Empiricist Epistemology,

Locke, Berkeley and Hume

Empiricism stresses the power of a posteriori reasoning — reasoning from observation

or experience — to grasp substantial truths about the world.

When a priori ideas conflict with the a posteriori, the a posteriori wins,
according to empiricism.
​
Empiricism is usually opposed to rationalism
- the view that reason rather than sensation or
observation is the source of knowledge.
Empiricists tend to see modern science as the paradigm of
knowledge. The empiricist approach is hands-on, down-to-
earth. Empiricists urge us to trust our senses, observe the
world carefully, perform experiments, and learn from
experience.

So, empiricists would say, we should be suspicious of

explanations that make reference to non-observable entities
such as gods, souls, immaterial minds, and other
metaphysical concepts not verifiable by the senses.
British Empiricism was a movement in
epistemology in the modern period of philosophy.
The major figures of British Empiricism are Locke,
Berkeley, and Hume. The ancient Greek
philosopher Aristotle is usually considered a
forerunner of modern empiricism. For example, he
criticized Plato’s very non-empirical notion of
transcendental forms.
The “British Empiricists” were:
John Locke (1632-1704)
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
David Hume (1711-1776)
 There are no innate ideas

Locke spends the entirety of Book I in his Essay arguing that

human beings have no inborn, or innate, ideas in their minds
at birth. Some of the rationalist philosophers wanted to claim
that when a human mind comes into the world it already
understands such fundamental principles as the principle of
non-contradiction - that a thing cannot both be and not be at
the same time in the same respect - and the principle that the
whole is more than the part. Locke does not believe that we
are born with any of these inborn ideas.
Locke believes that when a human mind is first born - whether the
birth of that human mind be dated at the moment of parturition
(birth), or earlier at the moment of conception, or at some point in
between - when the human mind first comes into existence it does
not come with any inborn ideas. When it first exists it is a blank
slate, a "tabula rasa," an empty surface on which experience will
then subsequently write all that we ever know. We may be born
with automatic instinctual behaviors - such as automatic reflex
motions in response to some stimulus - but these are not ideas or
perceptions or what today we might call "contents of
consciousness."
 All ideas come from experience

All contents of consciousness, that is, everything

that ever gets into the mind, comes into it from
one source only, and that source is experience.
Experience is the one source of input into the
human mind.
There are two kinds of experience, for Locke.
a. Experience of the outer world, which he terms
sensation, and from this mode of experience we derive
such notions as blue, round, solid, smooth, heavy, large,
etc.
b. Experience of the inner world, which Locke terms
reflection, and from this mode we get such notions as
fear, love, willing, doubting, affirming, thinking, feeling,
believing, remembering, planning, anticipating, and so
on.
 Simple and complex ideas

There are basically two sorts of ideas, simple and

complex. Simple ideas include all our simple
sensory sensations such as red, cold, sweet, loud,
soft, round, etc.
Complex ideas are complexes of simple ideas.
For example, my sensory experience of a red ball
would include a mixture of the simple ideas of red,
round, hard, cool, etc. That complex of simple
sensations goes into making up my experience of
the ball. That is to say, the sensation of this red
ball that is in my mind right now, i.e., the "idea" of
the ball, derives from the sensory experience of
the ball that I am presently experiencing.
Three kinds of complex ideas are built from simple
ones:

-compounds (“red house” = "red" + "house");

- relations (“taller than,” “loves”)
- abstractions which lead us to general ideas, e.g.,
“blue”, “dog.”Abstraction” is the name of a mental
process by which general ideas are generated from
particular ideas.
 Ideas are caused in us by
qualities

Ideas (or sensations) in minds are caused by qualities in things.

For example, the sensation (or idea) of red in my mind is caused
by the quality of red in the thing.
So we now need a definition of what a quality is. Here it is: A
quality is a power in a thing to cause an idea in a mind. So a
quality is not a thing, really, but is a power in a thing to cause an
idea in a mind.
Now this is where it gets interesting. There are two kinds of
qualities, according to Locke, primary and secondary.
Primary qualities are those that every physical object, every body,
must have. Primary qualities are actually in the physical object.
There are only six primary qualities:
solidity (bulk)
figure (shape)
extension (size)
motion/rest
number
texture
Representative (or Critical) realism” is Locke’s view that we experience
objects indirectly through “representations”.
The mind represents the world, but does not duplicate it. Descartes
also held this view.
Representative realism is opposed to naïve realism, the view that the
mind literally duplicates or “mirrors” external reality.
Primary qualities are measurable using numbers (e.g., size, weight).
They represent the world as it is “objectively”, the same for everyone.
Secondary qualities result from the interaction of sense data with our
sense organs, i.e., they are “subjective” in the sense that the powers
that produce them (corpuscles interacting on our senses) are
nothing like the ideas themselves
So Locke's notion is that everything we perceive besides the six
primary qualities (solidity, size, shape, texture, number, and
motion/rest) are all secondary qualities. They aren't really out there
in the world in the way we think they are. Sound isn't really out
there in the world in the way we think it is. Nor is color. Nor is
temperature, taste, smell, and so on. Neither are other sensations,
like pain, for example. We all realize that the pain we experience is
not actually out there in the world. We realize that pain is a
sensation we have in our brain/mind and that it is caused by
something out there in the world (a needle, a burn, etc) which is not
itself pain. It is just the cause of pain. We know the same thing
about the sensation of tickle, that it is not out there in the world.
There may be a feather out there in the world that some cruel
person is maliciously applying to us, but we realize that the tickle is
purely a sensation that exists in our mind (or brain). Well, Locke just
wants us to realize that all our other sensations (except the six
primary qualities) are also just in our minds
 Four kinds of existents

1. He believes there are selves (or minds). He believes that we know

about the existence of minds ­both our own and those of other people --
by a process he terms "intuiting."
2. The second kind of existent Locke calls ideas, i.e., the contents of
minds. He believes we know about the existence of ideas by reflection.

3. The third kind of existent is things, or physical objects. Locke believes

that we know about the existence of things through sensation.

4. Fourthly, Locke believes that there is a God, and that we know about
God's existence by logical proofs for his existence. (We will not be
looking at any of the classical arguments for the existence of God, but if
you ever take a Philosophy of Religion course you will learn about them
there.)