explicitly stated indirect theory of perception. Depending upon how far and how strictly they followed the idealist path laid out by this indirect theory of perception, some came up with an objective idealism (Locke), some with a subjective idealism (Berkeley), and some with outright solipsistic arguments (Hume).

Locke's original empiricist position was that of a commonsense philosopher who was attempting to reassert the Baconian account of science but got it wrong. Recall that Bacon put forward what can be characterized as a naive direct realist epistemology and materialist correspondence theory of truth by way of appealing to nature as the primary referent for scientific authority. Descartes, however, had adopted an implicit representationalism similar to that of Galileo and added to it a rationalist method which appealed to the clarity of innate ideas. Subsequently, Locke would adopt an explicitly stated representationalism and empiricist position which appealed to experience.

Stated simply, appeal to "experience" is ontologically idealist while appeal to "nature" is materialist. The idealist ontology of the British empiricists allowed only an "agreement or consensus" theory of truth at best (Locke) and at worst it leads their position successively down the slippery slope to solipsism. There is, in short, a degeneration of the empiricist account with various alternative approaches attempting to account for our access to the world but with the end result falling short of the mark.

For psychologists, the importance of understanding the philosophical degeneration of the empiricist position are threefold. Firstly, each of these empiricist figures had something to say about the place of psychology with respect to science in general, and made either favorable or unfavorable statements about the importance or existence of the "self." Secondly, the philosophical limitations within which the "Lockean tradition" of analytic "association" psychology was first put forward were retained in various subsequent psychological manifestations right up to the present. Thirdly, the philosophical limitations contained in the British empiricist tradition (from Locke through to Hume) are also important because the immediate rationalist philosophical reaction to it (the "Kantian" tradition) subsequently effected the methodological structure and proposed content of early German psychological traditions (including those of Wundt and Gestalt psychology). In other words, these combatant 18th century empiricist and rationalist accounts are important not only for their own history of philosophy sake but also for their respective disciplinary influence on the subsequent 19th century emergence, 20th century elaboration, and ongoing 21st century theoretical fractionation of psychology.

At times a political refugee and an active diplomat, Locke -who is quite rightly considered the founder of philosophical liberalism as well as British empiricism- produced and revised his most influential works during the period of 1687-1700.

The highlights of his liberal political philosophy are found in two works. His Treatises on Government (1690) was written to criticize Filmer's Natural Power of Kings (1680) and to justify the bloodless British "Whig Revolution" of 1688 (in which the traditional balance between parliament and king had been suitably adjusted). Similarly, his "Letters on toleration" (1689-92) describing the necessity of separating Church and State deeply influenced 18th century constitutional affairs in France and America.

Locke also inaugurated the age of philosophical empiricism, however, with An Essay on Human Understanding (1690). It is in successive editions of this work that he explicitly articulated the epistemological doctrine of "Primary and Secondary Qualities" (1690), and began the history of so-called "association" psychology (1700).

The central concern of Locke's (1690) work is to argue against those who had appealed to innate ideas or a priori principles in their accounts of human knowledge (including Plato, the Scholastics, and Descartes). The way we come by knowledge, he argued, is "not innate" but through experience:

The problematic aspect of his empiricist system lies not in this central concern over the origin of knowledge, nor even in its overall aim or intent but rather in the details of its execution and vulnerability to subsequent radicalized interpretation. Locke's aim was to provide an account of the "conformity" between ideas and objects. This is an attempt at a correspondence theory of truth (as in Bacon) but it relies heavily upon an Indirect Realist epistemomology more closely resembling Galileo's informal methodological demarcation between "physical and psychical" aspects of observed events. In that sense, Locke (1690) was merely stating explicitly what was already implicit in the prior indirect realist (representationalist) views of Galileo (1623) and Descartes (1641).

The full-fledge result of Locke's (1690) efforts can be depicted as follows (for the case of visual perception):

Given that the vulnerability of Locke's well-meaning brand of empiricism lies in the "indirect" aspects of his realist epistemological account (that he turns to "experience" rather than to "nature" as in Bacon), we should now consider those details. His initial systematic distinction in this regard is between ideas and qualities:

Two things should be noted about this important passage: (i) that Locke's is explicitly stating that "qualities" reside in the object whereas the ideas they afford reside in us; and (ii) that the overlap in the wording of this passage with that used by Newton's (1704) "philosophical" passage regarding color perception is rather striking! Newton's (1704) theory of color from natural sunlight passed through a prism is the first of many applications of Locke's explicit indirect realist theory regarding color.

Locke then drafts out a further formal distinction between so-called "primary and secondary" qualities as follows:

Locke (1690) used various commonplace examples including a snowball to illustrate the practical applicability of his doctrine. The extension in space, solidity, and motion of a snowball in one's hands are "primary" qualities while the color, coolness, and taste are "secondary" qualities afforded by the object to us.

It is indeed a testament to the theoretical potency of this doctrine that that Isaac Newton (1704) apparently adopted the distinction between primary and secondary qualities to argue against his own (1675) account that color does not constitute a "property" of light per se (see above). The great danger in the doctrine, however, is in its indirectness and our own resulting propensity to overextend or radicalize the intended demarcation beyond the bounds of Locke's original statement.

For Locke (1690), the demarcating distinction between primary and secondary qualities does not turn on "where" they are (in body or mind) but rather on "resemblance" to the objects in which these "powers" reside. His intent in distinguishing between such qualities was to describe the epistemological process of how we experience things in the world (including both the layperson's experience of commonplace objects and that of the more sophisticated kind that a seasoned mechanic or scientist has of engines or other such practical-empirical subject matter).

Locke follows a roughly materialist methodology because his account works from the outside inward. But by way of explicitly elaborating an epistemologically indirect (representationalist) account of perception he had also opened himself up to a very anti-materialist view which we will encounter in both Berkeley and Hume. Stated differently, in Locke's formalized Indirect Realist appeal to experience rather than to nature per se, the only de facto theory of truth provided is one involving conformity, resemblance, or agreement between ideas. These are all notably idealist criteria very similar to the "clarity" criterion used by Descartes.

Incidentally, the intellectual -Locke (1690) to Newton (1704)- influence seems also to have worked both ways. The fourth and last edition of Locke's Essay on Human Understanding (1700) had already included a chapter bearing the title of "The association of ideas." In it, Locke was concerned predominately with the theme of how "wrong" (incorrect, abnormal) associations are formed. Inspired by Newton, Locke (1700) was attempting to apply additive, mechanical principles to psychological issues just as Newton was now doing with both physical motion and the mixing of light.

It was thus that a history of "association psychology" was first set into motion (see Warren, 1921). As we will see later, the actual (ensuing) trajectory and methodological structure of that subdisciplinary movement (of which Hobbes' mental mechanics more than any aspect of Locke's account should be considered the "prime mover"), turned out to be as contrived and as static as the joint notions of Platonic absolute ideas and Aristotelian efficient causation upon which it also relied. These latter points (on association psychology) will be picked up successively in Sections 3, 4, & 5. For the remainder of the present section, however, we must first concentrate on the argumentative degeneration of British Empiricism proper through the philosophical figures which followed Locke (specifically Berkeley and Hume); and then endeavor to give some account of the Kant vs. Hume debate (which itself provides a second essential intellectual backdrop for our successive considerations of association psychology per se).

Berkeley was an Irish-born Anglican theologian who spent time in England and then America. His major philosophical works include: A New Theory of Vision (1709); Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and The Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous (1713). These constitute the first high-profile radicalization of Locke's initial empiricist position and their explicit intent is to counteract the burgeoning influence of secular 18th century philosophy and science. In short, Berkeley's brand of "phenomenalist" empiricism is an idealism par excellence (or rather a theistic immaterialism) where God both takes the place of matter as the origin of sense experience and serves as the cause of the orderly structure of the perceived world.

