Concepts and Knowledge Exam Questions

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  • Created by: Elena.S
  • Created on: 29-03-17 18:57

What is rationalism? (2)

  • philosophical stance that reason is the primary source of importance knowledge
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What is empiricism? (2)

  • philosophical stance that sense experience is primary source of important knowledge
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What is concept empiricism? (2)

Idea that concepts occur after sense experience

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Locke's arguments for concept empiricism (5)

1) babies don't have innate concepts, what appears to be innate is learnt from sense experience in womb
2) concept of God isn't innate/universal
3) concepts can only be part of the mind and not be consciously aware of it if already experienced/sensed (neither new nor remembered)

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Hume's copy principle

  • simple ideas come from simple sense impressions
  • complex ideas are combos of simple ideas
  • nothing is ever new, just copied and added together to make something that seems new
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Hume (concepts of self/causation/morality)

  • everything comes from sense experience, if you can't trace them back to sense experience, concept must be wrong
  • self: strand of feelings/experiences lumped together
  • causation: feeling of anticipation from seeing one thing to another bc we saw it in the past
  • morality: products of emotions/sentiments
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Criticisms of concept empiricism (7)

1) is it possible to break everything down into simple ideas? i.e horse's mane, where do we stop?

2) do all simple come from sense experience? (Hume: Missing shade of blue)

3) do all concepts relate to sense experience? (i.e concept of Foreign country without visiting it)

4) do we have to have some concepts in the minds before we can make sense experience? (Condillac's statue - statue with no concept of causation wouldn't understand anything)

5) inner structures i.e Kant's conceptual scaffold, Chomsky's deep grammar

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What is concept innatism? (2)

  • rationalist response to idea that all knowledge comes from sense experience, arguing that some knowledge comes from reason/known innately
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Defence of innatism (5)

1) Leibniz: predisposed to develop concepts, just takes a while for us to be aware of innate concepts

2) Leibniz: lacking a describing word doesn't mean lacking the concept

3) Leibniz: if concepts exist as dispositions, they don't need to be new/remembered, they're just there

4) concepts can arise through reflection without sense experience

5) Plato: certain universal concepts (i.e beauty/truth/justice) are known innately, through sense experience, we only perceive imperfect copies of these, we know the perfect copy from the realm of forms which our souls are from

6) Descartes: clear (very obvious) and distinct (clear and not mistaken) ideas - how do we form these? Sense experience doesn't tell us everything (i.e wax argument - we still know it's a candle despite physical changes) so concepts must come from mind not object; trademark argument - causal principle states something causing something else must be equal/greater than effect

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Criticisms of concept innatism (9)

1) Locke: inward reflection is sense experience

2) Against Plato: we derive concept after enough experience of examples and abstract after/from experience

3) Against Descartes: my concept of extension is primary quality and is perceived through experience

4) Hume: I can't infer that two similar experiences are same so I can't infer innate concepts from recognition

5) Locke: applying Ockham's razor makes innate ideas unnecessary

6) If it takes innate ideas a while to develop, how can you tell difference between ideas and not innate ones?

7) How are innate concepts already part of the mind?

8) Against Trademark Argument: is it true? (i.e matches and fire; evolution) do we have an idea of infinite beings? Incoherent God bc contradictory powers; idea of all-powerful God isn't universal; empiricist accounts of origin of idea of God

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What is knowledge empiricism?

