So you think empiricism and rationalism are dead?: New faces for an old argument (another H & S post)

Some folks might wonder why a psychology major would have to take a class like History and Systems of Psychology…I mean, seriously, what do these old philosophers have to do with contemporary psychology? Well, in a word, everything. Let’s take as an example, the great intellectual throw down between empiricism and rationalism. Empiricists (think John Locke, James Mill, Julien de La Mettrie) believed that humanity was born a “blank slate” and everything that came to populate the mind was a matter of experience. Here we see experience acting on the mind like a stamp on clay. The mind, for the empiricists, was passive and acted in an automatic manner. Thus, associations became the primary mechanism for how humans learned things (hmmm…I wonder what famous psychologist was influenced by this understanding of humanity? Can anyone say, “humans are complex pigeons”?).

The rationalists, on the other hand, were skeptical that the mind was so passive. They understood that some type of psychological activity occurred between sensation and perception (again, I hope you are seeing that this in some ways is really just a continuation of Bacon’s idea that “biases” impact our interpretations of the natural world…hence his “idols”). This type of action and analyzing of sensations were understood by the rationalists to reflect innate capacities of the mind…that is, humans are definitely not born “blank”. This is where my lame attempt at a funny dialogue between Locke and Kant in the powerpoint lecture comes in. For Kant, how could an empiricist come up with the category of “all”? Humans have not experienced “everything” they can, yet they have this category. Kant thought this reflected some type of innate mental structure (category of thought) which operates on sensory data and impacts our perception and understanding of that data.

This argument never really got “won” by either side. Instead what we have seen throughout the history of psychology is that both streams of thought continue on and both have had their “moments of glory” with various figures in psychology. Currently, we might talk about the inheritors of these two schools as still having the same old argument (and one which we are studying somewhat obliquely in our focus on “the self” throughout this semester). On the one hand we have the inheritors of some of the empiricist legacy, the social constructionists (like Cushman and Gergen). In their arguments, we can get a sense of their empiricist legacy. Both Cushman and Gergen deny that there is such a thing as human nature, therefore, it is humanity’s “embeddedness” within a cultural milieu that totally shapes the self. Do you see the connection? They, too, believe that humans are born “blank slate” and that cultural and historical experience are the totality of who we are as “selves”. On the other side of the fence are the inheritors of the rationalist legacy, the evolutionary psychology camp (like Steven Pinker, David Buss). Pinker wrote a book in the past few years (he was at Kenyon two or three years ago speaking…he was really good!) entitled “The Blank Slate” in which he uses an argument from evolutionary psychology and its research to blow up the old empiricist assumptions of humans being born a “blank slate” (you will need to read the book yourself to judge whether you think he is successful at this or not). Evolutionary psychology is similar to the rationalist’s argument in that humans are born with innate evolutionarily adaptive capacities (“modules” in the brain to use their lingo) that impact the way humans interpret data and behave. Of course, it is important to remember that between these two extremes there is a lot of ground! This is part of the fun of this argument…figuring out where you stand in this centuries old debate!