Locke & Berkeley

okay and welcome to this continuing series of lectures in my online introduction to philosophy course we're now entering the phase of the course where we'll be talking about the empiricist so we've been spending a lot of time on Descartes and so forth in various rationalist thinkers now we're going to look at what are typically known as the classical British empiricists we'll start with John Locke although people sometimes grumble because Hobbes who came earlier is somewhat of a better philosopher a better writer a better thinker but Locke has earned a place and a lot of people cite him as the first modern empiricist we'll talk about Locke will talk about Berkeley and David Hume whose Scottish butt gets grouped in with the British empiricists so this lecture will be focusing particularly on Locke and Berkeley and then we'll have a separate set of lectures on David Hume all right so just to remind ourselves where we are here this is the timeline we've been following in this course and we started all the way back when sort of looked at the invention of writing work our way to the ancient period the beginning of Western philosophy we fast forward it to the modern period we were looking at Descartes who writes his major work in 1641 and just to remind you Newton is writing his mathematical principles of natural philosophy in 1687 and the period we're going to be looking at now is john locke writes it will his most famous work an essay concerning human understanding in 1690 so that's just three years after Newton publishes the mathematical principles of natural philosophy then we'll turn our attention to Barclay whose writes one of his most famous pieces a treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge in 1710 so we're remembered a Carver 1641 so now we're coming into the 1700s and eventually we're going to beginning the Hume who's writing in 1740 eight and Hume actually dies in the year of the American Revolution 1776 okay and then of course we're going to be ending this discussion of the modern period by looking at conches writing in the 1780s so a lot of the people that were we'll be discussing are alive at the end of the 1600s the beginning of the 1700s this is when modern science as we pretty much know it as common sense knows that at least is being developed purified and refined and of course it all culminates in the work of Newton the mathematical physics okay so we're going to start with Locke here first of all now Locke can in some sense be seen as trying to naturalize Descartes so Descartes had been a champion of mechanistic philosophy you'll recall from the last lecture which is the claim that the physical world is a giant mechanism the dominant metaphor in the 1600s would have been something like a giant clock so des cartes work along with Galileo laid the foundations for Newton's work and it's pretty clear that Newton had read des cartes work and extended and revised some of his ideas and mathematize it and developed calculus as a solution of various problems which allowed that kind of mathematically precise physics to develop so the kind of physics we associate with equations differential equations describing the movement of objects and so on this is what's being developed and Locke is around at the time of this development he's very impressed by what's going on there but he's an empiricist he doesn't think that like Descartes that there are truths which can be known only by reason and that the way you start is by first trying to figure out what can be knowable with certainty and then extending that to give you a theory of the physical world so he's Locke can be seen as holding much the same views as Descartes about the mind with some exceptions except some major disagreements about the nature and source of innate ideas so whether there are any at all we'll see that Locke is going to argue that there or not and the way we come to achieve knowledge not by reason but by careful experimentation careful observation that's the way Newton extracted out his laws of motion was by looking at a lot of data that Galileo had left of how physical objects behave accelerating at various inclines and so forth and then extracting out of that empirical observations a mathematical description so there's the idea that it's looking at the world with which in the first and foremost instance gives us real knowledge about the world okay so as I had just had previously mentioned the lock starts off in his famous work by trying to attack innate ideas he doesn't think that there are any innate ideas so Descartes had argued that all clear and distinct ideas are innate and that these things are necessarily true and known directly by reason so the first foremost idea is I think that for I am and then you have various mathematical concepts logical concepts physics and so forth which are also innate so Locke develops two arguments against innate ideas the first is that not every person agrees or has these ideas and the second is the crux of his argument is that there's an alternative explanation because in every case we can give a story which shows how the idea arose from experience so that's what we're going to briefly look at is Locke's attempt to do this ok so the first argument well if there were innate ideas if there really were innate idea is then there would be universal agreement about these things so for instance here's something which was thought to be innate that a thing cannot be and also not be at the same time so something can't exist and also not exist at the very same time now you might think yeah there is universal agreement on that everybody agrees that something can't both exist and cease to exist but it turns out that there isn't and at the very least there are you can find people who will deny these kinds of claims whether they're from different societies whether they're in mental institutions or whatnot there is not universal agreement on this and locked sites this as a flaw in the idea that there are innate ideas so the the crux of this argument the real force of it comes from something that Locke shares with Descartes which is the claim that one is immediately and infallibly aware of the contents of one owns mind of one's own mind so Locke and take our bolt held that if something happened in your mind then you must be aware of it so it's inconceivable on their view that there could be something going on in your mind which you don't know about so the mind is something which you have immediate unfailing access to and if that's your view then anything in there should be immediately apprehended by the conscious subject so if there are these ideas in