click for referencing advice

home page for society and science

Social Science History for Budding Theorists

home page to Andrew
Roberts'
web site

3: What is Science?

The Ideas of Locke, Hume and Wollstonecraft

 

INTRODUCTION

JOHN LOCKE

DAVID HUME

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

I am not really here

(¶1)   The ideas of science, especially social science, were developed from philosophy. But what is science? And have we any reason to have confidence in it? These are contentious issues and, to introduce you to some of the arguments, I am going to outline the theories of knowledge (epistemologies) of three people with different, but related ideas.

John Locke
who published an
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
in 1690,

an empiricist
see carrots - apples - elephants -

David Hume
who published
A Treatise of Human Nature
in 1739


an empiricist but sceptical
see swans

Mary Wollstonecraft
who published
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
in 1792.


who saw a role for imagination
Fairytales

The first chapter of Wollstonecraft's book examines the human condition, and includes her ideas on knowledge.

(¶2)   Let us imagine each of these theorists giving us advice about how we should be scientific in our pursuit of knowledge. What would that advice be?

  • Locke would tell us that we must reason carefully about sense data so as to build up sure knowledge that is not distorted by fantasy or passion

  • Hume would agree with Locke, but would tell us sadly that science is very limited and that reason is the slave of our passions.

  • Wollstonecraft would not agree. She would tell us that although reason should control our passion, we should let passion unfold our reason. The two must work together, passion or fantasy as the driving force, reason as the controller. And she would tell us that we should have the courage to make mistakes
click to go back to fuller version

Now, having heard their advice, we must let them explain it!

JOHN LOCKE

(¶3)   Locke and Hume - like Hobbes - both believed that the only firm base for knowledge is observation.

click the picture to go to lectures That is to say, the only way to make sure our ideas (the carrot image in the head) are true, is to relate them strictly to the sensations coming from the outside world. Click on the picture for another picture of observations and ideas

Locke said

"I shall inquire into the original of those ideas ... which a man ... has in his mind"

(Locke 1690 Introduction, point 3 Method).

"Let us then suppose the mind to be ... white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas, how comes it to be furnished? ... Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from experience. In that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself"

(Locke 1690 Book 2, chapter 1, point 2, All ideas come from sensation or reflection).

(¶4)  According to Locke the two fountains of knowledge are:

  1. Observations about external sensible objects, which he calls sensation, and

  2. Observations about the internal operations of our mind, which he calls reflection.

(Locke 1690 Book 2, chapter one - see Locke's text)

(¶5)   Observations can be simple, or complex. Simple observations are always true. Complex observations are not always true.

Here is an example that Locke gives of simple ideas:

"all our simple ideas are adequate", he says, "being nothing but the effects of certain powers in things." For example, "if sugar produce in us the ideas which we call whiteness and sweetness, we are sure there is a power in sugar to produce those ideas in our minds, or else they could not have been produced by it." (Locke 1690 Book 2, chapter 31, section 2, Simple ideas all adequate).
This then is the bedrock of science. The firm basis on which we can build certainty in a world of uncertainty is by tracing all our complicated ideas back to the simple experiences they originated from, which we are confident are true.

(¶6)   Complex ideas are convenient, but do not always correspond with reality in the way that the sweetness and whiteness of the sugar did.

Complex observations are made up of lots of simple ones.

We use these bundles of simple ideas because they save us time. Your idea of an apple, for example, is a bundle of simple ideas. You bundle together its colours, shape, feel, taste etc, and think of the bundle of those impressions as an apple.

This saves you a lot of time, because you just think "apple" instead of having to think of all the impressions that compose the apple. And you can use the same idea for as many apples as you like. (Locke 1690 Book 3, chapter 3, section 20, Recapitulation)

go to Hume's analysis of
an apple

This photograph from someone else's website shows the complexity of what we see when we look at apples. And the picture does not include the sensations of touch, taste, shape, weight, smell or sound. Can you make a list of simple sensations from these apples? I will start you off:

white, orange...

