Don't watch this!

I think he's losing his grip on Locke, consciousness and reality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y693BveTT48

But he might be brilliant. If I can bring myself to watch again I'll probably know. Probably.

Lots of Locke 'n' homework!

I've done a little summarising of the Locke we've done this week, but I'm going to save the primary & secondary ideas stuff until you've done the homework!

John Locke ‘Primary & Secondary Qualities

• Explain Locke’s distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities. 
• Why does Locke feel it is necessary to distinguish between primary & secondary qualities?
• Can you think of any problems or flaws in the idea of primary & secondary qualities?
• Why does this distinction make Locke a realist? 
• Could he justify or ground his 'realism' - if so how? if not why not?
• What are the implications of Locke's view in terms of constructing an epistemological theory?  

Have a good think about these things and say as much as you can. 

Due Wednesday 21st October

Locke: where Ideas 'really' come from

This week, amongst other things and many interesting philosophical ramblings, we read from 'Book 2, Chapter 1' of Locke's  'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding' and saw how he believed our minds come to be filled with ideas.  We saw that,  for Locke, all ideas come from two sources: 

   1. experience of 'external objects' received through our senses 

  (SENSATION)

   2. experience of the workings of our own minds. 

  (REFLECTION)

As he puts it: 

Our understandings derive all the materials of thinking from [1] observations that we make of external objects that can be perceived through the senses, and [2] of the internal operations of our minds, which   we perceive by  looking in at ourselves. 

For Locke, those are the only ways that we get ideas. He says, 'These two are  the fountains of knowledge, from which arise all the ideas we have or can naturally  have.'

    ('Essay' Bk ii Ch.1)

Locke goes on to distinguish between 'simple' and 'complex' ideas.

In Book 2, Ch 12, he says that the mind 'exerts its power' on simple ideas in 3 ways:

(1)  Combining several simple ideas into one compound one; that is how all complex ideas are made.

(2)  Bringing together two ideas, whether simple or complex, setting them side by side so as to see  them both at once, without uniting them into one; this is how the mind gets all its ideas of relations.

 (3)  Separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence; this is   called abstraction, and it is how all the mind’s general ideas are made.

He goes on to tell us that:

 'Ideas thus made up of several simple ones I call complex. Examples are ·the ideas of· beauty,  gratitude,  a man, an army, the universe.'

So, to make complex ideas we take simple ideas and mix them, put them side by side, or try to see them in isolation from other simple ideas that they may be muddled and confused with. 

Easy!

Locke on Innate Ideas

We saw that Locke had several arguments against the notion of innate ideas and they went something like this:

1. NO UNIVERSAL CONSENT:

If any idea were innate in all human minds then surely certain ideas would be universally accepted and agreed on. But they're not.

2. CHILDREN & IDIOTS:

Locke says that, 

to imprint anything on the mind without the mind’s perceiving it seems to me hardly intelligible. So if children and idiots have souls, minds, with those principles imprinted on them, they can’t help perceiving them and assenting to them. 

In other words it makes no sense to speak of an idea being in our minds without us being aware of it. How can we have 'understandings' that we don't understand. Surely the whole point of an idea is that it is 'had'. (As in, "I've just had an idea!" said Clive.)

3. THE CIRCULAR ARGUMENT:

Locke attacks saying this the argument that we only come to knowledge of these 'innate' ideas when we develop our 'reason', saying that it is non-sensical and seems circular' because in order to know innate ideas we have to have reason, but the evidence that we have 'reason' is our knowledge of innate ideas. Doh!

This attack on innate ideas was revolutionary in Locke's day and has profound implications: if a person is 'blank slate' then we can draw anything on it. This makes politics, education and the whole nature of a society fundamental to the kind of human beings it produces. This is the old nature/nurture debate which seems to rumble on forever without ever really getting anywhere, usually because the people debating it have political axes to grind and are not actually open to discussion. 

Descartes, Locke & the Story of Epistemology

I wanted to remind you of the point of the stuff we'd looked at - why did Descartes bother to sit in his oven searching for certainty? What was the story? So we wrote  a little note that was similar to what follows except I've tried to improve and clarify it. And I've added a long rambling introduction. 

Descartes was working in a difficult period, (aren't we all?), he was very keen on the new scientific thinking or 'natural philosophy' as it was called, which had begun to question the dominant religious ideology of the time. It was only 100 years since Copernicus had rather upset the church by demonstrating the 'revolutionary' idea that the Earth revolved around the sun, thus shifting 'man' from the centre of the universe where God had apparently put him. 

