Philosophy

Philosophy Study Guide

Chapter 7: What is Real? What is True? Learning Objectives 1. Discuss Locke’s causal theory of perception 2. Describe the theorist Berkeley and the belief regarding reality 3. Discuss Hume’s theory on skepticism when discussing reality 4. Discuss Kant’s view on how individuals constitute their world

7.1 Questioning Independent Reality The British empiricists included Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, all of whom believed in the possibility that external reality might not exist and that all knowledge must come from experience. All three agreed that there was no way to prove that external reality actually exists independently of our experience of it. Bertrand Russell wrote in his book, Problems of Philosophy , about advancing the view that all mathematics could be derived from logical premises. Continuing, in his essay Appearance and Reality , he explores the question of whether there is any knowledge in the world that is so certain that no reasonable person could doubt it. He demonstrates the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface of even the commonest things of daily life by analyzing the apparent paradoxes of perceiving something as simple as a table. Russell’s essay emphasizes the significance of the philosophical distinction between appearances (what things seem to be) and reality (what they are). It has appeared that if we take any common object of the sort that is supposed to be known by the senses, what the senses immediately tell us is not the truth about the object as it is apart from us, but only the truth about certain sense data which so far as we can see, and it depends upon the relationship between us and the object. Thus, what we directly see and feel is merely appearance, which we believe to be a sign of some reality behind. 7.2 Locke: All Knowledge Comes from Experience John Locke’s approach to epistemology is founded on empiricism. He believed we are all born with a blank slate. His revolutionary theory that the mind is a blank slate on which experience writes is detailed in his essay entitled Concerning Human Understanding, which discusses that all of our knowledge is from experience. All human knowledge can ultimately be traced back to experiences we have had transmitted through our five senses. Locke believed that it is possible to demonstrate how people could develop such universal knowledge based solely on experience. Locke states, “To say a notion is imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same time to say that the mind is ignorant of it and never yet took notice of it, is to make this impression nothing. No proposition can be said to be in the mind which it never yet knew, which it was never yet conscious of.”

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