Empiricism and rationalism: answering the worry of skepticismĮmpiricism and rationalism are essentially rival responses to the worry of skepticism. Rationalists like Descartes thought experience could not be trusted, and thus sought to understand the world through the certainty of deductive truths, as in mathematics. Like Locke, Descartes also sought to undermine the dominant scholastic theories of the time, but did not target the rationalism at the root of the structure. A key rationalist thinker was the 17th-century French philosopher, René Descartes. Rationalists argue that reason is the chief source and test of knowledge, not experience. Today, with the success of empiricist-based science harnessing nature for our benefit, Locke’s views might seem to align nicely with common sense, but it’s important to note that when he was writing, Locke’s arguments most definitely did not align with the common sense of the time.īefore Locke, it was not empiricist theories of knowledge but scholastic theories founded in rationalism that held sway. Locke thus champions an approach to understanding the world known as empiricism: knowledge comes from experience, and so by analyzing our experiences we will come to know the truth about reality, and nothing should be asserted unless it can be ratified by experience. Try it now: can you imagine a brand new color? A new texture? A new sound? A new taste? Locke argues no: you’re equipped only with materials acquired from previous sensory experiences, and your imagination is limited to combining these materials in different ways. ![]() But it couldn't contain any ‘ideas’ you hadn't previously acquired through sensory experience. It might have the horns of a bull, the wings of a dragon, the trunk of an elephant… it might have a heart with 97 chambers. But that new imagined animal could only be made up of parts you've previously encountered through your sensory experience. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? When has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.įor example, you may be able to imagine, say, a new animal. Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, a tabula rasa, void of all characters, without any ideas. Ideas are thus atomic in nature, and can form complex, unique structures: but the constituent parts are all ultimately obtained from sensory experience. Our minds cannot create ideas, Locke argues: they can only combine them. In his brilliant 1689 work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke argues that, at birth, the mind is a tabula rasa (a blank slate) that we fill with ‘ideas’ as we experience the world through the five senses.īy ‘idea’, Locke means “whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a person thinks.” In other words, an idea is anything you experience or reflect on - and Locke’s key point is we can only get such ‘ideas’ from the senses. Are we born with innate knowledge? Or do we acquire knowledge only through our sensory experiences? Does the world of our sensory experience align to ‘reality’? Or is experience a poor guide to what’s really there? These are key questions of epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with what knowledge is, how we acquire it, and whether it has secure foundations.Ī philosopher who had particularly influential things to say about these questions is the 17th-century English philosopher, John Locke (here’s our reading list on John Locke’s best and most essential books, who argued that knowledge is demonstrably acquired only through sensory experience, but that our sensory experience is not infallible.
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