Proceeding from Locke's (1690) examination of human knowledge, Berkeley (1710) contends that all sensory experience falls into the category of Locke's "secondary" qualities. In a few sweeping phrases, Berkeley both misrepresents Locke's initial account of secondary qualities (as something residing in the head -not actually Locke's position) and also rejects as incorrect Locke's fundamental distinction between primary and secondary qualities altogether:

According to Berkeley, all sensory phenomena are secondary qualities and they reside only in the head of the perceiver. He postulates no access to any external world and appeals only to the phenomena of a personalized mind. The 1710 work is, therefore, best known for its Latinized saying "esse is percipi" (to be is to be perceived):

The adoption of "Phenomenalism" (a form of Subjective Idealism) set Berkeley position apart from Locke's original indirect though Objective Idealist representationalist theory of perception. Berkeley's "apple" is merely a collection of sensory impressions:

Notice that the integrity of all objects is now merely an aspect personalized subjectivity. The existential integrity and relative permanence of the apple is the result of Berkeley's perceiving the pieces of that apple together. It is not that he perceives the pieces going together because they have intrinsic integrity or permanence in the world around us. Commonsense, however, suggests that it is the other way around (that we experience things as whole because they are whole). It can be said therefore that Berkeley turned Locke's commonsense approach to perception on its head and denied the existence of objects per se as anything more than that which is perceived by the individual mind.

But by having separated the active personalized human mind -including its ideas, sensations, and passions- so forcefully from nature in and of itself, Berkeley must then somehow reassert a rationale for the orderly structure and relative permanence of perceived objects. While this carefully argued rush inward to the mind may seem problematic from the perspective of secular philosophy and science, it should be noted that it put Berkeley, the theologian, just where he wanted to be! That is, the only available means by which the jerky existence of objects as perceived can be stabilized is by way of discursive recourse to God. As mentioned in Bertrand Russell's (1946) work, the following limericks (attributed to Ronald Knox) are illustrative of the important role of God in Berkeley's phenomenalist system:

There was a young man who said,
'God Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be when there's no one about in the Quad'

Dear Sir:
Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully, God.

According to Berkeley, it is God who stabilizes our individual experiences and perceived existences. It is God who coordinates our perceptions of one another and even of ourselves by providing existential consistency. The role of God in this system is to restore and account for "necessity" in experience. It is the divine mind, that ensures the perceived regularity in what we call "nature." This aspect of Berkeley's position is best laid out in his 1713 work -which is written in the style of a running dialog between two fictitious characters: "Hylas" who stands for scientifically educated commonsense; and "Philonous" who is Berkeley (see Russell, 1946, pp. 624-626).

For the scientifically-minded ontological materialists such as Bacon, Galileo, and even Locke, of course, accounting for necessity in experience is no problem. Experience of perceptual necessity is merely a reflection of natural necessity. But for Berkeley that's no longer possible because nature no longer exists in and of itself. So necessity in observable phenomena has to be accounted for in a different way and that's the role that God is playing.

Berkeley's central philosophical doctrine (theistic immaterialism), though satisfying to himself, was not particularly convincing or influential. Secular knowledge and the practical utilization of empirical science were undeniably on the rise. Similarly, philosophically speaking, his radical epistemological account acted as a negative influence because it moved British empiricism from its initial, admittedly logically tenuous, objective idealist position (in Locke) toward a subjective idealism (in Berkeley and then Hume) and postulated no access direct or indirect to any external reality.

Berkeley's (1709, 1710, 1713) works did raise a set of tree troublesome pseudo issues which, as it happens, were instrumental in shaping the intellectual confines of 18th-19th century psychological debates. These issues include: (1) the "laws of association" of sensory elements; (2) the issue of visual distance perception; and (3) the imageless thought controversy. Although the raising of such issues can not be described as a progressive contribution to later perceptual or cognitive science, they were certainly influential and therefore deserve some coverage.

First of all, with regard to the laws of association of sensory elements issue, Berkeley (1709) is widely recognized as the first author to explicitly apply the theory of association to the area of perception in a primarily psychological monograph. Stated plainly, in his New Theory of Vision (1709), a visually perceived object is simply a learned association of experienced sensory elements. Berkeley (1709) uses the term "habitual or customary connexion" between "ideas" (Sect. 17) to account for near distance judgments. Similarly, Berkeley's "table" (1710) is merely an association of hardness, smoothness, and whatever other visual or tactile phenomena his mind may have experienced. Berkeley (1713) then extends this account to the other sensory modalities including: taste, odor, sound, color and heat sense (see Russell, 1946 for an account of his specific arguments in this respect).

We should take note, however, that both the particular brand of indirect perception being advocated (phenomenalism rather than representationalism) and the fact that Berkeley immediately went on to utilize the initial (1709) analysis as a discursive support for his more central philosophical doctrine regarding God, indicates that Berkeley's motives for undertaking it are decidedly different from those of later secular figures in the area of perception psychology proper.

The second issue raised by the psychological aspects of Berkeley's (1709-1713) writings is that of visual depth perception (the so-called "problem" of distance). This is, once again, an issue which is raised (or rather created) by Berkeley's theistically motivated commitment to a phenomenalist denial of any sort of perceptual access to external necessity.

Any materialist, -even a representationalist one like Galileo or Locke- would claim that the reason why some objects appear far away is because they are far away. This is a self-evident "tautology" to be sure, but it is also one upon which a theory of "occlusion of objects" and/or "textural gradients" in a visual field of an organism can be based (as was later done during the early years of perceptual psychology proper).

But since Berkeley is ideologically committed to working out a phenomenalist account of distance perception, he (unlike Locke) can't even start with such a commonsense tautology. Nor can he argue that perception of distance is given by way of innate ideas because (like Locke) he has already given up appeal to such convenient "Cartesian" fictions. The issue of exactly how learned associations between sensory elements lead us to an understanding of visual distance thus becomes a rather tricky problem (rather than an empirical starting-point) for his inquiry. He has to come up with a completely different means of accounting for the kind of the distance judgments we all make on a daily basis.

The intellectual constraints which Berkeley is working within become readily apparent when he even declines to appeal to mathematically descriptive "angles and lines" drawn outward from the eye to objects (see Berkeley, 1709, Sects. 5 & 14 respectively). These mathematical devices (involving the calculation of obtuse and acute angles of incidence for objects at various distances) had already served with great utility in both the area of optics (for the purposes of lens or spectacle shaping), as well as in the area of pictorial art (for the purpose of providing a realistic portray of visual perspective). But Berkeley's phenomenalist epistemology disallows the possibility of appeal to such external necessity.

As the following two extracts indicate, Berkeley's (1709) account of visual distance perception, therefore, is made solely in terms of learned connections between visual and "self perceived" muscular sensations -of the sort which result from the convergence of the eyes (for "near" distance judgments) and of eye strain (of different sorts for "far" distance judgments including the "magnitude or clarity" of the image perceived):

In short, Berkeley's theory of distance perception is both confined in scope and its discursive details fly in the face of the practical developments of the era. By way of zeroing in primarily on the issue of "near" distance perception (as an implied possible model for all distance judgments), Berkeley is able to discount, or rather sidestep, contemporaneous developments in other fields of inquiry (practical and otherwise). These developments include both the mathematical use of triangulation (angles, lines) for naval navigation as well as those in optics (e.g., lens-making for spectacles, telescopes, or microscopes). While it can be argued that this carefully constrained phenomenalist theory of depth perception is a very clever theory to have worked out, it can also be argued that it was not a particularly useful one (except perhaps for Berkeley "himself").

Finally, with regard to the third psychological issue raised by Berkeley's writings, -which he called the issue of "abstract ideas" (1710; Sect. 6) but which was later to be called "imageless thought"- we have to note, as did Heidbreder (1933), that Berkeley takes one further problematic step in the radicalization of Locke by way of identifying (equating) idea and image.

Locke (1690) did not equate visual images (or even sensations) with all resulting ideas but only some. He recognized two different sources (one external and one internal) of the "experiences" which produce "ideas" in us:

Locke's representationalist account of sensation-based perception, left considerable leeway on the issue of the possible "independence" of resultant ideas from the initial visual (or other) sensory components from which most ideas are produced. In other words, according to Locke, a visually perceived object certainly "gives rise" to sensations which then produce ideas, but the resultant ideas may be very different from the original primary visual qualities provided to the perceiver by the powers of the object. This is, after all, the very definition of his secondary visual qualities (like color) which according to Locke do not "resemble" the objects which produce them in us.

