Epistemology

Descartes' Wax Example

• Experience alone is inadequate: real knowledge involves analysing experience
• Solid wax → Molten wax: How do we know it is the same substance?
◦ Intuition of the mind: faculty of reason that interprets sense data
▪ This is innate and what makes us distinctly human
▪ This faculty is called 'the mind' and is part of our immortal, non-physical soul
• Anatomy of perception supplies information, reason interprets information

Hobbes
• Hobbes disagrees with Descartes, arguing that reason is not a metaphysical but rather a
completely material and natural function of the brain
◦ Metaphysical explanations involving God raise the question 'Is there a God?'
• Hobbes agrees with Descartes' point that human beings organise sense data, as opposed to
simply experiencing it

Homunculus Fallacy
• According to Descartes, every human is essentially the thinking presence (mind) in their
brain, which understands the meaning of each experience registered
◦ Two flaws:
▪ Infinite regression: Descartes posits another little Descartes in his mind, which in
turn requires another little Descartes in the aforementioned little Descartes' mind,
and so on.
▪ Explanatory Poverty: Unclear as to what this mind or interpretive faculty actually is
Locke
• Locke defines an idea as “whatsoever the mind perceives in it self, or is the immediate
object of Perception, Though or Understanding”
◦ Presence and immediacy are important
▪ e.g. my idea of a peach is present in a more immediate manner than the actual fruit
itself is
• Locke begins by arguing that the mind is born tabula rasa and that all our knowledge comes
from experience. As such, Locke denied the existence of innate ideas
• Abstract ideas are extrapolated from experience
◦ Concepts are templates in our mind, made up of resemblances/common features
• Locke's epistemology is as follows:
1. All human knowledge is gained from experience
2. There is a real external world
3. Humans do not possess innate knowledge
4. Descartes was wrong to elevate the mind as an innate faculty of reason, as reason is also
learnt from experience
• Strengths:
◦ Does not develop needlessly complex theorems
◦ Able to explain maths and abstract notions such as justice or colour in terms of
extrapolation
• Objections:
◦ Statement 2. does not follow from statement 1.
◦ Statement 3. is not properly entailed by statement 1.
▪ How do we know how to learn stuff?
• Locke believed that there exists a veil of perception, but that the senses gave us accurate
 representations of the external world
• Objects have both primary and secondary qualities
◦ Primary qualities are intrinsic to the object, e.g. quantity, size, weight, density, etc.
◦ Secondary qualities are impressed upon the object by the brain, e.g. colour, smell, etc.
• Problems:
◦ How do I know that mental pictures are accurate representation?
◦ How do I know that I experience the same as you?
◦ How do I know that there is an external world?

The problem of induction

• Hume suggests a thought experiment: if one billiard ball hits another, is there any logical or
necessary reason why the balls shouldn't simply disintegrate, as opposed to simply knocking
into each other and causing each other to move.
◦ The problem of induction is that there are no logical or necessary laws that combine
cause or effect
▪ All that one is left with is conjoined and contingent events

Strengths and Weaknesses of Empiricism

• Strengths:
◦ Empiricist theories seem to fit with a modern scientific understanding of perception
◦ Empiricists do not need to resort to high-flown metaphysical speculation regarding
things like 'the mind'
• Weaknesses:
◦ Empiricism does not entail a material world, meaning that knowledge is probabilistic, as
opposed to certain
▪ Berkeley responds that we have to live with this uncertainty
◦ Cartesian scepticism
▪ Descartes argues that we could never know that our sense perceptions are not
illusions, hallucinations or dreams
◦ Subjective experience (Inverted Qualia)
▪ Unsure about whether others experience the world in the same way that I do
• There is no way of checking for a universal conceptual schema
◦ The problem of induction
▪ Our knowledge is at best a 'for the most part' prediction
• Example: Russell's Turkey
◦ Turkey gets fed every morning. Comes to expect this, yet at christmas has its
neck wrung
• However, most empiricists can live with this uncertainty
◦ Anti-Nativism is too strong a claim
▪ e.g. innate capacities for language acquisition (Chomsky), logic, reason, an intuition
for induction (Hume, Quine), etc.

