buying obby maulers
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Hi guys, so hopefully this essay will be a little more accessible than my last post here.
Basically, the question is: do humans have innate ideas, or do we get everything from experience?
Feel free to skip all the background information and post your opinion, but the background info will be aid you in having a good, philosophically relevant response.
If you raise a question that is answered in this original post, it will not really help the conversation.
For background, I will explain how Descartes answers this question, and then show views contrary to Descartes, in Locke and Berkeley. Basically Descartes, being a rationalist, says we have innate ideas, while Locke and Berkeley, as empiricists, say we get all our ideas from experience only.
Rene Descartes was a rationalist, meaning that he believed that the mind, rather than the senses, was the source of intellectual wisdom. His rational for said theory was that his senses can be deceived about the world. For example, when one is dreaming, one thinks it is real in the moment, and often will see or even hear things that aren't actually occurring in reality. Furthermore - and this is tricky, so read carefully - Descartes doubts that we truly experience objects through the senses, since they only seem to give us an image of them in the mind. Furthermore, all we experience is a collection of qualities that seem to go together, and yet we still call that collection a single object. This leads him to believe in innate ideas, which seem to explain how we understand concepts like 'objects' that we do not experience. We require innate concepts to distinguish between what we experience and what reality is actually like. For example, a perfect cube is something we never experience, and yet we understand the concept. This, for Descartes, is evidence that their are innate ideas: things like logical mathematics, and metaphysics, which help us make sense of the world. According to Descartes, even our sensory ideas involve innate concepts: bodies have no real properties resembling our ideas of colours, sounds, and tastes, except in the mind of the perceiver. This implies that the content of these ideas comes from the mind itself, and not from experience. To illustrate his point about innate ideas, Descartes uses a piece of wax. (This is important - if you read nothing else about Descartes, read this.) Descartes takes a piece of wax, and notes it's qualities. He than melts the wax, and notes it's qualities have changed. However, throughout the process, he notices that he still believes the wax is the same piece of wax, even though he has two completely different experiences of two completely different objects. This continuity is not known by the senses, because we clearly experience two different objects. It is the innate concept of continuous objects that the mind posits on the experienced piece of wax that allows us to experience it as a continuous object. This leads to how Descartes classifies thought: he thinks we have two ways of thinking. One is imagination: you can imagine a triangle quite clearly, and this imagined triangle is a result of sensory experience. However, when one tries to imagine a chilligon (1000 sided object) it is nearly impossible. However, one still understands the concept of a chilligon through pure intellection. This is the relationship between concept and experience: using our pure intellection, we understand the concept of the wax as a single object underlying through it's changes.
On the flip side, empiricists like Locke, Hume, and Berkeley are against Descartes.
Locke thought that humans have no innate ideas, and are born as a tabula rasa - a blank slate. Locke says this because if there were innate ideas (a priori knowledge) than it would be shared by everyone. However, since there are no such shared ideas, the mind is a blank slate at birth. The one ability Locke does believe everyone shares is the capacity to acquire ideas - this ability is their reason. As an empiricist, Locke's solution to where ideas come from is experiences. Locke identifies two types of ideas: simple and complex. Simple ideas are individual experiences of qualities - like 'large' or 'red'. Complex ideas are combinations of simple ideas - like 'chair' or 'computer'. He says our knowledge of these objects comes from their secondary qualities - which is really saying from their primary qualities. For Locke, there are no real generalities, only particulars - the qualities that make something up, not the something itself. When we say 'its a tree', there is no one tree that corresponds with 'tree' - it is an arbitrary word to describe trees in general, which we notice we have some similar experiences of and therefore we create, in our mind, an abstract general idea of tree that has only a few qualites that we perceive every tree has - but not every quality of every tree.. For Locke, something is real if it can be traced back to experience - so even though we may not experience complex ideas themselves, they are based upon experience. Complex ideas are basically our concepts - however, unlike for Descartes, in this case, they are not innate, but grounded in experience.
George Berkeley raised some issues concerning Locke's simple and complex ideas. However, like Locke, he was an empiricist, and would not side with Descartes. This is complex, so if you don't understand the first time around, try rereading it. Berkeley said that simple and complex ideas cannot be separated in the way Locke does, since we dont experience just simple ideas. Instead, we use our complex ideas to imagine individual simple ideas existing on their own, as opposed to our experience of them which is that they are always part of something else (you can't have 'red' without something being red.) Furthermore, Berkeley objects to abstract general ideas, since we don't experience them. Abstract general ideas strip down their relevant objects (like various individual trees) and assign to them some common attributes that they all share. However, we don't experience trees in this way - we experience many individual trees. For Berkeley, all our experiences are particular; there is no general whatsoever, whereas for Locke, there had been. Berkeley is also concerned about primary qualities and how they seem to vary from person to person - someone might say something is very big, while the other might say it is only somewhat big. If this is the case, they must all be secondary qualities - but if they are, there are no primary qualities, and the distinction fails.
