Reason as a source of knowledge

• A priori knowledge


  Knowledge that does not require sense experience to know it's true

  "A bachelor is an unmarried man"
• A prosteriori knowledge


  Knowledge that can be proven through through sensory experiences & observation

  "there are more than 6 billion people on earth"
• A priori and A prosteriori knowledge both require experience to be understood, however A prosteriori requires experience to be proven, A priori does not
• Contingent truths


  Either true/false depending on the world

  "there are more types of insects than any other animal"

  This may be true today, but another day it may be false
• Necessary truths

  Either true/false and the answer can't change

  "2+2=4"

  It is impossible to say 2+2 will ever equal anything other than 4
• Innatism


  The mind is born with ideas, knowledge and beliefs. The mind is not a tabula rasa
• Plato's Geometry problem, innatism

  Dialogue,

  Socrates asks a slave geometrical problems and leads him to the correct answer. Through deduction, the boy gets the correct answer, without experience but innately

  • Plato's Meno problem shows how we can naturally know things innately from birth using logical reasoning we are born with
• An issue with Plato's geometrical problem to explain innatism is that innate knowledge cannot overall help solve mathematical questions, we need experience to understand the logic from these questions
• necessary truth


  One that must be true, for Leibniz, true in all possible worlds
• truth


  A proposition in which the predicate is contained in the subject. The predicate is was is asserted, the subject is what the assertion is about, according to Leibniz.
• Standard for of Leibniz's argument of innatism

  P1: The senses only give us particular instances

  P2: A collection of instances can never show the necessity of a truth

  P3: We can grasp and prove necessary truths such as mathematics

  C1: Therefore the necessary truths that we grasp with our minds do not come from the senses

  C2: The mind is the source of necessary truths

  C3: Therefore, ideas are known innately

  Necessary truths do not come from our experiences/senses, but innately from our minds
• Leibniz's marble analogy, innatism


  • The statue presented to be sculpted is already present under the marble block, due to the naturally occurring veins & fissures in the rock
  • The sculptor simply releases the statue from the block

  This shows innatism as it shows how, like a block of marble, humans have the knowledge, they just need the right experiences to uncover it
• Locke's view on innatism

  Humans obtain all knowledge without innatism, the mind begins as a tabula rasa. We are born without knowledge and know everything through experience
• Universal consent


  There are principles which are universally agreed on by all humans, these support the existence of innate ideas.

  Universal consent to....

  Plato: concepts of beauty,justice & mathematical concepts

  Leibniz: Mathematical logical truths, concept of identity
• Locke believes there is no universal consent

  • Criticises foundations of innatism; universal consent
  • Believes innatism is incoherent
  • Denies any argument is universally held

  "No man would consent to even the most obvious moral laws without a great deal of reason first"
• Locke, no universal consent.....

  • Children come into the world with nothing on their minds, only have ideas of things they have experienced
  • Young child is vulnerable to moral influence and most open to understanding and experience
  • Children need; nurturing , active parents & tutoring to develop a "virtuous mind" (Do not just know things innately

  "Children are strangers to all we are acquainted with, and all the things they meet us with, are at first unknown to them, as they once were to us"
• According to Locke, existence and ideas aren't likely to be innate as ideas such as existence & identity are extremely complex, they require a lot of learning & experience to be clear on them. Children cannot just be born knowing these propositions or they wouldn't be difficult to understand
• Proof there is no universal consent, Locke


  P1: Any innate idea,x, if exists would be universally held

  p2: Children & idiots have not got ideas of x

  P3: The notion of a person having innate idea,x, and not being aware of it does not make sense

  C1: So x is not universally held

  C2: Therefore x is not innate

  If ideas were innate, everyone would be able to understand them - children & idiots can't. You cannot have knowledge but be unaware you do, that doesn't make sense. Ideas are not universally held so aren't innate
• Empiricism

  Key philosopher: Locke

  • Statements are synthetic
  • Knowledge is a prosteriori "Married men live longer than bachelors"
  • At birth, the mind is a Tabula Rasa
• sense impressions


  Understanding something as you experience the world, through the senses
• Concepts


  Imagining something without experiencing it at the time. The concept is formed from earlier sense impressions
• Sense impressions & ideas, empiricism

  Locke believes the term "idea" covers sensations, concepts & thoughts

  Hume says impressions & ideas are perceptions that we are immediately aware of (e.g. seeing a painting)

  • Impressions are related to feeling & sensing (how you feel about the painting
  • Ideas, related to thinking (thinking you would like to paint after seeing the painting)
• Difference between impressions and ideas, empiricism

  ideas are "faint copies" of impressions

  • You need to have impressions to form idea

  Without a particular type of experience (impression) a person cannot form the related concepts (ideas) e.g. a blind man, from birth, cannot imagine the concept (idea) of colour
• Transcendental 


  A specific feature in the world is necessary to enable a particular experience to occur

  (Term made by Kant)
• Deduction

  A process where the truth is gaurenteed within the statement
• Hume believers all idea come from sensual experience & our inner feelings, this is an empiricist belief opposing to Descartes who is a rationalist. Similarly to Descartes, Hume thought deduction was important however, he thought it had a different purpose than what Descartes thought - Hume believed deduction tells us about the relationship between ideas
• Hume believes deduction cannot tell us anything new about the world but can help us understand the relationship between ideas. E.g. we can see in real life bachelors are unmarried

  Descartes believed his cogito was a deductive argument as his statement was true in itself, he believed deduction was our source of knowledge
• Analytic statements


  Formal, abstract knowledge e.g. Mathematics, Logic
• Synthetic statements


  Empirical statements, derived from the five senses - empirical knowledge based on impressions from sense experience
• Hume categorised two kinds of knowledge as being either Analytic or Synthetic statements
• Analytic statements explain the relation of ideas
• Synthetic statements explain 'matters of fact'
• Analytic statements are formal, abstract knowledge e.g. Mathematics, Logic
• Synthetic statements are derived from the five senses - empirical knowledge based on impressions from sense experience
• Hume explains how we know matters of facts, through sensory experience and through memory. The knowledge "the sun will rise tomorrow" is inferred from past experiences, the sun has risen everyday in the past

  Hume believes our knowledge of cause and effect is based on experience, when observing something in the past, we infer what will happen in the future
• John Locke believed that people were born with a blank slate called tabula rasa which was then filled up over time with information gathered from the world around them. He argued that this meant everyone had different life experiences so would develop unique personalities and beliefs.
• intuition


  The rational mind apprehends the truth or falsity of something with immediacy (without any process of reasoning or inference).
• Empiricism: simple and complex ideas 💡 


  Locke uses his example of simple & complex ideas to argue that humans form all knowledge, even complex concepts from experience

  • Looking at the sky, may give me the simple concept of blueness 💙, a simple concept is just one thing
  • Complex concepts are made up of several simple concepts e.g. the ocean 🌊: made up of the simple concepts of blue 🔵 and cold 🥶
• Complex ideas go beyond specific instances of things to form abstract ideas 💡.

  E.g. the complex concept of one chair 🪑 forms abstract idea of chairs in general.

  Abstract concepts such as beauty 😍 or God are also abstracted from experience. E.g. we see 🙈 a beautiful ❤️ lake, a beautiful 😍 person and a beautiful painting 🖌️ and overtime abstract the common features of these experiences to form the abstract concept of beauty.
• Through the explanation of concepts, Locke shows how all our concept and knowledge - no matter how complex- can be explained as coming from experience. And so, if we can explain all knowledge and concepts using experience only, there is no need for innate knowledge 😜