Mommy...Where Does Knowledge Come From? Locke's Empiricism

Overview   

     For the research paper for my 17th century philosophy class I've chosen for my topic Locke's notion of simple ideas and their role in his epistemology.  So, what's all this mumbo jumbo about?  And who is John Locke? As most of you may know, John Locke was trapped on a strange island with a bunch of other people when their plane crashed.  But what many of you might not know, is that prior to crashing on the island in Lost, John Locke was a prominent 17 century philosopher.

     Locke is the grand daddy of empiricism--the philosophy that the foundation of our knowledge is sensory experience.  His philosophy is in obvious contrast with the rationalists Descartes and Spinoza who believed pretty much the opposite--that the foundation of all knowledge is accessible through rational refection.

   A super skeleton sketch of Locke's empiricism looks like this  (reduced  from about 500 pages to 6 lines):  

1.  There are no innate ideas...have you ever met a baby that knew how to do maph?  He gives quite a few different arguments against innate ideas but you get the gist of it.

2.  So, all knowledge must originate as ideas caused by sensory experiences.  (Perceiving something produces an idea of that thing in my mind).

3.  The mind then acts on these simple ideas to compare, connect, and abstract from them to form more complex ideas.

     In my essay I want to explore a couple of interrelated issues.  (1).  What is a simple idea?  and is this an intelligible concept? (2).  if we can come up with an intelligible notion of a simple idea, can it do the work Locke needs it to do to support empiricism, or do we need to allow some degree of innate knowledge?  Anyhow, you're going to follow along as I do my research...

Lets get in stahted in hah....

Ideas in General and their Origin

     For Locke, if someone reflects upon the origin of many universal truths "they would have found them to result in minds of Men, from the being of things themselves, when duly considered; and that they were discovered by the application of those Faculties, that were fitted by Nature to receive and judge of them, when duly employ'd about them."  If we translate this from Locke's beautiful prose it reads that knowledge of general truths is derived from the ideas that those objects cause in our minds through sensory experience. Enough with the generalities, lets get down to the nitty gritty of how this works.

     The contents of the Mind are ideas.  Er'body has a variety of ideas in their mind, such as Whiteness, Hardness, Sweetness, Thinking, Motion, Man, Elephant, Army, Drunkenness, Sippy-cup, Chains, Things that are Off the Chain, etc...How do all these ideas get into our mind?  Locke demonstrated that they can't be innate, so whence did they come?  

     Here he famously axes us so suppose the mind to be "white paper, void of all characters, without any Ideas"...all the ideas that fill our mind came from one source: experience.  All knowledge is founded on it and derived from it.  "Our observation employ'd either about external, sensible Objects; or about the internal Operations of our Minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our Understandings with all the materials of thinking".

     So basically our knowledge has two subsources: sensation which gives us ideas through the perception of external things; these ideas include things like yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet...and anything else we call sensible qualities.  Sensible ideas are the result of the ideas that are produced in our mind through a causal relation to an external object.  For example, the chair causes in my mind the ideas of brown, wood, chair, etc..

     Reflection is the other source "from which Experience furnisheth the understanding with ideas is the perception of the operations of our own Minds within us" as it acts on the raw ideas is has received from perception to produce new ideas.  Basically, we can get new ideas when our mind manipulates, mixes, abstracts, and compares whatever ideas we already have (from perception). Acts of the mind include: perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing which give rise in us new ideas (about other ideas). 

     There are no other sources of ideas beyond sensation and reflection.  Ideas arising from sensation arise from without and concern external objects whereas reflection involves ideas about our mind's own operation.  Locke challenges us to "search our Minds" for ideas that didn't come from one of these two sources.

     Pay attention! The more numerous and varied the objects you come in sensory contact with the more simple ideas you will have; there is a parallel for ideas arising out of reflection--the is a direct relation to the amount of reflection one does and quantity of ideas one has about the operation of his own mind.  Also, there is a direct relation to the degree of clarity your ideas have with the the degree of attention you put into observing external objects and your mental operations.  If you don't pay attention your ideas will be unclear and your knowledge will rest on a shaky foundation--so pay attention!

