The acquisition of knowledge to inform an understanding of anything has, throughout the ages, produced multiple theories that try to explain how it is achieved.
For example, Empiricism suggests that knowledge is derived primarily from sensory experience alone. Thomas Hobbes believed that everything in the universe is purely physical in nature and that cognitive processes are determined by predictable physical laws, and that ideas originate from sensation. Indeed, Hobbes believed that, “…sense perception is epistemically fundamental” and that, “…all knowledge is ultimately traceable back to, and validated by, sense perceptions”(Machamer, 2014). In this way, he suggested that behaviour derives purely from physical experience in response to physical stimuli or sensation.
Similarly, empiricist John Locke suggested that all knowledge is derived from experience, both through our physical sensory mechanisms, but also through cognitive reflection on that physical experience, and that this together is what determines all our sensations, feelings and ideas. Incidentally, he also suggested that at birth the mind begins as a blank slate or tabula rasa, and that, “…the mind is initially dependent upon experience for its operation”, and then evolves as experience is gathered (Duschinsky, 2012).
Rationalism, on the other hand, claims that, “…we have substantive a priori knowledge of the world and, typically, that we have non-empirical concepts (Vanzo, 2016). Following from this, Rene Descartes, often seen as the father of modern philosophy, suggested that our human senses are, in fact, an unreliable source of knowledge because they can easily be deceived, and that we acquire knowledge primarily through active mental processes, i.e cognitive mechanisms like thinking, intuition and reasoning about circumstance and he makes a,”… clear distinction between the idea of mind and the idea of body” (Ventriglio and Bhugra, 2015).
Yet another view, Behaviourism, suggests that it is only through learning alone that knowledge is created. Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov showed that pairing a new physical/environmental stimulus with an pre-existing and well-known stimulus could, though repetition, produce the same response to the well-known stimulus, which as a consequence, invoked what appeared to be a fundamental form of learning, i.e the learnt association between a perception of a stimuli and its response, which “…ultimately led to the theory of respondent conditioning” (Guercio, 2018).
Pavlov’s results also suggest that there exists an underlying cognitive mechanism which appears to control this associative learning behaviour. One potential model for this is the simulation of an artificial experiential environment that is based on this stimulus-response (S-R) theory for the purpose of eliciting and gathering environmental stimuli and responses to create contextual and situational awareness and knowledge. (see Figure 5)
J.B. Watson, who researched associative learning, suggested that stimulus-response (S-R) learning is the basis of all human experience, and that learning could only be studied by observing behaviour in circumstances, and that “…observations of behaviour could be used to infer the nature…” of behaviour itself (Hall, 2009).
References
Machamer, P. (2014) ‘Thomas Hobbes’, Hobbes studies, 27(1), pp. 1–12. doi: 10.1163/18750257-02701003.
Duschinsky, R. (2012) ‘Tabula Rasa and Human Nature’, Philosophy, 87(4), pp. 509–529. doi: 10.1017/S0031819112000393.
Vanzo, A. (2016) ‘Empiricism and Rationalism in Nineteenth-Century Histories of Philosophy’, Journal of the history of ideas, 77(2), pp. 253–282. doi: 10.1353/jhi.2016.0017.
Ventriglio, A. and Bhugra, D. (2015) ‘Descartes’ dogma and damage to Western psychiatry’, Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences, 24(5), pp. 368–370. doi: 10.1017/S2045796015000608.
Hall, G. (2009) ‘Watson: The thinking man’s behaviourist’, The British journal of psychology, 100(S1), pp. 185–187. doi: 10.1348/000712609X413656.