sensa See PERCEPTION. sensationalism, the belief that all mental states – particularly cognitive states – are derived, by composition or association, from sensation. It is often joined to the view that sensations provide the only evidence for our beliefs, or (more rarely) to the view that statements about the world can be reduced, without loss, to statements about sensation. Hobbes was the first important sensationalist in modern times. ‘There is no conception in man’s mind,’ he wrote, ‘which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original.’ But the belief gained prominence in the eighteenth century, due largely to the influence of Locke. Locke himself was not a sensationalist, because he took the mind’s reflection on its own operations to be an independent source of ideas. But his distinction between simple and complex ideas was used by eighteenthcentury sensationalists such as Condillac and Hartley to explain how conceptions that seem distant from sense might nonetheless be derived from it. And to account for the particular ways in which simple ideas are in fact combined, Condillac and Hartley appealed to a second device described by Locke: the association of ideas. ‘Elementary’ sensations – the building blocks of our mental life – were held by the sensationalists to be non-voluntary, independent of judgment, free of interpretation, discrete or atomic, and infallibly known. Nineteenth-century sensationalists tried to account for perception in terms of such building blocks; they struggled particularly with the perception of space and time. Late nineteenth-century critics such as Ward and James advanced powerful arguments against the reduction of perception to sensation. Perception, they claimed, involves more than the passive reception (or recombination and association) of discrete pellets of incorrigible information. They urged a change in perspective – to a functionalist viewpoint more closely allied with prevailing trends in biology – from which sensationalism never fully recovered. See also EMPIRICISM , HOBBES, PERCEPTIO. K.P.W.