     On our first ideas: At what point in our life do we have our first ideas? "When he first has any Sensation" then it is to these first sensorily derived ideas that we employ the mental operations of perception, remembering, consideration, reasoning, etc...In time the mind (can) reflects on its own mental ideas.  This means something like the having thoughts like "I am looking at the elephant", "I like elephants", "I am thinking about myself looking at the elephant", "I like thinking about myself looking at elephants" and so on...Through this process the mind gets more ideas--ideas from reflection.

The important point is that we need the initial sensory ideas first before the mind can go to work on them, after that, through continual reflection and more sensory ideas the sky is the limit.  Our minds are idea factories!

       Hint at a criterion for simple idea (finally, Yay!):  In receiving these basic ideas from sensory perception our minds are passive.  So long as our perceptual apparati are in good working order there is little we can do to avoid the intrusion of these first sensory ideas into our mind; and no one can be wholly ignorant of what he does when he thinks.  These are the simple ideas--the one's that the mind can do nothing to avoid or blot out, no more than "a mirror can refuse, alter, or obliterate [...] the objects set before it."  Ok, Locke, I'm going to hold you to that!

Time to take a break and work on the proposal for my Kant paper...due tomorrow : )

Dueling with Dualism Part 3: The Leibniz Challenge and The Nature of God

Due to overwhelming reader demand here is part 3 of "Dueling with Dualism"...

Quick Review

     I know most of you have memorized most of Spinoza's philosophy but for the few of you who haven't and would like to be brought up to speed, here's what we've covered so far:  The grand argument that Spinoza is making is for Monism--the idea that there exists only one substance.  The argument proceeds in 4 intermediary steps...

1.  No two substances can share an attribute.

2.  It pertains to the nature of substance to exist, i.e., substance necessarily exists.

3.  God--defined as a substance that contains all attributes--exists.

/C.  Since (1) no two substances can share an attribute, God is the only substance that exists.

    In the previous post we looked at arguments for (1).  To prove (1) Spinoza demonstrated that if we supposed the opposite of his position, that is we supposed that two distinct substances 'A' and 'B' did somehow share an attribute 'X' we would have nothing through which we could appeal to pick the one out from the other.  The attempt would sound like this, "which one is 'A'?" Answer: "the one with attribute 'X'.  Since the attribute 'X' is common to both substances this information is of no help in confirming identity.

     The next attempt was to try to distinguish substances that share an attribute through modes.  For this we supposed two extended substances 'A' with mode 'm' and substance  'B' with mode 'n'.  The problem with this method of differentiation is that modes depend causally and conceptually on attributes for their existence; so mode 'm' only exists because it inheres in the attribute of extension and the same goes for mode 'n'.  Identifying a distinction between two things via the modes only tells us that the modes are different, it can't tell us that they are different substances.  So we know that the mode of substance A and the mode of substance B both inhere in the attribute of extension.  And since substances are known through their attributes, given the same attributes, the substances A and B must be the same.  By appealing to modes we end up back in the attribute problem.

Leibniz's Challenge

     Leibniz says ok, so we can't distinguish two substances that share a single attribute via appeal to the attribute or to the modes; but suppose instead there are 2 substances 'A' and 'B' that share one attribute in common but possess more than one attribute each.  Substance A possesses attributes 'x' and 'y' and substance B possesses attributes 'y' and 'z'.  Even though they both share attribute 'y' why couldn't we appeal to attributes 'x' and 'z' to distinguish them from each other? 

     To see how Spinoza can answer this challenge we need to review his definition of the relationship between a substance and its attribute(s); for Spinoza it is a matter of definition that a substance can be picked out and its essence (its nature) known simply by reference to its attribute.  For example, in Cartesian model, in the case of the substance 'Body' I can identify it as such solely by appealing to the fact that it is extended.  I don't need to appeal to any other concepts except the attribute which it possesses.  Similarly if something is the substance 'Mind' then if I am aware of its attribute of thought I can identify the substance as being 'Mind'. 

