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Lesson 1.6: The Blank Slate
14 Plays25 days ago
Locke promises a “blank slate” mind—but once you follow the logic, his empiricism starts sliding toward skepticism.
Topics discussed:- Three “contenders” for what knowledge is: Descartes (JTB + foundationalism); Bacon (knowledge as power); Locke (empiricism)
- Locke’s tabula rasa (blank slate) and why he rejects innate ideas
- How Locke tries to calm intellectual arrogance: learn the limits of the human mind
- Objections to Locke: Berkeley’s skeptical pressure, Hume’s problem of induction, and modern cognitive-science pushback on the blank slate
- How each theory hits a wall (utility vs certainty vs “reliable enough”)
- Pyrrhonian skepticism as a therapy for overconfidence in theory
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Transcript
Understanding Historical Mindsets
00:00:01
Speaker
it's probably impossible to really do a mind meld with someone from the 17th or 18th century. You'd have to know everything that they know and only what they know.
00:00:19
Speaker
You'd have to unlearn, I suppose, what you currently know. More than anything, you'd have to not know how the story ends, right? So we unfortunately can't say that that is the case for us.
00:00:37
Speaker
But I think we've done as good of a job as we can do in trying to understand where each of these theorists was coming from.
00:00:48
Speaker
I mean, we we got some historical context and I think we do have a feel for what these big three epistemic thinkers from the era kind of had in their noggin, right?
The Shift from Truth to Practicality with Bacon
00:01:02
Speaker
To recap a little bit, let me just give you a quick overview of the three thinkers we covered. Francis Bacon, he did not like the goalposts that were set up in his day.
00:01:17
Speaker
He tried to shift the focus of intellectuals from attempting to discover unquestionable truths like some philosophers aimed to do And instead, he wanted practical know-how.
00:01:31
Speaker
He wanted to alleviate human suffering. So all he really wanted to do is get information that we could apply in practice, right? And this might involve controlling nature, but always for the betterment of of, you know, just regular people, to be honest.
00:01:51
Speaker
That's Mr. Francis Bacon.
Descartes: Faith, Reason, and God
00:01:53
Speaker
Rene Descartes had much loftier goals in a sense, sort of a more traditional philosophical bent. He wanted to establish a first philosophy that reconciles faith and reason. And as we learned in the lesson covering his ah lessons covering his views, he at least feels that he successfully linked doubt and ignorance to the ploy of a demon, mine evil demon, of course.
00:02:28
Speaker
And, you know, that would mean that knowledge and learning are by default connected to God. In fact, He made it so that in his system, it is the existence of God that ultimately rescues us from the pit of skepticism.
00:02:45
Speaker
And hopefully, by building this kind of system, he could create a type of inquiry that the church would be, you know, maybe not only accept, but even endorse, maybe even get behind, right?
Locke on Tolerance and Knowledge Limits
00:03:01
Speaker
And John Locke, for his part, he was interested in you know, getting people to sort of lessen the intensity of their beliefs, in particular, religious convictions, but also other convictions that he thought were problematic in his day.
00:03:19
Speaker
He argued that there are natural limits to the mind, such that there's things that we will never really be sure about. And hopefully through his arguments, he could, you know, he at least wanted to get us to develop greater tolerance for disagreement, being okay with not everyone believing what we believe.
00:03:45
Speaker
I haven't given John Locke enough of a say in this, so let me give you a nice long quote from the gentleman so that you can really get a sense for what he's going for. It's quite literal, right? I mean, I'm not even interpreting in any way. It's what he says.
00:04:05
Speaker
Here's a quote. If I succeed, that may have the effect of persuading the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things that are beyond its powers to understand, to stop when it is at the extreme end of its tether, and to be peacefully reconciled to ignorance of things that turn out to be beyond the reach of our capacities.
00:04:33
Speaker
Perhaps then we shall stop pretending that we know everything. If we can find out what the scope of the understanding is, how far it is able to achieve certainty, and in what cases it can only judge and guess,
00:04:49
Speaker
that may teach us to accept our limitations and to rest content with knowing only what our human condition enables us to know." Quite explicit, right? That is exactly what he was aiming to do.
00:05:06
Speaker
Well, I don't know if it was the philosophers who were making these arguments, ah who, you know, ended up producing the results that ended up happening.
00:05:18
Speaker
Probably not. We want to, you know, give some credit to philosophers, but there's probably a big combination of, you know, historical factors that led to the eventual decline of large scale religious conflict. So.
00:05:35
Speaker
In fact, it was over the course of the 1600s when this happened.
The Peace of Westphalia's Impact
00:05:40
Speaker
So we are discussing the period from 1605. That's roughly when Bacon started publishing his works.
00:05:49
Speaker
And the late 1600s is when Locke was publishing his works. And so we can say with considerable certainty that it wasn't philosophy necessarily that got religious violence to ah to simmer down.
00:06:05
Speaker
it was all kinds of socio-political factors. We know that because the peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War, that was in the middle of the century. Right. So they didn't even have time to listen to Locke's arguments.
00:06:20
Speaker
The peace of Westphalia is pretty important in the history of Western Europe. It did a number of things. Of course, it ended the Thirty Years War. It also weakened the Holy Roman Empire.