Descartes himself was big on maths inventing Cartesian coordinates by which you can identify the precise spot at which a fly is located on a ceiling!  Anyway, he wanted to apply the new 'scientific' way of thinking to the most fundamental questions like 'is Scott right about the Matrix?'  He wanted to turn the rigour of rational thought inward and examine the contents of his mind. But we could also read his Meditations as a program for rebuilding society: Descartes wanted to sweep away superstition and received wisdom and replace it with rationally constructed principles.  He also wanted to show that he could prove a) the power of 'men' to use rational thought and b) that God existed. If he could use the power of rational thought to prove that God existed then he hoped the church might see the rational enquiring mind as less threatening and more helpful.

So, if Descartes was to challenge all the strange ideas of his time he had to have a strong foundation for his own knowledge claims. that foundation is of course provided by his 'cogito', and on this point of certainty that he 'grounds' his epistemology. The cogito is thus 'foundational'. 

Having established beyond any scepticism the certainty of his existence as a thinking thing, Descartes can claim epistemological grounds for his subsequent ideas about the nature of the physical world that he perceives through his senses, (like the wax) but knows and understands through his faculty of Reason.

John Locke, some 50 years later, rejects Descartesʼ ideas as to how to ground knowledge. For Locke the mind is a blank slate - a tabula rasa, and all the ideas, all the knowledge that we come to possess comes to us through our senses. 

This dispute sets up a philosophical debate that has, in various forms, rumbled on into contemporary philosophy. 

The argument can be summed up in basic terms as a dispute about how the kinds of things that seem to go on inside our heads relate to the kinds of things that seem to go on outside our heads. Do we have accurate representational knowledge of the world? Is that even a sensible question? 

Three Minute Philosophy

Found a "Three Minute Philosophy on John Locke" on YouTube. Thought I'd post it on here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-buzVjYQvY

Fisticuffs in Filosophy!

We examined the distinctions between logical and empirical truths and had a very stimulating debate! Joe and Jake were very reluctant to accept the idea that there was a clear distinction between the statements 'All humans are mortal' & 'Children are younger than their parents' or 'Accepting the notion of linear time, children are younger than their biological parents.' - as it ended up. Even if we accept strange experiments with genetic material no-one can ever be older than the genetic material from which they come. 


The point is that it would be possible to adjust the concept of 'human' to include the notion of immortality if we ever have empirical knowledge of such a thing, (and I accept the whole notion of infinity raises all sorts of problems), but it's logically possible, whereas it is logically impossible to adjust the meaning of the word 'child' so that it doesn't mean 'of a parent'. 


In the opinion of the referee (me) Scott, Sam & Will (Georgina was lucky enough to miss the atmosphere of violence and intimidation) won at least 2 -1. :)

A Priori Knowledge

We finished off Descartes (the first 3 Meditations anyway, which is enough for our purposes at the moment) and then got to grips with some of the important concepts they involve. 

The term 'a priori' which translates as something like 'before experience' doesn't really mean 'before' experience which makes it confusing. What it means is 'independent of' or 'outside of' experience, but the easiest way to think of it is as knowledge that you don't need to go and check by having a look at the world - you don't need 'empirical evidence' - you don't need to use your senses. So, you can know that the internal angles of a triangle add up 180º without having to go out and feel, sniff, see, hear or eat any triangles. 

Think about a perfect circle. Because that's all you can do: think about it, that is, because a perfect circle does not exist anywhere in the real world (honest, Joe!) So you can only know a 'perfect' circle in an 'a priori' way. A problem with this kind of knowing is that it doesn't seem very different to 'imagining'. I can imagine a perfect circle then set out to try and build one and I might end up with something very useful for wheels and things. I can imagine a perfect society where everyone values learning, art and fairness, and I can set out to build one. So what's the difference?  Mmm ... I'll stop there. 


Although you should be aware, that the term a priori is not uncontentious (some philosophers suggest the term has no real meaning or content: see Michael Devitt's 'No Place for the a Priori'  at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/Philosophy/people/devitt/papers.html
Unfortunately our exam board still seem to take the notion as a given (see Paper One, Q. 1, May 2009). I hope to point out their ignorance at a forthcoming meeting. 

Big, Important homework!

Explain how Descartes’ thoughts about the wax help him to understand more clearly:

a) his nature as a ‘thing that thinks’

b) his ideas about the separation of mind and body into two distinct ‘substances’: body and mind / physical and metaphysical. (Cartesian dualism) 

Due Monday 5th October (plenty of time - no excuses!) 

Wax, wax, wax, always the ... wax !

Below is a revised, redrafted and extended (hurrah! they cry) version of the various notes I have written with you and last year's lot on this wax business. It's got quite long and I possibly repeat myself a little, but it has been useful to me to re-read and re-write it, so I hope it will help you.  I suppose it represents a kind of response to the wax essay question, but try not to rip me off too much. (You might be better off writing your response before you read it).