In order to complement the rather passive "sensation" based aspect of the mind, Locke also recognized an active ability of the mind which he called "reflection." This was a form of "internal sense" in which the mind actively gains an understanding of its own operations:

The point to note here is that for Locke, the ideas arising from this latter sort of internalized reflection were distinctly different from the ideas arising from external sensations (including visual images). Not so for Berkeley!

According to Berkeley (1710), the contemporary philosopher's belief in "abstract" (decontextualize) non-image based verbal concepts (a.k.a., imageless thought) is merely a "delusion of words." Instead, he argues that if one attempts to think -via reflection I presume- of a "general Idea of a Triangle" (Introduction, Sect. 13), we are fooling ourselves because the very act of defining that term (triangularity) conjures up images of particular triangles we have encountered in the past. In other words, for Berkeley, the idea and image are inseparable fused:

This notion of equating ideas and images (or sensations) is important because it persists from this time forward right up into the late 19th century. In fact one of the big controversies of late 19th century psychology is around this very issue. Wundt, who was primarily concerned with investigating the psycho-physical aspects of psychology, will take Berkeley's position and say that there are no ideas except those which can be analyzed in terms of sensory elements. Külpe (1893) will counter-argue Wundt and formally declare the existence and importance of "imageless thoughts" as a subject matter for psychology.

Külpe eventually won that argument but it is in Berkeley that the issue can first be said to have arisen. In the following extract, Külpe (1912) drives home the point of the distinction between sensory elements (the proposed components of ideas) and higher mental thought per se by utilizing the example of the difference between memorizing the "wording" versus recalling the "meaning" of a poem:

David Hume was a Scottish-born philosopher who, despite producing high quality writings at an early age, never received a university appointment in Moral Philosophy due to his lack of commitment on the issue of the soul among other things (see James Fieser, 2001). His major philosophical works including Treatise of Human Nature (Bk. 1 & 2, 1739; Bk. 3, 1740) and a shortened version called An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) put forward a "skeptical" (a.k.a., subjective idealist) phenomenalist epistemology similar to but, in some respects, even more radical than that of Berkeley. As Edna Heidbreder (1933) so aptly put it:

With Hume's further radicalization of empiricism, both the unitary personal mind (a.k.a., the "self") and its experience of causality are denied and we end up with an account of the world which is collapsed into an "aggregate of ideas, supported by no substance and connected by no necessity" (Heidbreder, 1933, p. 48). Hume's position is, therefore, typically considered to be both the logically necessary endpoint and the reductio ad absurdum of the British Empiricist school of philosophy. As Russell (1946) put it, by making empiricism logically "consistent" he had also made it "incredible" (p. 634).

If at face value this mid-18th century Humean position now strikes us as rather silly we should recall that it was originally the product of a rather careful, logical line of reasoning which for many subsequent figures in the philosophy of science has been highly compelling. For that reason Hume must be recognized as one of the two philosophical figures from this entire period to have had a major impact on later Western philosophy proper. The other figure to do so was Kant whom argued against Hume but rather unsatisfactorily.

But while both empirical science (including psychology) and philosophy proper continued on their de facto related courses of disciplinary development and elaboration, the early 20th century subdiscipline of philosophy of science per se seems to have been predicated on the unsound premise that the advance of Western philosophy had been halted with the debates between Kant and Hume. Thus, more often than not, even late 20th century philosophers of science -the ones which would make considerable trouble for early "insider" historians of psychology- either took up a Humean position or were arguing against the Humean aspects of psychology from the perspective of some neo-Kantian position.

So in the remainder of this Section we will have to pay very close attention to both these figures. Likewise, from here on in we will also need to be on guard for both the reoccurrence of their respective errors and for the potential remedies proposed during subsequent periods of psychological discourse. For the fact of the matter is that we can not truly appreciate many of the past errors and contemporary advances in psychology without knowing something about the philosophy of Hume and Kant.

The thing to recognize upfront about Hume is that he is a logician. Hume will start with the basic assumptions of Locke regarding the empiricist presupposition about knowledge being gained from experience and carefully work out their logical consequences no matter how much they may conflict with commonsense.

We will concentrate upon three aspects of Hume's position and their implications for science in general as well as for psychology in particular. These include: (1) Hume's Phenomenalism which while distinguishing between sensory "impressions" and "ideas" contained no explicit theory of the object; (2) his portrayal of causality judgments as mere experience of "constant conjunction;" and (3) his reasons for denying the existence of the "self" including the Aristotelian nature of his logical argumentation.

One thing which becomes clear when reading Hume is the similarity between his phenomenalist epistemology and that of the ancient Greek Sophists (who not only recognized the fallibility of human perception but also emphasized an impassible "barrier of the senses").

Unlike Berkeley (who appealed to the mind of God as a source for the stability of objects as perceived by us), Hume puts forward no theory regarding the object. He remains "skeptical" about the object. It simply doesn't enter into his explicit deliberations. He doesn't deny that it exists outside our perceptions, he does not affirm that it exists. If it's there, we can't know about it. Now, doesn't this skeptical position remind you of the ancient Greek Sophists?

Furthermore, the "Introduction" to Hume's (1739) work argues that "It is evident, that all the sciences [including Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion] have a relation, greater or less, to human nature." He speaks here of their "dependence" upon "the science of MAN; since they lie under the cognisance of men..." (Hume, 1739, Bk. 1). Hume's position is quite clearly a 17th century version of the ancient Sophist's argument that "man is the measure of all things."

At first glance the methodological implication of Hume's "skepticism" seems marvelous for psychologists. No longer, for instance, can the physicists claim that they form the basis upon which all else is built. No, psychology is the science upon which all else is built. When the physicist goes to look at a physical process (objects and their events), what is he or she actually looking at? Sensations, and as everybody knows, such sensations belong to psychology not to physics. So if physicists want to be sure about what they can say about such processes, they have to turn to us (to psychologists) to find out what they can properly talk about with respect to such sensations, ideas, and images. Loosely speaking, according to Hume, psychology now becomes the "fundamental science" upon which everything else is based.

Although this position seems quite flattering for the psychologist, it is really troubling in the long run because with Hume, the objective idealist epistemology of Locke's empiricism has been logically followed to its ultimately subjective idealist endpoint. Subjective idealism is methodologically problematic because among other things it produces a seemingly impassible barrier of the senses. If in fact there is only "sensation and perception" as a point of reference, how can we distinguish between our "ideas" and the sensations we got them from?

Note that for an ontological materialist, this is no problem at all. Even Locke's representationalist account of perception argued that there are communally referential objects (out there); that it is the emanations coming from them which impinge upon our retinas (this we call sensory image); and that it is these passively obtained images which are then actively worked upon (by reflection) in our brains to produce personalized ideas.

But, if, as in Hume's skeptical account we can not rightly suppose that anything exists external to us, how can we distinguish between sensation, image and idea? Hume (1739) attempts to answer this epistemological conundrum by way of a subjective distinction between sensory impressions and ideas. He even specifically cautions the readers in an important footnote that:

For him, the term "impression" does not mean that something was impressed upon us "from outside" because he is not presuming anything about how it got there. We can not, according to Hume, know anything about how impressions are produced; they simply 'are there.'

Thus, as the following extracts indicate, Hume's distinction between "impressions" and "ideas" is a purely subjective one. It has to be so because we are limited to a discourse from within the supposed barrier of the senses. For Hume, this subjective distinction between impressions and ideas is carried out in terms of their respective "forcefulness and vivacity" to the mind of the perceiver:

He elaborates by further distinguishing between "simple" ideas (which are representative of felt impressions) and "complex" ideas which are not:

In this further elaboration, some of the fundamentally self-contradictory aspects of Hume's skepticism come out in sharp relief. Foremost among these is the awkward fact that in distinguishing between simple and complex ideas he does eventually make loose (implicit) reference to real "streets and houses." That is, he makes implicit reference to 'that which he has already argued we have no referential access.' Given Hume's methodological assumption of the barrier of the senses, the only way to carry out any form of analysis (including the above analysis of the experiential vivacity between felt impressions and simple ideas) is to accept such inconsistencies; for the alternative to doing so is a total inquiry-ending solipsism.

Book 1, Part 3, of Hume's Treatise (1739) is one of the longest of the entire three volume work. It concerns the issue of the nature, basis, and rules governing the kind of causality judgments we all make in philosophy, science, and everyday life. This initial destructive skeptical critique of standard causality judgments was subsequently followed up in the Enquiry (Sects. 3, 4, & 7, 1748).

