W1 C3

Epistemology

  • A branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge.

  • Plato believed that knowledge was inherited, therefore, a natural component of the human mind.

  • Aristotle believed that knowledge was not inherited, but derived from sensory experience.

Rationalism

  • Plato and Aristotle believed that the mind is actively involved in the attainment of knowledge.

  • Thinking, reasoning, deducing.

Nativism

  • Knowledge is innate, inherited.

Empiricism

  • Sensory experience is important as the basis of all knowledge.

Plato

  • Every object in the physical world has a corresponding abstract idea

Aristotle

  • Ideas come to be connected or associated with each other via laws or association.

  • Similarity, contrast, contiguity, frequency.

Descartes

  • Disagreed that most of human behavior is governed entirely by free will.

  • Dualist model of human nature, combined rationalism and empiricism.

  • Mind has free will and innate ideas, and produces voluntary behaviors.

  • Body produces involuntary and reflexive behaviors in response to external simulation.

Hobbes

  • Sense impressions are the source of all knowledge.

Locke

  • A newborn’s mind is a tabula rasa, a blank tablet.

Berkeley

  • Claimed that we can only experience secondary qualities.

  • Nothing exists unless it is perceived; to be is to be perceived.

Hume

  • -

Kant

  • What we consciously experience is influenced by both sensory experience, caused by the empirical world, and the faculties of the mind, which are innate.

  • Mind is the source of knowledge.

Mill

  • -

Paradigms

Behaviorism

  • Purely objective, experimental branch of natural science; science of behavior (observable and measurable aspects only).

  • Recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.

  • Developed as a reaction against the more mentalistic leaning of psychology during earlier times; influenced by Darwin’s Evolution Theory.

  • Human behavior can be learned, and therefore, unlearned.

Five Schools of Behaviorism

Watson’s Methodological Behaviorism

  • For methodological reasons, psychologists should study only those behaviors that can be directly observed.

  • Humans inherit only a few fundamental reflexes and basic emotions — everything else is learned.

Hull’s Neobehaviorism

  • Utilized intervening variables, in the form of hypothesized physiological responses, which were operationalized.

Tolman’s Cognitive Behaviorism

  • Analyze behavior on a “molar”/broader level.

Bandura’s Social Learning Theory

  • Strongly emphasizes the importance of observational learning and cognitive variables in explaining human behavior.

  • Theoretical influences of behavior, environment, and person/cognitive factors.

Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism

  • Rejected internal events as explanations for behavior, but does not completely reject the inclusion of internal events in a science of behavior.

Watson

  • Father of Behaviorism.

Thorndike

  • Pioneer of ideas of Behaviorism.

  • Law of Effect:

Simple Mechanisms of Learning

  • Habituation

  • Sensitization

Basic Assumptions

  • Principles of learning should apply equally to different behaviors and to a variety of animal species.

  • Learning processes can be studied most objectively when the focus of the study is on stimuli and responses.

  • Internal processes tend to be excluded or minimized in theoretical explanations; parsimony.

  • Learning involves a behavior change.

  • Organisms are born as blank slates.

  • Learning is largely the result of environmental events.

  • The most useful theories tend to be parsimonious ones.