Ernst Mach’s Biological Theory of Knowledge

Abstract

Mach’s philosophy (and his theory of knowledge) is usually characterized as empiricism, sensualism, and phenomenalism. It is a continuation of the older philosophical tradition, the roots of which go back to the 18th-century sensualism of Hume in England and Condillac in France; its more remote ancestors are John Locke and George Berkeley, who themselves belonged to the still older tradition of nominalism. The main features of this philosophy may be briefly characterized in the following way: sensory experience is the basis of all knowledge; the human mind is at its birth a tabula rasa, which is gradually filled by the traces of sensory impressions; even the so-called highest and most abstract thought processes contain faint sensory elements and thus depend indirectly on sensory experience. In John Locke’s words: Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu; there is no such thing as imageless thought. While memory consists in more or less faithful reproductions of the traces of original sensory impressions, imagination is nothing but a reproduction of the same images in a different order; in this respect there is no basic difference between the so-called passive imagination of dreams and the active imagination characterizing artistic and intellectual creation. Mach’s contemporary, Ebbinghaus, claimed that what we call normal, orderly thought is something in between the fixed ideas and the disorderly flight of imagination (Ideenflucht); human thought, whether in its normal or pathological manifestations, is wholly determined by the laws of association.KeywordsHuman MindEuclidian GeometrySensory ExperienceBiological TheoryAssociative LinkThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.