Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction

In the previous chapter we examined the work of Hume and Kant. We saw how Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ constituted a major shift in the understanding of the place of human beings in the universe. No longer was the mind thought of as a passive recipient of experience that impinged upon it from outside. Kant had shown that experience was made by the mind rather than just received by it. Such a view, we saw, has major consequences for the extent to which we can have knowledge of the world. If we can only experience reality through the organising filters of our own minds, this means that we can never experience reality as it is in itself. Or, to put it in Kantian terms, we can only experience the world of phenomena, not that of noumena.

This restriction on knowledge applies also to our own minds. Because the mind is active in constructing experience, we do not have direct knowledge of the mind as it is itself. Any perception that we have of the mind is mediated by the same organising framework as perception of the external world. The mind as it is in itself is therefore something that lies behind experience. This conclusion marks a fundamental shift from the Cartesian position according to which the mind is the thing that we know most directly and securely. Descartes, as we saw in Chapter 4, argued that it was contents of the mind that we could be most certain about. It was knowledge of the outer world that was problematic. A similar view obtained with Locke – the only things that we perceive directly are ideas in the mind. And, though Locke believed that these ideas were caused by external substances, we could never know these substances directly in the way that we knew our own ideas.