Introduction to Philosophy Lecture #8: Epistemology & Logic - Rationalism versus Empiricism

under the broad heading of epistemology or the study of knowledge there's probably you know indefinitely many different approaches that people might take but we're going to talk about two of the ones that the most prominent at least in the modern history of philosophy and those are rationalism I'll put verses here because we're going to frame this discussion as an argument between two incompatible positions that you could describe these positions in a lot of different ways and not all of them need be at quite as incompatible as inconsistent as will be the two modes of characterization of these two positions that I'm going to give you I'm going to I'm going to describe the two views in such a way in other words that you will see them as being in necessary conflict the a choice would have to be made between these two positions that's a little bit artificial not too much given things that the representatives of these positions have said themselves but it helps to understand the deeper issues that are involved in the cut and in the discussions between these two people if one portrays them fairly clearly and it seems to me it helps to clarify things if you portray them as being in necessary conflict but so the other view okay it's empiricism now it's this view that's represented by John Locke and by the other fellow who you are asked to read David Hume both of them are empiricists okay this view is represented by people like Plato I'm going to describe him as a radical rationalist for reasons that will emerge later and people like Descartes and for all we know given what we've studied and some would fall in that category too again for reasons that I think will become clear later although Anna's own wasn't dealing with epistemology so I'm not going to put his name on this list but as near as we can tell given his mode of argument for God's existence it would seem that he's he may very well be in the in the tribe of rationalists rather than in Paris it's that he falls anywhere now when you hear the word this is again a sort of part of a survey it's not just a rhetorical question I just been curious as to how widely use this word is if you hear the word the empirical what it basically means is based on observation or something like that as opposed to being something that's merely theoretical so I'm going to put this as I told you I'm going to frame these in such a way so that you can't agree with both you have to make a choice and so that means that I have to put this in a fairly radical form but John Locke actually says stuff like this so it's not like I'm putting words in his mouth all knowledge comes from experience okay and to keep this thing balanced will describe rationalism perhaps somewhat moderately as the view that says that not all knowledge comes from experience at least some according to rationalism comes from some other source and the way we will gloss rationalism because I can't think of right offhand another alternative is to say that for the rationalists they rationalist tend to believe anyway that at least some knowledge is inborn or innate so they embrace the doctrine with this impersonal brackets of the doctrine of innate knowledge or innate ideas sometimes whoops ideas sometimes the doctrine of innate principles whenever you see something like a doctrine of innate ideas and they acknowledge innate principles you're referring to you're seeing a reference to the central doctrine of rationalism now what's innate mean it means inborn some knowledge at least some knowledge is inborn now I mentioned that Plato is a radical rationalist why why radical he seeks all knowledge is inborn there's no knowledge that can come of experience and so what i'm doing here is leaving room for some rationalists the ones who aren't Plato in particular I'm leaving at least the possibility that some rationalists might take the position that even most knowledge comes from experience all they have to do to be a rationalist is to say not all does a rationalist on this characterization could say you know I'll go along with you about most stuff mister empiricist but I just can't I can't I can't accept the idea that all knowledge comes from experience so that has the effect characterizing these two positions in this way has the effect of at least on the surface making empiricists look like radicals and making rationalist look more moderate and one of my reasons for characterizing them that way is first of all there's some reason to think of modern rationalists in this way but secondly because I'm still struggling to make rationalism sensible to you folks who were are in an era when empiricism is the dominant philosophical view about knowledge and I'll work a little harder at that okay empiricism says all knowledge comes from experience I've associated with rationalism a doctrine I might as well do the same thing for empiricism look use this name the doctrine of the tabula rasa it's a phrase of Locke's means blank tablet like tablet the mind is at first like a blank tablet there isn't any knowledge in the mind at first any knowledge that ever gets there has to come through what experience now keep in mind while I'm not going to dwell too much on this keep in mind that for the empiricist there are two kinds of experience that are relevant here one is sensation the other is reflection and here's what they have in mind is sort of like a difference between a external kind of experience if you like in an internal kind of experience there are some things that we learn through our five senses for example those are all things learn from sensations but once we have some of that data we can now think about reflect on the information that we've received the sensations we can combine them imaginatively in certain ways and Locke talks about things well I mean how do we come up with the idea of the Unicorn we never experience one well we experience horses and we experience things with horns and we have these ideas and we can juggle these ideas in our mind through reflection combine them contrast them and come up with new things but doing that is still just experience I mean we it's because of the experience of reflecting on some of the ideas that we've already gained that's how we get that's how we get these new ideas with reflection so not all experiences external according to the empiricist some of its internal mainly the experiences that we gain through the activity of reflecting on ideas that we've gotten before any questions about this so far there should be something familiar about some of this discussion which opposes stuff that comes through experience and stuff that doesn't where did that come up before partner talking about the the sand on the beach we did we talked about that's right we use we can consider the possibility that maybe our ability to distinguish between things that were designed and things that weren't maybe that was based on experience but I'm thinking of a different thing that came up in discussing different styles of argument for example different styles of argument between an zones and then the arguments that we saw in the cosmological and teleological life a priori and a posteriori I mean what this comes down to what the empiricist position can bounce to is saying that all knowledge is up our posterior eye and a priori what the empiricist position comes down to is a claim that all knowledge is a posterior that is facing experience whereas the rationalist position says that at least some ISM questions so far okay I'm going to put another name down here among the