     It's very important that I don't need to appeal to anything outside of a substances attribute to identify what kind of substance it is.  Another way to view this principle is that identity of substances is possible through appeal to self-contained concepts.  E.g., The concept of "extension" is part of the concept of Body.  I don't need to appeal to any concepts beyond those included in 'Body' to identify it as such. 

     OK, so now that we are armed with relevant information, lets return to Leibniz's challenge of two substances 1 cup...Oops, I mean two substances, multiple attributes--with one of them shared.  So, how are we going to distinguish between substance A (with attributes 'y' and 'z') and substance B (with attributes 'x' and 'z')?  Obviously we can't appeal to substance 'z' because that's the one they hold in common and it wouldn't help us pick out either A or B.  This leaves appeal to 'y' and 'x' but there's a problem; according to our definition of attribute, every substance can be known through each of its attributes.  According to our definition I should have been able to know the nature of substance A and B through any of their attributes; but this clearly doesn't apply if I appeal to attribute 'z' because both share 'z' and knowing that A has 'z' and B has 'z' doesn't help me distinguish them as distinct substances.       

    So, to summarize the response to Leibniz's challenge that two substances could share an attribute if  each substance had multiple attributes, Spinoza can reply that the scenario that Leibniz presents violates the definition of attribute; namely that every attribute a substance possesses must in itself must conceptually imply the nature/essence of that substance.  Another way to put it would be that I should be able to appeal to any of a substance's attributes and, without appeal to anything else, know what type of substance it is; just as we can with extension and body, and thought and mind.

Multiple Attributes...Say Wuuut?

    That's right ninjas, contrary to the Cartesian idea that each substance has only one attribute Spinoza contends that a substance can have multiple attributes; and if that doesn't boggle the mind, he says a substance can have infinitely many!  I'd explain it to you right now but according to the book whose format I'm following we have to first further discuss Spinoza's substance monism.

Step 2: The Necessary Existence of Substance

     "It pertains to the nature of a substance to exist".  Here we are entering the realm of ontological arguments (more or less "arguments for why something exists").  I'm not a big fan of ontological arguments because they always seem to be defining things into existence; on the other hand how else can you explain the existence of fundamental things.  You could say that the same thing happens in theoretical physics in regards to fundamental forces and particles; take energy for example, that it cannot be created or destroyed is one of its defined properties.  In a cosmological context we might also say that energy has always existed (it's a difficult statement to disprove empirically); it is in the nature of energy to exist; and the same goes for the fundamental particles of matter.  So, I think I we view Spinoza's ontological arguments in this context they don't seem so anachronistic and irrelevant. 

      Getting back to Spinoza's view of the nature of substance vis a vis existence, it is a matter of logical necessity that existence is part of the intrinsic nature of substance.   To understand why he makes this claim lets consider nature of finite things first.  In regards to finite things, such as your computer, you, the chair you're sitting on, your fridge, the tree outside, the other tree beside it, the grass in your lawn, the blade of grass on the property line between your property and your neighbour's property, the blade of grass beside that...I could go on...there is nothing about the nature of finite things that makes their existence logically necessary.  If you didn't exist, or if your computer didn't exist, or if the tree didn't exist..and so on, there'd be no logical contradiction.  We'd still live in an intelligible world.

     Beyond logical necessity there is also the fact that finite things are the products of their causes--and that could be unknowably many causes.  Take a table for example, for it to exist a carpenter had to make it (a cause), and he had to get the wood from a tree (a cause) and something had to make the tree grow (causes) and the parents of the carpenter had to copulate for him to exist (causes) and so on.  

