Introduction to Philosophy

Achieve Test Prep: Philosophy

Leibniz’s Case against Locke Leibniz was a rationalist with a very modern view of innate ideas. Rather than viewing them as being stamped on the human mind (Locke’s metaphor), he believes that the human mind at birth contains inclinations, dispositions, tendencies, or natural potentials to form these ideas. He proposed an interactive concept of intellectual development in which people mature, their innate tendencies gradually evolve and become fully formed ideas through the mind’s interaction with experience. Leibniz pointed out that there are many things that we do seem to know innately, but experience and education are required for these ideas to fully develop. Leibniz contributed to the fields of engineering, math, physics, linguistics and history as well as philosophy. He maintained that the world, as created by God, is the best of all possible worlds. Leibniz points out that there are many things that we know through habit or through our memory blanks that are not immediately before our perception and we can even act on this knowledge without being explicitly aware of it. Locke’s Causal Theory of Perception There are four independent elements in the knowing process of perceiving the experiential world relating to one another in a mechanically causal fashion, according to Locke’s causal theory of perception. They are listed here: • The entity or object of the world • Sensations (sense data, images, sensory impressions) emitted by the objects via impulses and transmitted to our five senses • Ideas which Locke characterizes as the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding; in other words, the images and impressions produced in our minds by the impulses emitted by objects • The human subject, knower, or conscious mind who is able to perceive the ideas in his or her mind and reflect on them, thus constructing knowledge Locke poses the question: if you examine your own thoughts, what would you find? He is confident that the only thing you would find would be images based directly on your senses, or what he terms your reflection on these images, with which he means cognitive operations such as perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing. Locke’s point is that such data are not imprinted on the mind innately and require sense experiences to familiarize an individual with them. Locke further analyzes the qualities of independent objects and how these qualities relate to the perceiving subject by distinguishing two types of qualities: • Primary qualities: The properties of objects that reside in the objects, independent of our perceptions of the object. These include qualities that can be measured: size, shape, and weight. • Secondary qualities: These do not reside within the objects themselves but instead are the power or disposition of objects to produce sensations in our minds. These would include qualities such as color, smell, texture, and taste.

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