there then they should be apprehended by these subjects and they shouldn't disagree but yet we do find disagreement so now you might say yeah but they're crazy or yeah but they there's something different about them but Locke thinks that this is besides the point so we may say that they're crazy they think we're crazy so which of us who's to really say ultimately who's correct here right the fact of the matter is that there are not there is not universal agreement on the existence of these facts now continuing continuing this Locke's develops another line of this kind of argument where he says look if there were innate ideas then they would have to be there at birth right they're born in there so even infants would have to be aware of them from this other from the conjunction of these two claims so you knew you have a mind which has certain contents you have the view that the subject has unfailing access to those contents and so you put those together if babies have minds and their minds are filled with these things they should immediately come out knowing math and geometry and physics logic and so forth but that's not what happens at all so Locke's main case here is what he calls infants and idiots an idiot is an older term for a mentally deficient person so the case here is that infants and idiots don't have these ideas but if they're supposed to be born in at least person's mind universally this seems to refute that claim noticed it's also an empirical argument that Locke is making here we have empirical evidence that is just not the case that there's universal agreement about these things and so therefore we should read reject this idea now after Locke there came to be a view which was developed by liven ins which is a different way of thinking about innate ideas so what liven ins did was to contend that the the knowledge isn't in there already when you're born but rather there's some kind of capacity or disposition to acquire it which comes online at a various at some stage and development so that when you're born you may not know to two plus two equals four is a necessary truth but as you develop there's a faculty in the mind which comes online and gives you access to that necessary piece of knowledge and this is a way of responding to Locke's claim that infants and idiots don't have this stuff because now you can say well something went developmentally wrong with the idiot case and the babies haven't developed it yet so if we allow them this kind of time it will eventually develop now of course the argument over whether these ideas are innate is besides the point and one problem with this whole debate at that time was that the issue of an anus kind of is a red herring because what Locke really wants to assert is that all knowledge comes from experience so if it does turn out that some aspects of human reasoning are innate there is still the question of whether that innate knowledge could have risen in response to experience so for instance if you take an evolutionary view you might think that yeah there's certain things that are built in there they're built in there by evolution over a long period of time but they're in response to the experience of ancestors and so ultimately are the kinds of things which experience taught us and if that's your view then you can sort of agree that there are innate ideas and then go on to wonder whether or not those innate ideas give us access to any necessary and universal features about reality so it's sort of a unfortunate aspect of this debate that they got hung up talking about whether they were innate or not and not about what the true source of those ideas were now of course there's an assumption behind all this that if they're if the ideas are innate then the source must be somehow direct insight or something like that so so it's a bit forgivable that they phrased it in this way but this leads us to our next issue here which is that Locke wants to try to show that we can account for all human knowledge solely on the basis of our experience so on the one hand he has this idea that you can say not everyone shares feeling the same way about these ideas so that we have some evidence that they aren't innate and also we can give a positive account which shows how everything what you think we know can ultimately be built up out of things we have experienced so this includes everything mathematics logic language physics biology literature psychology everything right so the goal that lawcasts is to try to show how all of this stuff is ultimately traceable back to something in our experience now to begin this he first makes a simple distinction which isn't as clear and lock as it is and later empiricists but Locke does endorse a version of this and this is the idea of a distinction between a simple and a comp sex idea so simple ideas are ones that don't have any constituent parts and come directly from experience so a simple idea might be like a shape or color or sound so something we pick up immediately from our experience whereas a complex idea is composed of a simple idea so once you have these two kinds of ideas it's easy to explain a whole wide swath of things that we normally think about so for instance if I want to think about a unicorn even though there are no unicorns I've never experienced a unicorn I can show how my idea of a unicorn is really a complex idea which is composed of simpler ones like for instance the idea of a horse plus the idea of an animal with a horn you combine those two things and you get the idea of a unicorn and of course I've had experience with horses and also with UHN excuse me not with unicorns I've also had experience with animals with horns so each part of that idea is composed of simpler things which I actually have had experience with and then I'm able to combine those two things together in the mind to form a complex idea and of course even the idea of a horse is composed of simpler ideas of very shapes and colors and sounds and so forth so ultimately what lot lock things is that there's going to be a small set of basic ideas of primitive ones that we get directly from interacting with our experience and then those things can be recombined in such a way as to allow us to form ever more complex ideas so that's an important tool and one that gets made of a lot of use of is put excuse me that's an important tool and one that gets used a lot in constructing empiricist theories okay so now simple ideas have as their source one or two excuse me simple ideas have one of two sources so some of our simple ideas come from sensation which just means the ideas about that we have of external objects so for