HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS


THE LINES OF DEVELOPMENT FROM PHILOSOPHY (Summary Figure)

Critical question: How do we come to know

Early philosophers

Plato/nativism-all knowledge innate

Aristotle/empiricism-all knowledge acquired

More recent philosophical developments

Descartes

Dualism

Implication of his dualistic position

Materialists

Argued that our mind may be machine

Suggests we can derive the laws of the mind

Lloyd Morgan's canon

British Empiricism

Locke-all knowledge acquired

Built up through the association of ideas

Associationists (the Mills and Hartley)

Principles of association

Contiguity, Repetition, Vividness

Mental chemistry

 

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