rationalists who I will talk about later a man named Noam Chomsky his first name is norm another rationals contemporary of ours a linguist perhaps now retired from MIT but still one of the most influential linguists in the second half of the 20th century and he says that some knowledge is inborn some knowledge is innate and would get to him in due course or they won't open here let me now bring in some new reasons for believing this view before tackling Locke's arguments against this view okay so I'm going to talk about it not so philosophical reasons for believing in rationalism things that are a little bit more down-to-earth and then we'll go to Locke's discussion of why rationalism must be wrong this discussion will the Locke discussion comes pretty much straight out of the reading assignment so you should recognize it and there's a whole section in there and the reading assignment calls like no innate principles some such thing and that's where Locke gets to some of the stuff I'm going to talk about later but for now I want you to consider how it is that people acquire knowledge now I'm going to speak as I think a contemporary moderate rationalist might speak and so I'm going to concede right off the bat that an awful lot of the stuff that we learn in our lives comes to us some experience maybe 99% of it even okay and so for illustration I want you to imagine some kid for exempt some little infant they're crawling around on the floor learning about the environment and maybe the kid doesn't quite walk yet but it's just on the verge of learning it doesn't talk yet but is learning about the environment so you got to imagine this kid let's just say because I realize it's going to come up it's going to come up as we consider this further further let me pin down a time of the year let's say this kid is learning about the environment during the summer months okay and he's in the living room crawling around pretty much left to his own devices may be some adult is sitting around nearby but not paying too much attention so the kid can get into some trouble but that's what kids do when they explore so I mean the kid is going to not have words for stuff right but will still somehow learn about the potentials of things in the environment for example might learn that what we would call the kitty you know it's kind of smooth and soft to the touch but you know you do the wrong things of that kitty and you get yourself scratched now kitty is a word but there's going to be some tendency on that kids part right - you know but maybe the kid will you know touch the kid once or touch the kitty wants and and you know get scratched or grab the kitty again and gets scratched and maybe if it's especially dense kid I can't think of a better word because this is me go on for long periods of time I think it scratched over out you know but it's like it happened for a long long time and eventually I mean I think it Bart Simpson some things like that sometime but eventually some extrapolation from experience will be made right in the in one presume that the kid is have any chance for any kind of a life later on that the kid will learn from experience somehow right and so let's imagine that that's kind of the model for us the kid learns about the kitty the kid learns about the this place over here let's imagine if it's a sofa okay you can you can sort of hide things under the sofa like the sandwich that you don't want to eat or whatever it is that your mom gave you and and you can crawl up on the thing you can pull yourself up and stand there and you can throw things up on the top and you can pull the cushions down but you learn about these opportunities and you don't have names for stuff but you you're learning about this and I don't know how sophisticated crawling around kid can get it's hard to know you can't fall into their heads but they look like they learn quite a bit they learn about places to hide things they learns about places to look at something's lost they learn about places where they can crawl up they learn about things they can do to get mom or dad or somebody else to come help them and they learn this presumably through experience the reason I want you to imagine that that this is in the summer time is for the following reason I mean sometimes what we learned through experience has to get revised later on so I mean now I've got this particular image of an apartment in Chicago that I grew up in and you may not have anything like this experience so I'll try and describe what I have in mind but then I'll name it to you in a second because I think most of you maybe many of you anyway won't have any idea what I'm talking about but let's say over there in one side of the room right against the wall there's this kind of hard thing hard really cold thing it's another thing that you can kind of pull yourself up on it's another great thing to hide the kiddies ball under or your your yogurt or something that you don't want to eat that's a great place to conceal stuff like that but it's really cold to the touch it's kind of like if you're really hot in the summertime it's kind of pleasant nice what am I thinking about Zingo no radiator right and other people will never have seen your hater in their lives like that good yeah I'm thinking about a radiator the kind you might find in the department and the reason I want to offer this example is that you can have you know like a kid's life you know months go by and it gives life that's a lot of time so it can have you know six months of experience of this Raider radiator it could be very very solid experience but then along comes October weather changes the whole thing's different the thing isn't used to sit there quietly now it's weighing sat you used to be cold now you don't dare get near it's one another one of those things go oh out out out because it's hot you know it's it's going to burn you if you touch it too much the it starts to smell now because all that yogurt you stored behind summer months but you know there's all kinds of changes and so you have to if for example you generalize into thinking this is a nice safe place to climb this is some yep you know you change your view now I say this because the teachings I want to emphasize the fact that the teachings of experience are not infallible I mean can they could lead us to expectations that are that are erroneous and that will come back to be important later but what I think the rationals would say is this and this is going to require some reflection now on your part that all of this stuff plainly serves as you know all these things serve as good examples of stuff learned through experience so let us grant that the empiricist is right about most of what we know but there's one thing that is required prior to all of these events that I just described that itself cannot be learned through experience what well you have to know something like this and I won't have him conscious reflective knowledge of this I think the rationalist would say but the kid has to know that there's reason to expect the future to be like the past in order to be even inclined to generalize from past experience in formulating expectations of the future now I'm going to give this a name okay yes I'm going to give it a principal what the rationalist would claim I think is that all of us before experience have to know at least in some sense the principal of the general uniformity or regularity put regularity in parentheses of nature of the world the rationalist claimed rationalist candidates or No okay principle of the general uniformity of nature now I underlined the word general because you know that nature