British Empiricism

• Why Britain?
  • Separation of church and state
  • Tolerance of other religious positions
  • Rejection of Augustinian model
• God still a force, but ...
  • God did not interfere in everyday workings of world
    • unlike Calvinist and Catholic positions
  • God was a clockmaker
  • Most saw science as supporting the existence of God
  • Religion should be about morality and not about dogma
  • To consider that there could be not God was not in the zeitgeist
  • Locke's mercantile model and language, i.e., contract
• Of pendulums ...
  • First swing: the Renaissance
  • Second swing: the Reformation and Counter Reformation
  • Third swing: the Enlightenment
• British Empiricism
  • Reaction to Descartes's rationalism (innate ideas)
  • Stressed importance of experience
  • Skeptical of absolute certainty
  • Accepted Bacon's view of starting with observations
  • Followed Newton in creating laws of nature
  • Became major source of American psychology
    • colonization
  • Royal Society (1662)
• Types of Empiricism
  • Epistemic empiricism--knowledge depends on experience
  • Semantic empiricism--meaning, also, depends on experience (stricter)
  • Positivism--knowledge is what can be verified, thus knowledge depends on method of verification
  • Materialism--knowledge must be given some physical basis, i.e., thinking and brain
  • Operationalism--knowledge depends on the operations required to specify their meaning, related to positivism
  • Pragmatism--suppose some bit of knowledge were true? What difference would it make?
• Role of Language in Science
  • As a tool
  • As the final arbiter of scientific work and thought
  • As metaphor for the mind, thought