Reason and Experience

Reason and Experience

1. Tabula Rasa

   • Blank slate - idea being that our mind is a blank canvas at birth and is "furnished" through our lives
   • Philosophers
     • Locke
       • All ideas come from sensation and reflection
         • Idea = something that is directly present in the mind e.g book, car, computer, hand etc blind people lack the idea of colour
         • Sensation = Through experience Reflection = through remembering or thinking about an experience
     • Hume
       • Impressions are the basis of ideas
         • Impressions = sense experience or feelings ideas = concepts memories and thoughts
       • Copy thesis: all ideas are coppies of impression
         • Impressions are more vivid and forceful than ideas, as long as we can trace back our concepts, our knowledge is secure
         • We can form ideas of things we haven't experienced by putting two sense impressions together
           • Example - Unicorn = concept of horse and horn
           • Golden Mountain
             • Never seen a golden mountain but you can form an idea of one, this is because you have a sense impression of a mountain and a sense impression of gold and so you can put them together to form a complex (compound) ide
       • Missing shade of Blue
         • If we were given a section of blues where one shade of blue was missing, would we be able to form the concept of the missing shade of blue? It seems plausable to suggest that one would be able to imagine the missing shade of blue.
         • Hume says that this is the exception to the rule but saying this undermines the basic tenet of empiricism
       • Hume against philosophers who spoke about concepts that cannot be derved from sense impressions
         • Words such as 'the' 'if' 'so' 'all'
           • Essential for understanding sentences but they don't seem to have a corresponding sense impression
     • Wittgenstein
       • Sense impressions are not sufficient for ideas
         • Teaching and learning
           • Sense impressions alone could not be the only thing involved in learning. Not only teachers but parents and friends and role models that tell us and teach us things. 
           • Suggests that we have innate knowledge of learning therefore our mind is not a tabula rasa at birth
         • Tove
           • if someone held up a pencil and said "this is tove". if it were true that sense impressions are sufficient for aquiring ideas you should aquire the idea of "tove" from the pencil But the sense of impression isn't sufficient because it could mean anything such as "this is a pencil" "This is round" "this is hard etc. you need someone or something to say WHAT "tove" is supposed to represent

2. Innate Ideas

   • Innate ideas are: 1. there at birth 2. a priori (aqured independent of experience) 3. Universal (everyone has them) 4. The foundation of all our knowledge
   • Universality - everyone has the same innate ideas although they have different experiences
     • Locke
       • if everyone was born with the same innate knowledge then we could expect everyone including children and "idiots" to accept them. But if you asked a child if they believe that something can 'be and not be' they would get lost.
   • Plato
     • Numbers
       • We can never experience the number 2 so our concepts of numbers must be innate
         • we can encounter "two-ness" but ever actually the number 2
       • Empiricists argue
         • We can aquire the concept of different numbers by experiencing lots of things in twos, the concept of 2 is therefore some sort of copy of the comon denominator
         • However, chances are we haven't experienced many things in groups of 5146 (example)
   • Chomsky
     • Language
       • Children pick up language really quickly and can use it to make their own sentences
         • only way to explain this phenomenon is to say that there is an innate capacity for language
       • Language mould
         • Universal languarge structure or grammar that all languages conform to.
       • An ability, not knowledge
         • Not a form of innate knowledge. The ability to construct gramatically correct sentences is not a knowledge. it is better to say that children have an ability. ( a know-how rather than a know-that)
         • However, it is a knowledge the ability enables
           • 'the cat look there on the mat' is incorrect, but this wasn't learnt through experience.
   • Moore
     • Morality
       • You can only recognise good behaviour when you see it
         • if you try to describe good behaviour you only describe the action or an opinio rather than the concept.
       • Yellow analogy
         • you can't define yellow, you can only describe it as "being yellow" You can only describe morality as "being good" but you cannot define good
         • you cannot define "good"
           • Therefore, if you cannot define "good" you cannot get a sense impression of "good" and so therefore we cannot learn it so it MUST be innate.
           • Hume said you can
             • Morality has some innate ideas but depends upon the emotion of the individual. Hume could not gain a sense experience of morality and therefore said it must not exist
             • However children have a sense of morality from a young age
       • innate knowledge of morality can suggest 2 things
         • 1. we can naturally act in a moral way 2. we have an inbuilt ability to make moral judgements.
         • Animals have shown signs of morality
           • Lab rats and Vampire bats as examples

3. Conceptual Schemes