Locke's Empiricism

ok so now we're going to talk about Locke's empiricism and essentially what we're doing now is saying well Locke critiqued this notion of innate ideas and the rationalist tradition of epistemology and so we need to see what he's going to offer as an alternative and because if one of his major criticisms was that we don't need to postulate innate ideas to explain anything empiricism can just explain everything that we need so we need to actually analyze what his alternative is and see if it's worthwhile so rationalists as we've already discussed believed there are some beliefs we have which won't be justified by an appeal to our experience empiricists on the other hand think that every belief we have at bottom will be justified by an appeal to experience so if you're playing the why game with a child right every time somebody asks why you believe something you give them a justification and you keep going keep following the chain all the way down and at bottom Locke and other empiricists claim that you're ultimately going to justify that whole entire chain of beliefs by some experience you've had so how does this all start off well Locke initially thinks we come into the world as a blank slate or in Latin tabula rasa right so there is we all come in as this tabula rasa there's absolutely no information on us right so there's a nice little picture of a blank slate there so that's a good sort of analogy for how we start in the world so when we come out of the womb when we're born we're just blank right but the second we start experiencing things our slate gets filled with a bunch of content right so even as an infant the second we come out of the womb and start seeing things we're already being filled with experience we're not choosing to if just that the second we get the perceptions coming in it starts to fill our slate in and I guess this could happen even in the womb if I'm not sure how we characterize some of those perceptions but if you're perceiving things in the womb then those would be filling your slate as well but the ultimate point is that we all start off completely blank there's nothing there yet if you were a rationalist you would think that a child in the womb or a fresh born infant already has some knowledge with it it didn't need to start perceiving things to gain knowledge maybe God just had already written some knowledge into our brains right so that's a really important point Locke thinks we're all starting off as these blank slates and then experience quickly starts to give us the material we need to work with so how do we get ideas and so for the rationalist it's pretty easy right we already have some and then we can use experience as well right so the rationalist isn't claiming that we never use experience or just saying there's some beliefs that don't rely on experience so the rationalist already has a bunch of tools what does the empiricist have well here's how Locke thinks we form all of our ideas we start off with these simple ideas and we get simple ideas through the senses and really this is just what we get when we're perceiving things right so when we touch something when we hear smell or see something we're gaining all of this raw material from our experiences and these count as simple ideas and it's important we don't actually choose to receive these ideas we just simply receive them right so it's not like we're choosing to have perceptions of the world we're just passively receiving perceptions from the world so examples of things that count as simple ideas would be things like whiteness hardness sweetness etc same on for all the colors textures tastes so on and so forth so these are all very simple ideas we don't get a lot of content from them but we do get the raw material we need to start building all of our other ideas and this notion of building ideas or getting other ideas comes to us from Locke's notion of complex ideas so roughly what's happening here is he thinks we can take all of that raw material we get from our simple ideas and perception and then we can use our mind to take those simple ideas or the raw material and build new ones right so our mind is a powerful thing it can actually create ideas from the simple ideas we get so some examples of complex ideas here are listed birch tree a unicorn you can compare between objects we'll talk about this more in just a second but roughly see the level of complexity here right so a unicorn when we first see a unicorn obviously we will never see one but if we could see a unicorn we would get all these simple ideas coming in right like a shape whatever it smelled like or felt like the idea of whiteness whatever the color of its horn is like a greyish maybe we could feel the horn and get this idea of hardness and then when we put all of those simple ideas together we would get the complex idea of a unicorn right so even if you thought we could never get the all the material from the same place that's okay if we witness a horse somewhere witness a horn somewhere else our mind can take the simple ideas we get from each of those encounters put them together into one big complex idea the unicorn so the important thing to think here is that for the important thing to notice is that all of our ideas have to come from one of these two processes right we either get it through perception or our mind takes what we get from perception and builds new ideas so if we have ideas of these really complex things like God or the existence of an external world then we're gonna have to eventually be able to describe it by these processes and we'll talk about how you might do that or look later okay so let's say some more about complex ideas it's a lot doesn't think the mind can just do absolutely anything it wants he thinks that the mind has this power of reflection and that includes a number of sort of sub powers so one power of reflection is that we can take a bunch of ideas we have already so these could be simple or complex but it has to be stuff we already have and then we can join them together right so we already talked about how this might work with the idea of a unicorn right we can have this complex idea of a horse that we've already built and then get