Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction

We saw in the previous chapter that Descartes, in his search for absolutely certain knowledge, argued that real knowledge was innate and was not derived from the senses. The senses, he believed, were often misleading and could not, therefore, be the source of the true and infallible knowledge that he sought.

But not all thinkers agreed with this position. In contrast to Descartes, they argued that sensory experience was the ultimate source of knowledge. This school of thought is called empiricism. In this chapter, we will discuss the work of two major empiricist philosophers, John Locke and George Berkeley. These two thinkers built on an established tradition of philosophy that emphasised the importance of experience. We have already seen in Chapter 1 that Francis Bacon (1561–1626) argued for the importance of empirical observation in the building up of scientific knowledge. Another important forerunner of the later empiricism of Locke and Berkeley was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Hobbes was a contemporary of Descartes and, indeed, published a set of objections to Descartes’ Meditations to which Descartes subsequently replied in an attempt to rebut Hobbes’s criticisms.