(¶7)   The problem for science is that you can have complex ideas about things that do exist, and about things that do not exist.

How do we tell the one from the other?

For example, you can imagine an apple that tastes like an orange, but you probably do not believe that such an apple exists. How do you distinguish between complex ideas that are true (like an apple that tastes like an apple), and complex ideas that are false (like the apple that tastes like an orange)?

(¶8)   Locke says that

"Truth lies in so joining or separating these representatives [ideas or words] as the things they stand for do in themselves agree"

(Locke 1690 Book 2, chapter 32, section 19)

In other words,
  • truth is when the way that you have joined together simple ideas in your head, matches the way that the things they represent are joined together outside your head.

  • Falsehood lies in asserting that things relate in the outside world in a way they do not.

(¶9)   Let us try this through with a complex idea that we probably think is false.

Think of pink elephants dancing on the top of a tower block.

You can do that, Locke says, because all the (relatively) simple elements that you compose the image of, actually exist.

You have had some experience of each, which provides the material in your mind from which you build the fantasy of pink elephants dancing on a tower block. The way that these elements are joined together in your fantasy, however, does not correspond to any real joining together of those elements outside your mind.

go to the top of the tower block

(¶10)  According to Locke, the greatest cause of error is wrong connections (Locke 1690 Book 2 chapter 33, section 9 Wrong connection of ideas a great cause of errors),

So if you connect pink to elephants dancing and imagine them on the top of the tower block, you have made several connections that do not exist in the real world. You might actually see them, if you were drunk. But if you say that they really exist, you have made an error.

I am not really here

To be scientific we have to reason very carefully about the things we say are true. We have to analyse (break down into their component parts) our ideas and make sure that those parts are connected outside our heads in the way that we have connected them inside our heads.

This is how Locke puts it:

"Herein, therefore, is found the reality of our knowledge concerning substances; that all our complex ideas of them must be such, and such only, as are made up of such simple ones as have been discovered to co-exist in nature"

(Locke 1690 Book 4 chapter 4 section 12 So far as our complex ideas agree with those archetypes without us, so far our knowledge concerning substances is real)

(¶11)  Let's have another example.

Imagine that you go for a walk in a dark wood at night. There are very clear sounds and indistinct shapes that begin to frighten you. Terror overcomes you and you run from the wood convinced that you are being pursued by spirits of evil that infest the wood.
From then on you do not enter the wood after dark. The image of the evil spirits is very real to you.

But is it true?

That depends on whether those clear sounds and indistinct shapes really hang together in the real wood as evil spirits, or whether, in the real wood, they are (for example) the clear sounds of night animals and the indistinct shapes of trees.

From this example you can see how Locke thinks that superstitions arise, and how you might go about separating superstition from science.

If someone alleges that sprites and goblins really exist, and tells you that they saw them in a dark wood, then you have to analyse the sensations they had and try to see if they hold together in reality (outside their head) in the way they clearly do inside their head.

We have to be very critical of our beliefs if we are to be scientific. (Locke 1690 Book 2 chapter 33, section 10 An instance. "The ideas of goblins and sprites ... ")

(¶12)  What we have been calling "connections" in the mind between different simple ideas, Locke calls the Association of Ideas (Locke 1690 Book 2 chapter 33).

This is an important concept in the science of mind (psychology) that developed from Locke's ideas, and which continues today in the science known as behaviourism.

Here is one example he gave.

Some people like reading books. They count it a pleasure to be able to read. Other people only have to think of a book to feel pain. So some people associate (connect) the idea of book to pleasure, other people connect it to pain.

But these connections are not inherent in the book in the way that sweetness is in the sugar. How is it, then, that the thought of a book gives some people a pain?

Locke says that to understand this we have to look back at how we were treated at school. Some people have been punished for not understanding books. They have associated this idea of punishment to the idea of a book. Now they may have forgotten the original cause of that association of ideas, but books may make them feel uncomfortable as certainly as sugar tastes sweet! (Locke 1690 chapter 33, section 15)

(¶13)  Let us imagine that you are the person who associates pain with reading. (Well done for reading this much!).