isn't always consistent isn't always regular in all ways but in order to establish or to even have an inkling that our past experience is even relevant to the future we have to have at least a rough idea that nature is not chaotic so let me make this an equivalent in brackets nature is not totally I mean this is the most modest way I can think of it to put this principle chaotic we have to know this we have to know that nature is not totally chaotic to have any reason at all to base our future behavior the things that we do next on our experience of the past wouldn't you learn that from experience now if you see something you experience something if it's a little kid they would really think it directly we do think something on the lines of oh well that happened a couple days later they get into a wait a second and before that means the things that happened in the past okay let's that's a real good suggestion and that's the sort of thing you would expect the empiricist to come back with so let's put this to the side let's just look at how this works first let's work with radiators t1 t2 t3 t4 touches or time whatever you want to put it easier times when the kid touches the radiator during a summer finds it's cool it's cool and then just say you know like the dot dot dot dot there to just say there's it some number of occurrences that will finally lead the kid to the conclusion let's just say and this isn't something again the kid has to formulate in words but the conclusion is radiator is safe and this conclusion that the kid has concluded this is kind of indicated implicitly by the fact that the kid now just place around the radiator without worrying about it and then you can imagine the similar set maybe it takes a little longer if the kid is if the kid's first experience of the radiator is that it's cooled it might take a while to extinguish that and in the words of psychologists so that when the fall rolls around it might take the kid a little longer to unlearn this conclusion that the radiator is safe than otherwise it would have taken I think it might or might work faster may I mean I know you got to do experiments to find out whether this is the case or not it might learn faster if that the radiator is on safe if the kid first encounters radiators of the winter times right because he doesn't any to unlearn maybe me but here's the pattern I mean this is just a general pattern of what I'm going to call inductive reasoning so we're doing a little more logic there too now the suggestion is that maybe this principle itself principle of the general uniformity of nature maybe this principle itself could be learned through the same process but from experience right so that means that then we have uh put ours for regular we have experiences of nature's regularity right R 1 R 2 R 3 R 4 dot dot dot now I'll just say nature is regular is that the suggestion okay well here's the problem with that over here we argued that the that in order to have any reason at all to conclude this from this in order to include to draw this general conclusion from these past instances or if you like you could equivalently think of this as a conclusion about the future that the radiator will be safe the next time I touch it the argument before went in order to have any reason at all to draw this conclusion about the future or this generalization from these past experiences we must already know the principle of the general uniformity of nature we must know that because otherwise we have no reason to project into the future anything at all about our past experience well that same argument works over here in order to have any reason at all to think that it's legitimate to conclude that nature is generally regular from this finite sequence of past experiences I already have to know that nature is regular that nature's not pay on do you see what I'm saying yeah but I don't really agree with it okay just it seems like you wouldn't have to have any more knowledge about the future being the same as the past if you just continually experience that something is always the same yield but we get to realize that it always will be the same in the future too on what phases are you entitled to conclude that on the future will be like the past well if the kid touches his radiator like every day for a week he'll realize this radiator is cold it's always cold that's right that's what people do what entitles the kid to do that then his experience shows invades always cold has always been home yeah why is the entitled included the cold next huh see now logically speaking there is a there's a curiosity anyway about inductive reasoning just generally unless you think about the law of great numbers in probability theory I know you may not know what the law of great numbers in probability theory is but it's like this given sufficiently long flips of coins for example I can put the coin we know that the chances of my getting heads on any flip of a fair coin is 50/50 right law of great numbers says that among other things it says that you know I can flip that if I flip that coin an arbitrarily large number of times there will be in the sequence somewhere there will be sets of two heads in a row and will be places where there are three heads in a row will be places whether our 10 hits in a row or places where their hundred heads in a row and we'll be placing rivets a thousand hits in a row to America to keep going on like that the law of great numbers says that in any long enough and any sufficiently long sequence you're going to get sequences like that where you're going to have just by chance you know 100 billion heads in a row it has to be pretty damn long sequence before you get that right but we don't have the time here the kids making this judgment on two three four experiences it's not doing 100 billion flips of the coin and in any scientific experiment I mean are getting any any any time I should say the scientific experiment cuz that's just a particular kind of application of inductive reasoning them in any inductive reasoning at all whether it's scientific or not I make a leap if I jump from any finite collection of experiences to the conclusion that all further experience is going to be this way or even at the very next one is as far as in logic is concerned I'm not particularly entitled to make that leap unless of course I've got some further principle to make use of such as that if nature is in general uniform then a sufficiently large number of experiences may very well entitle me to to draw the conclusion that nature is and will be just as I'm experienced before I get the bride I want to stick with you I mean what that's not I mean I don't this is not the sort of thing where I mean clarity or words suddenly rement need wash over you like like a tide or like a cleansing bath but the argument structure suggests that if I was right just think over here that you needed a principle of the principle of principle of the uniformity of nature pun I needed the the pun rule in order to get from these experiences to that and that's needed there well it seems by parity that it's needed there too in other words you already need the principle of the generally informative nature to entitle you to conclude anything from experience including that nature is regular so you couldn't have derived it from there that's the that's the force of the argument and then and then the command the suggestion you made is just the one that needs to be made in order to help see the rationalists point I mean if you don't consider the possibility that this might be derived from experience you might not see that anything that's