Empiricism

Question 1

Define empiricism

Answer 1

The view that knowledge is based in sense experience

Sense experience -> idea -> knowledge

Question 2

Define induction

Answer 2

Argument from empirical evidence

Question 3

Define deduction

Answer 3

Argument independent of experience

Question 4

Define synthetic

Answer 4

statement verified by evidence

Question 5

Define analytic

Answer 5

Verified by its own internal logic

Question 6

What was Locke’s view on the mind initially being a ‘tabula rasa’?

Answer 6

• He believed it was true
• We need bot the senses and our minds as the sense tell us about the external world and the mind of the internal world
• Knowledge is not innate as when babies come into the world they don’t know anything

Question 7

What was Hume’s view on the mind initially being a ‘tabula rasa’?

Answer 7

• Agrees with Locke
• Experiences impress themselves onto your mind (they are sense-impressions)
• Can only know about it through sense experience => people without their sense organs cannot have knowledge about such things
• For ideas to have a distinct meaning they must be rooted in the sense-impressions

Question 8

Problems with empiricism

Answer 8

• Senses can be wrong which would mean that you would have false knowledge
• People experience different things => we all have different types of knowledge

Question 9

Noam Chomsky’s criticism

Answer 9

noticed basic grammatical features are the same across languages => suggests there is some language capacity in our brain that it innate

Question 10

Define realism

Answer 10

our senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are

Question 11

Define indirect realism

Answer 11

we perceive an object through sense-data, not directly

Question 12

Bacon’s influence

Answer 12

and early empiricist who claimed that science is in need of “a form of induction”

Question 13

Criticism of direct realism- perceptual variation

Answer 13

shape of it changes from our perception and colour is not inherent in the object

Question 14

Criticism of direct realism- illusion

Answer 14

if our senses are subject to illusion then we cannot directly be perceiving what is in the world

Question 15

Criticism of direct realism- hallucinations

Answer 15

implies that the experience is the same, whether or not an object is actually there

Question 16

Criticism of direct realism- The Time Lag Argument

Answer 16

• when we look at the Sun we are seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago
• Russell argues that this happens everywhere

Question 17

Criticism of Locke’s empiricism

Answer 17

• How can Locke explain why we can imagine a unicorn/ green elephant if we have never experienced it
  CP: you have experienced both greenness and an elephant and what your mind does is combine the two together, perceptual variation
  + Locke can solve the soul theory with a simple explanation: what seems like new mathematical knowledge, it is in fact a combination of our experiences
• Fallibility of the sense => makes empirical knowledge uncertain, link to Descartes
• Plato: how do we know what it means to have a perfect triangle, we have never experienced a perfect triangle and no combination of experience can explain such a thing as it is a concept not a physical thing => P argues that we have innate knowledge

Question 18

Explain Hume’s causation

Answer 18

• we have never experienced an effect without a cause, but “constant conjunction is not a necessary connection” => inductive reasoning cannot be relied upon as observing a regularity does not rule out the possibility that next time something different will occur