The pain you feel is a passion or a feeling. It is also a fantasy. Not in the sense that the pain is not real, but in the sense that pain is not linked to reading books in reality, in the way that it is linked, for example, to putting your hand in a fire.

Locke recognises that sorting the scientific truth out, that books are not inherently painful, can be very difficult. Very reasonable people, he says, can be set in their ways; tied to unreasonable associations of ideas; by their education, by the customs of their society, and by other people drumming false ideas into their heads for party advantage.

The main cause of the errors in the world, he says, is that: the constant din of education, custom or party drives false associations into our minds and blinds us to plain reason. (Locke 1690 Book 2 chapter 33 section 18)

(¶14)  If Locke has now fully explained to you his advice that the way to be scientific is to reason carefully about sense data so as to build up sure knowledge that is not distorted by fantasy or passion, we will pass on to Hume's advice.

DAVID HUME

(¶15)  Hume, you may remember, agreed with Locke that science is built on sorting out the relationships between our ideas to make sure that they corresponded to the relationship between objects in the real world.

But, he told us sadly, when we try to do this we do not get far. Science is very limited and reason, on which we try to build it, is a slave to our passions.

Habit and custom are what hold our ideas together, and matching our ideas to the real world is a lot harder than we first thought and, in most areas, probably impossible.

Hume was a sceptic, one inclined to doubt the possibility of real knowledge.

(¶16)  None of this should be taken to mean that Hume was anti-science. Far from it. He subtitled his book An attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects. By moral subjects he meant things to do with human conduct as distinct from inanimate nature.

Isaac Newton had established a science of physical objects in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which was published in Latin in 1686 and in English in 1729. In this he had shown the laws of what we call physics, in such a way that people could check his findings by carrying out their own experiments.

Hume wanted to do the same thing for the mind. Working from Locke's theory of the association of ideas, Hume wanted to create a science of mind that you can check out for yourself in the comfort of your own mind. So here we go. Check out for yourself what Hume is saying!

(¶17)  To carry out Hume's experiments, let us take an object that we feel confident exists in the external world.

I have chosen an apple. You can do this mentally or, as I have, you can get an apple.

Hume first asks us to analyse our apple: to break down the sensations that we receive from it into their simplest component parts.

I can see lots of different colours, reds, oranges, greens, browns, and white where the light catches it. When I was holding it, it felt cold and smooth. It has a shape, and it has weight which I feel in my hand when I pick it up. This apple also has a beautiful smell. The smell is making me feel hunger. If I give in to the hunger and take a bite of the apple, a host of other sensations of taste and sound come from it.

(¶18)  So this is Hume's first point. An idea like an apple is a complex of lots of simpler ideas.

You can think of those ideas (red, green, white, cold, sweet, etc) separately. It is these separate, simple, ideas that Locke said we could have confidence in. We bundle the separate ideas together, for convenience, into the idea of an apple.

But this is a construction of our mind. If I put the apple on the chair behind me I can still smell something. I can also feel something cold in the small of my back, but I cannot see any of the colours I saw before.

Nevertheless I hold together, in my image of that apple, all the ideas of colour, shape, smell and touch. And I believe that they are held together in reality. I put my hand behind me in the sure confidence that it will find the solid, sweet smelling, cold, colourful sphere that I have called an apple. I have just done that. The apple, as you would expect, is back.

(¶19)  Next, Hume asks us to explain how we justify holding the separate simple sensations together, and believing that they constitute one object, an apple. How is it that simple ideas are compounded or associated into complex ones. Nature, he says, gives us a hint by:

"pointing out to everyone those simple ideas, which are most proper to be united into a complex one" (Hume 1739 Book 1 part 1 section 4).
The first of these hints is resemblance. I have seen lots of apples before, they all looked different in some respects, but they were sufficiently like one another for me to think that bundles of sensations like that can be considered as apples.