instance tables chairs colors qualities like hot and cold sweet the planets all of those things we get from actually sensing so now we hear we see we taste we touch we smell and etc then of course we're also able to reflect on our own mental activity and reflection is the source of our idea of our own mental life so for instance when I want to do something when I doubt it when I perceive something like I hear it how do I have the concept of hearing something let me able to reflect on my own experience and the various auditory experiences I have give rise to the concept of perceiving so all of this stuff is then at our disposal and our the primitive things out of which we're going to build our more complex ideas and reflection the minds ability to self reflect to reflect on its own activities is going to become an important part of Locke's theory okay so let's go ahead and remind ourselves Locke basically accepts Day cards view about perception remember he is can be seen as trying to naturalize the theory that Descartes had trying to take away the rationalism and innate ideas make it in a peer system of view so there's a physical world that win a body and those causally interact and that gives rise to our experience and notice that the colors sounds and shapes are in the mind of the person not out there in the world and this is what's usually called Locke's causal theory of perception and de Carr held a causal theory of perception as well Locke gives fancy names to these which have stuck so secondary qualities are what Locke calls sound shape excuse me secondary qualities refer to such things as sound colour taste feelings have warmed that etc these things are not really out there in the world so when you look at an object and see its color there's no real color on the object according to Locke the colour is in the mind now the primary qualities of an object amount to the kinds of properties an object has which can be quantified or mathematize so you can say how much mass how much density how much weight how fast something is moving these things really are in the objects and we know that they're there because we have mathematical physics which tells us about how they behave and the way that they work so Locke is accepting Descartes view that there are the properties in the mind secondary qualities and then there are the properties outside of the mind the primary qualities and the only ones which are really out there that are mind independent are the primary qualities so this is something that is a theme through all of the work in this modern period it's really thought that modern science the science of Newton and Galileo had demonstrated that colors were merely in the mind of the perceiver and did not exist in the actual physical world so that if you were to remove all human minds you would be left with the world that only had the mathematically quantifiable properties shape size weight and etc so this is just a way in which lock is similar very similar to Descartes so here's a way of just spelling out what we just said the primary properties are mind independence they're all the properties which a mathematical physics appeals to and the secondary properties are produced in the mind they are the objects out there lock things have a tendency to produce in us this kind of experience so for instance when we call something red and we're talking about a physical object the physical property of red for locked is simply whatever property an object has which disposes us to have a red kind of experience but the red experience is not something which is in the world no object really looks red the red experience is merely something that is mental now Locke's views on the self are also very interesting and have become very persuasive and in modern contemporary times so Locke's question which is really motivated by his Christianity he wants to know when you if you really believe in the resurrection and you become resurrected what counts it what makes that resurrected person the same person as you right that's Locke's question so this amounts to a client a question about what it means to say that a person is the same person over time so I mean just give you a general feel about this I feel like I'm the same person I was today as when I was young but why and notice this isn't to say I believe everything that I did when I was young I of course have many different beliefs I have I've learned a lot of stuff I've rejected some of my old beliefs modified others I still have some of them etc but nonetheless when I look at a picture of me from when I was five years old holding up a toy for instance I can say look that's me holding that toy and the question here is in virtue of what am i right in virtue of what is it that that thing the picture really is a picture of me even though I'm physically very different in it then that thing in the picture so there are many answers to this question Locke gives one very famous answer which is that you are the same person because you remember yourself or are conscious of yourself as being the same person that has existed over time so this is what's known as psychological continuity you are aware of yourself as a person who has these various experiences you remember that happening to you you're conscious of this time period in between then and now so in short you are aware of your mental life as belonging to a single self and Locke's answer to the question what makes a person the same is just this if you have this kind of psychological continuity then you are the same person if not then you are not so a fun way to get fun way to kind of test this and see you feel about this kind of stuff is to think about this following kind of thought experiment so suppose that a new technology is invented that allows us to teleport to faraway places it doesn't have to be far away of course let's just say you can teleport to work so snowstorm on you rather not drive or if you like it more far-fetched invincible you could teleport to the moon or to Mars or whatever where there's tourist Technology Tech tourist industries have started up so suppose that the technology works this way you step into a machine and it scans your genetic makeup now what it does is it uses this very exact genetic information to create a duplicate of you on the other end where the other teleporter is located so you don't actually move to the other location rather they scan you they take that information and use it to make an exact duplicate so they duplicate over there is flesh and blood and so forth now unfortunately in order to do this they have to destroy the original body but the copy on the other side