The idea of empiricism

Write 3 to 4 paragraphs about empiricism and Locke’s arguments for it, do you agree with its central claim that all ideas and all knowledge come from experience, i.e. is a posteriori?   Can Locke’s explanation of how we get ideas from experience account for the ideas that Plato and Descartes said could not come from experience:  infinity, goodness, and perfection?

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Introduction

The idea of empiricism is that all ideas, including sensory, mathematical and moral ones, come from experience. This can be explained by John Locke’s theory of associationism (or his explanation of how people learn). In this post I’ll explore Locke’s arguments for empiricism in more detail.

John Locke was a 17th century philosopher who argued that all ideas come from experience.

Locke was a 17th century philosopher who argued that all ideas come from experience. He believed that there are three kinds of ideas: sensory, mathematical and moral. Sensory ideas were based on the senses and included tastes, sounds and smells. Mathematical ideas were based on properties of things that could be measured or counted, such as length or weight. Moral ideas were those concerned with human behavior such as good or wrong acts (Locke 2002).

Although Locke’s theory may seem like an obvious way of explaining how we know things about our world through observation, it has been criticized for being too simplistic by some historians who suggest that some forms of knowledge cannot be explained by this method alone (Schopenhauer 1851).

He believed that there are three kinds of ideas:  sensory, mathematical and moral.

Locke believed that there are three kinds of ideas:

• Sensory ideas are based on the senses. They include sounds, colors and smells.
• Mathematical ideas are things such as numbers, shapes, sizes and weight. They also include the properties of material objects like hardness or softness (which can’t be felt).
• Moral ideas are things like justice or injustice (how you treat your friends), goodness or evil (what you do to people who aren’t friends).

Sensory ideas were based on the senses and included tastes, sounds and smells.

In this section, I will discuss Locke’s explanation of how we get ideas from experience. Locke believed that all sensory ideas are based on the senses and include tastes, sounds and smells. He also believed that they were derived from experience.

Mathematical ideas were things such as numbers, shapes, sizes and weight.

Mathematical ideas were things such as numbers, shapes, sizes and weight.

Mathematical ideas are based on the senses. They are innate in young children who can see objects or hear them spoken aloud by their parents. But after this stage, children develop new ways of thinking about these same things through experience or custom.

Moral ideas were things such as justice and injustice, good and evil.

Moral ideas were things such as justice and injustice, good and evil.

Just as the idea of a square does not come from experience, so too, the idea of moral goodness does not come from experience. In other words, it’s innate to all children at birth (and probably adults too). We later learn what this innate moral goodness is by seeing examples in our society or through custom—the way we’re raised and taught by our parents and other adults around us.

These different kinds of ideas were thought to be innate in young children but later in life they would be replaced by other ideas learned through experience or custom.

Locke’s view was that all ideas and knowledge come from experience. This is a position that can be called empiricism. The basic principle of empiricism is that our ideas are derived from sensory experience—our senses give us information about the world around us, which we then interpret as having perceptual qualities such as color or shape (ideas like these are called primary). These different kinds of ideas were thought to be innate in young children but later in life they would be replaced by other ideas learned through experience or custom.

Locke argued that if we want to understand how people acquire knowledge then we must look at how their minds work rather than assuming that their minds must contain some mysterious faculty capable only of receiving information directly from God’s mind (i.e., God speaking through revelation). He believed it was possible for people with limited knowledge base on what they observed outside themselves so long as they did not assume any preconceptions about what those observations meant: “The proper method therefore must always be by experiment purely mechanical without any presupposition whatsoever.”

Conclusion

John Locke’s main argument for empiricism was that all knowledge comes from experience. He believed that we are born with certain innate ideas, but later in life we learn new ones through our experiences of the world around us. This is why people can have different conceptions about the same thing depending on their surroundings or culture:

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