This chapter examines the character of British Labour as a reformist party. Drawing on work of United States diplomats reporting back to Washington, and the work of Egon Wertheimer, a social democratic journalist in London during the 1920s, alongside other sources, it advances an original perspective on Labour politics, one that is based around its empiricism, its antipathy to theory, and its insularity. It argues that such empiricism is grounded in the circumstances of its foundation, the decisions of key actors in its early years, and the wider context of British politics. In turn, such a practical outlook shaped the party’s insularity and general lack of concern with developments elsewhere. Focusing on the years of the Attlee government between 1945 and 1951 alongside other material, the chapter examines how this orientation shaped Labour politics. It asks whether the party can be considered ‘exceptional’ in comparison with European social democratic parties. It concludes that empiricism and insularity offer revealing insights into the Labour Party and its approach to politics, insights that have frequently been neglected in scholarly enquiry.

Kant states that empirical concepts, unlike pure concepts, are drawn from experience. Commentators are divided on whether this commits him to empiricism. I develop a rationalist reading that ascribes to Kant an epigenetic account of empirical concepts. To pave the way for this account, I first discuss Leibniz’s innatist alternative and then examine the parallel between Kant’s arguments about the origin of categories (pure concepts) and about biological formations. In both arguments, Kant defends a model of epigenesis that postulates an innate ‘preformation’ (in the form of ‘germs’ and predispositions) in the relevant cognitive faculty or organic species, while leaving room for external material conditions to play an indispensable role. The same model, I argue, can be extended to the formation of empirical concepts. I then connect this Kantian model with recent literature in cognitive science on the ‘epigenesis of mind’ and with the ongoing controversy over concept empiricism.

This chapter introduces empiricism: philosophies of science based on the notion that science is based on observations of facts, from which generalisations can be made. A short piece of fiction is first used to illustrate this notion. Building on this story, the methods of Francis Bacon are described as a prominent example of early empiricism. This is followed by a brief treatment of positivism and its influence on different branches of science and on society. Some possible limitations for empiricism are outlined, in particular the theory-dependence and fallibility of observations. It is argued that observing without theory is inefficient as a scientific method, since we then do not know which observations are relevant. The chapter concludes with a section acknowledging that despite its limitations, empiricism still has an important role to play in science, and the limitations are revisited in an attempt to explain this.

This chapter offers an immanent critique of empiricism within interpretivist sociolinguistics, traces of which can be noted in scholars’ tendencies to reproduce the epistemic fallacy, and to explain broader social mechanisms and phenomena including linguistic inequalities by drawing directly from empirical evidence found in texts. Of specific critical interest in this chapter are works in raciolinguistics, a recent strand of interpretivist sociolinguistics which critically unpacks the said co-naturalisation of language and race. Although revealing valuable insight into the colonialist heritage of academic research on language and society, works in raciolinguistics are critiqued in this chapter as (a) reducing discourses to their producers, (b) failing to account for the necessary relationship between discourse and non-discursive phenomena, (c) providing reductive views of conceptual abstractions in sociolinguistics, and finally (d) denying the importance of universalism as crucial to the broader project of social emancipation. The contribution of critical realism in strengthening sociolinguistics as an interdisciplinary strand of the social sciences is also highlighted.

The concept of concept emerged in classical Greece once philosophers began to reflect on their disagreements about the nature of things. Plato made a critical advance by distinguishing the content and object of thought. It is only with Aristotle, who has more to say about content, that we find the beginnings of a theory of concepts. On his view perception enables animals to distinguish between different types of particular, but cannot consider these types on their own abstractly, as we do in thought. This latter ability, together with the operations of combination and division, allows us to consider a much wider range of types than we encounter directly in perception. Abstraction is the ability to focus on certain features rather than attending to all. But the ability to create new concepts, by adding positive and negative qualifications, underwrites the productivity of language and the possibility of scientific investigation.

This chapter examines the historical development of psychology through the framework of empiricism, beginning with behaviorism’s emphasis on stimulus–response relationships and extending to cognitive psychology’s focus on mental processes. It describes neuroscience’s potential to synthesize these perspectives: preserving the behaviorist mandate of referring only to measurable phenomena while acknowledging the existence of important processes that occur between stimulus and response and that may be rationally characterized using some of the language of psychology. The chapter also introduces a conceptual framework for understanding neuroscience’s practical contributions to psychology while describing critiques of redundancy and the logical difficulties posed by reverse inference. Finally, this chapter advocates for the value of clear empirical communication in describing psychology’s relationship with behavior, citing historical examples of ambiguous language in biological psychology.