derived as a conclusion from experience seems to require some principle that says that nature is not totally panicked right I don't see the connection between you're certainly a good in Paris instead what the rationalist hopes to make plausible here is that this is something the kid has to know the the rationalist is prepared to acknowledge that this isn't something the kid you know knows explicitly but it's something like tacit knowledge how do we know that the kid knows is my cousin kid does this well you may do some of the kids dint know that was another particular kid ghost Kayla well that's a pretty damn sophisticated kid and that certainly is a possibility right but mostly I mean I think kids don't think about the thing as a heater or ons or offs I mean it's just here's this group fact out there in the world you know it's like you know it's a force of nature kid and you know explanation I mean kid might be puzzled as to why this is happening but the you know to be puzzled is not to even know that an explanation is possible so maybe some kids you know it's curious I mean it's when I can when you talk about density though I might be just the kid you know it just be just that kid to teach coconut the thing you know and the poor parent says it kids some debts when I mean those maybe that if they survive long enough they needed the scientists the empirical science into the future because they may be doing some proto investigating so I mean you know maybe we have lots more scientists if it work for the dangers of having that kind of bit cracker in mind but but to be sure I mean denseness is not the only explanation be given for somebody's you know continually trying to experiment with the world and the and trying new things or challenging beliefs of being there are even just a very idea being reticent about leap leaping to conclusions on a good kid that says you know like I just don't want to reach the conclusion here or if the kid is not inclined to leap to include conclusions that maybe that's a careful thinker but maybe also a short-lived kid has the ones that learn more quickly about dangers or you know the ones that are while they're risk-averse they don't like risk but they're the ones that might have a safer traveler so interesting interesting point but this is the first the first candidate the rationalist argues and will revisit those the complaints that both of you are making about this thing as we talk about it but the rationalist position is that plainly in order to learn anything at all from experience in order to get the whole operation of learning from experience off the ground we have to know that nature isn't chaotic for consider if if we weren't making that assumption consider that we were open to the perfectly real possibility that maybe nature is completely chaotic no that would mean we would have no reason whatsoever to conclude that just because I've touched this radiator 450 times in the last hour and it's been hot every time and I'm getting blisters on my fingers that's no reason to assume that the next time it's going to be hot so let's try it again I mean if nature's completely chaotic it might just switch right it might switch to the no ice cream if nature is completely Beata now using an example like that I think shows how ludicrous actually would be to imagine that nature is completely chaotic this isn't something that we can really successfully conceive them we are apparently I mean if you think about it we are making this assumption we do this all the time we simply and automatically react to the world as if the future is going to be more or less like the past at least we do so insofar as we profit from learn from our experiences we don't think this through but the rationalist argument is that just shows how deeply embedded gist knowledge is we know that the world is not chaotic we use that knowledge automatically and that's just an indication that this isn't something you learn from experience this is something that's inborn it's deep they use other suggestions I think mentioned by lock now Locke doesn't talk about this one so much but I think there are things that look whoops go comma there whatever is is things look like straightforward logical truths another one might be it's impossible for the same thing both to be not to be at the same time and in the same sense I think that's another one that locked talks about these are things that some of the rationalist the rationals name like myths I believe was use these as examples that were especially important these may look like principles of logic statements or a pure logic but I think that's part of what the rationalist position is that there's some stuff that we have to know in order to even make sense of our experiences in order to render them coherent and logics another thing that we have to know and we have to know the principle of the general information nature maybe we have to know certain things about logics or facts or else we're never going to experiment learning from experience is never going to get off the ground now this guy Chomsky who again we may may or may not return to later but I want to promise you I return to at least this briefly and here we are at a good time to do that it's no Chomsky's view that at something like when I'll call the basic structure of logic is inborn its innate it's part of neural physiology it's part of the way were built not something we learn he's a linguist he came to this conclusion by studying natural languages and it's his view this is one of the things he most famous for is that all natural language is what it's Swahili or Chinese or English or Spanish or whatever all natural languages as different as they are one from the other they all share a common deep structure this is something that's part of being a human being something we have not because our soul pre-existed this life or anything like that it's because of the way that our neural physiology is designed so that it's inborn for that reason that he insists that this is knowledge and it's anymore okay now that's where I want to leave the rationalists side of the issue and go over to John Locke now start a cleaning sheet here blank slate there are three Lockean arguments okay and the first one is kind of a trap so it'll sound it might say should sound a little bit wrong given what we've said about the rationalists but it's a trap it's supposed to set the argument up for argument number two it's not that Locke doesn't mean argument number one he's just trying to want to flesh out it's actually tease out a certain key feature of the rationalist argument that he thinks is vulnerable so it starts like this argument number one well if you I'm going to go up I'm Wally Locke now if you rationalists or write about this about knowledge and how we get it and if you're right that there are some things like these several principles that you've enunciated let's say you're right that these things are innate their inborn then that must mean that every human being knows them unless maybe they're you know brain damaged or something like that but every normal human being should know these things if you're right that there is more is that what you mean to say that's the way I'm understanding you rational this is that right and by and large the rationalist would say yes very every normal people every normal normal person knows these things in a plea okay well Locke's first argument is no they doubled just go ask them I mean this is make up a sign that says something like take this pulp poster you know that I've got right here and go around and carry it off to Central Park in New York and hold