sentimentalism the theory, prominent in the eighteenth century, that epistemological or moral relations are derived from feelings. Although sentimentalism and sensationalism are both empiricist positions, the latter view has all knowledge built up from sensations, experiences impinging on the senses. Sentimentalists may allow that ideas derive from sensations, but hold that some relations between them are derived internally, that is, from sentiments arising upon reflection. Moral sentimentalists, such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, argued that the virtue or vice of a character trait is established by approving or disapproving sentiments.
Hume, the most thoroughgoing sentimentalist, also argued that all beliefs about the world depend on sentiments. On his analysis, when we form a belief, we rely on the mind’s causally connecting two experiences, e.g., fire and heat. But, he notes, such causal connections depend on the notion of necessity – that the two perceptions will always be so conjoined – and there is nothing in the perceptions themselves that supplies that notion. The idea of necessary connection is instead derived from a sentiment: our feeling of expectation of the one experience upon the other. Likewise, our notions of substance (the unity of experiences in an object) and of self (the unity of experiences in a subject) are sentimentbased. But whereas moral sentiments do not purport to represent the external world, these metaphysical notions of necessity, substance, and self are ‘fictions,’ creations of the imagination purporting to represent something in the outside world.
See also HUME, HUTCHESON , MORAL SENSE THEORY, SENSATIONALISM , SHAFTESBURY.
E.S.R.