Hume's combined (1739; 1748) doctrine regarding such causal judgments can be boiled down to two propositions. Firstly, when we say 'A causes B', all that we actually have a right to say is that, in "past experience" A and B have frequently appeared together or in rapid succession. Secondly, no matter how many times we may have actually observed the "conjunction" of A and B, that provides no sound reason for expecting them to be necessarily conjoined on a future occasion -though it is the "customary" source of our "habitual" expectation.

Notice that for Hume, "expectation" is a defining feature of causality judgments. Where does such expectation reside? In us! So, according to Hume, what is commonly referred to as causality 'out there' is merely an expectation in us that one event will follow another.

The everyday notion of causality which most of us naively hold to is one of production. If we say that 'event A causes event B,' then we understand this to mean that event A has somehow "produced" something new. Causality is usually considered as a process of necessary production of something new from what has gone before.

But Hume (1739) hastens to reject this typical "production" notion of causality:

His argument against the production view of causality can be paraphrased as follows: Do I see the supposed productive aspect of causality? No! All I see is the sensation of event A followed by the sensation of event B. I can never know that A necessarily causes B but only that B has succeeded A in my perceptions. They are "constantly conjoined" perhaps, and by way of custom or habit -themselves based upon vivacity of impressions to our mind- this kind of experience leads to "expectations" of their common occurrence, but that's all we know. Such "imperfect" inference from past experience, therefore, is not a "sound" basis upon which to postulate "necessary" relations between the two observed events.

Hume's (1739) phenomenalist argument regarding cause as mere expectations of constant conjunction is carefully laid out but suffers from a lack of persuasive examples. In various sections of the Enquiry (1748), however, the requisite discursive examples are brought forward and utilized to their full effect:

Finally, the most striking discursive moment comes in Section 7 when Hume argues that his account is not just true of external events (gravity, fire, gunpowder, etc.) but also of the internal volitional operations of our own bodies. He asks therefore:

While overgenerous readings of Hume's position on causality have portrayed it as a mere warning to avoid rash causality judgments (e.g., to not confuse correlation with causality), the actual conclusion of Hume's account is that we never perceive causes or laws of nature; we perceive only events or sequences and mistakenly infer causation or necessity by way of customary expectations. Any proposed causal law is not a necessary aspect of nature but merely an habitual "mental summary or shorthand of our kaleidoscopic experience" (Durant, The Story of Philosophy, 1933, p. 281).

As was the case with his phenomenalist account of perception per se, it is in a seemingly "minor infraction" to his generally adhered to line of argument that Hume's skeptical position on causality judgments must ultimately be recognized as self-contradictory. As Russell (1946) pointed out, Hume's postulated "law of habit" is itself a causal law. The fact is that, where psychology is concerned, Hume allows himself to believe in causation of a limited sort, which, in general, he condemns.

In what present-day psychologists would surely consider a rather curious section of the Treatise called "Of Personal Identity" (Bk. 1, Pt. 4, Sect. 6), Hume utilizes empirical, rhetorical, logical, and phenomenalist arguments to inform the reader (step by step) of all the reasons for his doubts regarding the existence of any unitary entity called the "self." Although Hume starts out by openly acknowledging our shared "natural propensity" toward belief in personal identity, neither his own initial "reflective" empirical analysis nor his accompanying logical reasoning allows him to maintain a belief in such a concept.

One or another concept of self is central to nearly all aspects of contemporary psychology but this has not always been the case. We will soon be encountering arguments which are very similar to those used by Hume, so we should not dismiss his denial of the self concept out of hand but rather make every effort to understand why he rejects it as legitimate. Other figures, most notably William James in the late 19th century, draw very different solutions to the issues Hume raises. The question we will eventually ask is: 'Why was it that James was able to maintain confidence in his personalized self when Hume (and various others) could not! By making this kind of comparison, we can learn a lot about what is required theoretically to produce and maintain a sound concept of "personal identity."

Hume's initial reflective-empirical argument regarding the self runs as follows:

When Hume attempts to reflect upon the inner workings of his mind, he observes many things going on but he never finds anything which can definitively be called either a "self" or a "single power of the soul." This is his initial reflective-empirical conclusion.

In the midst of stating this conclusion he also delivers the following somewhat disingenuous rhetorical barb at any potential opponents on this issue:

Hume then elaborates his logical argumentation for rejecting the self. The structure of this logical argumentation is important to note because it reappears from time to time throughout the subsequent course of psychological history. It can be paraphrased as follows: We all know what "identity" is, it means "sameness." But when I look at what I naively call myself, I do not see identity, I see only "diversity." I see this feeling, that feeling; this sensation, another sensation; and all of these are in "perpetual flux and movement."

The point to notice here is that the structure of Hume's logical argumentation proceeds in a strictly Aristotelian way -according to the Formal logical principles of Identity, Non-contradiction, and Excluded Middle. When Hume reflects upon his own experience he recognizes its "diversity." Since diversity is a category which according to Formal logic opposes and excludes identity, then obviously he can not logically acknowledge identity per se therein. Having logically excluded identity, he is forced to also exclude self because, as he says, the concept of self (by its traditional definition) rests upon the existence of (or at least some conception of) some kind of continuous or persisting personal identity.

When we get to James, we will encounter an entirely different kind of logical reasoning -one that accepts the simultaneous existence of opposites in objects or processes in the sort of way that we have already encountered in Heraclitus. But this notion of interpenetrating opposites, which first shows up in Presocratic Greek thought (see Section 1) and which is then "excluded" by Aristotle, remains excluded up to Hume's time. It only reappears in the late 19th century.

So, says Hume, the typical concept of self that was used by former philosophers including Descartes, is a logical "fallacy," a result of "confusion," mistakes, and definitional "absurdity." These are the descriptive terms he uses about the concept of self and this is his formal logical conclusion regarding so-called personal identity.

However, having already started out by recognizing our tenacious propensity to appeal to the self concept, Hume must now provide an account of why we so often use that word. Here he couples the empirical and logical arguments to his more general phenomenalist account of mind suggesting that -like a refitted warship, or a rebuilt Church to which we ascribe the same "name" as its predecessor- the term "self" is merely a customary, habitual description of a diverse train of "related" ideas:

In other words, like the supposed identity of objects (which Hume's phenomenalism has already drawn into doubt), the oft supposed identity of a personalized self does not refer to anything but a smooth succession of impressions and ideas. The supposed existence of self (like that of the supposed existence of material objects) is based merely upon a series of categorical mistakes and mental habits. This is the rather disappointing phenomenalist conclusion regarding personal identity to which Hume is ultimately led.

In the "Conclusion" to Book 1 of the Treatise, Hume shares a revealing autobiographical statement which indicates he was both aware of and constantly bothered by the discrepancies between the demands of daily life and the skeptical conclusions that he was driven to in his philosophy:

In the final analysis Hume remained primarily a formal logician. He attempted to cede no rhetorical ground to the practical "commonsense" philosophy of prior figures like Locke. Without denying his existential tension regarding the practicalities of daily life, he apparently came to accept it with great equanimity as part of the price paid for carrying out rule-seeking philosophy. Evidence for this can also be found in another semi-biographical statement contained in his essay "The Sceptic" (1742). In the following extract, Hume is sharing with the reader his motives for not taking the practicalities of daily life as a guide to his philosophy:

Life, he says, is governed by "fortuitous" accidents rather than "reason" -because reason after all requires appreciation of, or at least appeal to natural necessity. Since his (1739) philosophy has already denied any "human" access to causal necessity in life (the role which Berkeley ascribed to God -an appeal to which Hume had explicitly rejected), life itself is best taken as a "dull pastime" rather than a "impassioned" guideline to philosophical inquiry.

Philosophers should not be "indifferent" to everyday life but nor should they take it too "seriously." For neither path would be "pleasurable." Similarly, the only motive Hume gives for the pursuit of such philosophical inquiry (or science for that matter) is his own proclivities toward finding "amusement" in it.

