Locke's Empiricism

i want to talk to you today about the philosophy of john locke you've probably heard of john locke as having a deep influence on the american founders and indeed his political philosophy did influence people like george washington john adams thomas jefferson james madison and so on they were more likely however to have on their bookshelves his work on the theory of knowledge which is what we're going to be talking about in this course it's surprising to us perhaps that a long book on the theory of knowledge and locke said by the way i'm sorry it's so long i didn't have time to make it shorter um would be on their shelves instead of his works on political philosophy which are actually quite short and directly relevant to the american experience but locke was somebody who was trained as a medical doctor he spent most of his life as the personal physician of the earl of shaftesbury he also became involved in politics he had to flee for hal to holland for a while and ended up coming back to england on the boat that brought william and mary back to the throne so locke was highly influential in politics even in his own day in fact he served on the board of trade and did his best to try to abolish the slave trade he was a strong believer in individual liberty we're going to look here however on his philosophy empiricism that was based mostly on his medical experience he was a man of science and brought that attitude into philosophy and tried to turn philosophy into something that had a sort of scientific foundation where does scientific knowledge come from lux said experience experience of the world so he was recognized as a great professor of moral philosophy however it wasn't just moral philosophy or political philosophy that he excelled at it was in formulating a highly influential theory of knowledge one of the basic questions of the theory of knowledge is what is the ultimate source of knowledge or what sources of knowledge are there and then what are its limits locke gave answers to those questions distinctive answers that were based on the aristotelian tradition but helped to shape this and still remain highly influential today well empiricism is the view that all of our knowledge of the world comes from experience we can distinguish two forms of it a concept form that says all of our ideas all of our concepts come from experience and a judgment form that says all of our knowledge of the world comes from experience so all of our ideas all the raw materials of thinking are coming from our perceptions or the perceptions of other people the collective human experience of the world and all of our judgments all of the things we proclaim as true all of our beliefs are coming from experience here is how he frames this thesis of concept empiricism and he spends by the way all of book one of the essay arguing that there are no innate ideas all of her ideas come from experience he says all ideas come from sensation or reflection let's suppose the mind to be as we say white paper devoid of all characters without any ideas how comes it to be furnished whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundly foundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge notice that image of the mind when we're born our mind is white paper a blank sheet of paper with nothing written on it what does right on it by the time you get to be my age all sorts of stuff much of it junk is written on it but one hopes a lot of knowledge as well where's that all coming from it's not built in the first place as a baby i'm born with my mind a blank slate but aha his answer is in one word experience all our knowledge is founded on experience from that it ultimately derives itself so everything i know about the world is coming from experience everything written on the mind has been written by my experience of the world what does our experience consist in he says there are really two forms of it our observation employed either about external sensible objects or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking these two are the fountains of knowledge from whence all the ideas we have or can naturally have due spring so all of our ideas are coming from two forms of experience my experience of the outside world my experience of the table or of the keys or of other things my eyeglasses and so forth or it's coming from the internal reflections the internal operations of my own mind now at first glance you might be surprised by that you might think well experience is typically experience of the outside world right experience of things around me what do you mean experience of what is inside and indeed rationalists tend to say wait a minute that's not experienced at all that's something else that's reflection that that's my kind of thing not your kind of thing but locke is saying wait a minute of course i have an awareness of things going on in my own mind i'm aware that right now i am speaking that is something that is an activity in my body and so is partly an external matter but i'm also aware that i'm thinking and that awareness that i'm thinking is something that is happening purely internal it is something internal to my mind of course i have that kind of awareness the empiricist doesn't intend to deny that i can be aware that i am right now seeing for example forget what i'm seeing that's about an external thing but i'm just aware that i'm getting visual impressions that i have visual visual images before my mind that's something that i can know and that's a kind of experience i experience what's going on in my own mind and the same thing is true of my own thinking i can be aware that i'm thinking i can be aware of what i'm thinking i can be aware of my own feelings i might be aware of pains for example that are purely internal and some of those might be things that are tracked to something external like the little paper cut i got yesterday on my finger but some of them aren't a few years ago i was in an auto accident and it took a long time to fully recover from that i had a student a master's student for a while who was writing a thesis on the phenomenology of pain that is to say the experience of pain and as we would talk i would be sitting there thinking well i feel fine and by the end of an hour talking to her about how it feels to be in pain i would think oh i'm in such pain okay that wasn't something i could track in many cases to a specific thing just kind of like oh my back hurts and that was something that really well i i would nor ordinarily not even think think about but talking about it made me hyper aware of those internal sensations i was receiving of course i can be aware of my own internal sensations my own internal visual impressions my feelings of pain my feelings of pleasure i can be aware of my own thoughts so all of those things