The second hint is contiguity (togetherness) in time and place. At the moment, with the apple in front of me, the separate colours are all together, at the same time, in one circular area. They stay together when I move the apple. I cannot say, for sure, that the smell is in the same place, but I can say that it is in the same time. Before I fetched the apple from my kitchen, I was not aware of the delicious apple smell. If I take the apple back to the kitchen, I can predict that the smell in this room will fade away.

Maybe my hunger will fade as well? Or maybe I will have to eat the apple for that to happen? Which brings us to the third hint that nature gives: cause and effect. Experience teaches us that picking up apples has similar effects on us whenever we do it. We have previously smelt apples, and felt hungry, so we recognise the link between the sensation of smell and that of hunger. Experience has also taught us that removing the apple does not always remove the hunger, to do that we may have to eat the apple.

(¶20)  So, to summarise, Hume says that the natural processes by which we associate simple ideas, the processes by which the mind is conveyed from one idea to another, are three, resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect (Hume 1739 Book 1 part 1 section 4)

(¶21)  The idea of cause and effect is essential to science. Science looks for laws that link one thing to another reliably. So how reliable is nature's hint that things are connected by cause and effect? Hume says, not at all reliable. He attempts to convince us that by cause and effect we mean nothing other than constant conjunction. Things constantly happening together. If A is seen as always being followed by B, we say that A causes B. But, although we believe that there must be a necessary connection between them, we cannot support this belief other than by reference back to their conjunction in our experience. If asked to prove that eating an apple will relieve hunger, I can refer back to my previous experience of that happening and I can repeat the experiment. All that happens in each case, however, is that the experience of eating the apple is followed by the experience of not feeling as hungry as I did before.

(¶22)  Hume points out that: there is nothing in any object considered in itself, which can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it, and that even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience (Hume 1739 Book 1 part 3 chapter 12).

This means, for example, that even though eating an apple has relieved hunger many times before, you have no reason to be sure that it will again. The next time it may be different.

click on the picture to go to the web site it
comes from Think of the person who has seen a thousand swans, and every one has been white. That person would feel very confident in saying that all swans are white.

But all he or she can really say is that all the swans seen, so far, are white. When Europeans reached Australia they found that some swans are black.

What is the difference, in terms of experience, between saying all swans are white, which we now believe to be false, and saying that night will not last for ever, but will be succeeded by day? We think of that as certain because it has always happened in the past. But, on the analogy of the swans, we cannot be sure it is going to happen next time!

(¶23)  The point of Hume arguing thus, is not to make you doubt that morning will follow night, or that eating food will relieve hunger.

Hume is anxious that you remain sane. If you begin to get into a bad state whilst thinking about these things, he advises you to do what he does, go and have a laugh and a good meal with some friends. You will soon forget about philosophy! (Hume 1739 Book 1 part 4 section 7).

What he wants to show you is that the argument made by Locke that we could discover certain knowledge, is not as secure as we might have thought it was.

(¶24)  Most of what we say we "know", Hume argues, is belief supported by strength of feeling.

This is what he says:

"It is not solely in poetry and music we must follow out taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. When I am convinced of any principle, it is only an idea which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence" (Hume 1739 Book 1 part 3 section 8).

According to Hume

"all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cognitive part of our natures" (Hume 1739 Book 1 part 4 section 1).

(¶25)  Building on what we actually experience, even our bodies are in doubt. Look at your hand. Is what you see part of your body? Hume says:

"properly speaking, it is not our body we perceive, when we regard our limbs and members, but certain impressions which enter by the senses; so that the ascribing real and corporeal existence to these impressions, or to their objects, is an act of the mind."
It is your mind that holds together all the different impressions that you think belong to you. But how could you prove that they belong together?

(¶26)  So Hume agrees with Locke that, to be scientific, we must reason carefully about sense data so as to build up sure knowledge that is not distorted by fantasy or passion.

But he discovers through his mental experiments that our reasons for linking experiences together are built more on habit, on what we are used to linking together and feel most comfortable with, rather than rigorous reasoning. (Which is what he means by saying that reason is the slave of our passions).