What a long way indeed we have come from the optimistic starting-place of Francis Bacon's impassioned (1620) call for science and philosophy to be used for the practical use and benefit of life. Bacon and Galileo portrayed science with great optimism as an enterprise which we engage in to reveal the necessity of things. Science asks questions like: "Why must those aspects of nature be ordered in that way?;" or "What explanations can we find for the way these aspects of nature work?;" or "How shall we measure and discover which of these aspects of an event are causal rather than incidental or correlational?;" and further "Which of these established causal aspects of the event are the central determinants thereof?;" etc. These are all questions of necessity. According to Hume (1739; 1742; 1748), however, philosophy and science reveal only the habits of the mind and therefore have no intrinsic or practical value because they can not provide any account of necessity in nature.

There is an important object lesson to be learned here regarding Hume that we will remind ourselves of from time to time. It can be stated as follows: When a philosophy or theory advocates a position which is so at variance with commonsense and the practicalities of everyday life, we have a right to question that position. Commonsense is not always right but it should not be abandoned without a fight.

Despite Hume's account of science as merely an amusing past-time incapable of producing explanations, practical science was making headway. Philosophers like Kant recognized that they could not calmly acquiesce to Hume's position because it didn't support the kinds of investigatory or productive activities in which scientists and practical people of all sorts were already engaged. If the ongoing development of human knowledge and technology was so evident, there had to be some kind of basis for theoretical certainty to match up with these practical advances. The fact that Kant did not succeed in surmounting the methodological limitations imposed on inquiry by Hume's account should not diminish our appreciation for the motive behind his efforts to do so.

Immanuel Kant was a German "Critical philosopher" and university professor in Logic and Metaphysics at Königsberg (once in Eastern Prussia but since 1945 renamed Kaliningrad as part of Russia). Kant wrote three major works along this "critical" line: Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 2nd ed., 1787); Critique of Practical Reason (1788); and Critique of Judgment (1790). Respectively, they deal with how knowledge is possible, how goodness is possible, and how judgment of aesthetic taste is possible. Our main concern is with the psychological and scientific implications of the first work, but in each the term "critical" refers to Kant's attempt to elucidate what the capabilities and limitations of human reason might be in that area of inquiry.

As a boy, Kant was heavily immersed in the German Pietist religion, a sect which like the Methodists of England insisted on the full strictness and rigor of religious practice and belief. Having entered the Collegium Fredericianum (one of the celebrated centers of German Pietism), intending to study theology, he was found to excel in the classics. He subsequently went on to the University of Königsberg where he read science and maths and was exposed to the tradition of Continental rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz).

He stayed on to teach part-time at Königsberg and produced one notable early scientific work, called General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), which put forward a nebular hypothesis for the formation of the solar system. The professorship he sought, however, seemed ever-elusive. Somewhere between (1755-1770) while struggling to produce both scientific work as well as carrying out a rather impressive teaching portfolio, Kant was (as he said) "awakened from his dogmatic slumber" by Hume's biting skeptical attacks on both the rationalist account of causality; and their logical arguments for the existence of God.

While the exact timing or textual mechanism of this awakening is still a matter of debate, it is known that by 1762, Kant was already readjusting his former thinking on such Enlightenment era issues by carefully reading the newly published Émile of Rousseau. That work argued, roughly, that: though the empirical reasoning of Hume might logically count against a belief in God and immortality, feeling was overwhelmingly in their favor, so why bother yielding to the atheistic despair of arid skepticism? Two early essays by Kant along this line were forthcoming: "The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God's Existence" (1763) and "On the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals" (1764). In other words, the issue of God and morals was a very important theme in the so-called "pre-critique" era of Kant's intellectual development.

In any case, by 1771, when Hume's "Treatise of Human Nature" was first published in the German translation, Kant certainly had an opportunity to consider the details of the British skeptical philosophy more closely. It is also known that from 1773 onward he began formally working out a plan to synthesize the strengths of Empiricism and the burgeoning "romantic movement" into a new approach which he called "Critical" philosophy. Will Durant (1933), therefore, aptly states the general mission (or rather motive) of Kant's initial Critique (1781) as follows:

Such was the bipartite general motive of the man himself. With respect to placing Kant as a biographical figure into the ongoing development of Enlightenment thought, Durant has done a great service to later generations. The distinctly "Kantian" aspects of his critical philosophy (as presented in his Critique of Pure Knowledge, 1781), however, can only be understood by stating outright the more specific "goals" connected with his motive. Regard to the question of the theory of knowledge (as covered in the 1781 work) Kant would develop an updated form of rationalism which had three goals: (i) to emphasize the preparedness of the mind to receive information from the world (much like Descartes); (ii) reject Humean skepticism by attempting to reassert a modified representational theory of perception (much like Locke); and (iii) highlight the limiting effect of the old Aristotelian logic on empirical science by way of reinserting the Socratic (though not Heraclitean) dialectic back into philosophy.

It is these specific goals (contained in the initial Critique) which indicate Kant's interdisciplinary role as an intellectual "bridging figure" between late Enlightenment thought and subsequent 19th century developments in philosophy and science. Kant was very much part of ongoing advancement of Enlightenment thought but the course of 19th century intellectual and scientific progress clearly outstretched the bounds of his careful deliberations and pronouncements.

Before launching headlong into the details of Kant's 1781 work, we should take note of the audience to which it was addressed and the disciplinary situation Kant was facing while writing it.

First of all, when he embarked on writing the Critique, Kant (in 1773) was not a gentleman scholar (like Locke) comfortably musing to an audience of "amateurs." He was someone who, over a long period, had slowly climbed up through the pre-professorial ranks and was just now afforded his first (and perhaps only) opportunity to impart his approach to an audience of learned students and professional philosophers outside the bounds of Königsberg. In short, this work was intended as Kant's one all-encompassing legacy to the philosophical community:

To elaborate, Kant had attended the University of Königsberg studying Latin literature, mathematics and physics until 1744 when, unable to pay the tuition, he was forced to withdraw and tutor others on a variety of topics until 1755. In that year a friend lent him the money to re-enroll and he was awarded combined Master and Doctor of Philosophy degrees. At that point, however, Kant began an extended stint as a "Privatdozent" (the equivalent of today's sessional lecturers) at Königsberg -a period in which he was passed over twice for advancement- until 1770 when he finally received the long-sought professorship in Logic and Metaphysics (held until 1797).

Stated plainly, Kant, from the earliest years of his long private and public teaching career was forced by biographical and ongoing practical circumstances to become a broadly educated generalist rather than a specialist in any one particular aspect or area of contemporary science or metaphysics. It should not be surprising therefore that his initial Critique (originally published as an 800 page Opus Magnum) was written up in a style intended to impress. Throughout it we hear the impassioned tonality of an overzealous philosophical reformer and yet encounter the dense professorial terminology (e.g.,"Transcendental Aesthetic, Transcendental Analytic, and Transcendental Dialectic" -which constitute its three "parts") suitable to one who had achieved an office of great authority. As Durant put it:

Secondly, and perhaps more relevantly to our own concerns, it is important to understand that the professional or disciplinary situation Kant was facing while writing the initial Critique was similar at least in some respects to that faced by Socrates (see Section 1). Consider for a moment Socrates contemplating the Sophists of his era. The Sophists are telling him: "You can't know anything for certain, and there's no basis for deciding upon right action, etc." Socrates, in considering this dilemma, eventually accepts the Sophist's argument against direct appeal to objects. He sides against the materialist methodology of the Presocratic philosophers. So where does he go for certainty? Inside the mind of the thinker. In "self-knowledge" he finds the secret to certainty and this is the idealist approach later developed by Plato (with his appeal to universal abstractions and so on). Similarly, we saw Descartes was also very concerned with the issue of knowledge. Having recognized the weakness of the former marriage between materialism and representationalism he appealed to "innate ideas" as the basis for his rationalist approach.

Kant is going to do the same sort of thing as Socrates and Descartes. But his new rationalism will not appeal to self-knowledge or to innate ideas, but rather to a priori "categories" of understanding. As Heidbreder (1933) puts it:

Our coverage of the 1781 Critique will zero in on three themes running throughout that work: (1) Kant's Rationalist method; (2) his attempt to reassert a Representationalist view of perception; and (3) the limiting implications for science, philosophy, and religion which that work imposed. Suffice it to say that the crisis for science and religion raised by Hume was not sufficiently resolved by Kant's efforts. Our "goal" is to show why.