and my own emotions i might be aware that i'm feeling sad or feeling moody and kind of grumpy or feeling happy and all of those things are possible too those are gained by reflection not by sensation of the outside world but they're both legitimate sources of knowledge and they're both kinds of perception so perception can be directed externally toward the outside world it can be also directed internally through reflection where i think about my own mental states there are then two kinds of experience sensation and that comes through the five senses vision hearing smell taste and touch but also reflection reflection that notice the mind takes of its own operations lock says i can be aware of my own mental operations of my own mental states well locke talks a lot about ideas in fact descartes is the one who starts this entire approach to philosophy called the new way of ideas and locke has ideas as a central concept all throughout his theory of knowledge what is an idea for locke he gives us a number of different characterizations different definitions as you if you will so here's one an idea is whatsoever is the object of the understanding what a man thinks so every time i think i'm thinking about an idea or at least it's the object of the understanding now this is tricky and barkley is going to attack locke a lot on a variety of different subjects but i think this is as we'll see the foundation of barclays attacks whatever is the object of the understanding suppose i'm thinking about an external object i'm thinking about this mask let us say this mask has a bunch of cows on it if you can see it's kind of entertaining but if i think about the mask i'm thinking about i want to say the mask the outside object it's not an idea right i may be thinking about it using the concept or the idea of a mask of a cow and so forth but on the other hand i seem to be directed toward the outside object so when locke talks about an idea as being the object of understanding we've got to realize that phrase is ambiguous for him sometimes the object of the understanding the object of perception the object of my thinking is going to be in his thinking the outside object like the mask or like the hand but other times he seems to say no it's the object i'm thinking about the object i'm always thinking about the object that's the object of the understanding that is to say i'm always thinking by means of ideas and the object of the understanding is the ideas that's a dangerous ambiguity so i think we can clean this up however the way lock presents it it's a bit confusing and we have to try to watch his terminology here because it looks like he's saying i'm always thinking about ideas i never get beyond the ideas to thinking about the world and that seems very weird but barkley as i said is going to make a big deal of that say indeed i never get to the world i just get to ideas to return to lock his next characterization is this an idea is whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking so again what am i thinking about i'm always thinking about an idea he seems to apply that seems surprising i can never think about the mask about my hand i'm always thinking about an idea of the hand an idea of the mask that seems weird it's that which his mind is applied about while thinking that which my mind is applied about i'm up i'm thinking about it looks like i'm saying it looks like a lock is saying i am always thinking about ideas now i've said i think we can clean this up a bit and the way i would do that is to describe an idea in a very different way it's not the object of my thinking the object of my thinking is typically the mask or the keys or my hand or triangularity or justice or whatever it is that i'm thinking about but i'm thinking about it using certain abilities certain cognitive abilities to classify things in the world and that's what i mean by a first order cognitive ability an ability to classify things in the world as hands or as masks or as triangles or as keys or as cases of justice or injustice what's going on in those cases i am showing that i know how to use the word triangle that i know how to apply the concept of triangle then i have the ability to distinguish well hands from other hands hands from non-hands i can distinguish keys from things that are not keys i can tell you when i've got the same key i can distinguish justice from injustice and so forth all of those are cognitive abilities about my ability to classify things in the world and so i think that's the way to really understand locke's talk of ideas but admittedly he doesn't frame it in those terms at all he doesn't talk about abilities or capacities he talks about ideas as objects and i do think in the end that gets him into some trouble but let's see if we can understand what he's up to anyway i'm often in my phrasing of the issue between the rationalists and the empiricists going to phrase it in terms of concepts by which i usually mean these cognitive abilities or cognitive capacities i'm not going to tend to use the term idea except where he does simply because i think his idea of an idea is a little bit confusing is it really what i'm thinking about or is it what i'm thinking by means of i'd like to say i'm thinking about the mask but by means of an idea of the mask in fact by means of a concept of masks in general that's something that makes more sense i think than saying i'm thinking about the idea and it looks like then i can never actually think about the mask well in any case the concept in pierce's thesis is that all of our ideas as lockwood frame it or all concepts as i would like to frame it are coming from experience none of them are innate we do not have any innate inborn first order cognitive abilities so we don't come already being able to classify triangles from non-triangles or hands from non-hands or masks from non-masks etc etc those are distinctions we learn from experience we don't come already classifying the world into all sorts of things instead we learn those classifications from experience so we gain those cognitive abilities through experience our own experience or the experience of other people that is in some way communicated to us so we could say any innate cognitive abilities have to be higher order now we do have some cognitive abilities we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking the mind when we're born is purely a blank sheet of paper we can do things with ideas once the baby starts receiving information the baby can start doing things with it so lock recognizes a number of these higher order abilities things we can do with concepts that we can do with ideas abstraction combination negation and a variety of other logical operations are things that we are capable of performing so the mind does come with certain abilities built into it but