it up you know standards down there in the path you know watch while people go by and hold this and say you know this stuff you know there's stuff in people and he'll probably have you arrested but you know if you say do you know the principle of the general uniformity of nature do you know that nature is generally uniform do you know in addition that whatever is is and that it's impossible for the same thing both to be and not to be at the same time and in the same sense you folks all know that now I think you get a lot of people saying well two and three look reason enough to me I don't know about that number one other people say to see three they'll say look at three you see huh you know and I got to do a little bit explain let's say you finally managed to explain each of these things to people with Locke I mean I agree with Locke on this it seems to me that you're not going to get universal agreement on these things any more than you're going to get universal agreement on anything at all there's nothing that everybody would agree to nothing that indeed it makes sense to say everybody know so that's argument number one not everyone knows these things just ask them you'll see simple so you rationalist must be wrong your your view implies that everybody have to know these things and we can quickly establish that not everybody knows these things and indeed it seems most reasonable to imagine that there's nothing that everybody knows there's nothing that everybody even agrees to ha so you rational is wrong that's argument number one now what are the rationalist going to say that any one of those rather than Brian prepare you guys are relying on Brian too much again yeah it doesn't even if all the rationalist idea is ok before they said it's a lot that you can have as long as it's not all experience they didn't limit it to everybody most people know this now I think I actually think that there's some sense in which the rationalists would just bleep balancing lock that's not right you haven't got us right but I don't think that's the case you're right that the rationalists the way I've set up the dispute between rationalist and empiricists I made the rationals seem a little bit more reasonable in that lock and the empiricist seem to say that all knowledge comes from experience where the ration will suddenly say ah all some doesn't but also the way I characterize the rationals was that they were pretty sure which sorts of things they were that were innate and which were the innate principles well there's these things that I've suggested to you the principle of the gentleman uniformity of nature and then these other things that look kind of like logical truths they say you got to know those things before you can make any sense of the world before you can learn from experience you got to know those first and some modern rationalist like Noam Chomsky I think I mentioned him with a modern rationals like Noam Chomsky would say these are part of our hardware they're part of the neural physiology there's some things that are some knowledge that is innate its inborn but not it's not magical it just has to do with the way we're wired that's the way that has to do with the way the brain is set up so I think it's Locke is at least fair to the rationalists in tackling these principles these are the ones that the at least according to our characterization is and some particular rational caesars these are the sorts of things that they focus attention on I don't know if I was going to say what you just said not everyone knows them because it's not straight knowledge that we have it's it's what lets us gives us our logical thing well I think you're on the right thing but you're not saying it quite the way I think the rationalist what the rationalist is I think that's it's basically it the point is it is straight knowledge it's just that it's not something that the people necessarily know that they know I was just going to say like oh yeah well obviously so in fact they do know what's on that piece of paper written out like that they don't know right and they may never reflected on this I mean this is exactly what the rationals would say I think they or maybe maybe with some more for us to say walk you idiot because we didn't mean the example of the little kid crawling on the floor we didn't mean that if you held up this sign with this little kid with a yeah I know that I mean the little kid can't read the sign and even if you spoke to the kid I mean a kid doesn't understand English kid probably doesn't think we were talked about kids that didn't even think of sofas in terms of the words sofa they think of them as think of things in terms of the opportunities that they present to them and stuff like that we're talking about tacit knowledge here John you know we don't mean the kid that people know these things and know that they know them we're talking about unconscious knowledge if you like okay knowledge that's implicit in the behavior itself we know that they know them we know that they know these things because we watch we can see them behaving in this way and they couldn't behave in this way if they didn't know this stuff walk well that sets lock up for argument number two and that's I'll write it down he says the very idea of unconscious knowledge is a contradiction I'll see if I can illustrate that he has an idea I mean firstly I think he'd say this you know look it's okay to talk loosely in normal context we can talk about people saying that people they know how to ride a bike even though if you ask them how do you write it bike that's not something most people can tell you they just can show you we can use the term loosely in that context but we're talking about principles right we're talking about knowledge and for both flocking and the rationalists for the most part there the argument seems to be about what you might call knowledge that knowledge that two plus two equals four knowledge that nature is generally uniform knowledge that whatever is is we're not talking about knowledge how here which is maybe a loose usage of the term that's non cognitive I mean your knowledge you know how to walk you say I know how to walk that's not something that you you know in your head so to speak I mean you just do it right and only some specialists over there in the biology department maybe knows how people walk I mean I don't know how people walk is the old line about centipedes you ask a centipede how do you manage to do that how do you coordinate all those feet you get the centipede to thinking about that senator you won't be able to walk anymore hey this is too complicated but maybe that's the same way with with lots of these things if you if you have at least there's a distinction at between the cognitive knowledge of that something and then the looser sense in which we say that we people know how to do things now whether that's really elusive buser sense I want to step aside here and warn you whether that's really a looser sense or whether that's a primary sense that's that's an interesting question that's an interesting philosophical question but I think it's fair in at least this traditional argument between the empiricists and the rationalists it's fair to say they're talking about knowledge that something called cognitive so that's the first step in making this point I think the next preparatory step is to say and then we're doing epistemology here we have to be very cautious in our use of the term we're trying to analyze knowledge and so we mustn't allow loose senses of the term to enter it better with me for me all right now that's just preparatory you familiar with