Reason and Experience

Reason and Experience

1. tabula rasa

   • all subsequent ideas and knowledge must come from experience
   • both simple and complex ideas must stem from sense experience
   • propositions that don't relate to sense impressions should be treated with suspicion
   • criticisms
     • some ideas can't be traced back
     • we do not know for certain what causes sense impressions
     • impressions require a classification process
     • simple/complex ideas don't make sense
     • trap of solipsism
     • scepticism about the future and the past

2. Logical Positivists claim that propositions, to be meaningful, must be hypothetically verifiable

3. Foundationalism is the claim that our knowledge must be based on a set of foundational beliefs that themselves cannot be questioned

   • An empiricist would claim that sense impressions are indubitable and so from the bedrock of knowledge

4. innate ideas

   • not derived from experience
   • truths of mathematics, God, beauty and morality etc.
   • empiricists would argue that such truths do not contribute to knowledge of the world that exists
     • they are either true by definition - tautology
     • Or they are deduced implications of truths that are already known - deductive reasoning

5. certainty

   • seems limited to introspection and tautologies
   • Descartes' cogito and other transcendental arguments

6. conceptual schemes

   • the mind has a predetermined structure that categorises the real world into the world we perceive
   • experience is unintelligible without conceptual schemes
   • if we can work out the ways in which the mind categorises the data then we can know a priori how the world will appear to us
     • in this way synthetic a priori knowledge is possible