they aren't the abilities to classify objects in the world that we experience those we have to gain through experience instead they're the abilities to gain concepts and then to do things with various concepts so let's see how that's supposed to go the thesis itself of concept empiricism is not original with locke it goes all the way back to aristotle aquinas centuries before locke had said nothing is in the mind without first being in the senses which is locke's main position here there are no innate ideas and as locke himself frames it all ideas come from sensation or reflection men barely by the use of their natural faculties may attain to all the knowledge they have without the help of any innate impressions so no innate ideas impressions concepts what have you hume says something very similar a little bit later than locke all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions by which he means sensations perceptions or in other words it's impossible for us to think of anything we haven't antecedently felt either by our external or our internal senses by what lock refers to a sensation or reflection the judgment empiricist says that all of our knowledge of the world comes from experience there aren't any synthetic a priori truths all of my knowledge of the world is either purely verbal or it's something that is based on experience so we've looked at a couple of distinctions the distinction between the a priori and the posteriori hume introduces special terms for these and they become influential in the empiricist tradition and a posteriori judgment is one that depends on experience hume calls those matters of fact and often when people in the empiricist tradition refer to matters of fact that's what they mean they mean things that are going on that are in the world and our knowledge of which depends on experience the a priori is what hume referred to as relations of ideas those are things we can know by a mere operation of thought he says independently of experience because they involve the relations of our own ideas sometimes he'll say they're purely verbal truths they they are based only on language on the meanings of terms so he's really there you might say identifying the a priori and the analytic relations of ideas sounds ambiguous it's something discoverable by a mere operation of thought so it's independent of experience so it's a priori but also he seems to imply it purely involves the relations between ideas between concepts or between meanings of terms if we put it linguistically that makes it analytic now that's not a confusion on hube's part he thinks those are equivalent concepts in the end even though one is semantic about meanings the other is really epistemic about knowledge nevertheless they coincide precisely so from the point of view of the judgment empiricist there are no synthetic a priori truth all truths are either analytic and a priori and those two terms thus become materially equivalent or they're synthetic and a posteriori and those matters of fact those two terms synthetic and posteriori become material equivalent as well so they're just relations of ideas that one check mark of the analytic and a priori or matters of fact the synthetic and a posteriori lock thinks both of those things are true that is to say that all of our concepts are coming from experience and all our knowledge is coming from experience but also he thinks there's a connection between these two that is to say that concept empiricism entails judgment empiricism if you are an empiricist about concepts he says you've got to be an empiricist about knowledge if in other words we have no innate ideas all of our concepts are coming from experience it follows that all of our knowledge comes from experience now why he says synthetic a priori judgments if they existed would have to contain innate concepts if there are things i am born knowing well that means those bits of knowledge must contain concepts things i know are built out of cognitive abilities they're built out of concepts and so for me to have innate knowledge i would have to have innate concepts but i don't have any innate concepts or at least first order cognitive abilities but if i have no innate concepts no ah priori concepts then i can't have any a priori knowledge knowledge is something like the units that are built from the building blocks of concepts no building blocks no building and so i can't have judgments innately without having concepts innately here's how he phrases the argument had those who would persuade us that their innate principles not taken them together in gross but considered separately the parts out of which these propositions are made the ideas or concepts in other words they would not perhaps have been so forward to believe they were innate if the ideas that made up those truths were not innate it was impossible that the propositions made up of them should be innate or our knowledge of them to be born with us so if i don't have any innate ideas i can't have any innate knowledge he says if the ideas be not innate there was a time when the mind was without them but then they won't be innate those principles since the very ideas out of which those principles are formulated would not be there the principles wouldn't be there so they can't be innate they're derived from some other origin for when the ideas themselves are not there can be no knowledge no ascent no mental or verbal propositions about them so for locke there are these two major theses of empiricism the concept thesis there are no innate ideas all of our ideas or concepts come from experience but also the claim that all of our knowledge is coming from experience nothing is already known inborn innately we don't have any innate synthetic operatory principles and he thinks that follows from the claim that there are no innate ideas if i don't have any innate concepts any innate recognition abilities how can i possibly have any innate knowledge that knowledge would have to be based on recognizing the connections among my various cognitive abilities but i don't have any cognitive abilities so i can't recognize any connections among them so in short he's saying it might look as if you could be a concept empiricist and a judgment rationalist that is to say yeah all my concepts are coming from experience but hey once i've got them boom they fit together automatically but he's saying not true not true i can't have any innate knowledge if i don't have innate print concepts of which those principles might be constructed so if i don't have the building blocks i don't have the building if i don't have the concepts i don't have the knowledge

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

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Id: Un_UaJnBszY

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021