is exactly the same it has all of the same memories thoughts feelings emotions beliefs desires and etc in fact you could imagine this as occurring very quickly and maybe you were in the process of saying something like maybe you're during the course of teleporting uttering the sentence I can't believe I'm going to Mars and maybe your physical body was destroyed on earth when you uttered the phrase I can't believe and then as the duplicate is created on Mars it would continue I'm going to Mars so from the point of view of the duplicate nothing has happened except now that they're on Mars right you have all the same thoughts all the same beliefs all the same feelings all the same emotions and from from the point of view of that person well all you did you step in you remember stepping into the teleporter on earth and you remember thinking yourself I can't believe them going to Mars and you started saying that and the next thing you know you're on Mars so now of course Locke would say you're the same person all right all that matters is that you have this kind of psychological continuity and this duplicates on Mars does have that psychological continuity now the question here the test for you is would you use this technology or not and this isn't a way to try to figure out whether the view is right this is just a way for you to figure out what you think about Locke's view because Locke's view is there's no reason you shouldn't use the technology having the same body isn't what's important what's important is you have the same psychological continuity in the same stream of consciousness the same memories beliefs desires that you did a second ago and that you're aware of yourself as having that same series in fact Locke uses lots of examples like this you know he says look we can imagine switching consciousnesses with what he calls the prince in the popper so you could imagine a prince having as consciousness switched with a poor person and of course we're very familiar with this view from popular movies like for instance big with Tom Hanks where his consciousness is switched into a grown-up's body and Freaky Friday and so forth and so on so there's tons of examples of these kinds of ideas that Locke has and his idea look it's not the same body that makes you you you switch consciousness your your consciousness is now in Lindsay Lohan's body and it's still you that's in Lindsay Lohan's body so it still you that's in there it doesn't matter which body you have it doesn't matter how the what brain it is what what immortal soul is connected to it if there are any what matters is this psychological continuity okay so that's been a very influential view in the philosophy of personal identity now let's turn quickly to talking about Berkeley and Berkeley in particular in regards to idealism so Berkeley is an idealist and an idealist is someone who denies that matter exists so Berkeley thinks that the only things which exist are mental things that everything is an experience and Berkeley is an empiricist and he thinks empiricism is the driving reason for why we should believe that idealism is true that's because by material by matter what he means is the mind independent stuff posited by Descartes and also by Locke which we can perceive it's the substance which underlies the primary quality so remember the primary secondary quality distinction that we just talked about so the primary qualities are in the first instance mental as well it's just that they resemble or reflect the real properties that objects have so when you're looking at a table and seeing the shape of it the color of the table is just in the mind it doesn't accurately capture the way the table is but the shape of it does Locke says listen to the shape of your idea your experience of this table resembles the actual table out there in the world which you are in contact with and Berkeley is here going to try to attack the idea that there are some stuff outside of our experience which the experiences are trying to capture so the first reason is just this thing that we were talking about we're all empiricists here and we've never seen any material so why should we believe that it's there empiricism is the view that what is real is what you can see taste touch smell in here and according to empiricism at least in this modern version we're looking at the only things that you see taste touch and here our experiences so empiricists should just accept the idea that everything that they observe in their day-to-day lives is a mental thing and is it really a material thing in the sense that Locke in Berkeley wanted us to think now the other line of argument that Berkeley develops is that the primary qualities of our experiences are said to resemble the materials they represent and Berkeley spends a lot time trying to figure out what that could mean how could something mental resemble something physical men took mental things and physical things are so very different it doesn't seem to be any way that we can coherently tell a story about how one could resemble the other so if we take that seriously then we have no real way of saying primary qualities resemble the material things that exist in the world Berkeley at some point says the very concept of this material that these philosophers are talking about is incomprehensible this is what sometimes known as Barclays Master argument it's got less attention recently than it used to and people have moved away from thinking that Berkeley really it's hanging as much as he is on as he was thought to on this idea but the idea was supposed to be that you can't even conceive of what it would mean for matter to be existing when you aren't looking at it independently of you experiencing it and the idea was supposed to be that every time you try to conceive or imagine some object existing mind independently say you're trying to think of a tree that's in the middle of a forest with no one around to see it well Berkeley says as soon as you try to do that you have now thought of the object it's now you you're picturing it in your mind and so you can't really even picture what it would mean to say that the tree exists all by itself that's an idea which box up which scholars have called Barclays master argument alright so I said that already no so let's just get our picture back up here again and just repeat the same things that we've been saying here so far so Locke's theory had this distinction between primary and sensor and secondary qualities and and these are both properties of your experience I have primary qualities out there just to indicate that they those things are real properties of objects