THOUGHTS?
BE RATIONAL
Basically, the question is: do humans have innate ideas, or do we get everything from experience?
Feel free to skip all the background information and post your opinion, but the background info will be aid you in having a good, philosophically relevant response.
If you raise a question that is answered in this original post, it will not really help the conversation.
For background, I will explain how Descartes answers this question, and then show views contrary to Descartes, in Locke and Berkeley. Basically Descartes, being a rationalist, says we have innate ideas, while Locke and Berkeley, as empiricists, say we get all our ideas from experience only.
Rene Descartes was a rationalist, meaning that he believed that the mind, rather than the senses, was the source of intellectual wisdom. His rational for said theory was that his senses can be deceived about the world. For example, when one is dreaming, one thinks it is real in the moment, and often will see or even hear things that aren't actually occurring in reality. Furthermore - and this is tricky, so read carefully - Descartes doubts that we truly experience objects through the senses, since they only seem to give us an image of them in the mind. Furthermore, all we experience is a collection of qualities that seem to go together, and yet we still call that collection a single object. This leads him to believe in innate ideas, which seem to explain how we understand concepts like 'objects' that we do not experience. We require innate concepts to distinguish between what we experience and what reality is actually like. For example, a perfect cube is something we never experience, and yet we understand the concept. This, for Descartes, is evidence that their are innate ideas: things like logical mathematics, and metaphysics, which help us make sense of the world. According to Descartes, even our sensory ideas involve innate concepts: bodies have no real properties resembling our ideas of colours, sounds, and tastes, except in the mind of the perceiver. This implies that the content of these ideas comes from the mind itself, and not from experience. To illustrate his point about innate ideas, Descartes uses a piece of wax. (This is important - if you read nothing else about Descartes, read this.) Descartes takes a piece of wax, and notes it's qualities. He than melts the wax, and notes it's qualities have changed. However, throughout the process, he notices that he still believes the wax is the same piece of wax, even though he has two completely different experiences of two completely different objects. This continuity is not known by the senses, because we clearly experience two different objects. It is the innate concept of continuous objects that the mind posits on the experienced piece of wax that allows us to experience it as a continuous object. This leads to how Descartes classifies thought: he thinks we have two ways of thinking. One is imagination: you can imagine a triangle quite clearly, and this imagined triangle is a result of sensory experience. However, when one tries to imagine a chilligon (1000 sided object) it is nearly impossible. However, one still understands the concept of a chilligon through pure intellection. This is the relationship between concept and experience: using our pure intellection, we understand the concept of the wax as a single object underlying through it's changes.
On the flip side, empiricists like Locke, Hume, and Berkeley are against Descartes.
Locke thought that humans have no innate ideas, and are born as a tabula rasa - a blank slate. Locke says this because if there were innate ideas (a priori knowledge) than it would be shared by everyone. However, since there are no such shared ideas, the mind is a blank slate at birth. The one ability Locke does believe everyone shares is the capacity to acquire ideas - this ability is their reason. As an empiricist, Locke's solution to where ideas come from is experiences. Locke identifies two types of ideas: simple and complex. Simple ideas are individual experiences of qualities - like 'large' or 'red'. Complex ideas are combinations of simple ideas - like 'chair' or 'computer'. He says our knowledge of these objects comes from their secondary qualities - which is really saying from their primary qualities. For Locke, there are no real generalities, only particulars - the qualities that make something up, not the something itself. When we say 'its a tree', there is no one tree that corresponds with 'tree' - it is an arbitrary word to describe trees in general, which we notice we have some similar experiences of and therefore we create, in our mind, an abstract general idea of tree that has only a few qualites that we perceive every tree has - but not every quality of every tree.. For Locke, something is real if it can be traced back to experience - so even though we may not experience complex ideas themselves, they are based upon experience. Complex ideas are basically our concepts - however, unlike for Descartes, in this case, they are not innate, but grounded in experience.
George Berkeley raised some issues concerning Locke's simple and complex ideas. However, like Locke, he was an empiricist, and would not side with Descartes. This is complex, so if you don't understand the first time around, try rereading it. Berkeley said that simple and complex ideas cannot be separated in the way Locke does, since we dont experience just simple ideas. Instead, we use our complex ideas to imagine individual simple ideas existing on their own, as opposed to our experience of them which is that they are always part of something else (you can't have 'red' without something being red.) Furthermore, Berkeley objects to abstract general ideas, since we don't experience them. Abstract general ideas strip down their relevant objects (like various individual trees) and assign to them some common attributes that they all share. However, we don't experience trees in this way - we experience many individual trees. For Berkeley, all our experiences are particular; there is no general whatsoever, whereas for Locke, there had been. Berkeley is also concerned about primary qualities and how they seem to vary from person to person - someone might say something is very big, while the other might say it is only somewhat big. If this is the case, they must all be secondary qualities - but if they are, there are no primary qualities, and the distinction fails.
THOUGHTS?
BE RATIONAL