     This idea of chains of causation don't apply to substances.  Substances are self-caused.  So long as the concept of a substance is coherent it is in its nature to exist; and if its nature is to exist, then it does exist.  Alright, before you have a wack attack like I did when I first heard this let me 'splain what my professor said about this.  At first this idea of something existing simply because it is coherent and its essence seems like the kind of stuff that give philosophy a bad name.  But if we approach Spinoza's idea within the framework of his naturalism a different picture emerges.  In this context he is simply searching for fundamental entities and principles upon which our universe is built.  He's doing theoretical physics.  He's asking what sorts of entities must necessarily exist in order for our known world to be intelligible and what physical laws need to exist.  View in this context we can see Spinoza as a proto-Naturalist theoretical physicist.  This is usually how he is interpreted.  The talk of "substance" and "god" are all just artifacts of the time in which he wrote.

     So, to summarize his position on substance: (a) it is self-caused; (b) it is conceptually and causally independent from other substances; (c)  if it is conceivable and it is coherent--i.e., doesn't lead to logical contradictions--it exists.  For the most part (a) is self-explanatory and it logically follows from it that no substance can be caused by anything else.  Regarding (b) for Spinoza causal and conceptual relations are equivalent; for example a finite thing such as yourself is both causally and conceptually dependent on the same things for your existence, thus we can equate the two concepts.  Applied to substances, no substance can be causally or conceptually related to any other substance (because they are by definition causally and conceptually independent).   So, given that a substance cannot be causally or conceptually related to any other substances and all things inhere in substances, it must follow that substances are self-caused and self-conceived (which in the end is the same thing).  Besides this argument that naturally follows from his premises Spinoza also applies, in tandem, the principle of sufficient reason (PSR): because a substance cannot be produced by anything else, it must be produced by itself, i.e., it is self-caused.

     A possible objection to self-causation is that since causes must exist prior to their effects then for a thing to cause itself it must exist prior to itself, which doesn't make any sense.  Spinoza gets out of this because of his "wide" notion of causation.  Essentially he holds there is an equivalence between causation and explanation; to give an explanation of something is to talk about its causes and vice versa.  On this wider notion of causation, saying something is self-caused is the same as saying it is self-explanatory.  Like I said before, if we give Spinoza in a modern naturalist interpretation, this idea doesn't seem so outrageous; as I mentioned before, we see the same ideas being applied in modern theoretical physics.  And now that we have proven premise (2), that substances necessarily exist, we can move to (3).

Step (3) and (4): God Is The Substance That Contains All The Attributes And God Is The Only Substance In The Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooorld!!!!!!

     As with most Spinozan arguments we begin with a definition: 

By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.

So what's it all mean?  Well, we know that God is a substance.  We know he has infinitely many attributes.  From premise/fact (2)--that all substances necessarily exist it--follows that God necessarily exists.  And from the premise/fact (1)--no two substances can share attributes--and (3) God's got all of 'em, (4) there can be no other substances but God, hence substance Monism.  Q.E.D.

     There is one important caveat that arises out of Spinoza's rationalism, which is that the notion of God has to be logically coherent and all of its features must be intelligible.  These demands were a significant break from tradition, not so much it what they required but the degree to which Spinoza insisted that the PSR be applied to God.  Spinoza's God can't do or be logically unintelligible; he can't escape the fundamental laws of nature because God just is the fundamental laws and substance of nature.  There is no separate being that shows favoritism or has some master plan for humanity.  There is just the lawful order of the cosmos...the God/Nature.  Obviously this doctrine would not have been viewed favourably in a time (sadly, even now) when orthodoxy was that the notion of God wasn't subject to intelligibility.

     So, apart from a fairly standard ontological argument for God Spinoza did make one unique contribution via the PSR.  He said that given his definition of God there is no good reason by which we could explain the fact that God doesn't exist.  Again, if we interpret Spinoza as a modern naturalist this is in a way equivalent to trying to explain why the cosmos is the way it is and and trying to come up with reasons for why it could have been otherwise.  I think, formulated this way, these are legitimate ways to say, "well the world just wouldn't make any sense if we didn't postulate (a Spinozan) God".  

