Does knowledge come from experience or reason? What is truth? How is truth certain and universal? This is the subject of debate in Western epistemological philosophy, and today we discuss these issues through Locke's philosophy. Today's content is a bit abstract, but it is very important for understanding Locke and empiricist philosophy, and it is recommended to read it patiently.
All our knowledge and ideas are stored in the brain, and we can't observe them directly, so how can we be sure that this knowledge is reliable? The empiricist philosopher Locke also faced such doubts. Locke said that our human mind (and brain) does not know things directly, and it must use ideas as a medium to know them.
Therefore, our knowledge is true only because there is a correspondence between the ideas in our minds and the reality of things. Simple concepts and complex concepts are in line with things, cannot be fabricated by our hearts, and are the result of the role of external things in people's hearts. Therefore, Locke believed that ideas are real, and the knowledge formed on the basis of ideas also has reality, including moral knowledge and mathematical knowledge have reality, which Locke made a simple argument, but later criticized by many philosophers, such as the later great philosopher Kant.
In Kant's epistemology, he proposed the famous "twelve categories", including the four types of categories of mass, quantity, relation, and modality, and what is the category, you can understand is the innate form and structure of reason. For example, when we say: This is an apple; this is all bananas, in these propositions, "one" and "all" are the categories of single and full names. We can perceive all kinds of simple ideas of apples and bananas, but we cannot perceive the "quantitative categories" of "one" and "all", and in all our knowledge we have, we also include all kinds of such categories, such as qualitative categories including: positive, negative, infinite; modal categories: contingent, real, and inevitable, etc., which are important categories that we cannot directly perceive, but are the "innate forms" of reason.
So, on the one hand, Kant acknowledges that our knowledge begins with experience, and on the other hand, he also believes that experience alone cannot form knowledge, and that knowledge needs to have a rational innate form, which you can understand as our innate cognitive framework. For example, when we say: This is not an apple, this is a banana, and in these propositions we include the "quantitative and qualitative categories" that experience cannot perceive. Thus, Kant reconciled the contradiction between empiricism and rationalism in Western epistemology, both of which are essential in knowledge, and knowledge begins with experience but is formed from reason. There was a series of Kant's philosophies before, and you can look at my previous videos and articles.
Introducing the reliability of knowledge, next, let's see, among all this knowledge, there is a more special kind of knowledge, that is: truth, the pursuit of truth, what has always been the thing we yearn for, then what is truth? Every philosopher may have a different definition, but Locke believed that truth is also a kind of knowledge, only that it is universal and certain. "This swan is white" is a knowledge or proposition, it is deterministic, but it is not universal, because it only describes the swan; and when we say, "All swans are white", the proposition is universal, but the proposition is not deterministic.
Locke said that truth is the division of various marks according to the fit of real things, in other words, Locke believes that truth is in accordance with objective things, which is a typical empirical view of truth, which is called "truth conformism". In fact, there are two traditional views of truth: one is the theory of truth conformity, and the other is the theory of truth fusion. Truth conformism believes that judging whether a point of view is true depends on whether it is consistent with objective facts, such as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, we see it every day, so this is a truth, it is in line with objective facts, it can be seen that this view of truth is based on "inductive method", it is worth mentioning that later Kant also challenged the theory of truth conformity, he called it the "Copernican cognitive revolution", not the truth gives objective facts, but our objective facts conform to our innate cognitive form, The relationship is inverted, and more content, you can also look at my previous video of Kant's philosophy.
Another view of truth, called the theory of truth fusion, is based on deductive law, that is, whether a point of view is true or not, to see whether it conforms to some greater premise or truth, such as "man is inherently dead", this view is truth, because its premise "all life has a death" is truth. Truth conformism and truth fusion theory are actually based on two kinds of reasoning logic, inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning. Obviously, Locke's view of truth is closer to the theory of truth conformity, which is actually the universal view of truth in empiricist philosophy.
Now, now that we've introduced Locke's view of truth, how do we determine that truth is universal? Another important concept to be introduced here is the concept of substance. The idea of substance is also a very important but difficult one in Western philosophy.
In Locke's view, the idea of substance is a collection of simple ideas, and each simple idea is attached to the substance and cannot be directly perceived by us. The concept of substance is also the prototype of things in the outside world, but the concept of substance is not directly perceived by us, it is a collection of simple and complex ideas, so the reality of the concept of reality is lacking, or the reality of the concept of reality is not so direct.
For example, "this apple" is an entity, and the simple concept of the color, shape, taste, etc. of this apple is attached to the substantive concept of "this apple", but all these simple concepts are different from this entity concept. Simple ideas are things that we can directly feel and reflect on, such as colors, shapes, tastes, etc., but "this apple" is a physical concept, a collection of all simple ideas, which we cannot directly perceive. Therefore, there is a difference between the concept of substance and the concept of simplicity.
And for a truth to be universal and certain, it is necessary to determine that the nature of the various entity concepts is inevitable, for example, the substantive concept of each swan contains a simple idea of white, but the inevitable connection between the white ideas of each swan is difficult for us to determine. Moreover, the inevitability between the nature of the idea of substance and the simple idea of attachment to the substance is difficult to determine. There are two levels of inevitability here, one is the inevitability of the nature of different entities, and the other is the inevitability between different simple ideas, both of which are difficult to determine.
So Locke says that few generalized propositions in various entities have unquestionable certainty. We see that all swans are white, and we cannot be sure that all swans are white, that each swan is an independent entity, and that the inevitability of the nature between them cannot be guaranteed. This idea was further discussed in depth by the later English empiricist philosopher David Hume, leading towards radical skepticism. Hume argues that induction based on experience can never attain certain and universal truth.
Okay, let's summarize today's content, today's content is a bit abstract. We have mainly explored the question of the reliability and reality of knowledge, which in the empiricist view is a perception of the affirmation and negation of ideas, and the reliability of knowledge comes from perception. Of course, the same is true of universality and certainty in knowledge, but precisely because certainty of knowledge comes from perception, it is difficult to determine the necessity and universality of the nature of different entities.
So Locke believes that it is difficult for us to find unquestionable truth, which is an empirical view of truth, which is actually suspicious.
Well, that's all for today, and I'll continue to share more of Locke's wonderful philosophical ideas later, if you like my articles, please pay attention to likes, collections, and small broadcast books, we'll see you in the next article.