this simple idea of whiteness and maybe other complex ideas such as what a horn is and then throw them all together join them and then we get this new idea we get this new complex idea of the unicorn another way reflection might work is we can bring ideas together but hold them separate in our minds right so we're not combining them here we're just bringing them together and basically this is our power of comparison and so I can get my idea that James is taller than Daniel because I can bring together my complex idea of James my complex idea of Daniel and I don't have to join them I hold them separately from one another and then I can study the differences and similarities that each idea has and so now I have this new idea right that one object is taller than another and then finally our brains can use this power of reflection to abstract and form new ideas so how does this work well we have these general concepts or general ideas of we'll use the example of a cat here right so when I say hey cats exist I'm not talking about any particular cat I'm saying there's this general thing called a cat and these things exist so what's happening here well our brain is taking the particular simple ideas and complex ideas we've add and do have of the cats we've seen throughout our life and abstracting away from each of those particulars to build a very general idea all right so let's just say we've seen two particular cats right we've seen the cat mr. snuffles and the cat Bob the cat and so we can take both of those ideas in our mind and let's imagine there are a few more cats right so just say there's five or six cats there and we can take each of those complex ideas and notice that they all have something very similar to one another and we can abstract away from each of those instances and form our general idea of a cat so this is the brains power of reflection it can do a lot right so just through these three processes we can take all the simple and complex ideas we already have and build a whole slew of new ones which are don't hat can range from sort of complex to infinitely complex okay so the next thing we need to know is that Locke thinks there's this distinction between primary and secondary qualities so when we experience objects we experience a number of things right when we perceive an object we perceive a bunch of information about it what color is it health well how dense is it what's the texture how many is there is that object in motion we experience all that stuff now Locke thinks there's a distinction to make he thinks that some of those qualities actually describe or represent the object right they're a true description of how the object actually is so for example he thinks primary qualities are the qualities that represent the objects as they actually are some examples of these will be solidity figure extension motion and number then there are secondary qualities and these are qualities that the object produces ideas of in our minds but they don't actually represent the object the object doesn't actually have these qualities and so examples of secondary qualities or things like colors sounds tastes odors and felt temperature so he's going to think primary qualities are true of the object secondary qualities are somewhat like an illusion we do see them when we look at the objects but they don't properly describe the object so now we should be asking well why should we believe this this is pretty weird talk right so first Locke wanted this distinction so we could make sense of some scientific findings so in his time they had already discovered that objects appear to have a color but this isn't actually due to the object being that color it's due to the motion and reflection of my new particles right so it's due to the way light reflects off of different surfaces and interacts with our eyes and so Locke thought we can make sense of these scientific findings by making this distinction between primary and secondary qualities now just because he wanted this distinction doesn't mean it actually exists so we have to see why we should believe in such a distinction and here Locke gives us a number of reasons to believe this distinction actually exists first is the example of the grain of rice so Locke says take a single grain of rice and divide it in half does it still retain all of its qualities well that seems true it's still gonna be whitish it's still gonna be the same texture it's still gonna smell the same it's still gonna be a single grain of rice it's still going to have all these different qualities right whether they're primary or secondary now he says keep dividing it and keep dividing it and keep dividing it at a certain point the grain of rice at a one of its many divisions will change color it will also change its a texture it will change its smell so on and so forth but it won't change any of its primary qualities it won't change a number it won't change the idea whether or not it's in motion it won't change the idea that the rice has extension so Locke wants to say well if it keeps all the primary qualities and loses all the secondary well then the primary qualities must truly describe it the bucket of water example just says hey if you stick one hand in some ice one hand near fire and then stick them both in the same room temperature bucket of water then it's going to feel different to each hand but the water isn't actually two different temperatures all right so this secondary quality of temperature or temperature feel is illusory and can lead us astray so the secondary quality must not actually be describing the object but we could get the primary quality of literal temperature through a thermometer and then that would correctly describe the object so that's why he thinks we should believe in secondary versus primary qualities and now you've seen Locke's entire different set up how his empiricism works and how we're supposed to build all of our ideas if we're an empiricist next we'll look at a secondary in Pearce's named david hume and see how his alternative works

Channel: James Hall

Views: 11,353

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Id: XgyYVOB2wBE

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2017