5. history

George Berkeley

• Argued that existence depends on perception; if something is known, it's known through perception.
• Rejected the existence of unperceived existents.
• Immaterialism: Extension, figure, and motion are ideas existing only in the mind.
• Addressed solipsism by proposing objective reality is maintained by God's ongoing perception (objective idealism).

John Locke

• Proposed the concept of tabula rasa (blank slate).
• Our knowledge comes from sensory experience.
• Representationalism: Ideas represent objects; the mind understands objects through ideas.
• Inspired by Boyle’s corpuscular theory.
• Primary qualities (position, motion, size, shape) exist in particles.
• Secondary qualities (color, hardness, odor, sound) are produced by primary qualities acting on sentient beings.
• Ideas are mental representations, not the world itself.

David Hume

• Focused on the problem of knowledge by induction.
• Accepted Berkeley's judgment regarding Locke's primary qualities but rejected Berkeley's objective reality.
• Science is based on observation and experience.
• Refined Locke's ideas into perceptions of the mind.
• Impressions: Primary perceptions from sensory stimulation.
• Ideas: Residual images left by impressions.
• Laws of association: resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect.
• Questioned causality, arguing it's inferred from constant conjunction and succession of events.
• Concepts like God, matter, and self are products of imagination, not direct experience.
• Introduced the problem of induction, highlighting the uncertainty in generalizing from past observations.

Immanuel Kant

• Countered Hume’s skepticism by asserting order arises from mental categorization.
• Proposed ‘categories of the mind’ to organize raw impressions.
• Dwelled on the ‘thing-in-itself,’ reaching the idealist extreme by positing that the objective world cannot be accessed.

Hermann von Helmholtz

• Denied Kant’s innate mental categories, advocating for empirical understanding.
• Proposed unconscious inference theory.
• Doctrine of specific nerve energies: qualitative perception is not always related to the outward stimulus.
• Perception requires internal mediation and past experience to construct coherent percepts.
• Mind stores signal sense images in memory to represent objective reality.
• Argued perception is an unconscious inference, not a direct representation of the world.

Auguste Comte

• Conducted a historical analysis of the development of sciences, identifying three stages:
  1. Theological Stage: Projection of human qualities onto nature, supernatural explanations.
  2. Metaphysical Stage: Supernatural replaced with conceptual abstractions.
  3. Positive Stage: Relies on observation alone.
• Positivism rejects metaphysical speculation, focusing on observable facts.
• Emphasized observation, experimentation, description, and generalization based on observation.
• Associated with common-sense realism.

Ernst Mach

• Aligned with Hume; knowledge comes through sense experience.
• Used 'elements' instead of sensations.
• Sciences are interconnected, primarily interested in sensations.
• Objective of science is to state observations in terms of sensations.
• Explanations should describe functional dependencies between sensations, not causes.

Logical Positivism

• Aims to demarcate science from pseudo-sciences.
• Demarcation verifiability vs. Popper's falsifiability.
• Logical positivism (or logical empiricism) was popular in the early 20th century.
• The demarcation criterion aimed to restore order against metaphysics and ideological skepticism.
• Demarcation refers to distinguishing between science and non-science.

Problems in Observation

• Observation-driven science was challenged by relativity and quantum mechanics.
• Theoretical considerations played a leading role.
• Fundamental concepts (space, time, causality) became problematic.
• The Vienna Circle demanded that statements be empirically verifiable.
• Meaning lies in the method of verification.
• Metaphysics, poetry, Heideggerian philosophy, and theology were deemed nonsensical, as their claims could not be empirically verified.

Logical Positivism

• Science consists of statements describing positive objective facts and logical relationships.
• Integrated into a cohesive logical system, built from elementary axioms.
• Axioms are connected with observation statements through correspondence rules.
• Verification is the cornerstone of science.

Theory and Explanation

• Theories are linguistic structures describing states of affairs and logical relationships.
• Formalized systems enable statements to be deduced.
• Framework supports the deductive-nomological method.

Reduction in Positivism

• Involves establishing relations between theories.
• Higher-level theories are deduced from lower-level theories with bridge laws.
• Ideal positivist framework: unified system where the same methods apply across all fields.
• Psychology, history, and other disciplines should use the same physical language.

Standard View of Science

1. Sense data are the basic elements of scientific knowledge.
2. Theories are sets of statements, either observation or theoretical.
3. Ideal theory has a logical backbone.
4. Unobservable terms must be translatable in terms of observations.
5. All sciences unified by same methods.
6. Scientific progress is cumulative.
7. Philosophy of science explains the success of science and promotes scientific method.

Problems with Logical Positivism

1. Theory and observation are not independent.
2. No satisfactory demarcation criterion.
3. Humanities: Objective observations are uninteresting.

Wittgenstein’s Volte-Face

• Early: Picture theory of proposition linked language to the world.
• Later: Rejected positivist theory of language.
• Coined “language games,” where meaning depends on usage within contexts.
• Meaning exists within practice.
• Poses a problem to the pursuits of assertive and fixed foundation, hinting at a social turn in the interpretation of cognition and science.

The “Myth of the Given” & “Myth of Jones”

• Knowledge is linguistically suspended, losing grounding in an intrinsic given.
• Knowledge comes from uttering true sentences and convincing others.
• Knowledge claims validated through prediction, control, and consensus.
• The