Empiricist Psychology

Empiricist Psychology

Let empiricism be the doctrine that all knowledge of the external concrete world derives from interactions with that world and only from such interactions. There is no knowledge of this world deriving from pure reason, tradition, God, the genes, or language. Super-empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge derives from interactions with the external concrete world, no matter how abstract or internal the subject-matter—logical, mathematical, psychological, ethical, linguistic. Everything known is perceived by the senses. This is an epistemological doctrine, but it is backed by a psychological theory, adumbrated by classical empiricists.[1]The theory can be variously formulated, but it has a familiar shape: first there is an external world that is basically independent of our minds; this world is copied by our senses to form sensory impressions; these impressions are copied to produce mental images; these images are then copied to form concepts; these concepts in turn are copied to form meanings; these meanings become attached to words to form language, which is a kind of copy of meanings. So, language copies the world via impressions, images, concepts, and meanings. You could choose to adopt a stronger type of empiricist psychology: instead of speaking of copying you speak of identity. Images are impressions, concepts are images, meanings are concepts, language ismeaning. Thus, language would turn out to consist of impressions, perhaps disguised or trivially modified. If we include the external world in the chain of dependencies, then everything mental will be bits of the world, on an identity theory. You might think it better to stop the chain at impressions and leave the world out of it (as some empiricists do), but then you face the problem that the type of knowledge you secure will not be of the external world—and that is what we are trying to explain. At a minimum, we need a relation of copying or mirroring as between impressions and external facts. The idea of the whole system is that everything cognitive derives intelligibly from a chain of dependencies held together by the relation of copying. Perhaps the copies get fainter the further along the chain we go, so that concepts are faint copies of images and meanings are faint copies of concepts (etiolated, reduced). This is empiricist psychology at its most naked. The interface between world and mind is the perceptual impression, which determines what lies downstream from it. The impression mirrors the world and all the rest mirror the impression—bear the imprint of it, inherit its nature, follow its ways. All mental structure, all mental content, all mental intentionality derives from sensory impressions—that’s psychological empiricism. The mind can’t get beyond impressions and impressions are all it gets. Nothing else intrudes, save trivial operations such as copying (subject to becoming fainter). It could be that the copying gets sharper or brighter, but classical empiricists think that in fact the copying is always in the direction of faintness. The heart of the theory is that it is the receptivity of the mind to external influence that lies at the root of all knowledge—as mediated by copying relations.

We can contrast this theory with rationalist psychology. Strong rationalism would maintain that all (real) knowledge derives from within the mind, including knowledge of external concrete reality. It therefore needs a psychological theory to back it up. Rationalists don’t tend to say much about this, which makes their theory look unsupported, but it isn’t hard to articulate what kind of theory their epistemology requires. First, we have what is innate to the mind or brain or animal—genetic endowment, as we would now say. This exists in the epistemic subject prior to its expression in conscious fully formed ideas or concepts. Let’s take a leaf out of the empiricist’s book and say that the latter copies the former—mimics it, is shaped by it. Structure, content, and intentionality are transmitted from the innate original to the mature derived; there is a kind of mirroring relation between them. We could opt for an identity theory, but that seems a bit strong, as it did in the case of empiricism. Now we have a range of options: we could say that the consciously developed idea that derives from the innate structure gives rise to sensory impressions, mental images, and meanings, or we could deny this. We might even think that it takes the form of an impression from which images and concepts are then derived; or that it takes the form of an image that gets transformed into impressions, concepts, and meanings. The important point is that the origin of all these items is endogenous not exogenous; they don’t derive from an external stimulus but from an internal something (there is no good word for it—perhaps we could say an internal stimulus, stretching that concept). This is the general form of a rationalist psychology: inner etiology not outer etiology—coming from within the subject not from the external object.

We can briefly note the form of other competing theories, now regarded as dead letters. Traditionalist epistemology will say that the psychological processes involved in acquiring knowledge are those of the teaching relation, hence mainly verbal. Knowledge comes from outside but not from inanimate nature—it comes from a living teacher (a wise man, say). A theistic epistemology will recruit God as the source of all knowledge: our knowledge comes from a divine being, possibly mediated by his minions on earth (his teaching assistants, as it were). So, we need faculties that are receptive to God’s communications—a devout soul and a pure heart, perhaps. Then we have the linguistic turn: all knowledge derives from language. Language provides the sine qua non of human knowledge—the form of our thought. We can’t get beyond the speech act or the text or the symbolic system or the language of thought. Everything cognitive is derived ultimately from words: concepts, images, impressions. Reality itself is a linguistic construct (you know the spiel). All knowledge is really linguistic knowledge. In each of these cases, there is a drive to reduce everything cognitive to some preferred subset of the cognitive. The traditionalist and theistic theories have the advantage in some respects, since they presuppose a knowledgeable source for human knowledge—a wise man or an omniscient being. Empiricism is trying, heroically, to explain knowledge in terms that don’t presuppose it (thus begging the question): external objects, sensory faculties, and a copying process. Rationalism is less ambitious in that it postulates innate knowledge in the explanation of later (“acquired”) knowledge, without saying much about where that knowledge comes from (God, genetic evolution).

What should we say about empiricist psychology? Simple: it’s completely wrong. Impressions are not copies of facts, faint or otherwise, still less identical to them. Images are not copies of impressions for any number of well-known reasons. Concepts are notoriously not images or copies thereof. Meaningful language is not just a duplication of our conceptual scheme (it has its own syntax and phonology). These criticisms are by now extremely familiar and need no reiteration. A better picture is that we have here a layering of discrete faculties that interact with each other, but don’t reduce to each other. In particular, impressions are impotent to produce the full range of cognitive phenomena that populate the human mind; specifically, they can’t explain concepts and hence knowledge containing concepts. The psychological theory brought in to bolster the empiricist epistemology is hopeless, even if the epistemology itself is on the right track (and it surely contains more than a grain of truth). The whole idea of mental copying is deeply mistaken. The psychology we need is not thispsychology; and it’s not clear what other kind of psychology would serve the turn. Cognitive science has not given us a psychology that supports empiricist epistemology. How do interactions between the mind and the external world lead intelligibly to knowledge? What are the mechanisms? That, we don’t know. We do know that impressions alone will not carry the load; they are the wrong kind of thing to provide an exhaustive account of knowledge. They may (or may not) be necessary for knowledge (I think not[2]), but they sure as hell aren’t sufficient. Back to the drawing board, as they say. And don’t hold your breath.[3]

[1] Jerry Fodor’s Hume Variations (2003) provides a useful background to what I write here.

[2] See my “Entanglement Epistemology”.

[3] I wrote this paper in order to provide a compact picture of the epistemological lie of the land since the seventeenth century. It is illuminating to see how the moving parts fit together, or fail to. All is not ship-shape and above board, to put it mildly. Everything gets exaggerated to the point of caricature. The concept of copying, in particular, is made to do impossible work. Empiricist psychology does not give us a convincing (empirical) account of how knowledge gets into the mind.