Rationalism is merely a theory of knowledge which states that knowledge comes from the correct use of reason. Both Socrates and Descartes, for instance, put forward varieties of the rationalist theory of knowledge.

Having started out by accepting Hume's basic argument that the necessity of the world can not be derived from experience, Kant opts for a new rationalist methodology which begins inside the mind to derive two a priori "forms" and twelve a priori "categories" which give order to impoverished sensory experience. The mind is somehow "prepared" rationally by these forms and categories to select, accept, and consider impoverished data of the senses and make something out of it. Experience, he argues, does not work on its own, you need to bring Reason to bear upon experience if knowledge is to be forthcoming.

According to Kant, access to "knowledge" (truth claims regarding things-in-themselves) is not perceptual. There is no direct perceptual access to the objects of perception at all. The access Kant postulates is indirect, intellectual, and rational. So, his Critical philosophy is Idealist (like Hume) but is intended as an "objective" (rather than a subjective) idealism. He is attempting like Descartes to find certainty about the world by postulating rational (though not innate) categories of the mind.

The new brand of rationalist method which Kant comes up with also utilizes a procedure called "Transcendental Deduction." This is an attempt to establish a uniform procedure of analysis which upon application to specific topics would lead to conclusions that can be agreed upon. The term "transcendental" refers to that which is not "in experience" but "implied by" experience. It is an effort to provide a procedural basis for making objective statements (truth claims) referring to objects to which we have no direct perceptual access.

The important point to mention here is that, for Kant, the general process of obtaining human knowledge involves an active, bi-directional, interaction between external objects and the a priori contents of the mind. We can be sympathetic to Kant in this endeavor because if one is working within the 18th century intellectual confines of the Indirect view of perception, his system seems to be the best way around those confines. But it is not a perfect solution because in the final analysis it "begs the question" rather than solving the "problem" of knowledge. For instance, he did not postulate how the preparation of the mind got there but merely states that it logically must be there if we are to have objective knowledge about the world we live in. As Russell's (1946), somewhat presentist, account put it: "Kant holds that the mind orders the raw material of sensation, but never thinks it necessary to say why it orders it as it does and not otherwise" (p. 687).

Looking backward in a more generous manner, we may indeed be tempted to project a valuable implied argument onto Kant's actual 1781 (pre-evolutionary era) rationalist argument -that the mind is indeed "prepared" via an evolutionary context. According to 19th century evolutionary theory, the mind of any individual human (or any other sentient organism) is prepared through an evolutionary process which has required some sort of contact with the environment in which it developed. The closest that Kant himself ever came to this sort of analysis, however, is contained in his Anthropology (1798) where he subtly pulls back from it: "How nature brought about such a development, and by what causes it was aided, we know not."

Our 21st century analysis of the Enlightenment era's "problem of knowledge" can not, therefore, be confined (as it was in Kant, 1781) to the individual human adult confronting the world and suddenly asking the question "How do I know." We will see below that the transcendental deductive procedure he describes is in some ways essential to scientific inquiry, but we'll also note that the metaphysical baggage which went along with it ruled out any logical possibility for an "empirical" psychological science itself.

In the old view of representationalism (the one implicitly held until Locke explicitly stated it) the "arrows" worked in only one direction -from the outside inward. Locke's Representationalist theory of perception was not only indirect but unidirectional, and passive. To maintain a roughly materialist (correspondence) theory of truth, Locke felt that it was necessary to argue that perception itself was a "passive" process -where the object causes the sensation and the sensation allows the idea to be formed. Perception, for Locke is passive; it is the mere 'receiving' of sensory information from the world.

Locke had reasoned that if perceptual process itself was active, too many distortions would occur and we could not maintain the object-relatedness of our resulting knowledge. Locke's additional concept of mental "reflection" served to pump activeness back into his general account of knowledge claims. In this third conceptual realm active "associations" between ideas take place, but the initial sensory and perceptual stages were portrayed as passive and unidirectional.

It was both the indirectness of Locke's appeal to experience (rather than to nature) and the denial of the active aspects of perception which made his initial correspondence theory of truth vulnerable to the radicalized empiricism of Berkeley and Hume (who put forward bi-directional, anti-materialist, active accounts of perception). Recall that in the strictest sense, Berkeley and also Hume (though for different reasons) are not representationalists at all but rather "phenomenalists." Visual perception is portrayed in both accounts as the experience of sensory images; it is not truly representative of any "thing" per se.

Only with Kant do we have an attempted return to a "representationalist" theory of perception account. Kant is responding to the unsatisfactory phenomenalist endpoint of Hume's skepticism. His goal is to find a way to around skepticism; to describe how we are able to make knowledge claims of the mathematical, physical, and cosmological sort; to recognize the activeness of perception and fallibility of the senses yet to leave room for empirical scientific inquiry.

Kant's fundamental formal epistemological distinction in this regard is between "noumena" (things-in-themselves) and "phenomena" things-as-known. For him, all knowledge (the end product of the general transcendental process of reason being described) falls under the heading of this latter epistemological distinction. The perceptual process (that which ultimately leads to human knowledge) is conceived as an active, bi-directional, interaction between external objects and the a priori contents of the mind. In contrast to Locke, Kant suggests that the immediate aspects of perception are due partly to the effects of external things but primarily to the active, selective, content of our own perceptive apparatus.

He attempts to outline our inferential means of making transcendental claims about things-in-themselves (noumena) by way of proposing a rationally derived inventory of the a priori contents of the mind. This inventory of the powers and contents of the human mind includes two a priori "forms" (sense of space and time) along with twelve a priori "categories" which Kant divided into four sets: (i) of quantity: unity, plurality, totality; (ii) of quality: reality, negation, limitation; (iii) of relation: substance/accident, cause/effect, reciprocity; and (iv) of modality: possibility, existence, necessity. These are all applicable, he suggests, to whatever we experience.

Having derived these forms and categories, he then attempts to move outwardly from the mind to reestablish contact (albeit indirect contact) with the existence of real objects. This is an attempt to reassert some kind of representationalist view of perception -the view that there are real objects 'out there' which produce sensations in us, which then give rise to ideas. But even though he will accept the existence of external objects, Kant's methodology is not a materialist one (like that of Bacon or even Locke) because it is the categories of understanding which impress order on experience. The order does not come from external objects but is "imposed" from inside outwardly.

In short, he is left in the awkward position of postulating the existence of the thing-in-itself but provides no firm basis upon which the resulting knowledge claims can be made regarding them. Having altered the original formula for representationalism so very drastically, the initial momentum for belief in the world around us, alas, is eventually lost. Since (unlike Locke and Descartes) Kant denies that we can have anything more than inferential access to the thing-in-itself, his attempt to reassert a representationalist theory of perception ultimately collapses into a rationalist form of phenomenalism which can be depicted as follows:

According to Kant, we can never have epistemological access to the noumenon (the thing-in-itself) but only to sensations from such objects. Kant's portrayal of the general "sensation, perception, knowledge" process, therefore, is not properly speaking a representationalist view.

Hence, there is a peculiar sort of epistemological dualism contained in Kant's approach to the problem of knowledge. On the one hand, the thing-in-itself is asserted to exist. Indeed it's existence logically follows from the structure of his theory because "phenomenon" is treated as an interaction between the noumenon and the a priori contents of the mind. But on the other hand, the implication of the theory is that the noumenon cannot be known.

Kant simply does not satisfactorily resolve the issue of how "knowledge" corresponds to the world around us. For this reason he is considered the so-called father of subsequent German Idealism. The followers of that school of philosophy (including Fichte -the theoretical founder of German nationalism; and Schelling -who was associated with the irrationalist Romantic movement) simply gave up appeal to the thing-in-itself:

In the short-run, it was usually the self-contradictory inferential view of Kant (1781) that was put forward as the standard counter-argument to either Locke's (1690) failed materialism, or to Hume's (1748) rather flippant skepticism. But there was one notable exception to this rule. In this regard we should make special mention of Thomas Reid (1710-1796) who put forward a contemporaneous Direct Realist theory of perception as an alternative to the indirect realism of the representationalists. Reid was the first figure from this entire period to recognize that main methodological snare of Enlightenment thought lay in the indirect aspects of the representationalist theory of perception.

As Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow (and contemporary with Hume and Kant), Reid was disturbed by Hume's atheistic skepticism but also recognized that an adequate counter-argument would not be obtained by returning to the phenomenalism of Berkeley (1709; 1710) -which seemed very dogmatic even from a theologian's point of view. How, for example, (argued Reid) could it be used to to convince the nonbeliever that there was a God to guarantee objectivity? As we have already seen, it couldn't. Reid's theologically motivated argument for direct realism will suggest that the very objectivity of the world provides the means to convince the nonbeliever.

Reid (1785) declared that the senses make us "immediately" (directly) award of nature and arouse in us an invincible belief in the existence of the world around us. Like Bacon, he suggests that one must start with the wonders of nature and not with an appeal to God (Berkeley) or to mere sensation (Locke) as a basis for objectivity.

In the above abstract Reid is calling our attention to a very problematic aspect of all the representationalist and phenomenalist theories we have covered thus far. Each of those portrayed the having of a perception or the knowing of objects as the result of some further reasoning or inferential process. In contrast to them all, Reid is suggesting that our perception of the world is not an argument or an inference but is immediate.

For Reid, the having of a perception is not the conclusion of an argument, it is a "given" and the object is its premise. This is a very modern position for any Enlightenment figure to take and all subsequent direct realists will carry it forward as the fundamental demarcation point of their approach.

Reid's supporting argument for this direct realist position, though religious in flavor, clearly anticipates the evolutionary arguments of the 19th and 20th century. The evolutionary argument will be that natural selection would not have produced a being that does not extract accurate information from the world in which it developed. In other words, it is a far more complex prospect to attempt to produce an understanding of an organism according to the presuppositions of the indirect realist (representationalist) account, than it is from a direct realist position. As Reid put it in his day:

In contrast to Hume, Berkeley and Kant, Reid can be considered as a commonsense philosopher of the theological stripe. By way of his direct realist assertion that the power to perceive objects is part of the "original constitution" of the human mind (and not an issue of inferential argument) he provides the one guiding light of the late Enlightenment era with respect to their so-called problem of knowledge.

For the most part, though, subsequent philosophy of science was stuck at theoretical loggerheads between Locke, Hume, and Kant for 200 years thereafter (see Section 3 & 5). Interestingly enough, Russell (1946) inadvertently puts his finger on part of the problem with Kant's overall philosophical approach (its stilted formalism) while discussing the more particular issue of what a "sufficient criterion" for virtue might be. He states that: "To get a sufficient criterion, we should have to abandon Kant's purely formal point of view, and take some account of the effects of actions" (p. 683). The same pointed observation holds, though Russell did not state it, for Kant's indirect realist criterion of knowledge! The problem for all "post-Kantian" materialists would be how to develop a theory of perception which acknowledges the "activeness" of the perceptual process while not giving up "direct access" to the objects of perception nor the "practical" everyday aspects which initiate and follow from making truth claims. While successive approximations to such an account were forthcoming in the 19th and early 20th centuries (see James in Section 4), it was not until relatively recently that the psychologist J.J. Gibson (1966, 1979) provided an active, direct, and ecological theory of "Direct perception" which seems to meet all three criteria (see Sections 3 & 5).

In our remaining coverage of Kant, we will consider what he viewed as the implications of his 1871 account of knowledge for science (including psychology), philosophy, and religion. It will be noted that while Kant managed to highlight the limiting effect of the old Aristotelian logic on empirical science by way of reinserting a Socratic dialectic back into philosophy (in the form of unresolvable "antinomies") he was not able to fully overcome those effects on his own attitudes and pronouncements.

The first point to mention is that Kant's fundamental epistemological distinction between noumenon and phenomena was "analytically paired" with a further methodological distinction between empirical or scientific and so-called metaphysical knowledge. As set forth in both Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783), that "methodological" distinction ran as follows (see table right).

"Empirical or scientific knowledge" is that which is gained through the interaction between the active perceptual apparatus of human beings and their experience of sensations. The sciences are restricted to empirical knowledge of observable phenomena. "Metaphysical" knowledge, on the other hand, is that which goes beyond such phenomenal experience. Having made this methodological distinction, Kant then elaborates by distinguishing between various pure and impure sciences respectively.

The contemporaneous implications of this proposed inequitable status between the two kinds of knowledge will become more clear as we outline their role in framing Kant's attitudes and pronouncements regarding science and religion. Their wider, ongoing, significance goes well beyond our immediate consideration of Kant. It was precisely this methodological distinction between empirical or scientific and metaphysical knowledge that the 19th century "positivists" would adopt and which various early 20th century "Logical positivists" would radicalize by claiming that all nonempirical (philosophical) issues should be excised from scientific discourse. With respect to this initial methodological division of inquiry, Kant can therefore be considered as much of a "precursor" to the constrained 19th-20th century positivist view of science as Hume was with respect to their underlying epistemology.

Secondly, a few words must be said regarding the related issue of the limiting effects on scientific and religious inquiry which Kant imposed during his discussion of so-called "Antinomies." A large part of the Critique is devoted to showing how discursive fallacies arise from an inappropriate projection of the so-called a priori aspects of mentality to things that are not experienced. When this is done, so Kant maintains, we find ourselves troubled with antinomies -mutually contradictory propositions each of which can apparently be argued by scientists or theologians of various stripes. Kant names four such discursive antinomies: (i) the beginning or non-beginning of the world; (ii) part vs. whole relations; (iii) causality in nature vs. freewill; (iv) existence (absolute vs. relative). According to Kant, such antinomies are unresolvable because their resolution would require some kind of non-inferential access to the object under debate.

The first two discursive antinomies pertain to arguments in physics such as the contemporaneous disciplinary opposition between adherents of a finite vs. an infinite universe; and between divisible vs. indivisible matter. According to Kant, the truth claims put forward in support of these mutually exclusive arguments do not correspond to the "things-in-themselves" (noumenon) and the controversies themselves spring from an illegitimate application of the categories and of space and time to the "thing-in-itself." In other words, in these two antinomies the physical world as understood by physicists (phenomena) is mistakenly considered as an appeal to the "thing-in-itself" -as an appeal to an ultimately independent aspect of the mechanical necessity of nature. Any opposition derived from these contradictory discursive positions will therefore not be resolved and are fruitless he argues.

But science, according to Kant, was not alone in this limitation to phenomena. Standard theological arguments also often fall into antinomies whenever they attempt to go beyond the bounds of observable facts. The last two antinomies, in particular, are encountered during religious debates: the third with the issue of "spirit" or freewill vs. determinism; and the last with the issue of the origin, extent, or breadth of God's powers). If personal freedom and God are conceived of as beings subject to mechanical causality a "determinist" position follows, but if spirit and God are affirmed to exist outside space and time relations a "freewill" position will be held. God, freedom, and immortality are three ideas, but while "pure reason" of the transcendental phenomenal rather than mere sensational or metaphysical kind can lead us to form ideas of God, freedom, and immortality, it can not ultimately prove their reality. It was with this point that Kant concludes his 1781 Critique, leaving the door open (he believe) for the affirmation of the existence of spirit and God.

The important point to recognize is that Kant does not intend to provide us with a way to resolve these four antinomies but only a means to apparently avoid them. The Kantian "dialectic," his antinomies, did not indicate any way out. No path for resolving conflicts between different adherents in either the scientific nor the theological realms of inquiry was provided. Simply stated, Kant's argument is that conflicting theories are a normal state of science and theology. He counseled opponents to seek compromise, to hold to their truths and yet respect the truths of others. Why? Because, if they do not, they would both find themselves ultimately in the grip of subjective interests. For Kant, siding in favor of one side of an antinomy rather than another is purely a matter of subjective choice (Ilyenkov, 1977).

