Sensationalism

Sensationalism, in epistemology and psychology, a form of Empiricism that limits experience as a source of knowledge to sensation or sense perceptions. Sensationalism is a consequence of the notion of the mind as a tabula rasa, or “clean slate.” In ancient Greek philosophy, the Cyrenaics, proponents of a pleasure ethic, subscribed unreservedly to a sensationalist doctrine. The medieval Scholastics’ maxim that “there is nothing in the mind but what was previously in the senses” must be understood with Aristotelian reservations that sense data are converted into concepts. The Empiricism of the 17th century, however—exemplified by Pierre Gassendi, a French neo-Epicurean, and by the Englishmen Thomas Hobbes and John Locke—put a greater emphasis on the role of the senses, in reaction against the followers of René Descartes who stressed the mind’s faculty of reasoning. Locke’s influence on 18th-century French philosophy produced the extreme sensationnisme (or, less often, sensualisme) of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, who contended that “all our faculties come from the senses or . . . more precisely, from sensations”; that “our sensations are not the very qualities of objects [but] only modifications of our soul”; and that attention is only the sensation’s occupancy of the mind, memory the retention of sensation, and comparison a twofold attention.