Week 3 - Empiricism and Reality as It Is

I've learned a little this week about the thinking of empiricists like Aristotle, John Locke, George Berkley, David Hume and Immannuel Kant and the ways in which their philosophy contrasts with the thinking of rationalist philosophers like Plato and Descartes. It's been challenging to read and follow the thought process of each and I'm not sure that I'm really understanding everything properly. They all have their own unique terminologies for describing the acquisition of knowledge, and there seems to be some disagreement between them on the extent to which we can actually know reality through our experience.

Unlike rationalists, who believe that we possess innate knowledge of universal truths, it seems that empiricists believe that all of our knowledge is acquired through our senses. Aristotle and later empricists like John Locke thought of the mind as a kind of blank tablet before experience writes on it. I think the idea of the mind as a completely blank tablet at birth has been disproven by developmental psychologists. I took a developmental psychology course last semester and learned about the innate aptitude that we all have at birth to acquire language and understand the logical rules of grammar. Also our capacity to understand certain principles and make moral judgements is affected by the myelinization of neurons in our brains (development of a layer of fatty insulation). Before a certain age, children have less of an ability to empathize with others.

Aristotle thought that we arrive at concepts of "universal" properties like beauty through the process of induction and intuition. We experience beauty on many particular occasions and then make an inductive generalization based on these experiences. We use the process of intuition to recognize universal truths. Empiricists like Aristotle seem to be linking our thought process and language to our experience of reality through some kind of shared underlying structure. Aristotle felt that this link demonstrated that our knowledge did reflect reality as it really is.

John Locke also believed that our knowledge represented reality as it really is, but we had to make a distinction between "primary qualities", those qualities of an object that you can measure and scientifically study and "secondary qualities", those properties of an object that are subjective, which we experience through our sense organs, like color, smell, texture and taste. It seems to me that he was saying that primary qualities are more objective and therefore more representative of reality than secondary ones. But i'm a little dubious about the objectivity of the primary qualities that he describes. There are cases in which there have been multiple interpretations of scientifically measured results. Just because you can measure it doesn't mean that you eliminate subjective interpretations of that measurement.

David Hume didn't believe our knowledge represents reality as it really is. He thought no knowledge comes from reason.  We can only know our constantly changing sensory experience, nothing of the external world. He also thought we could have no definite certainty that the laws of nature that have always existed within human memory would still be true tomorrow. That idea is pretty disturbing. I think there is a lot of comfort in the notion that reality is consistent.

If I am understanding correctly, Immanuel Kant believed that we can only have knowledge within certain limits. We can have knowledge of the phenomenal world, which is reality as it appears to us. The mind helps to construct this experience through filtering the sensory data it receives. He thought we can't really know reality which is outside of our experience, or the noumenal realm, which involves matters like speculating on the existence of God. It's interesting to me that physics too has gradually moved further toward the study of things in the noumenal realm, such as the behavior of subatomic particles, which we can't see, touch or easily measure.