     At first I wasn't too keen on this application of the PSR to invoke the existence of God; it just seemed too much like a really bad layman's argument from ignorance for the existence of God.  But like I said, given the naturalist interpretation of Spinoza's God and substance, I can live with it.  But if Spinoza tries to attach supernatural powers to his "God"(but he di'in't), I'm outta here!

What Can A Pain in Your Butt Teach You About Metaphysics?

This section of the sixth and final meditation is for me the most interesting and raises the most philosophical issues.  I still remember when I first encountered it 12 years ago in my second philosophy class.

Arguments For What My Senses Can and Can't Tell Me About the World and Myself

     There is nothing that my own nature teaches me more vividly than that I have a body, and that when I feel pain there is something wrong with the body, and that when I am hungry or thirsty the body needs food and drink, on so on.  So, I should not doubt there is some truth in this.

     The basic argument here is that sensations such as pain demonstrate that humans are a composite of Mind and Body.  The fact that we can perceive sensations that belong to Body in our minds is evidence for the Mind-Body hypothesis of humans.  We are not Minds that are merely present in a Body "as a sailor is present in a ship".  If this were the case we wouldn't feel any of the sensations we do.  A sailor doesn't feel pain when his ship bumps into a rock, he only perceives it by sight and understands what has happened via the intellect.  Yet we have in intimate awareness of sensations, that are not purely intellectual understandings, when we bump into a pointy object, for example.  The same goes for hunger and thirst which are not just intellectual concepts when we feel them.

     We are also aware that there are other bodies around us that produce in us sensations of heat, smell, sound, colour, taste, etc...  We also know that we have an aversion to some of these sensations, like the smell of rotten eggs; and we have attraction to others, like the taste of pizza.

     Of course sometimes what our senses tell us about the world can sometimes be false.  In this case I'm not talking about optical illusions and such, but that the way in which information about the world comes in through the senses shapes the way we think the world is structured.  Take for example the sensation of heat:  Is there actually a thing "heat" which I am perceiving?  It's kind of interesting to think about.  In everyday language we still say, "that's hot" but our scientific understanding of the world contradicts this idea.  

     This is where Descartes really got it right.  On the Aristotelian view, objects that were hot contained an essence, "hotness" (not the kind that some chicks have--another kind) and when we feel heat we are somehow perceiving a thing/essence "hotness".  Descartes on the other hand had a mechanistic view of the world.  Although the idea of heat as being average kinetic energy hadn't been discovered yet Descartes had an idea that was very close.  His idea was that the particles that made up a body were rotating very quickly and these particles interacted with nerve endings which sent a signal up the neural pathways to the part of the brain which was the interface with the mind.  For Descartes (and any modern person) we know that if I were to perform an autopsy of a hot object, I would never find any thing I could point to and call "heat".  As a general explanation it's quite amazing how close to being right he was.  

      So here's the cool part.  Suppose I stub my toe (again) on the "Gotdamned" chair again.  According to Descartes the pain I feel does not exist in my toe, but in my mind.  Of course it sure doesn't feel that way but again this is a case where the way our senses function to perceive the world causes us to draw false conclusions about the world.  Pain is not a property of Body.  Pain (a sensation) is a property of Mind, thus the pain is a consequence of an interaction with Body but the pain itself is not in mah toe.  If I cut the nerve route from my toe to my brain/Mind, I would have no sensation of pain.  Pain is really our brain/Mind telling us "there is damage to sector 7G".

     In the Aristotelian view the pain actually exists in the toe.  It's really there, just as properties of mass and shape are.  As an aside, I think it's kind of interesting that despite centuries of science we still speak of the world in the Aristotelian sense.  I guess you could make an pragmatic argument for speaking of the world in an Aristotelian way.  It'd be quite a mouthful if every time you stubbed your toe you said, "Got damn particles in that chair collided with the particles in my toe, which initiated a chain reaction to the part of my brain that is the interface with my mind and produced a sensation that I call 'pain'".

