British Mental Passivity – Ch7 | Test Bank – 6th Ed

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Chapter 7

Mental Passivity: The British Tradition

Chapter Objectives:

Review the rise of England and the colonial organization of the English speaking peoples through naval power.
Following the tradition of Newton, English science flowered through empirically based successes.
Survey of dualism defined as mental passivity and environmentally determined: The importance of associationism.
Later British empiricism: John Stuart Mill and the acceptance of psychology within the philosophical establishment.

Chapter Summary:

The relative freedom and political stability of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain produced an intellectual milieu amenable to advances in the natural sciences and philosophy. The major theme of British psychological thought was empiricistic, emphasizing knowledge acquired through sensation. The mechanism of this acquisition process was association. Founded by Hobbes but fully articulated by Locke, British empiricism retained the necessity of the mind construct while underlining the importance of sensations. Berkeley, Hume, and Hartley evolved skeptical positions concerning the reality of matter and mind that could have left the British movement in the same sterile position as French sensationalism. In addition, James Mill, although he was somewhat salvaged by the utilitarian influence, reduced associations to mental compounding. However, the Scottish common sense writers succeeded in restoring empiricism to a more flexible and open-ended position that recognized complex and integrative psychological phenomena. Thus, the later empiricism of John Stuart Mill, while adhering to scientific inductive methods, adopted a broadly based model of psychology that viewed mental operations and physiological processes as complementary and necessary dimensions of psychological inquiry. By the nineteenth century British philosophy was providing strong support for the study of psychology.

Suggested topics and issues for class discussion and/or short essay examination questions:

1. What was the climate of intellectual freedom in seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain, and why was it influential in colonial America?

2. How did research in the natural sciences in Britain, for example in astronomy, biology, and physics, contribute to the basis of empiricism?

3. In general, how was empiricism defined by the British philosophers? Compare this approach within the deductive and inductive methods of logical reasoning.

4. Why were Hobbes's views on psychology materialistic?

5. What was the motivational basis of Hobbes's psychology and how was it related to his principles of association?

6. What was the relationship between motion in the environment and internal ideas for Hobbes?

7. How did Locke's views on government reflect his empirical psychology?

8. What was the relationship between sensations and mental contents for Locke?

9. What did Locke mean by tabula rasa?

10. What were the two important operations of the mind for Locke? How did these operations justify the need for the retention of the construct of the mind?

11. What was Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities of environmental events? Relate this distinction to similar ones offered by Galileo and Kepler.

12. How did Berkeley's problem with the distinction between primary and secondary qualities lead him to the position of questioning reality external to the mind?

13. Contrast the functions of the mind among the views of Descartes, Locke and Berkeley.

14. In what sense are Hume's views on psychology skeptical?

15. What were Hume's views on associations and how were they reductionistic?

16. How did Hartley extend Hume's views on association?

17. In what manner did the early empiricists define the mind as passive and reactive? What is the problem of reductionism in this definition, as particularly reflected in the views of Hume and Hartley?

18. How did the "common sense" psychology of Reid and Brown modify the positions of the early empiricists?

19. What were the views on associations of Reid and Brown?

20. Describe Bentham's utilitarian influence on James Mill.

21. How were the views of James Mill on mental associations an example of extreme reductionism?

22. Describe the three principles of associations proposed by John Stuart Mill.

23. How were the psychological views of John Stuart Mill empirically based?

24. What did Bain mean by psychophysical parallelism?

25. Collectively, how did the views on the mind of the British empirical tradition differ from the French tradition of sensationalism?

Objective Questions:

1. Britain of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was remarkable for its

A. large armies. B. great universities.

C. absolute monarchy. D. great literature.

E. intellectual freedom.

2. Experiments on the conduction of electricity were done by

A. Stephen Gray. B. Edmund Halley.