PSYC85H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Copernican Revolution, Empiricism, Cogito Ergo Sum
Document Summary
Week 2 lecture #2: thursday september 10, 2015. Must start from certainty in order to understand what else we can know. Introspection is a valid way of searching for knowledge. Intuition: careful, unbiased, attentive use of mind to arrive idea whose validity can"t be doubted. Body can be reduced to mechanics, are variations on animal bodies. If descartes was right, we should be able to build a machine that works exactly like a human body. Newton: dispersing white light through prism shows stimulus does not equal what we perceive. Could be extended to ideas of psychological perception. Empiricism: truth/knowledge can only be arrived at through the senses/experiences (contrast with reason as per descartes) If they existed, all ppl would have the same ones. Ideas come only from experience, and they constitute all of human knowledge. Simple: can"t be reduced to anything else (atoms)