     The bottom line is that the purpose of sensory perception is not necessarily to tell us how the world actually is but to help us navigate the world by informing us what is beneficial and what is harmful.  I think this is a really important philosophical point and one that even everyday people misunderstand (say it ain't so!).  The issue is whether the world exactly resembles the way we perceive it.  Within philosophy of perception and epistemology there are some that say that there is no way to know because we can never step outside of what we perceive in the "theater of mind" and there those that says there is a one to one relationship...and as you might expect the bulk of people's opinion is somewhere in between.       

     Descartes answer is that our perceptions of Body resemble the modes of Body that are necessary (size, shape, extension, mass); however this is not the case in the other modes of Body.  In the case of the non-necessary modes of Body (eg., scent, colour, texture, etc...), there is something (structure perhaps) in the body that produces in us as sensation of a property, but the property we perceive doesn't resemble the property in the Body that caused it--although it is not ruled out as a logical possibility. 

     This is a little bit complicated but bear with me: Lets take colour for example.  Suppose I'm looking at a purple cup.  Is the cup actually purple (an essence) or is there something about the structure of the the cup that produces in me the perception of purple?  Does "purpleness" fly from the cup into my eye?  Probably not.  Descartes gets this right too:  We know that the surface atoms of the cup are structured in such a way as to absorb all wavelengths of light except purple; it's not really purple as in, the atoms are all coloured purple.   

     So, because of the structure of the cup, light of only 1 wavelength of reaches my eyes.  Now, is the light that reaches my eyes actually purple?  No, it's just light waves at a certain frequency.  It just so happens that when my eyes receive light at this particular frequency it produces a certain nerve impulse that produces in my Mind the (phenomenal) sensation of purple.  Had the light waves been traveling at a different frequency, it would have resulted in slightly different nerve impulses which would have produced in my Mind a different phenomena of colour.  

      Also, if my brain were structured slightly differently, maybe the wavelength that now produces in me the colour purple might produce in me the colour red.  This raises a tangential issue, which is that when it comes to these secondary modes there is no way to know if one person's experience "purple" isn't another person's experience "green".  The things is, it doesn't matter so long as we all make the same distinctions and call it the same thing.  

     Now lets try to relate this all back to our starting point, that our senses don't necessarily tell us about the world as it is but tell us instead how we should best navigate our world.  Lets go back to the subject of "pain".   Through faulty reasoning I may come to the conclusion that the "Got Damned chair" I stubbed my toe on has something in it that is "pain" that is now in my toe, or that a fire has something in it that is heat.  But fire is not made of any thing called heat any more than my toe is has something in it called pain.  Nevertheless, my sensory perception of my interaction with these entities tells me that I should avoid striking the chair with my toe and should not put my hand (or any part of me for that matter) in the flame--unless it is into the feh-laaaaaames of passion.

But If God's So Good, How Come Sometimes Our Senses Tell Us to Do the Wrong Thing?

     Descartes realizes he has a little problem if he is going to simultaneously hold that a) god isn't a deceiver; b) that he wired us (are there wires in clay?) in such a way were we can be deceived about the world; and c) sometimes it seems that our sense perceptions of the world lead us to the wrong course of action.   Descartes explanation is that although there are situations that can arise where our reaction to a stimulus isn't the best one, the fact is that most of the time it will be.  God wired us in the way that will bring about the best response to deal with situations that will most frequently occur.

     Here's an example:  Suppose you have a wound on your finger and you need to put some sort of disinfectant on it and this disinfectant stings upon application.  The problem is that your sensory system, whenever you put the disinfectant on says "ARUGA! ARUGA! ARUGA! We are sensing pain.  Begin evasive maneuvers immediately!"  Our sensory system is giving us a message that is actually detrimental to us in this particular circumstance.  

     Descartes would concede that this is true but that more often than not moving your limb away from things that cause the sensation of pain is a good thing and will preserve your life and health longer.  Therefore god's still a good guy after all.  I think this is a pretty good argument and if we substitute "natural selection" for "god" we have a good modern argument.  Ta! Da!