And he thinks that this is not altogether a bad thing. Its all very well questioning what we believe during a seminar, or for academic purposes, but, Hume reminds us, we have to get on with living as well, and the beliefs that our culture provides us with, however irrational, do allow us to do that.


MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

(¶27)  You may have noticed that Hume is both radical and conservative.

    He is radical when he is arguing his epistemology, in the sense that he destroys our confidence in all that we take for granted. He leaves us wondering if there is anything we can reliably believe. Radical doubt, like that, is according to Hume, important for the advancement of science.

    He is conservative, however, as soon as the argument is getting us confused. Come on, he says, lets forget about philosophy and go for a good meal and a laugh. Its much better to stick with our society's prejudices than to let academic doubts drive us mad.

(¶28)  In 1789 the French Parliament decided to do away with prejudice, and to build society on the basis of reason.

France was going to be a scientific society where the relations between people would be built on reason and experience rather than custom and prejudice. (See the Declaration of the Rights of Man)

The revolution in the French Parliament was was infectious:

  • It spilt out of the parliament onto the streets of Paris. When the women of Paris found they could not afford the price of bread, they marched to the King's palace and demanded a society in which they could afford to eat.
    "We will go and get the head baker"
    they said. (Timeline October 1789)

  • Revolution spilt into the fields of France, the poor farmers took over the fields from the rich, demanding enough land to grow the food they needed to feed themselves. (Timeline 1789)

  • It spilt over national frontiers, in Germany the philosopher Hegel wrote that for the first time in the history of the world reason was taking over reality! (Hegel, F./History)

    But still the revolution could not be stopped.

  • It ran across the seas to the French West Indies. The slaves heard it and rose in rebellion to demand that they too should have a society built on reason and the human rights, not on slavery and force. (Timeline August 1791)

  • And it spilt into the home. In England, Mary Wollstonecraft said that we should build the relations between men and women on reason. (Timeline September 1791)

    (¶29)  Now here is the problem:

    According to Locke a society built on reason is not only possible, but desirable and natural. What we have to be careful of, especially in a revolutionary situation, is that our passions do not distort our reason. If they do, we run the risk that we will end up fighting one another rather than establishing a rational society.

    Locke says that we must reason carefully about sense data so as to build up sure knowledge that is not distorted by fantasy or passion. This applies to our understanding of our relations as human beings as well as our understanding of the physical world.

    Hume, however, has convinced people that the careful reasoning about the world that Locke advises will not get us very far. We are more likely to drive ourselves mad trying to reconstruct the world, because the mental associations we make are insecure. We are weak reasoners, and so it is most sensible to stick with the associations of ideas that our society provides us with.

    (¶30)  In relation to the French Revolution, Hume's caution was echoed by Edmund Burke in a book published in 1790 called Reflections on the French Revolution.

    Burke defended prescription and prejudice against individual reason. A prescription is something that is prescribed for you. You do not have to understand the medicine that your doctor prescribes, you just take it on trust. In the same way our society prescribes to us ideas about how things hang together. Prejudices are pre-judgements. They are given to us before we reason. They are beliefs that we just have because our culture has them.

    Burke argued that these ideas come from a collective bank of reason that society has built up over the centuries. People who accept those prejudices are wiser, according to Burke, than the intellectuals who try to reconstruct society on the limited reason that they have as individuals or as small groups. The British Constitution, he argued, evolved gradually and cautiously, with respect being paid to the hidden wisdom that it contained. The French revolutionaries, on the other hand, were trying to reconstruct society with no respect for its past and on the basis of a set of principles (the Declaration of the Rights of Man) that could be written down on one side of a sheet of paper.

    (¶31)  Burke was criticising the group of English thinkers that Mary Wollstonecraft belonged to. They had welcomed the French Revolution and wanted to extend its principles on this side of the channel.

