Psychology 3950F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Empiricism, Depth Perception
22 Nov 2013
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Lecture 3: empiricism and rationalism in the 17th and 18th centuries. Empiricism: trusting sensory experience, doubting certainty could ever be achieved: all knowledge derived from sensory experience. Dies in oaks manor in 1704 at age 72. Main point of novel: there are no innate ideas: just because some things are universal, this doesn t mean that they are innate. Occam"s razor: locke reminiscent of william of occam, one should not increase beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything . If such universal ideas can be accounted for in some way other than innateness, they should be: acquiring knowledge through sensory experience is simpler, and therefore should be used instead. Universal ideas are not really universal: universal consent proves nothing innate , neither children nor people of low intellect possess universal knowledge/have minds, and therefore there is no such thing as innate ideas. Experience begins with a sensation (auditory, vision, etc. )
