Describe and assess Locke, Berkeley and Hume's empiricist approach to knowledge and the conclusions they reach

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Describe and assess Locke, Berkeley and Hume’s empiricist approach to knowledge and the conclusions they reach

Empiricist philosophy arose out of doubts towards rationalism, in an attempt to search for a theory of knowledge that would be consistent with ordinary human behaviour. Instead of seeking absolutely certain knowledge about an alleged real world, empiricists have tried to discover where we get our information from and what degree of reliability it actually possesses. Rather than rejecting sensory data in favour of some completely certain knowledge about a non-visible realm, these philosophers have begun with our sense experience as the source and basis of what we know, and have tried to construct an account of knowledge in terms of a posteriori evidence.

Empiricism has been the major mover in Western philosophy, and its most influential peak came around the 17th and 18th centaury; a time when Locke, Berkeley and Hume, were contemporaneous. I shall assess the approaches of all three and look at the theories for knowledge that they came up with.

         John Locke (1632-1704), a medical doctor by profession, tried to work out an explanation of our knowledge in terms of a posteriori sense experience. He studied the work of Descartes, the rationalist, and rejected the suggestion of ‘innate ideas’ or a priori knowledge. He believed that humans were not born with any form knowledge and said that just because something is universally agreed, its not necessarily true, and just because something is universally known, its not necessarily innate. This rejection of the a priori is central to Locke’s theory; stating that the mind is a blank sheet, written on by what comes to us through our a posteriori experiences.

He said that all ideas we come to have originated from either sensation or reflection. An ‘idea’ being a ‘mental image’, or a notion of an experience. Sensation is how we perceive through the senses. And reflection comes after sensation; it’s any mental activity such as wishing, thinking and so on.

In order to justify his empirical claims, Locke patiently tied to show how all our information derives either from experiences of reflection, or of sensation. The most basic elements of our knowledge are what Locke called simple ideas. These are ideas that are not compounded of any other elements. As examples of such ideas, Locke offered the taste of sugar or the small of a rose. These simple ideas are presented to us only in sensation and reflection. The mind has the power, we are told, to store up, to repeat, and to combine these basic ideas one it has experienced them.

These simple ideas come to the mind passively, however, those ideas that do not fit into this criteria are known as complex ideas, which come from the minds ability to combine various experiences it has had in the past.

Locke tired to show how the various parts of our knowledge come from different experiences such as sensation or reflection. A basic difficulty he ran into was that of showing which of our ideas are real, that is, which parts of our information ‘have a conformity with the real being and the existence of things’. We have a great many ideas in our mind that do not relate to anything that actually exists in the world, such as our ideas of mermaids and unicorns. How do we tell just from the examination of our ideas, which ones of them ought to be considered as real, and which are only the results of our imaginations? The answer Locke gave enabled him to work out a theory about the character and reliability of knowledge.

He divided the sensations that we have into two groups – the ideas of primary qualities, and the ideas of secondary qualities. The primary qualities are those items in our experience which must belong to the objects that we are experiencing, whereas the secondary qualities ‘in truth are nothing in the objects themselves, but the powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities’. For example, according to Locke, size and shape are primary qualities while the colour that we see in objects is not. The colour is a result of certain conditions, or as he called them, ‘powers’ in the objects, which act upon our minds so that we see colours. The distinction that Locke was trying to draw is that between the scientific description of an object, what properties scientists report an object has, and our ordinary experience of the same object.

But how much knowledge can we have by means of sensation and reflection, and how reliable will it be? Knowledge is the result of the examination of ideas to see if they agree or disagree in some respect. The first sort of knowledge is achieved by the examination of two or more ideas to see whether they are identical or different. For example, one could compare the ideas of ‘black’ and ‘white’, and immediately see that they are different. The second sort of knowledge about ideas deals with the co-existence of two or more ideas, that is, the discovery that two or more ideas belong together. This usually amounts to finding out that these ideas are part of, or caused by, the same substance. A third kind of knowledge about our ideas is the discovery that two or more ideas are related together in some manner. The fourth and last type of knowledge is the discovery of whether or not any of our ideas are experiences of something that exists outside our minds, that is, if they are ideas of some real existences.

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Locke felt that these were all the kinds of knowledge we could possess, but how much of each kind and how certain will they be? The greatest degree of assurance we can have is when our knowledge is intuitive, that is, by simply looking at two or more ideas, we see immediately that something is true about them. This type of complete certainty, Locke claimed, we can have about truths like ‘white is not black’, which intuitively we see are true.

However, sometimes when we merely consider certain ideas together, we are unable to tell if they do or do ...

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