  • knowledge can only be discovered through sense experience and can either be synthetic a posteriori or analytic a priori
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What is knowledge rationalism? (2)

  • knowledge can be found through reason/intuition and can potentially be synthetic a priori (tell us something new about the world without sense experience)
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Hume's fork

  • argues that knowledge can either only be
    1) relations of ideas (a priori/analytic/necessary/cannot be denied without contradiction) i.e "I exist"
    2) matters of fact (a posteriori/synthetic/contingent/can be denied without contradiction) i.e "Nutella is better than jam"
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Criticisms of knowledge empiricism (7)

1) potential scepticism about existence of external world
2) rationalists argue empiricism leads to conclusion that we cannot know if external objects exist, if this is wrong, so is knowledge empiricism

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Defence of knowledge rationalism (7)

  • we can know things without sense experience through rational faculty for intuition combined with deduction to understand through reason or innate knowledge
  • Plato: maths is synthetic a priori, known innately but tells us something new about world (slave boy analogy)
  • Geometry: tells us something about space itself rather than just concept, mathematically viable
  • Descartes: not only is concept of object innate, so is knowledge of its existence
  • Leibniz/Spinoza: ontological argument/pantheism - possible for God to have synthetic a priori knowledge
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Criticisms of knowledge rationalism (7)

1) is maths purely analytic? Perhaps it doesn't just describe world but is rooted in deeper logic
2) Empiricists argue there is more than one type of geometry - Euclidean (analytic a priori) and non-Euclidean (contingent synthetic a posteriori)
3) Reliance on supernatural (God or realm of forms)

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Define sense experiences (2)

  • everyday things that senses pick up in the present
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Define concepts (2)

  • what the brain makes of stored sense experiences for the future
  • Hume: broken down into simple ideas (if not possible i.e God, not relevant)
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Define simple ideas (2)

  • simple sense impressions
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Define complex ideas (2)

  • combinations of simple ideas i.e horse + horn = unicorn
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Define clear and distinct ideas (2)

  • something that cannot be doubted i.e Descartes: "I think therefore I am"
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Define knowledge innatism (2)

  • ideology that humans are born with certain concepts not known through sense experience
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Defence and criticisms of innate ideas (5) (1/2)

1) instincts - babies crying don't link this to knowledge of experience
CRITICISM
Empiricists: practical > propositional knowledge
RESPONSE
Behavioural psychology: all knowledge is practical knowledge

2) morality - Hutcherson: morality comes from God-given sense; Moore: moral concepts not in world bc not experience using senses
CRITICISM
Hume: morals derived from sentiments i.e sympathy; humans born with emotional faculties using sense impressions to generate morals + emotions

3) numbers - Plato: we experience examples > purely so must be innate in world of pure thought
CRITICISM
Empiricists: abstraction of experience
RESPOSNE
Descartes: we are capable of thinking of numbers without experience

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Defence and criticisms of innate ideas (5) (2/3)

4) God - Descartes: causal principle (imperfect humans cannot think of perfect God so must be innate) + trademark argument (God left idea of himself so we'd know who created us)
CRITICISM
Causal principle isn't true + idea of God isn't universal

5) Physical objects - Descartes: solid wax + melted wax have v different properties + if we only used sense experience, we wouldn't recognise them as same + clear and distinct so must be innate
CRITICISM
All concepts come from sense experiment

6) universal concepts - Plato: we experiences examples of beauty + justice without five senses so must be in realm of form
CRITICISM
Tabula rasa; we don't understand them at birth

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Defence and criticisms of innate ideas (5) (3/3)

6) causation - Kant: causation is innate bc how else would we process sense experience apart from in present? (Statue idea)

7) deep grammar - Chomsky: innate structure to learn language bc we pick it up quicker than expected

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Criticisms of innate ideas (7)

1) unnecessary
Locke: simplest theory is best theory (Ockham's razor)
2) not all innate ideas are universal
Everyone doesn't have same ideas i.e God
CRITICISM
Leibniz: some might not be aware they have innate ideas; not all innate ideas are universal; could be from past lives
3) transparency of ideas
Locke: makes no sense for people to have innate ideas without knowing it
CRITICISM
Leibniz: idea of subconscious memories i.e songs
4) how can we distinguish innate ideas?
We don't know what's innate or not
CRITICISM
Leibniz: innate ideas are necessarily true + a priori
5) reliance of supernatural
CRITICISM
Chomsky: deep grammar

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