    Wollstonecraft was one of the first to appear in print with an argument against Burke. This argument turned Locke's ideas about knowledge upside down.

    click on the castle for a
modern author who also believes that fantasies (fairytales) are important
for science
    click on the castle for a modern author who also believes that fantasies (fairytales) are important for science
    Passion and fantasy, Wollstonecraft argued are an important part of reason. Yes, they can lead us into trouble, but that is part of being reasonable. When you reason something out you run the risk of making mistakes, and if you are not willing to make mistakes you will never learn.

    (¶32)  Let her explain this to us herself. The first chapter of her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a defence of the human power to reason scientifically about human relations, against Burke's criticisms of individual reason as exercised by people like her who questioned the conventions. She asks and answers three questions:

    1) "In what does man's pre-eminence over the brute creation consist? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than the whole, in reason."

    2) "What acquirement exalts one being above another? Virtue."

    3) "For what purpose were the passions implanted? That man by struggling with them might attain a degree of knowledge denied to the brutes, whispers experience".

    (Wollstonecraft 1792 paragraphs 2, 3 and 4)

    (¶33)  Notice that Wollstonecraft is talking about virtue and knowledge. What she says is intended to apply to obtaining knowledge about what the world is (science) and about the right way to behave (morals).

    (¶34)  In the last question and answer she links passion and knowledge in a positive way. Unlike Locke, who thought we should carefully disentangle our passions from our observations, Wollstonecraft says that we were given passions in order that by struggling with them we can gain a kind of knowledge that other animals do not have.

    Experience whispers to us that this is the case. This is something we learn, not something we just have. It is the wisdom of creation, she says later, "that the passions should unfold our reason". (Wollstonecraft 1792 paragraph 14)

    (¶35)  To understand what I think she means, think of an example given by Rousseau in a book that Wollstonecraft was very fond of. Rousseau says that we should learn the natural way, by making mistakes. A child should be allowed to make mistakes if it is to learn. If you never wanted your daughter to be hurt, you might never let her run about. That way she would never fall and hurt her knees. She would also never learn to run and keep her balance. Nature, Rousseau says, intends that we learn by making mistakes, by falling over. The excitement (passion) of running in the garden may end in tears when your little girl falls and cuts her knees. But she learns through this experience something about running and balance that she could never learn if she was prevented from running.

    "That wise Being who created us", Wollstonecraft says, "willed, by allowing it to be so, that the passions should unfold our reason, because he could see that present evil would produce future good." (Wollstonecraft 1792 paragraph 14)

    (¶36)   According to Wollstonecraft, the bad things in the world, which she calls "evil", have a purpose. By making mistakes we learn.

    She agrees with Burke that this is not just an individual unfolding of reason. It also happens collectively, through human history.

    "That from the exercise of reason, knowledge and virtue naturally flow, is equally undeniable, if mankind is viewed collectively"
    she says (Wollstonecraft 1792 paragraph 5)

    History is a process in which human beings progress, via miserable mistakes, to the unfolding of reason in the way that creation intended. According to Wollstonecraft, the problem with people like Burke is not that they have understood that individual reason is just part of collective reason, but that they want to stop the process. The French Revolutionaries had used their reason to deduce:

    "the more equality there is established among men, the more happiness and virtue will reign in society. But this and any similar maxim deduced from simple reason, raises an outcry - the Church or the State is in danger, if faith in the wisdom of antiquity is not implicit; and they who, roused by the sight of human calamity, dare to attack human authority, are reviled as despisers of God and enemies of man." (Wollstonecraft 1792 paragraph 21)

    (¶37)   Wollstonecraft contrasts two types of thinking. Thinking what you are told to think, and thinking for yourself.

    "Mind" does not develop if you are afraid to think for yourself.

    The clergymen of the Church of England had much greater educational opportunities than most other people in Wollstonecraft's time. But she does not think much of the result. The "servile" manner of the poor clergymen, and the "courtly mien of a bishop" "render the discharge of their separate functions equally useless".

    The problem lies in their education. "Blind submission" is imposed on them at college to "forms of belief". They are told what to think and they learn to "obsequiously respect the opinion" of people in power. That, Wollstonecraft says, is not the way for reason to develop. Societies that insist on people believing what they are told, produce people who are "foolish or vicious".

