Empiricism and reality
those states in us which we call having sensations.’ 188
Hume, only the passions or emotions were innate. Hume also rejected Descartes’ view that we could look into our sense of self because he considered that we have no sense of self. Hume thought that when we strive to find a sense of self we only find a bundle of accumulated sensory perceptions and never a being or entity that can be labelled the ‘Self.’ Hume concluded that our belief in an external world is therefore not rational but that it is nonetheless natural and unavoidable: habit teaches us to believe in it. As the philosopher Sandie Lindsay pointed out, for all his flaws, ‘Hume had still performed a considerable service to philosophy. By showing on the one hand how an uncritical trust in reason had foundered in dogmatism, and on the other by reducing pure empiricism to absurdity, he had paved the way for Kant.’ 190 synthesized elements of both Rationalism and Empiricism. He argued that the only way to gain knowledge of the world was by a synthesis of sensation and intuition, the product of which he called experience. Without being informed by sensory perception, intuition could not form knowledge; similarly sensory perception alone, unmolded by intuition, could not constitute knowledge either. All knowledge fell into one of 12 categories which covered all elements of existence: these categories were innate ‘preconditions of the construction of objects in the mind.’ 191 The process of categorization required principles or ‘rules for the objective employment’ 192 of the categories. This synthesis could give knowledge of the empirical world but only from our own perspective – it was impossible to philosophize about reality independently of the self. This primacy of the self and not nature external to us was the Copernican Revolution in Kant’s philosophy. Kant noticed that it was a natural tendency of one’s intuition to act without any synthesis with sensation (‘pure reason’), to strive to find the objective world and see it, 190 Ayer, A. (2002) Language, Truth and Logic, p.26 191 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant#Theor y_of_perception, Categories of the Faculty of Understanding Section. 192 Scruton, R. (1982) Kant. p. 47 Kant’s thinking effectively
Locke believed that we had a quasi- photographic system of sense perception in which our senses brought in images of things with our mind actively comprehending them. Locke noted that even if the perception and the reality were the same there is a distinction between perception and comprehension and that only sense perception represented reality. He thus maintained that we can understand neither the internal constitution of objects nor their Primary Qualities, firstly because sense perception only conveys Secondary Qualities but also because he rejected Descartes’ views that we had innate ideas which helped us to understand the world. Interestingly, Locke’s division between Primary and Secondary Qualities has echoes today in our current understanding in physiology (and to a lesser degree physics) of the difference between absolute properties and cognition. Hume sought to reveal the full consequences of Locke’s Empiricist views by asking why we believe what we believe, in turn ending the Empiricist movement Locke started. For Hume, beliefs could be either Matters of Fact which were about the existence of real things or Relations of Ideas which were thoughts independent of external reference (for example the laws of mathematics). Hume questioned how we could know Matters of Fact. He rejected the view of Locke, arguing that we could not possibly know that there ‘really are physical objects that produce our sensory ideas.’ 189 He considered that the mind made associations in interpreting sensory perceptions to form a body of knowledge, unwarranted by the sensory perceptions alone. Similarly our imagination created links between different sensory perceptions. These effects caused us to think that we can know that, for example, our vision of a chair means there really is a chair in reality. He also rejected the idea that we could know Matters of Fact either through logical argument, as this involves principles such as cause and effect which are simply the mind’s invention, or through the aid of innate ideas because, to
188 Mackie, J. (1976) Problems from Locke, p.10. 189 http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4t.htm, External World Section
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