Tag Archives: Experience

Arts, Philosophy, Science

Philosophy: The blank slate

INNATE IDEAS

Intro: In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke rebutted the rationalists’ argument that we are born with innate ideas, and so laid the foundations for modern empiricist thought.

“No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.” – John Locke (1689)

British empiricism

Central to the philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704) is the idea that there is no such thing as innate knowledge: at birth, the mind is what he called a tabula rasa, or “blank slate”. When we observe new born babies, he said, it is clear that they do not bring ideas into the world with them. It is only as we go through life that ideas come into our minds, and these ideas are derived from our experience of the world around us. This idea stood in marked contrast to much contemporary thinking, particularly the ideas of Descartes and Leibniz, who argued that we are born with innate ideas and that our reason, rather than our experience, is our primary means of acquiring knowledge.

Locke’s idea was not new – it had been defended by Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, and even went back to Aristotle. However, Locke was the first philosopher to give a comprehensive defence of empiricism – the idea that experience is our principle source of knowledge. That is not to say that Locke dismissed the importance of reasoning in our acquisition of knowledge. He believed, too, that each of us is born with a capacity for reasoning, and that the right education is critical to a child’s intellectual development.

Learning the world

Locke claimed that there are two kinds of idea – ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection – and that the latter are made out of the former. In Locke’s words, the objects of the world “cause” ideas of sensation to form in our minds. We then organise these ideas into ideas of reflection:

Blank Slate – At birth, a baby brings no ideas into the world; its mind is completely blank. This means that everything that it will know will come from the world around it. For this reason, Locke claimed that the child should be exposed to the best ideas possible.

Ideas of Sensation – According to Locke, the objects of the world cause ideas of sensation in the infant’s mind. These simple impressions form in the way that light forms images on photographic film: it is a mechanical process that requires no effort on the child’s behalf.

Ideas of Reflection – As the child grows older, it builds ideas of reflection out of its ideas of sensation. From its interactions with other people, and its simple understanding of the qualities of a ball, for example, it can create the idea of “football”. From that, and other simple ideas, it forms the more complex ideas of “teamwork” and “competition”.

Primary and Secondary Qualities

According to Locke, we can only receive information about the world through our senses. This information, he claimed, is of two kinds, and concerns what he called the primary and secondary qualities. An object’s primary qualities, such as its height or mass, are objective, and exist independently of whoever is observing it. However, its secondary qualities, such as its colour or taste, may differ between observers. A ball, for example, may appear grey or multicoloured to two different observers, but both will agree on its size.

Primary Qualities – For Locke, the primary qualities of a thing are its length, breadth, height, weight, location, motion, and overall design.

Secondary Qualities – The secondary qualities of a thing are its colour, taste, texture, smell, and sound. These qualities depend on the perceiver’s senses.

NEED TO KNOW

. Although Locke denied the existence of innate ideas, he claimed that we have innate capacities for perception and reasoning

. In the 19th century, the notion of innate ideas resurfaced. Scholars questioned whether behavioural traits come from “nature or nuture”

. In the 20th century, Noam Chomsky extended Locke’s idea that we have an innate capacity for reasoning. Chomsky claimed that all humans have an innate ability to acquire language.

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Arts, Philosophy

Philosophy: Immanuel Kant

1724– 1804

Kant

Maxim: ‘Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.’

IMMANUEL KANT was a German academic and philosopher who made a major contribution to the Enlightenment period of Western philosophy in eighteenth-century Europe. Born into a strict and pious household, Kant entered his local university at Kӧnigsberg, East Prussia, at the age of sixteen to study philosophy, mathematics and logic. He remained at the university as student, scholar and professor for the rest of his life. Stories abound of the simplicity of Kant’s life, with one apocryphal myth stating that Kant was so meticulous in his daily routine that his neighbours set their clocks according to the time he left the house for his afternoon walk. It is also believed that Kant never travelled any further than ten miles from Kӧnigsberg during his lifetime and spent an entire decade in self-imposed isolation from colleagues and associates in order to devote himself entirely to producing his most famous work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

Kant’s principal project was to attempt to synthesise the differing strands of rationalism and empiricism that had dominated Western thought during the Age of the Enlightenment. Whereas a rational perspective laid claim to the notion that human knowledge is acquired through deductions based on existing ideas, the empiricist perspective promoted the view that reasoning is based on observation alone. Central to Kant’s “critique” is the concept of reason existing a priori or separate to human experience and the processes through which the human mind shapes our understanding of the world. For Kant, the human mind does not constitute an empty vessel that is filled through contact and experience of the world, but rather, the human mind actively acquires knowledge by processing the information it observes. Thus the human mind does not construct the world around us; instead our cognitive faculties reflect how the mind perceives them. In Kant’s words: “We can cognise of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them.”

By concentrating on the primacy of human autonomy, Kant argued that human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure experiences. Kant expanded this notion to posit that human reason provides the grounding for moral law, which in turn acts as the basis for belief in God, freedom and immortality. Thus scientific knowledge, morality and religion remain consistent with one another due to the pre-eminence of the human autonomy.

In terms of moral law or ethics, Kant suggested the existence of a “categorical imperative” or a supreme moral principle of universality. Moral judgements, for Kant, are determined according to the construction of what he termed “maxims”, or the principles that guide actions. In basic terms, the will to act on a maxim should take into consideration its universal implications.

In Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant uses the example of his borrowing money in a desire to increase his wealth. In the scenario, the moneylender subsequently dies, leaving no record of the transaction. Should Kant then deny borrowing the money? To test his new maxim, Kant asks if it would be permissible as a universal rule for everyone to deny ever borrowing money and concludes that it would not as this would render the practice of lending money entirely obsolete and impossible, regardless of the individual circumstances. Thus Kant’s statement – “Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law” – proposes that in order to act with moral freedom, the maxims or will to act should be tested as universal laws to determine if they are morally permissible.

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