RATIONALISM
mpiricism vs
Rationalism
• The type of mind
• Empiricism: Passive mind – acts on sensations and ideas in an automatic,
mechanical way
• Rationalism: Active mind – acts on information from the senses and gives it meaning
that it otherwise would not have. Transforms the sensory data
• Rationalism – mind adds to sensory data rather than passively organizing and
storing it in memory
• Innate rational system – mental structures, principles, operations, abilities, logical
processes
• A belief in existence of truths that could not be discovered through sensory data
alone
• Empiricism – causes of behavior (focus on experience,
association, hedonism)
• Rationalism – reasons for behavior
• Reasons are freely chosen – free will
• Examples??
• Empiricism – induction
• Rationalism – deduction
• However, a clear distinction cannot be found every time
• The distinction between empiricism and rationalism is a matter
of emphasis
IMMANUEL
KANT
(1724–1804)
Categories of
Thought
• Demonstrated that some truths were certain and were not based on subjective
experience alone
• The notion of causation does not come from experience
• Then where does it come from??
• A priori – independent of experience
• He did not deny the importance of sensory data
• However, he thought that the mind must add something to that data before
knowledge could be attained
• Something is provided by the a priori (innate) categories of thought
• What We experience subjectively has been modified by the pure
concepts of the mind and is therefore more meaningful than it would
otherwise have been
• Categories of thought (a priori pure concepts) – unity, totality, time,
space, cause and effect, possibility-impossibility, etc.
• We could never make statements beginning with ‘all’ without the
influence of categories because we never experience ‘all’ of anything
• For Kant, ‘a mind without concepts would have no capacity to think;
equally, a mind armed with concepts, but with no sensory data to which
they could be applied, would have nothing to think about.’
• Faculty psychologist
• Postulated a single, unified mind that possessed various attributes or
abilities
Causes of Mental
Experience
• Our sensory impressions are always structured by the categories of
thought
• Phenomenological experience – result of the interaction between
sensations and categories of thought
• Human mind is the center of the universe
• Human mind creates the universe – at least as we experience it
• Noumena or things-in-themselves – the objects that constitute physical
reality
• We are forever ignorant about noumena
• We can know only appearances – phenomena
• Appearances are regulated by categories of thought
Perception of Time
• Concept of time is creation of the mind
• We experience a series of separate events on sensory level
• We conclude that one sensation occurred before or after another
• Since there is nothing in the sensations themselves to suggest the
concept of time, the concept must exist a priori
• Similarly, all there is in memory (e.g., childhood experiences) are
ideas that can vary only in intensity or vividness
• The mind superimposes a sense of time over these experiences
Perception of
Space
• He agreed with other philosophers that we do not simply
experience sensations on the retina or in the brain, rather they
seem to be distributed in the space
• These sensations vary in size, distance and intensity
• Sensations are all internal but we experience objects as distributed
in space as external to the mind and body
• We experience a display of sensations that seem to reflect the
physical world
• Reason?
• Experience of space – provided by an a priori category of thought
• Categories of time and space are basic as they provide
context to all mental phenomena
• Kant did not propose specific innate ideas like Descartes
• Kant proposed innate categories of thought that organized
all sensory experience
• Kant – nativist
The Categorical
Imperative
• Kant attempted to rescue moral philosophy
• He asked what rule or principle was being applied to good and bad
feelings that made certain experiences desirable or undesirable?
• Categorical imperative – the rational principle that governs moral
behavior
• Categorical imperative – ‘I should never act except in such a way
that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.’
• Maxim of ‘Lying under certain circumstances is justified’ – distrust
and social disorganization
• Maxim of ‘Always tell the truth’ – social trust and harmony
• He suggested that if everyone made their moral decisions according
to the categorical imperative, the result would be a community of
free and equal members
• Empiricists’ analysis of moral behavior emphasized hedonism
• Whereas, Kant’s was based on a rational principle and a belief in free
will
Distinction between reasons and causes:
• Empiricism – behavior is caused by feelings of pleasure or pain
(hedonism)
• Kant’s rationalism – there is a reason for acting morally and if that
reason is freely chosen, moral behavior results.
Kant’s Influence
• Kant has had a considerable influence on psychology as he set the tone of
German rationalist philosophy and psychology for generations
• His work initiated a debate on the importance of innate factors which led to
the study and role of genetically determined brain structures or operations in
modern psychology
• He defined psychology as the introspective analysis of the mind and thus he
said, it could not be a science
• Ironically, psychology emerged as an experimental science of the mind and
used introspection as its primary research tool
• Anthropology
• Influence on contemporary psychology – Gestalt psychology
THANK YOU
