Are we born with innate knowledge? Or do we acquire knowledge only through our sensory experiences? Does the world of our sensory experience align to ‘reality’? Or is experience a poor guide to what’s really there? These are key questions of epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with what knowledge is, how we acquire it, and whether it has secure foundations.
knowledge is demonstrably acquired only through sensory experience, but that our sensory experience is not infallible. ^0a93e3
Note: John Locke’s argument.
In his brilliant 1689 work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke argues that, at birth, the mind is a tabula rasa (a blank slate) that we fill with ‘ideas’ as we experience the world through the five senses.
By ‘idea’, Locke means “whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a person thinks.”
an idea is anything you experience or reflect on — and Locke’s key point is we can only get such ‘ideas’ from the senses.
Our minds cannot create ideas, Locke argues: they can only combine them. Ideas are thus atomic in nature, and can form complex, unique structures: but the constituent parts are all ultimately obtained from sensory experience.
Try it now: can you imagine a brand new color? A new texture? A new sound? A new taste? Locke argues no: you’re equipped only with materials acquired from previous sensory experiences, and your imagination is limited to combining these materials in different ways.
empiricism: knowledge comes from experience, and so by analyzing our experiences we will come to know the truth about reality, and nothing should be asserted unless it can be ratified by experience.
Note: definition, ratified: sign or give formal consent to (a treaty, contract, or agreement), making it officially valid: both countries were due to ratify the treaty by the end of the year.
Before Locke, it was not empiricist theories of knowledge but scholastic theories founded in rationalism that held sway.
Note: Philosophy. The theory that reason rather than experience is the foundation of certainty in knowledge.
Rationalists argue that reason is the chief source and test of knowledge, not experience. A key rationalist thinker was the 17th-century French philosopher, René Descartes.
Rationalists like Descartes thought experience could not be trusted, and thus sought to understand the world through the certainty of deductive truths, as in mathematics.
skepticism.
Note: Philosophy. The theory that certain knowledge is impossible.
how are we to know they aren’t deceiving us all the time? How can we prove the world around us even exists? Descartes’ answer was to appeal to an indubitable starting principle: cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). From this base, he tries to build up truths, from the fact that he exists as a thinking being, all the way up to the existence of God. He does this purely through recognizing certain beliefs as ‘clear and distinct’ — as having no internal contradiction — and by deducing one after the other to establish a theory of knowledge with no real reliance on sensory experience.
Locke dismisses this rationalist response to skepticism, arguing that reason and logical deduction are mere tools: they cannot be innate sources or foundations of knowledge, Locke insists, as all knowledge is ultimately derived from experience, and rationalists like Descartes are wrong in thinking otherwise.
while Locke argues sensory experience is ultimately the source of all our knowledge, he actually agrees wholeheartedly with the skeptics that it’s an unreliable guide to reality.
Locke notes objects themselves cannot possibly be colorized independently, as color exists only in the interaction with a perceiving subject. When you look at a ripe tomato, for instance, the redness you see is not a property of the tomato itself, but a result of light reflecting off the tomato into your eye, which is processed by your brain to produce a red sensation. To someone from a slightly different vantage point, the color would be slightly different. To someone who was color blind, the tomato would appear different again. Moreover, if you wore blue-lensed glasses, or the source of light changed to dark purple, the color you’d experience when looking at the ripe tomato would change once more. Which of these is the ‘true’ color of the tomato? Why should we favor any of them?
It seems we are forced to conclude that while the tomato appears red under normal perceptual and light conditions, it is not itself red: it just looks that way to us under normal circumstances, because the light reflecting off it leads to a sensation of redness in our minds. We cannot say the object itself has a color at all.
this is the case not just for colors, but for all our sensory perceptions: how things taste, smell, sound, and feel are qualities not of things themselves, but of our interaction with those things, and such interactions are based on myriad circumstantial factors, and remain private to the subject undergoing the interaction.
As Locke puts it, it’s impossible to know… …if the idea that a violet produced in one person’s mind by their eyes were what a marigold produced in another person’s, and vice versa. This could never be known, because one person’s mind couldn’t pass into another person’s body to perceive what appearances were produced.
Note: This reminds me of an idea I had since childhood! I remember not having ample verbal dexterity to articulate such an idea and being frustrated by it. It also reminds me of a Vsauce video where he talks about something along the lines of “do we experience colors the same?”
Primary qualities of an object are qualities it has independently of being experienced, like its location, mass, dimensions, and material constitution. These can generally be thought of as its physical or intrinsic properties.
Secondary qualities of an object are the qualities we experience, like what it looks like, the color and smell it has, how it feels, tastes, sounds, and so on. These can be thought of as the mental properties the object gives rise to.
primary qualities are without dispute. An object’s location, mass, dimensions, and so on can be objectively measured and agreed upon.
Secondary qualities, however, are subjective, and the cause of much dispute: the colors people see, the textures they feel, the sounds they hear… we experience secondary qualities differently, and this is what gives rise to the skeptic’s concern about the reliability of our senses.
Our sensory experience has no bearing on the primary qualities of objects, which exist independently of any interaction with an experiencing subject.
upshot
Note: the final or eventual outcome or conclusion of a discussion, action, or series of events: the upshot of the meeting was that he was on the next plane to New York.
Let not the eyes see light, or colors, nor the ears hear sounds, let the palate not taste, nor the nose smell, and all colors, tastes, odors, and sounds, as they are such particular ideas, vanish and cease, and are reduced to their causes i.e. bulk, figure, and motion of parts.
Note: A quote from John Locke.
If we can only access the primary qualities of an object through its secondary qualities, how can we know about the substance in which its primary qualities actually inhere?
Note: definition, inhere, exist essentially or permanently in: the potential for change that inheres within the adult education world.