the game Trivial Pursuit okay I mean that this is a game that used to be really big deal I think it's kind of it's in most people's attics or basements now and hardly gets played anymore but roughly ten years or so ago this is a game that we used to play as a family and my kids were what eleven years old ten eleven twelve during that time my oldest kids and we used to play this this game from time to time it was a it's a neat game it's got some leveling principles in it as you may know you're supposed to it really seems at first blush is if it favors people you know like me we're older that's one worries I play the games because I think I could kill these kids at this game but that's not true but in any case it seems like with favor people who have just more general experience and it does at first but the the saving grace is that everybody almost everybody unless they're a professional trivia buff almost everybody has some weakness in one of these categories and if you remember or and maybe especially for those of you don't know the game the way it works is you just have to answer these questions about trivia and there's all kinds of versions of the game but in the most basic version there are several categories and and I'm for example one of my favorite categories is the science questions they're not always really about science but they just are the sorts of questions usually that I am more interested in and I also like the history questions those are green and yellow respectively okay and remember that much it's but I mean my real downfall is on the entertainment category questions because I mean I'm one of those people I can go to a movie I can love the movie I can be raving about them movie tell you all about the movie and not know its title not little any of the people in it I mean I could just ignore these things and I'm not sure why it's just a part you know part brain-dead in a certain area of my brain for perhaps but but that's that's a bad category and sports is another bad category for me the entertainments really the awful ones so what happens is you play this game and as you're going along you know you make progress and in the early stage of the game you can usually avoid for the most parking avoid categories you want to avoid by m'm you could go in one of two directions and so either go if your throw of the dice is going to land you on a category you don't want you can go the other way and and you can you can kind of sail through eventually you have to answer questions in each category because you have to get a tile from every category and your little wheelie thing but that's not so hard you can you know it may take time it takes me a lot of time to get finally get an entertainment question that I remember that I know and that's the time when the other kids for example they can take a movie they can move around and they can catch up but the real catching up time comes in the center now when you finally get you know all the categories one tile for each category in your wheel then you get to go up to the center and there's the end game that's played up there and the way that works is when you land if you finally hit the land in the center that takes a little hemming in Hawaii you find a land in the center then your opponents get to pick the category of the question that you have to answer and so you know what my kids are going to do I mean they're going to I'm going to be fun to be in there forever and usually have them they slowly but surely they finally catch up but I'm in there you know answering questions of these dumb movies I've never seen about the movies I have seen but can't remember but I mean on this one occasion I know I'm up there I get up there I'm in the middle I got all my tiles they've got two or three tiles of piece and they're getting ready for the end game which you know they enjoy a lot more than the beginning game and that's so like land in there and they say they say go guess which category we're going to ask you is it I don't know how about science and if they know it's going to be entertainment and they pull out the question and then they pull out the card and they read me they read me the one entertainment question that I know cold okay they asked me who played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and I say whoa hallelujah I got this one that hasn't won I know it I just I just just did I'm ecstatic I'm gonna finally win a game quickly I go back doing something else so I'm sighs this is fantastic this is great everybody knows the answer this question this is you know the Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz she's one the most famous actresses ever lived she was Liza Minelli's mother she was also when a star is born I mean she's famous she was one of the she was famous people all over the world during the time that she was doing these movies this is so great that you asked me this question they said what's the answer I said I I know that this is your thing is I know answered this question because everybody knows this it's uh oh you know I do this for about one minute and 45 seconds and they say you have 15 seconds and I said oh come on this isn't fair you know I know it we just played this game yesterday and I you know and I that was what the way I got my tile I answered this question right he said yes we remembered that what was it that you said yesterday I said well I gave you the name of the woman who played Dorothy it was it of God she was she was young at the times on earlier movies and they said well it looks like times just about up and my claim is of course I know the answer yes I know the answer and their claim is well if you knew the answer you tell us wouldn't you and I make a claim like maybe the rationalists would I say look I know it it's sort of underneath it's it's there it just I somehow can't I can't tell you what the answer is and they're perfectly reasonable responses to say and the perfectly Lockean response is to say what's stopping you I mean to say that you can't tell us that you know it but you can't tell us that would make sense if it were something like a CIA secret I mean or something like that or or any kind of a secret that that's when it would make sense to say I know the answer but tell you but not being able to give us the answer I mean not being capable of giving is the answer that's what it means to say you don't know the answer now maybe you'll know it in five minutes now Locke and my kids are talking in unison now right and they're yelling any night maybe you'll know it again in five minutes now that you've lost them you've lost this particular round of questioning and maybe you knew it five minutes ago but right now not being able to answer the question constitutes not knowing it the very idea that you could know something but not be aware of the answer according to this according to this very precise meaning of the word knowledge that's a contradiction and that's Locke's argument here but the very idea that someone could know something and not be aware of it it really doesn't make sense if you're being careful in the way that you're using the word no and that's what you should do if we're doing epistemology it's okay to talk about unconscious knowledge if you're sort of on the unit the sort of in common parlance day to day talk where this is this is the epistemology here we have to be careful oh these are parent right but in combination like you wouldn't be able to use breathing but instead I'll give you that example I want to hear them well this is part it's necessary and a kid wouldn't stop ringing that would be stop breathing yeah well it doesn't