    (¶38)   Now that we have explored three different ideas about what science is, it only remains for you to risk making a few mistakes for yourself. What kind of social scientist will you be? Will you be like Wollstonecraft, passionately pushing forward human progress, but relying more on inspiration than careful investigation and explanation? Will you be like Locke, carefully examining the evidence, and trying not to be disturbed by your passions? Or will you be like Hume, sceptical of how reliable the whole process is, not allowing it to stop you having fun with your friends, but, during your study periods, applying yourself diligently to the critical examination of what you have been taught?

    © Andrew Roberts 1997 -

    BUT

    The apples and pink elephants in this essay appeared first in a lecture given by Peter Sneddon.

    However pink elephant lives with Andrew Roberts and generally claims credit for any good bits in the lectures.

    I may not really be here,
but I still give the best lectures

    chapter 1
Empiricism, Theory and Imagination chapter 2
Hobbes, Filmer, Locke chapter 3
What is Science? chapter 4
Can Theory Redesign Society? chapter 5
Social Science and the 1834 Poor Law chapter 6
Durkheim and Weber's Contrasting Imaginations

    Citation suggestion

    Referencing

    My referencing suggestion for this page is a bibliography entry:

    Roberts, Andrew 1997 Social Science History for Budding Theorists. Middlesex University: London. Available at
    http://studymore.org.uk/ssh.htm

    With references in the text to "(Roberts, A. 1997 ch.3, par. -)"


    ABC Referencing includes general advice on referencing internet sources

    chapter 1
Empiricism, Theory and Imagination chapter 2
Hobbes, Filmer, Locke chapter 3
What is Science? chapter 4
Can Theory Redesign Society? chapter 5
Social Science and the 1834 Poor Law chapter 6
Durkheim and Weber's Contrasting Imaginations

    Study links outside this site
    Andrew Roberts' web Study Guide
    Top of Page Take a Break - Read a Poem

    Andrew Roberts likes to hear from users:
    To contact him, please use the Communication Form

    chapter 1
Empiricism, Theory and Imagination chapter 2
Hobbes, Filmer, Locke chapter 3
What is Science? chapter 4
Can Theory Redesign Society? chapter 5
Social Science and the 1834 Poor Law chapter 6
Durkheim and Weber's Contrasting Imaginations


  • Click for list of chapters and for print copies

    Citation: see referencing suggestion

    Index:

    analyze: pars 10 and 17

    apple idea (Locke): pars 6 and 7, apple experiment (Hume): pars 17 to 21,

    association of ideas: pars 12, 15,

    behavourism: par. 12

    being scientific: pars 2, Locke: pars 10,

    Edmund Burke:
    pars 30 to 32 and 36,

    cause and effect: pars 19 to 23

    complex observation: pars 5

    contiguity: pars 19

    custom (culture) bad for science according to Locke: pars 12 and 13; good for sanity according to Hume: pars 23 + 24 and 26

    does your body exist?: par. 25.

    education bad for science: pars 12+13 and morals 37

    epistemolgy defined in chapter one

    fantasy: pars 2, 9, 13

    goblins and sprites: par. 11

    Hegel:
    pars 28

    David Hume:
    pars 1, 2, 3, 15 to 26, 27, 29 to 30 and 38

    John Locke:
    pars 1, 2, 3 to 14, 15 + 16, 18, 23, 26, 29, 31, 34, and 38

    music: par. 24

    Isaac Newton:
    pars 16

    observation: pars 4

    painful reading: pars 12

    party feeling bad for science: pars 12 and 13.

    passion: pars 2, 13, 14, 15,

    poetry: par. 24

    pink elephants: par. 10

    psychology: par. 12

    reflection: pars 4

    resemblance: pars 19

    sensations: pars 3 and 4

    simple observation: pars 5

    sprites and goblins: par. 11

    superstition: par. 11

    walk in a dark wood: par. 11

    white paper: par. 3

    Mary Wollstonecraft:
    pars 1, 2, 28 and 31 to 38




      Social science history weblinks