and they are supposed to be the things which resemble the shapes and so on of the ideas we have so when we're our experience of the tree the color of its leaves and bark are purely mental and don't accurately capture the way the tree is the tree is not colored in any way but see how the shape of the tree there is the same as the safe of the tree outside so we make this inference that outside of us there's something which is causally responsible for our perception of the tree and that thing is something which has the the actual primary qualities that we experience in our experience so in one way you can see Berkeley as simply pressing the empiricists on this distinction so they've already given up the idea that the secondary qualities those properties of our experience accurately represent the way the world is right the empiricist have already accepted that at this point so why should we think that the primary qualities of our experience also accurately capture the world out there once you're prepared to say the colors aren't out there what makes you think the shapes are what makes you think all of these other things are we can't ever see those objects that was something which Berkeley is very keen on pressing Locke and his predecessors like Descartes they both dot Locke and Descartes admit that we don't have access to these objects what we have are representations of them and so we can't ever really 100% verify that the objects are out there except but through the work of God who guarantees that were not deceived and so that that's the only way that we can get around this idea so why don't we just give it up how can we be so sure if we're really empiricists and we're accepting only this idea that the things exist are those things which we can see why not just get rid of the mysterious things that we never actually come into contact with in our experience so one way of thinking about idealism is by using an analogy from the digital age so consider the things you see in a video game so suppose you're playing The Sims or suppose suppose you're playing you know some multi online game massively multiplayer online game like Second Life or you know World of Warcraft or anything right so suppose you're in the game and you walk into a room and you see a table in the room right so there you go into the room you see a table now if you leave the room and go back into it the same table is there if you set down something in that room and leave and then walk back into that room the same thing is still in the same place on the table so now of course when you are not in the room when you're not there there's no table still existing there what there is is a bit of code somewhere which says if the player does this and that and the other thing then represent this on the screen so the table only exists when it's perceived or when you're in the room with it when you're if you're in a first-person kind of game when your gaze is focused on it when you turn to the left the things there just simply aren't there anymore so this is what Berkeley means when he says in Latin SAS / kippe which means the essence of things is to be perceived so in order to exist Berkeley thought an object had to be perceived so what does this mean so you leave the room and the table no one's in there looking at the table does that mean that the table doesn't exist well strictly speaking if no one is really looking at the table then Berkeley says that's right the table doesn't exist it only exists when someone is looking at it but Berkeley claims God is always perceiving the physical world and so therefore we can rest assured that the physical world is always existing it exists because God is there in order to perceive it and this was Berkeley thought a nice and clever way to try to argue for God's existence we need an eternal observer in order to verify our the fundamental nature of the physical world so now before I end here I just want to say that Barclays views are very anti common sense the idea that the physical world doesn't exist and that all that exists are mental things experiences but in order to refute Berkeley it's not simply enough to say well look the table is over there I can touch it remember we've been over this everybody agrees that the experiences you have in a dream or in some matrix like scenario aren't enough to really prove that there are tables in the room so you can't simply say look Berkeley here's a table don't you see it Berkeley will say yes of course I do but what I see is an experience what I'm hearing what I feel all those things are in the mind already everybody already agrees that this is the case and this is generally because of the dreaming kind of stuff we've been talking about so this is sometimes what's called the argument from dreaming or hallucination in the dream I see a table it looks just the same as the awaking the table I see when I'm awake there is no table in the dream I'm only having experience so when I see the table when I'm awake since they look exactly the same what I see when I'm awake must merely be an experience as well everybody has accepted that view already and so Berkeley is simply saying look it's the other side it's the empiricists who think that there is more to the world than what we can experience who are violating their concerns with common sense if your view is that the only things which exist are those things which I can see taste touch smell in here and you also think that you can never see taste touch or hear matter then you shouldn't think that matter exists and that's Berkeley's point the empiricists have no reason to believe in matter as the philosophers to find it in other words as being that stuff which the primary qualities are thought to and be in in which we never come across in our experience all we ever have are these properties which the objects are represented as having and we never actually get to see the actual material stuff out there so Barclays challenge is if you're going to be an empiricist explain why you get to believe in things that you've never seen before and when it's put that way it's targeted at a very specific form of empiricism which was developed at this time and to which there's no good answer at least not yet and it's important that we understand this way of putting it because it's this way of thinking about things that Locke is having excuse me that Conte is going to come along and try to challenge

Channel: Richard Brown

Views: 41,637

Rating: 4.8243241 out of 5

Keywords: empiricism, John Locke George Berkeley, idealism

Id: R9GuSA9HHgA

Length: 38min 21sec (2301 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2011