we can't die I don't know that the kid knows any of those things I'm being John Locke I don't think the kid knows any of those things maybe maybe even some adults don't know about them but they don't think about them never thought about them they don't know now what about breathing itself and that's something that people do and they're and they're unconscious of how they do it I mean it's not conscious of it but with lockers do things it's not that's not knowledge what I found about knowledge nothing about aiding cognitive right I know okay part of it but right now I doubt you really think that this little kid that we were talking about they let himself a question I don't think a little kid that was that okay but well welcome what we get we're going to talk about what is going on according to the empiricists in a few moments and maybe that will give you words to say what you need to say because I think you're probably more sympathetic to the empiricists into the rationalist anyway given past conversations number three all our knowledge is explainable by reference to experience okay we don't need this kind of spooky doctrine of in more knowledge given the categories two different categories of experience that we mentioned before sensation and reflection according to Locke and I'm not going to go into this in Adel at any length here but according to Locke a careful analysis of every candidate everything that we really do know can show that it comes from either sensation or reflection or combination of the two now that's what he spends the bulk of a very very big book from which your reading was selected that's what he spends most of his time doing showing just how in this case in that case we can get we can get an adequate analysis of our knowledge without resorting to this kind of spooky proposition that there's some of our knowledge that's inborn you've got a little sampling of that in the assigned reading but that's the third argument not but to rehearse them again not everybody knows these things that supposedly are inborn unless of course you resort to a concept of knowledge that's basically contradictory that's too and three we don't need that idea we don't need that explanation anyway it's much more natural more straightforward and easier to explain all the things that we know on the basis of experience including such things as mathematics which are in logic I mean those are things we learn upon experiencing our own thinking process processes and it's not on reflection I mean we don't get the idea learn about two plus three equals five by focusing our attention on you know groups of apples or pears or bananas or chairs or anything like that we get we get our understanding of mathematics through reflection on the ideas of numbers and on the reflection on these on the definitions of these particular concepts like two and equals and five but once you know we won't have any reflect on until we experience those numbers them doesn't have to be those terms but not until we've experienced a couple of things where we understand what two is for example right I don't know how much like memory is like a part prints a part of our way of thinking so like your data tell you forgot maybe better number two because memories but depends on how you analyze memory I mean I mean if you think memory means that you mean that when I remember something that I'm I'm shining a light on something I already knew that's that would be one way of looking at it but that's not I think the way necessarily that the lock would look at it I mean I one person's memory may be stronger maybe someone else in here exact same patience playing that game two days in a row maybe someone else would have remembered it and it would say well there it is only because my memory and my brain is stronger than you okay but the crucial thing here is whether I mean it doesn't these differences from person to person don't make so much difference to this argument its argument it does make a difference how you understand memory if you imagine that what happens when I recall something like judy garland's name if if that's a matter of doing something with something I know then that does contradict Locke I mean that suggests that there is some sense in which I can know something and not be conscious of it but I think he wouldn't say that he says why during the period when I cannot give you the answer to that question about The Wizard of Oz during that period of time I just simply don't know it now I've forgotten it is a perfectly good way to describe that but what that means in part is I don't now know it and so all in his case depends on is whether you think it reasonable to say that I know judy garland's name even when I cannot come up with it no matter how much money you give me I mean if you think it's sensible to say that I know it anyway well then you'll have trouble with Locke's argument but it seems at least not silly of him to claim to make this claim here number two that in if you're really being careful about how you use the term it doesn't much make sense to say that you know something at those movements when you can't come up with it but but the kid crawling around on the floor and learning stuff does have certain tendencies does seem to have certain a a disposition to make judgments about the future or at least to shape his behavior or her behavior on the basis of past experience and that does seem to be something that's unlearned what are the appearances going to do about it all we know now is they're not inclined to call it knowledge and it's I want to turn to David Hume for some I think pretty good pretty brief reasons for saying that in particular okay two arguments I'll just number them like the phone at one and B no well fern here's what here's a mother each each reason is has a different different sort of strength to it I think this this one seems at the moment to me to be a little bit not quite as strong as the second argument but then other times it depends on how you reflect on it but the first argument goes like this ah it really doesn't make sense to call what we all do what that little kid does knowledge this supposes knowledge of the principle of the general uniformity of nature it is absolutely correct that the kid does what the rationalists describe the kid is doing the kid does base expectations of the future on a surprisingly small number of past experiences I mean it's really surprising how quickly kids learn let's say and and they you know they learn they and their learning is not a matter of being able to go inside their brains and see what's in there they're learning is evidenced by their subsequent behavior I mean you see what they do and they don't do and it is indeed structured by their past experience so there's no doubt but that that is there and there really could be no doubt that that that is innate its inborn but why shouldn't we call it knowledge well for one thing it's not just people that do this every animal species is I think Brian pointed out the other day every animal species does is even very very primitive animal species shape their behavior on the basis of antecedent or prior experience that's the way they work and unless you want to go around saying that amoebas and stuff have knowledge it seems bizarre to call this knowledge is an innate tendency an innate tendency it's like that's just the way we're built once again is to take inputs and take us even a awfully small number of them in large numbers of cases and and use them to shape output we it's not cognitive at all it's all it's automatic so I'll abbreviate that one by saying animals do it too in some