When I wake up in the morning
I know that the sky is going to be blue
And that the sun will be shining
The tweeting I hear are birds singing
I know that when I go downstairs
And feed my cat
He will have four legs and will be ginger
And that the big metal box with wheels outside
my house is called a car
But how do I know these things?
How did I come to be of this knowledge?
What allowed me to gain my concepts of
Sky Sun Birds Cat and Car?
There have originally been two schools of
thought to how we come to be of knowledge
Empiricism which argues that we gain all of
our knowledge from experience
And rationalism which argues that certain
knowledge
Can be gained just by reason and thinking
British Philosopher John Locke
Was an Empiricist and argued that when we
are born
Our minds are in the state of Tabula Rasa
Which when translated to English
Simply translates as blank slate
But what does John Locke mean by this?
Well John Locke was basically saying that
when we are born
Our minds are completely empty of all ideas
and concepts
And that as we start to experience things
through our senses
Such as touch taste sight sound and smell
Our minds start to gain those ideas and concepts
We are all familiar with
For instance a new born baby might see a dog
And therefore gain the concept of dog
On top of this Locke says as our mind gains
certain concepts
It starts to group them together to form more
complex concepts
For example it may group the concepts of Cat
Dog and Cow together
To form the concept of animals
Or group Box Wheels Motor together
To form the concept of car
This view on how we gain knowledge is supported
by Scottish Philosopher
And heavy pie eater David Hume
Who says A blind man can form no notion of
colours
A deaf man of sounds
Restore either of them that sense in which
he is deficient
By opening this new inlet for his sensations
You also open an inlet for the ideas
And he finds no difficulty in conceiving these
objects
This suggests that surely then our ideas can
only come from our sense experience
However rationalists would strongly disagree
And instead argue that there is some knowledge
That we can get without needing to have experienced
anything
For example a rationalist like Descartes
Would argue that concepts such as mathematics
Can be gained without experience
He backs up this claim by saying that we can
conceive the concept of a chiliagon
A one thousand sided shape
Without having experienced such an object
Other mathematical concepts such as
Square root equals and plus
Also do not seem to have come from experience
Implying that the Empiricist view that that
all knowledge comes from sense experience
is false
Lastly we will have a look at another more
modern view of how we gain knowledge
Raised by German Philosopher Immanuel Kant
Kant is neither an empiricist nor is he a
rationalist
Instead being German he created his own theory
Kant argued that we are all born with certain
innate concepts
That allow us to make sense of the world
The official term he gives to these are
Predetermined conceptual schemes
Kant argues that without these concepts our
experiences would just be a unintelligible
buzz of sensation
To illustrate this point he gives the the
analogy of a ship sailing down a river
He says that if we looked at a ship sailing
down a river
Without the predetermined concept of casualty
We would perceive the boat as a different
object every time it moved
And our perception of it changed
It is only our concept of causality that we
are born with
That tells us that the boat is the same boat
that we saw a few seconds ago up the river
So what do you think?
How did you become to know of things?
Please leave your thoughts and ideas in the
comments below
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