This chapter surveys associationist theories of emotion leading up to Darwin’s Expression. These theories analyze emotions as sequences of thoughts, feelings, and actions, linked together by principles of association. Thomas Hobbes contributes to this tradition the idea that emotions can be analyzed as “trains of thoughts.” John Locke contributes the idea that these trains are connected by the “association of ideas.” David Hume contributes the idea that association can occur via contiguity, resemblance, or cause and effect. David Hartley puts these ideas together to present the first full-fledged associationist theory of mind and emotion. Harley’s ideas are developed further by Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather), Thomas Brown, James Mill, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer, among others. This tradition in the philosophy of emotion has never before been described or analyzed.

Hume clearly distinguishes between better and worse causal inferences, notably in his “Rules by which to judge of causes and effects” in Treatise 1.3.15. Although Hume describes these rules as “all the logic I think proper to employ” in his philosophy (Treatise 1.3.15.11), the literature has paid relatively little attention to it. This chapter will investigate these eight rules, as well as their basis in Hume’s discussion of general rules. The paper then examines two controversial causal inferences in light of these rules by which to judge of causes and effects: first, the postulation of the calm passions; second, the missing shade of blue. As Hume himself recognizes, the correct application of these rules can be an enigmatic affair. Nevertheless, I find that there is reason to think that while Hume abides by these rules in his postulation of the calm passions, the missing shade of blue constitutes a gross violation of these same rules.

In this introductory chapter, I will outline what this book is about and aims to achieve, which is to continue what I started in a prequel book, A Mind for Language: An Introduction to the Innateness Debate (ML). Both books share the same central theme, namely the so-called Innateness Hypothesis for language, which is the conjecture proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky many decades ago that children acquire language guided by an innate, genetically based mental system that is specifically dedicated to this task. Both ML and this book critically examine the arguments that have been used, or could be used, to support this idea. Where ML considered arguments coming from linguistics proper, the present book delves into arguments from neighboring fields that overlap with linguistics in various ways, including cognitive science and neurolinguistics. The chapter concludes with a review of the linguistic arguments in support of Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis that formed the focus of ML.

In philosophy of science, Mach’s account of thought experiments is more often described as relevant for contemporary usage than Ørsted’s. In this chapter, I survey recent Kantian accounts of thought experiment, arguing that the leading views inspired by Kant in philosophy of science remain broadly empiricist. This tendency may be due to their focus primarily on the role of thought experiments in the sciences. In later chapters, I will argue – against recent Kantian views – that Kant understood cognition more broadly to include not only sensory perception but also mathematical construction. Acknowledging that cognition does not always require empirical fulfillment opens new ways of understanding how thought experiments work in philosophy, which may rightly differ from their use in the sciences.

Rather than thinking of nature versus nurture it is better to think about interactions between genes and the environment. The Santa Barbara School of evolutionary psychology proposed that human cognition is the result of innately specified domain-specific mental modules. Babies have certain expectations of the way that the physical world operates. Infants of at least three months of age have the knowledge that objects exist independently of their ability to perceive them. Babies have preference for face-like stimuli from birth and learn the details of human faces rapidly. Young children have an understanding of the role of mental states as a cause of behaviour. This skill, known as theory of mind, becomes more sophisticated as children develop. It is measured by a number of tasks such as false belief task and the eyes test, in which participants are required to judge how people feel from looking at their eyes.

This chapter explores Locke’s theory of language in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its history of influence on judicial thinking about hearsay evidence. Hearsay is distrusted because it is language all the way down – testimony based on second-hand narrative – rather than language grounded in the empirical world. The chapter analyzes three contemporary US Supreme Court opinions using this framework, Ohio v. Roberts (1980), Crawford v. Washington (2004), and Davis v. Washington/Hammon v. Indiana (2006).

The chapter reviews an approach to the development of a ‘scientific philosophy’ that developed in the early decades of the twentieth century in Central Europe. Logical empiricists combined an interest in using the resources of formal logic and an empiricist orientation to propose ways of distinguishing meaningful scientific discourse from what they regarded as cognitively meaningless metaphysical statements. In so doing, they articulated important and influential ideas about how to characterize the relationship between observations serving as evidence and the theories for which they are relevant. The chapter also examines their assumptions about the nature and structure of physical theories and how those shaped efforts such as Rudolf Carnap’s development of a theory purporting to quantify how much a particular body of evidence confirms a particular theory.

This chapter explores the political significance of experience. Imperial authorities and political writers deemed experience as one of the major attributes of a good ruler, and imperial officials acquired it thanks to their mobility and by serving in different places across the world. By integrating the study of the political theory with the actual practices of the officials, the chapter reveals how officials’ expertise was gained, valued, and transferred across the different imperial locations – not only from Europe to America but also the other way around. Officials’ experience, which was logged in their informaciones de méritos y servicios, spawned a new epistemological milieu that privileged direct knowledge and sensorial experimentation.