19th Century Empiricism
Introduction
Let’s come back to the diagram about the intersection of modern empiricism and rationalism of the Enlightenment in the kind of synthesis affected by Immanuel Kant, out of which grew distinction between two methodologies that persistent through philosophy until this day. The rationalism of the Enlightenment is mainly on the European continent, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. The outgrowth of that as we’ve seen in Hegel, the existential tradition to some extent people like Whitehead, and some kind of phenomenological kind of method that tries to look at reality through the lens of human self awareness. On the other hand, the empiricist tradition, Locke, Berkeley and Hume is mainly in Britain and continued in the 19th century with three people we’re going to be looking at Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Ernst Mach, and the greatest of these is John Stuart Mill. That continuing empiricist approach led to an emphasis on scientific method being universalized for all kinds of human knowledge. Whereas the way of seeing the world, the lens through which everything was seen for the European tradition is the human spirit with its creative freedom, on the other hands, the lens through which the 19th century empiricists are seeing everything is simply the lens of nature as viewed through the scientific method. To this day, throughout the 20th century, it’s fair to say that the philosophical dominance in the continent of Europe is phenomenological whereas philosophical dominance of English speaking philosophy is empiricist.
For the characterization of 19th century, there are three emphasis. First, the extension of Enlightenment objectivity into a hypothetical deductive method, that is to say, a methodology applicable to science in the spirit of Enlightenment objectivity, rejecting the Kantian kind of Copernican revolution. The previous Enlightenment thought in 18th century empiricists had premises that are empirical generalizations and from that deductive inferences. If we are talking about continental rationalists like Descartes, what you have is some intuitive self-evident innate a-priori premises and deductive method. The methodology of Enlightenment is from premises via deduction to logical conclusion either a-priori or empirical premises. But innate ideas are questionable and empirical generalizations are hard to verify, you can falsify them but verify is pretty difficult. So instead of empirical generalizations or a-priori premises, the emphasis is on a hypothesis as a premises, so a hypothesis for the premise leading to deductive methods. This is much more in keeping with actual scientific method. This becomes the understanding of the scientific method in John Stuart Mill, Ernst Mach, Bertrand Russel, in 20th century Logical Positivism, it really wasn’t cracked until Thomas Kuhn’s book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, when it was recognized that science works more in paradigms than with hypothesis. Second characteristic is the extension of that method for hypothetical deductive to the human science. Previously the tendency had been to think simply of science as with physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, but the significant thing in the 19th century is the extension of these methods to the human sciences, that is to say, to psychology, sociology, politics, the attempt also to ethics. This has been known as scientism. And our continental friends in the meantime would have connections over this sort of things. In fact, you might think of Husserl’s attempt to deal with what he called the crisis in the sciences in the light of this, he wants to make philosophy into a rigorous science, but not with hypothetical method, but with a-priori principles derived by the phenomenological method. But there is consequence. The consequence of this extension of scientific method to global range is the development of phenomenalism, anti-realism, anti-metaphysics. That’s particularly significant in 19th century because the nature of metaphysics was viewed in terms of the phenomena noumena distinction, in the light of the representational theory of knowledge, which left you with a lot of unanswered questions about the reality that it’s supposed to represent. Essentially what the positivist movement is doing is saying that all we know are appearances, ruling out the reality.
August Comte
Watch for two things for August Comte. One is his law of three stages and the other his contention about the unity of science. Law of three stages is his formulation of an empirical generalization about the history of science.
He’s an empiricist and he’s interested in the history of science so he’s going to give you an empirical generalization of the history of science. Namely that science evolved through three stages. From a religious stage to a speculative stages and to a scientific stage. The religious stage produces theology, mythology etc. This is the imaginative childhood of human mind. The second stage is the speculative, dealing with abstract ideas, constructs, metaphysical constructs, like theories of universal and essences, natural law ethic, theory of natural rights, democratic ideas like all men are born equal which are hardly empirical generalizations, notions of teleology, alchemy, astrology, final causes. This is the adolescence of human mind. But the third stage is empirical, scientific, dealing with what is positively known, what we can positively assert, hence the name positivism. This is the maturity and adulthood of the human mind. It’s in scientific stage that we are trying to formulate general covering laws, it’s an empirical generalization that covers all the data. And it’s based on the generalization that you can make your predictions and therefore develop technologies to make use of natural processes. What he’s particularly anxious to see develop is a science of social change. And it is the beginning of what now has become sociology. Sociology began with an attempt to be throughly empirical and it’s only in very recent years that sociology has begun to incorporate some of the phenomenological tradition and to recognize some subjectivity and so forth, the influence of people like Max Weber.
