As Philosophy Reason And Experience

AS PHILOSOPHY

AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 1: REASON AND EXPERIENCE Note: These notes are an overview of the entire syllabus for this part of the Unit. You should bring them to every class while we are studying this subject and use them as your primary reference material. There will, of course, be other handouts, other reading I will recommend and exercises set.

The three main sections are the ones that are mentioned in the syllabus – Mind as a tabula rasa, Innate knowledge and Conceptual schemes.

Key words, phrases or names are given in bold.

In writing these notes, I have relied heavily on the recently published ‘AQA: An Introduction to Philosophy for AS Level’ by Jones, Hayward and Cardinal and published by Hodder Education. Several copies of this book are available in the Library.

1 A Introduction This theme is the only compulsory part of the Philosophy A Level. This is because it is regarded as a central part of the subject which, in some way, underpins all the rest.

Reason and Experience is an introduction to what is known as Epistemology. Going back as far as Plato (427-347BC) this has always been regarded as the core of the subject. Epistemology is a Greek word meaning “the study of knowledge”. “What do we know?”, “Is knowledge possible?” and “What is the difference between knowledge and belief?” are typical epistemological questions.

2 There is a long philosophical tradition of scepticism which asserts that knowledge is impossible – that all we can have is various strengths of belief. But the new AS syllabus is primarily concerned with how knowledge is acquired and the main distinction is the ancient one of the difference between empiricism and rationalism.

3 Both empiricists and rationalists are concerned with the basis of our claims to know something.

What are our reasons for believing what we do? Obviously, some of the evidence we have for what we think we know is very dubious – our friends, magazines and newspapers, You Tube, the man down the pub, or whatever. Some of what counts as obvious to us is more reliable – textbooks, Oxford Reference OnLine, photographs, original documents or (maybe best of all) our own personal experience. But, of course, our own personal experience can be misleading – you may not see the whole picture, your expectations might “get in the way” (think about how eye witness testimony can be distrusted in court), you may misunderstand what you think you see, your understanding might be distorted by prejudice or expectation or your memory may be at fault.

All this is true and these discussions around what counts as evidence are very important in all of the subjects studied at college – think of experimentation in chemistry or psychology, the way that a case is built up through many different sources in law and the search for documentary evidence in history.

4 But the philosopher is asking very profound or fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge itself. This takes us back to empiricists and rationalists.

An empiricist asserts what for many is the obvious truth – that all that we know is somehow based on experience. The most extreme version of this theory is the idea that the mind is a tabula rasa, which is a Latin expression meaning “blank tablet or slate”. Here the idea is that when we are born we come into the world with no knowledge or understanding and that as soon as we are aware of the world we begin to take in ideas from our environment through our sense experience.

John Locke (1632-1704), the famous English philosopher, is associated with this idea. He believed that, for example, the child opens his eyes and sees his mother, starts after a few weeks to appreciate that his mother is a different person from himself, sees his father and recognises (after a fairly long period of time) that mother and father are different people - and that through a process of abstraction over weeks, years and months of experience gets some idea of “mummy”, “daddy”, “man”, “woman”, “person” and so on.

5 The idea of the mind as a tabula rasa is opposed by those thinkers who believe in innate knowledge, that is, that some of our ideas, and consequently some of our knowledge, do not derive from our experience of the world. They are somehow inborn or natural to us. There are some ideas that we have which are products of our mind or of our reason and not of experience. We are all born with certain instincts such as to suckle, to swallow and to cry. Similarly, some rationalists believe that, in addition to these instincts, we are born with a moral sense, logical principles and, maybe, knowledge of God.

6 Rationalists look to mathematics as a primary example that fits their theory. Mathematical knowledge can be gained by reason alone and without the use of any of the five senses. Somebody alone in a room and cut off from the world can work out substantial mathematical truths simply through rational reflection. Take, for example, a triangle. When a geometer considers triangles and triangularity he or she is not thinking about any particular triangle which he might meet with in reality or which he might draw on a whiteboard. Triangularity refers to something abstract and never to any particular example of a triangle. Even though all this appears to be true, the strange thing is that mathematicians, through purely abstract reasoning, can make calculations which are essential to building bridges or sending people to Mars.

Rationalists have traditionally believed that through the application of reason alone we can derive a significant body of knowledge about the world and how it operates. That knowledge would be like mathematical knowledge – certain, pure and eternal.

A rationalist, then, believes that not all our knowledge is derived from experience or able to be reduced to it. They will agree that many of our ideas are derived from the senses but that not all of them are and that some non-empirical ideas are essential to us having any knowledge at all.

7 This is where the notion of conceptual schemes comes in. This is the idea that there are some very abstract ideas we have that are essential to our acquisition of knowledge which are, somehow, prior to experience. We do not derive these from experience but, rather, it is only because we already have these “conceptual schemes” that we can have any knowledge at all. The most famous example of this way of thinking in philosophy is the theory of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He believed that our categories of space, time and causality, for example, do not derive from experience but are, somehow, a pre-condition of any experience whatsoever. This is a very deep point which we will consider in Section E.