Empiricism

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Locke opens his Essay Concerning Human Understanding by attacking a view he takes to be widespread and false: that certain ideas and principles are innate, stamped into the mind from birth, needing no experience to be known. His alternative image is now so familiar it barely reads as an argument: the mind at birth is a blank sheet, a tabula rasa, with no writing on it at all, and everything a person ever comes to know is written there afterward by experience, and by experience alone. Locke divides that experience into two sources. Sensation supplies ideas of the external world, colors, sounds, tastes, arriving through the senses. Reflection supplies ideas of the mind's own operations, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, noticed by attending to what the mind does with the materials sensation hands it. Every complex idea a person holds, however abstract or refined it seems, Locke insists can be traced back, link by link, to some combination of simple ideas that ultimately came from one of these two sources; nothing is built in beforehand, waiting to be recognized rather than learned. This is Empiricism's founding wager, and it is a genuinely testable sounding claim in a way rationalist innatism sometimes is not: find a substantive idea with no traceable root in sensation or reflection, and the blank slate has a hole in it. Locke's own confidence that no such idea exists is what makes his empiricism a program rather than a mood, an actual commitment about where every piece of human knowledge, without exception, comes from.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Hume divides everything the mind can know into two, and only two, kinds, a division so clean it has come to be called Hume's fork. Relations of ideas are the truths of mathematics and pure logic, discoverable by thought alone, certain, and true independent of anything the world happens to contain, the way three times five equals half of thirty is true whether or not anyone ever counts anything. Matters of fact are everything else, every claim about how the world actually is, and none of them, Hume insists, can be known with that same certainty, because the opposite of any matter of fact remains conceivable without contradiction; the sun's failing to rise tomorrow is perfectly imaginable, unlike a triangle with four sides. The fork is Empiricism carried to its most severe conclusion. If a claim is neither a relation of ideas, provable by pure reason, nor a matter of fact, grounded ultimately in some sensory impression, Hume's famous instruction is blunt: commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. This is the standard he turns on causation itself, arguing that the necessary connection everyone assumes links cause to effect is never actually observed, only the constant conjunction of one event following another, with necessity itself supplied by habit rather than perceived in the world. Locke had trusted experience to deliver real, substantive knowledge of things; Hume, starting from the same empiricist premises, arrived somewhere far more austere, and considerably harder to live with once believed.