Anyway ...


Descartes’ ‘Meditations’ are an attempt to find the foundations of objective (certain and unchanging) knowledge. Descartes believes that if he can find an ‘Archimedian point’ - just one thing about which there can be no doubt then he will be able to ‘ground’ all his other ideas. It is an attempt to construct a complete epistemology - a theory of knowledge - by building, piece by piece (brick by brick) on his foundation of certainty. (The cogito)

Having found his one point of certainty, that he exists as a ‘thinking thing’ Descartes tries to work out the status of the ideas that run through this ‘thinking thing’ that he is. His problem is that most of his ideas seem to come through his senses and he has already shown these to be unreliable and deceiving.

He decides that this thinking thing is ‘a thing that doubts, perceives, affirms, denies, wills, does not will, that imagines also and which feels.’ These activities of the mind are the more certain the less they have to do with the physical world. Therefore the imagination, which seems to build its ideas from perceptions of the physical world is less trustworthy than, for example, the act of doubting, (Remember Descartes prefers geometry to geography for similar reasons.)


In his Second Meditation, having pushed his scepticism, his 'method of doubt', through arguments concerning illusion and dreams and on to the point of considering that a malignant demon might be feeding him illusions about the world, Descartes, finally arrives at his point of certainty, 'I am, I exist', he claims, and goes on to say that this 'must be true whenever I assert it or think it.' To be thinking the thought of one's existence is, in itself, proof of that existence, he says.


Although Descartes is now certain of his existence as a mental entity he is still in doubt about the thoughts and ideas that he has as a thinking thing. (where do they come from? how trustworthy are they? are some more trustworthy than others?) He thinks again about the ideas that seem to come to him through the senses and begins to reconsider the physical world and the way he perceives it in order to understand how it is that he can be certain about his mental existence, but in doubt about the physical world.


In a famous passage he considers the way his senses give him perceptions of a piece of wax, and how those perceptions are utterly different and distinct depending on whether the wax is hard or melted. He concludes that although we normally understand our senses as providing us with understanding: to 'see' something is to understand it we believe, the example of the wax shows Descartes that 'Something that I thought I saw with my eyes ... was really grasped solely by my mind’s faculty of judgment.


Descartes discussion of the wax is central to understanding his notion of what it is to be a human being. It is his ability to conceive (have a concept of) the wax that, for him, demonstrates the power of rational thought. He concludes that because the information given to him by his senses about the wax is insufficient to allow him to know that the wax remains the same thing after it changes all its sensible qualities, it must therefore be his 'reason', his faculty of judgement that gives him knowledge of the wax. It is as if through the power of rational thought the sum of his understanding is greater than the understanding his senses alone could provide. This 'added power' provided by ‘reason’ is the underlying principle of Rationalist philosophy.


Descartes believes that knowledge of the external world is gained through the mind’s understanding (judgement) of the information we receive through the senses. The faculty of judgement is a mental capacity (ability) that brings together the ‘raw’ and potentially incoherent information of the senses and allows us to understand.  This makes him a rationalist as opposed to an empiricist. (we're doing them next).


For Descartes, this wax business confirms his belief that, he can know his internal world - his mental processes - better and more certainly than he can the external physical world. This emphasises the separation and the difference of the two ‘stuffs’ mental and physical and makes clear his ‘dualism’. 

To Infinity and Beyond!

But surely that's an incoherent statement, Buzz!

Yes, it's time to clamber onto the shoulders of giants (Scott will help) and see new worlds (or at least the old world in new ways) ; it's time to light fires of fascination and inspiration then cast buckets of cold doubt all over them! Vast lightbulbs of insight will illuminate in our small heads only for the fuse to go moments later, but ...

... We will emerge much wiser, much more annoying and knowing far less than we knew before only in a much cleverer way:)

Welcome to 'philosophybloglog' the much anticipated sequel to the hugely successful 'philsophylogblog'.

Enjoy.

Descartes: The First Meditation

We saw how Descartes used a form of extreme scepticism: he doubted everything he thought he 'knew', even the evidence of his senses.

He gives examples of three different ways in which he may be wrong about how he perceives the world. Firstly he uses the argument from illusion; (the stick in the water) to show that his senses are not reliable. Secondly he suggests he could be dreaming: the argument from dreaming. And thirdly he considers that a malignant demon may be deceiving him deliberately about everything: the argument from deception.

We also learned the meaning of ‘epistemology’, it is the study of what it is possible to know: is knowledge of the world possible, if so what?