In retrospect, by reintroducing some kind of dialectical thinking back into philosophy Kant had done it a great service. But, as Hegel (1770-1831) would later point out, Kant's "antinomies," were treated as insoluble logical contradictions in the mind of a proponent (e.g., being vs. nothing in the Socratic manner) rather than as potentially resolvable objective contradictions in nature (e.g., nothing-becoming-being in the Heraclitean manner). In other words, it was by way of personal example rather than by design that Kant showed the limiting effects of the old Aristotelian logic on contemporaneous philosophical inquiry. Hegel's Logic (1812-16) would later do this by explicit argumentative design. He argued that Aristotelian logic leads to a multitude of logical contradictions in the discourse of conflicting proponents but falls flat when it is applied to the realm of nature. Nature does not strictly speaking adhere to the three tidy formal logical laws of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle (see Randall, 1960). In that sense, Kant's account of the antinomies placed formal limitations on science comparable to his initial denial of all metaphysical questions in the realm of theology. It is not surprising therefore that theologians, both then and now, consider Kant’s "no to metaphysics" as a no to God.

With regard to the contemporaneous impact and interdisciplinary reception of Kant's 1871 Critique, Durant (1933) makes the following cogent statement which, I believe, indicates rather clearly that the crisis raised by Hume was not overcome by Kant.

Finally, as a matter of personal concern to us, we should outline Kant's attitude toward psychology versus other sciences such as mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Psychology, alas, is placed by him at the very bottom-most reaches of an informally stated and confusing hierarchy of inquiry including: pure (transcendental) science; empirical or experimental observation; and the systematic art of analysis.

According to Kant, the relative standing of mathematical and geometrical inquiries was both superior and ideal. They are both concerned with describing our "a priori forms" of space and time. The universality and necessity we find in those disciplines comes from their reference to the a priori existence of these subjective forms. As Kant (1781) put it in his discussion of the a priori nature of space:

In other words, mathematical and geometric laws conform to his general dictum of what "pure understanding" seeks to do: "The understanding does not derive its laws... from, but prescribes them to, nature" (Kant, 1783, Pt. 2, Sect. 36). Their methods are pure because they remain in the realm of phenomena and the laws they produce are "certain" because they reflect the a priori structure of such phenomena.

To draw out any coherent meaning from the above statements, however, it is necessary to recall what "space" is for Kant. Space is in no sense a property of things-in-themselves, nor is it a relation of things-in-themselves to one another. Space is nothing but the form of all the phenomena of "outer sense" (as contrasted to "internal sense" which we will mention shortly). Geometry and the mathematics it utilizes is therefore highly regarded by Kant because it is, as he put it, the science that determines (prescribes) the properties of such phenomenal space.

Still confused? Don't worry about it! The only two central points here are: (1) Kant considered mathematics and geometry as the highest kinds of science; and (2) he argued that any inquiry which does not, or can not, use mathematics should not be called a science (properly speaking).

With regard to the next lowest rung on Kant's hierarchy, "pure physics" of the applied or mechanical variety rather than the theoretical or ontological sort; and observational astronomy are also viable (though less perfect) disciplines. So too is the "art" of classificatory chemistry then practiced provided that it does not go beyond the bounds of empirically descriptive, mathematical, or experimental analysis of phenomena to make ontological claims and thereby become mired in antinomies. This emphasis on phenomena only was, of course, a highly restrictive position to take. "So science was 'saved'!" says Durant (1933).

Given that Kant's epistemology implied no direct access privileged or otherwise to things-in-themselves, the same also followed doubly for access to minds-in-themselves. Kant (1786) argued, therefore, that an empirical or experimental science of psychology is impossible:

For Kant, all empirical knowledge of things and minds (including our own mind) was an inferential "construction." Psychological inquiry, if it was to be carried out at all would thus be limited to a surface analysis of the "continuous" flow of sensory appearance, colors, sounds and the like; never a science of the mind-in-itself. If this Kantian 'all is phenomena-all is continuity' argument regarding "internal sence" (psyche) sounds familiar, it may be because it is the exact opposite of Hume's 'all is sensation-all is diversity' argument encountered above. It would be a long while indeed before William James (1890) would reassert the required naive direct realist and Heraclitean arguments back into psychological inquiry to resolve this particular logical antinomy.

Similarly, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) as the founder of laboratory based psychology; Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) a "phenomenologist" who stressed description rather than explanation, intuition rather than inference; and even Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) an early neo-Kantian figure who was highly critical of laboratory based psychology; would all later have their differences with Kant over the possibility of psychological science and self-knowledge respectively. Given that we are all currently engaged in studying the history of subsequent psychological science, suffice it to say that there was something wrong with Kant's account of psychology.

The period of intellectual history between Bacon and Kant started with great optimism and a mission-statement for science to follow. Science was to resolve problems by going out and grappling with the world. Truths would be inducted, experiments done, and such scientific activity would produce general explanatory principles as well as practical results.

This enthusiasm for science was shared by nearly all of the 17th-18th century figures we have covered. Even Locke was attempting to outline what we would now call the "cognitive" aspects of scientific inquiry with his premise that all knowledge comes from experience. Methodologically speaking he was a materialist but the supposed epistemological bedrock upon which he pored the foundation of his empiricist system (human "experience") turned out to be sitting on top of the uncompacted sand of the senses (primary and secondary qualities). Consequently, as C.W. Morris (1932) writes: "The traditional philosophy of the 17th century [including that of Locke] separates mind and nature much more sharply than any other period of classical thought" (Morris, Six Theories of Mind, 1932).

It was in the 18th century empiricism of Berkeley and Hume, however, that the logical limitations of Locke's initial representationalist epistemology are most strikingly revealed. What we find in Hume is an epistemological skepticism and ontological agnosticism with respect to the external world. To Hume, the seemingly inescapable logical implication of adhering to the empiricist approach was that we must relinquish the commonsense hope of science ever really coming to knowledge about the nature of things including a personalized self. There is, in short, a marked degeneration of the "Classical empiricist" argument with various alternative approaches attempting to account for our access to the world but with the end result falling short of the mark.

Bacon opened this period with the statement that science is a "job to be done," but by the time of Hume it is being depicted as merely a dull past-time. Kant's efforts were therefore motivated by an attempt to salvage science by way of resolving the problem of knowledge. Like the older Cartesian rationalism, however, Kant's new "Rational phenomanalist" solution goes back inside the mind for a starting point and imposes considerable limitations on scientific practice and psychology which would have to be overcome by 19th and 20th century figures.

What is the common underlying methodological reason for this 17th-18th century argumentative degeneration of empiricist and rationalist accounts? It is that all the figures after Bacon, with the notable exception of Thomas Reid, shared one variety or another of an indirect theory of perception. Whether in its representationalist or phenomenalist variety, this indirect perception theory relies upon a consensus or agreement (rather than correspondence) view of truth. Each figure worked out a rationalist or empiricist formulation of methods and procedures accordingly but all were unanimous regarding the fallibility of the senses. Thus, as J.H. Randall (1940) put it: In the 17th century science was "rational" (deducing events from axioms), in the 18th it was empirical "describing the succession of images that present themselves in experience" and only in the 19th century did it become truly "experimental" (after Randall, 1940, p. 271).

This shift toward both an emphasis upon experimental techniques for investigating nature and toward practical criteria of truth are not only two defining features of 19th century thought, they are also the initial means by which the scientific community began to overcome the unsatisfactory outcome of Kant's 1781 Critique. About Kant, for instance, Frederick Engels (1892) wrote the following:

The next few Sections will be devoted to elaborating the various 18th-19th century disciplinary developments in philosophy, science, and psychology which brought about this remarkable "progressive" shift in our understanding of nature (including the theory of evolution). By way of prelude, however, let me suggest that if there is a single object lesson to be learned from what has been stated thus far, as well as what follows, it is that: The methods used to investigate any particular aspect of psychological subject matter (perception, learning, memory, motivation, personality, etc.) should follow the route taken by the general evolutionary development of the process under study.

With regard to working out an adequate (logically coherent, veridical, and practical) theory of perception, this means proceeding from the outside inward. In the present Section, the ontologically materialist starting-point of Bacon's naive realism and of Thomas Reid's direct realism provide the examples to follow in this respect. Given that evolutionary theory per se had not as yet been brought forward, the intermediary figures (Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant) can not be faulted for either adopting or slipping into an ontologically idealist approach to the so-called problem of knowledge. But it should still be recognized that their anti-realist arguments and idealism were the source of many of the unsatisfactory aspects of their accounts of mentality.

Posted while in progress: June-Aug, 2003; Minor changes: January, 2008; August 2008.

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