Innate Ideas
• Plato: our immortal soul contains all knowledge that we can know, and it is through an
education that we may recollect this knowledge
◦ Meno: Socrates and the slave boy
• Candidates for innate ideas include the ability to recognise logic, intuit moral truths or an
intuitive sense of the divine
• Criticism: Sociological evidence suggests that cultural influence can change the manner in
which we follow through a deductive argument, e.g. tribes people of sub-saharan Africa
A Priori Knowledge
• Knowledge gained through reason, does not depend on direct sensory perception
• To know something a priori:
◦ X must be true
◦ Person S must believe that X is true
◦ Person S must have a good reason for believing that X is true
◦ This good reason must involve thought processes alone (no direct sensory experience)
• Examples: Maths, Logic, Tautologies
◦ However, are these really pure a priori knowledge or are they, to some extent, learnt
through practice (Quine), e.g. one learns logic through practicing it
• Other possible categories
◦ Truisms, Moral Intuitions, Religious Intuitions
▪ These are more controversial, and may prove problematic
• Are memory and introspection a priori knowledge
◦ Not based on reason or direct sense experience
• Criticisms:
◦ Quine's Contention:
Any form of knowledge can be refined in the light of empirical evidence
▪ e.g. law of excluded middle: 'one photon, two slits' experiment contradicts this
◦ There is no pure a priori knowledge: if you squeeze analytic statements hard enough
they become synthetic statements, e.g. 'bachelor tautology' – learnt from dictionary
◦ Mathematics may not be truly a priori (Frege), as a self-justifying system it requires
something external to justify it as a whole
◦ Rationalists posit a metaphysical mind as part of the soul or a set of preformed innate
ideas. Neither is clear nor provable.
◦ It is not true that knowledge established through reason is beyond sceptical attack
▪ e.g. systematic defect argument: all humans suffer from a brain warp that makes us
believe that maths, logic and tautologies are true, when they are not.

Conceptual Schema
• Hume's fork:
◦ All knowledge belongs in one of two categories:
▪ Relations of ideas - a priori, necessary, deductive
▪ Matters of fact – a posteriori, contingent, inductive
◦ However, relations of idea tell us nothing about matters of fact (i.e. how the world is),
and matters of fact are contingent (contradiction is always logically possible)
▪ As a consequence, we cannot have knowledge of matters of fact.
• Hume argues that all knowledge comes from basic units of sensory experience:
◦ Impressions (of sensations or reflection)
◦ Ideas (faint copies of impressions)
• Knowledge must come from sensory experience. Hume's example, three beliefs that no sane
person could possibly doubt:
◦ (1) Universal causation, (2) induction, (3) belief in an external world
• All are without rational justification: Neither (1) or (2) are matters of fact or relations of
ideas and so cannot be knowledge. (3) depends on (1) and can therefore also be refuted.
• Even reason is dependant on the acquisition of sense-data first
• Criticisms of Hume's Fork:
◦ Synthetic A Priori knowledge? e.g. '5+7=12'
 ◦ Contingent A Priori? e.g. cogito ergo est
◦ Analytic A Posteriori? e.g. 'Gold has atomic number 79'
▪ Found through empirical science, yet it is a defining property of gold

• Kant:
◦ Phenomenal world vs. Noumenal world (appearance vs. essence)
◦ We experience the world through sensations and then arrange these according to an
innate conceptual schema
▪ Arranged as concepts, as well as attributing the phenomenon a place in space and
time
◦ Experience → Reason → Judgement e.g. 'this is an X'
→ Understanding → Self awareness
→ Imagination
◦ We cannot gain knowledge of the noumenal realm, only glimpse aspects of it, e.g. when
we experience love or beauty
◦ For Kant, the mind is active: ordering sense-data, thinking of relations between sense-
data, imagining, being aware of imagining, etc.
▪ Powers of the mind:
• Sensibility: power to be receptive to particular object and events in experience
• Understanding: power to think imagine and judge
• Reason: power to make logical inferences
◦ According to Kant, empiricism is right to insist that ideas must be somehow grounded in
sense experience if they are not to be empty. However, rationalism is right to insist that a
priori knowledge is possible, though it reveals only the phenomenal world, not the
noumenal world.

• Quine's Coherentism:
◦ We can never have a complete, objective picture of the external world
▪ We can only piece together information in a way that coheres
◦ Like a spider's web:
▪ At the centre are the beliefs that we are most certain of
• Other beliefs must cohere with those closer to the centre of the web
▪ Anomalies expose weaknesses in the web that can be mended
▪ Ideas are woven together using reason
◦ The main difference between Kant's and Quine's theories is in Kant's emphasis on the
mind as arranging ideas, whereas Quine emphasises the importance of observation in
changing our 'web'