very primitive sense it seems to me you could argue even that plants do it because plants track the Sun for example I mean it'd be and it has to be done in time so the plant movement that you know goes like this is sort of anticipating the sun's movement or you know it's going like this on the assumptions of Sunnism can go back that way now I don't I said on the assumption but I don't think plants assume anything they certainly don't know anything and they don't assume things they just move they just move that way and something similar but more complex is to be said about animals right up to the kids and right up to you and me and scientists do it to this is inductive reasoning we're back to that I mean it's just something that the human species and probably every animal species can't do without you have to shape your behavior in some way and that's the way we do it but it's not cognitive and not knowledge now that the reason that seems a little weak to me is you might still want to say well I don't know maybe some sort of tacit knowledge at a very very rudimentary level even in the plants knowledge that the nature is not totally chaotic I still might seem sort of plausible I have a hard time saying amoebas know stuff and the tulips know stuff but maybe that's why I think argument number two that's a bit more power we shouldn't call it knowledge because it's it guides leads us astray half the time I don't know about half the time I don't know how to count how often our expectations of the future based as they are on our experiences I don't know how often they guide us right and I don't know how often they guide us wrong but they certainly aren't always right our prejudices as much as our scientific theories are formed on the basis of our past experiences when our experiences are limited we don't have an adequate base to make projections the base is never going to be completely adequate as we've seen in talking about induction there's always going to be some room for doubt if we're trying to extrapolate to a general principle on the basis of the finite collection of data it's always me some room for doubt but the kid is mistaken in on that day in October in projecting safety and touching the radiator and we make mistakes all the time as a matter of fact I gotta be hard to count hard to know how to count the numbers of successes and the numbers of failures that are generated by this innate disposition we always do shape our future X we can't avoid it we shape our future expectations and our future behavior on the basis of our past experience but sometimes often maybe even most of the time maybe as much as 90% of the time we're wrong and then we correct ourselves we learn from experiences trial and error and maybe that's why this is a good biological strategy for us to have as this inclination to use the past experience as the basis for our future behavior because it leads us into a method of trial there as long as we're ready to correct our mistakes when we find out that our expectations were based on an inadequate database as long as we're prepared to correct ourselves well then maybe this wasn't the bad strategy you could set up a little robot it seems and well I'm going to write this down yields mistakes as often I'm gonna put question mark around there because again I don't know how to enumerate these things as successes I mean the point here the point here is why would you want to call something knowledge inborn knowledge when it gives you mistakes as often as it gives you errors I mean the expectation for example the nature is uniform or regular and we in some respects it isn't in some respects it isn't and in our experience you know guides us you know gives us some kind of strategy to use and trying to figure out you know in which respects nature is going to be regular which respects it's going to change but that's the method of trial and error it secured to call it knowledge if it if it's if it's natural result maybe namely formulating expectations in the base of the past experience this is often mistaken as it is on target this is his idea almost leads to like a skeptics who was a that not how do you acknowledge Jesus first Hume is one of those famous skeptics on this now well it's hard to say I think I mean he's famous is a skeptic because what he does is collapses almost everybody's everybody else's Theory both the empiricists and the rational says it happens collapses just about everybody else's theory about how we can come to certainties about certain things he says there aren't any certainties but he also I think clears he's the first to clear a very interesting path namely a path that suggests well then who cares about certainties he was he was sort of impatient with with those other philosophers who seemed to keep trying to figure out new ways to establish the certainty of one or another principle in a couple of fell swoops you know one more or less directed at rationalist and another more or less directed at empiricists he came to the conclusion that about the only thing we can be absolutely certain about is the truths of mathematics and pure logic because like you said well two clusters I think that is all based on because no matter what kind thing you do it's all based on 2+3 try if you can memorize addition from one to ten you can do that's all you're doing is in columns up to 10 well perhaps not I don't think I agree that say something but back to the back this is this is in the end as far as I wanted to go on both the these two empiricist critiques of rationalism what is it that people have that's in more they have dispositions they have capacities the empiricist certainly don't deny that I mean people people some people are able to do other people things that other people can't human beings are able to do things other species of animals can't and vice versa so there are different capacities that different ones of us bring into the world and these are in significant measure innate inborn we have dispositions that means not just a capacity but a tendency to act in a certain way and that's probably what the rationalists have their finger on there are inborn tendencies to make judgments of a certain kind you could take a strong sceptical position and suggest that that's all the principles of logic are their tendencies I mean consider it this way means it that the if it's by virtue of the way our brains are wired that our logic works the way it does that seems to at least leave open the possibility that there are other logics that would be the products of other ways of hardwiring the brain and maybe other creatures out there in interstellar space go through the world using different logics I mean that their logic is different now I find that pretty incomprehensible but interestingly that it's hard to damage that position that way because of course I would find it incomprehensible I'm decide to think of things in our characteristically human way but if that were right if it were right that the logic that logic itself and then the truths of mathematics themselves were really just sort of functions of the way our species happens to be built then it seems peculiar to call it knowledge - I mean it's just another disposition we are disposed to think about things in certain ways this is the way we're built doesn't reflect anything about the universe as much as it reflects things about us you you

Channel: Jack Sanders

Views: 16,448

Rating: 4.8692808 out of 5

Keywords: Epistemology (Professional Field), Empiricism, Rationalism (Idea), Philosophy (Professional Field)

Id: BweGI6TK5pQ

Length: 80min 28sec (4828 seconds)

Published: Thu May 15 2014