The unity of science is the second emphasis in Auguste Comte, it’s the notion that all of the sciences follow essentially the same method. That thesis is one of the things in Comte which persisted into 20th century. The differences between sciences are differences of complexity, in that sociology for instance has build on psychology, psychology has to build on biology, biology has to build on chemistry, chemistry has to build on physics, physics has to build on mathematics. And by virtue of this extension of scientific method, he is advocating a methodological naturalism of the kind we met in John Dewey.
John Stuart Mill
I think it’s fair to say that John Stuart Mill is the most empirical of all the empiricists. Hume talks about two kinds of knowledge, matters of fact and relations of ideas, relations of ideas are analytic truth, like mathematics. Mill maintains that mathematics is an empirical science, so analytic truth are really empirical generalizations or empirical hypotheses, the laws of thought, non-contradiction, identity are empirical generalizations about the way in which we think and use language. What Mill is doing is reducing these first principles to psychological generalizations. And this is what Husserl meant by psychologism, that he’s fighting against. But in this move Mill is rejecting all intuitive knowledge, all self-evident truth. Inductive reasoning, he recognizes, presupposes the uniformity of nature, according to Mill the uniformity of nature is simply our broadest empirical hypothesis. In his work on logic, he refines Bacon’s inductive methods in order to render the kind of precision for positive knowledge that he wanted. When he asks about the nature of matter, his response is very simply that matter has its meaning is simply the permanent possibility of sensation. From empirical standpoint, the existence of material bodies means sensations are possible and the same token, the existence of mind means the permanent possibility of reflection. But discarding Locke’s view of the reality of matter and substance and the reality of mind is a material substance. He’s refusing to do metaphysics, refusing to speculate. This is very similar to David Hume who called mind simply a bundle of perceptions. You might play with the relationship between this and Jean Paul Sartre, no transcendental ego, each new perception taken for me creates the self anew.
This is why the ethic that Mill develops is his utilitarian ethic, the utility principle says we should maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain for the maximum number of people. It’s saying you should treat people a collection of painful and pleasurable experiences. There is no basis in utilitarianism for respect for persons for the simple reason he has no conception of the person beyond simply the bundle of experiences. Justice, human rights, these are the words we give for certain useful things which produce the positive experiences. So we value justice for its utility not because it’s right, there’s no prior right because there is no concept of person with intrinsic rights. This is why Mill has to develop a utilitarian theory of punishment where previously punishment had been viewed in a retributive sense, retributive punishment is not vengeance, retribution is simply holding a person accountable, and trying to maintain the social balance of pains. That’s a notion that Mill will have no basis for and so he developed a utilitarian theory of punishment building on Jeremy Bentham’s principles of morality and legislation in which Bentham advocated providing punishment in order to reform the offender to defer the offender without holding the offender morally guilty in the classic sense. So to this day you’ll find there are two theories of punishment in our society: one the retributivist and the other the utilitarian. You maybe aware that C.S. Lewis has an article on that in the collection called God in the dark. And his argument is it just dehumanizes the person, it’s not treating an individual as a person who did something, but as a cog in an environmental machine who didn’t have any choice, so the philosophical issue of freedom and determinism becomes very acute in that context. Mill addresses the question of freedom and determinism, liberty and necessity. Being anti-metaphysical, he has to reject necessitarianism, which nowadays sometimes is called hard determinism. That is to say there are sufficient cause for every human decision and action such that no other decision or action can occur. The antecedent causes are both necessary and sufficient, that’ a view of causation that would imply what Hume called necessary connections and he agreed with Hume that we don’t. So what we have then is a rejection of necessitarianism. One the other hand he isn’t happy about libertarianism or in-determinism, the view that human will is free and could choose other than it does. And he doesn’t like it because of the constant conjunctions we observe between motive and action, including act of will. So what he has is a kind of compatibility, or soft determinism, he wants to affirm that we do make decisions, but he denied that they are not due to internal causes. The soft determinism plainly feeds into his utilitarian ethic and so forth because if it is the case that we respond to causal factors which on our general hypothesis will lead to pleasure of pain, then those factors to which we respond in making choices will influence accordingly.
Ernst Mach
Ernst mark is an Australian physicists. There are two things he’s important for. One is his sensationalism. He wrote a book called The Analysis of Sensations, which means we can analyze every object for experience into the sense questions of observable. So he wants to do the same as Mill, to describe phenomenal objects, objects of experience in terms only of sense data. In that sense, our world consists nothing but sensations, sense qualities. The second thing that he’s important for comes out of a book of his on the Science of Mechanics where he insists that a scientific theory in an economical way of describing relations between sense data. Put those two things together and you have first the only thing science can talk about is sense data, second scientific theories are therefore scientific theories relating sense data. So the objects that science talks about are ideal objects, phenomenal objects that we have structured rather than objects as they are in themselves. This view of science is known as instrumentalism, scientific theories are simply instruments for doing things of a practical nature rather than it’s knowledge about any kind of reality in itself. This is the classic anti-realist view of science.