00:06:33
Speaker
The Holy Roman Empire is ah you know not really Roman and not really holy either. This was an attempt to sort of bring back the Roman Empire after its collapse in the fifth century CE.
00:06:49
Speaker
And it wasn't really anything like the old Roman Empire. Moreover, that is where the 30 Years War began. And in a sense, the Holy Roman Empire is the primary victim of the Thirty Years War because most of the casualties were within its borders.
00:07:07
Speaker
And after the conflict, it was severely fragmented. Essentially, ah many of the states that composed the Holy Roman Empire had even greater independence and they lost some territory. And it was it was a whole thing. But don't worry, they will limp along for another century or so. The Holy Roman Empire does not disappear from the map until A guy named Napoleon comes on the scene. i don't know if you've heard of him.
00:07:37
Speaker
in any case, um the Peace of Westphalia also established national territorial sovereignty, meaning that each state got to decide its own policies. And that's a thing that had to happen, right? That wasn't always the case.
00:07:55
Speaker
And it legalized... lutheranism and calvinism right so a lot of the conflict here was because of religious perspectives catholicism versus ah some version of protestantism well now the you know versions of christianity other than catholicism were perfectly legal and so this would of course create um a legal protection for them. And so, you know, wouldn't be as easy to, you know, launch a war over this kind of thing.
00:08:32
Speaker
So that is a massive change that occurred in the in the domain of religion during this century. It's not the only change. Let me bring back to you now this idea that we had explored earlier in the course this idea of a worldview.
00:08:53
Speaker
As we know, the Aristotelian worldview had been collapsing and in its place came about, the the view that came to dominate is the Newtonian worldview.
Newtonian vs. Aristotelian Worldviews
00:09:06
Speaker
So this, of course, takes some time. But in 1687, that is when Newton publishes his Principia Mathematica. and it is a work of natural philosophy today we would call that science of course and that was a model of the universe that was very unlike aristotle's goal-oriented function-oriented model and it was very much mechanistic so newton talked about objects out in space and they are governed by natural law so it's not like you know
00:09:43
Speaker
the planet Venus moves around in a circle because of the ether. It has nothing nothing to do with that, you know, the purpose or the function of ether. it has to do with, you know, angular momentum and gravity and and those kinds of things, right? So it isn't for a purpose. It's just the laws of the universe acting upon objects. Very much like, you know,
00:10:07
Speaker
like the gears of a clock, right? Things just work that way and that's it. There is no teleological explanation behind it. Okay, well that's another big change in the intellectual milieu of the time period. The switch over to a Newtonian mechanistic worldview.
00:10:30
Speaker
And I have one more for you that is not unrelated to the first two. So this is from a book that I invoke upon a lot for at least this unit. It's called World Views and it's an introduction to the philosophy and history of science.
00:10:48
Speaker
But another big change that happened has to do with the way that people saw themselves within society, what role they play within society.
00:11:01
Speaker
and what they're entitled to in a way. Let me read you this quote and then we'll we'll talk about it a little bit.
Social Change from Aristotelian Decline
00:11:11
Speaker
The general conception of an individual's role in society changed.
00:11:17
Speaker
The Aristotelian worldview included what might be considered a hierarchical outlook. That is, much as objects had natural places in the universe, so likewise people had natural places in the ah and the overall order of things.
00:11:34
Speaker
As an example, consider the divine right of kings. The idea was that the individual who was king was destined for this position. That was his proper place in the overall order of things.
00:11:47
Speaker
So this is something that we touched on before, where even though within the Aristotelian worldview, this isn't really explicitly said at any point,
00:12:00
Speaker
But it kind of seems like that, right? If the king was born to rule, That sort of implies that if you're not king, you were born to not rule, which means you were born to obey, right? and So that belief in subordination to the king sort of just fit in with the Aristotelian worldview.
00:12:22
Speaker
But eventually, that Aristotelian worldview goes away, right? And what ends up happening to the role of the individual? Well, let me continue here with the quote. It is interesting to note that one of the last monarchs to maintain the doctrine of the divine right of kings was the English monarch Charles I. He argued for this doctrine unconvincingly, it might be noted, right up to his overthrow, trial, and execution in the sixteen forty s
00:12:54
Speaker
it is probably not a coincidence that the major recent political revolutions in the Western world, the English Revolution in the 1640s, followed by the American and French Revolutions, with their emphasis on individual rights, came only after the rejection of the Aristotelian worldview.
00:13:16
Speaker
So the author here is being a little coy. He's suggesting that... sure, our model of reality, our our you know the prevailing you know version of physics is updated over the 1600s, but that also changes our social models of reality, right?
00:13:40
Speaker
It turns out that once you let go of the aristotelian worldview and they start and start embracing something more mechanistic the idea of you know this king has blue blood and he is you know destined to reign over this territory That just kind of sounds silly.
00:14:00
Speaker
And as the Aristotelian worldview is waning, so are these, you know, you might call them outdated forms of government. And you move toward a system that has, you know, individual rights and um and eventually transition to a more liberal, um you know, classical liberal political situation.
00:14:26
Speaker
And so that's a lot to think about. i mean, over the course of these 1600s, not only is there a massive intellectual shift regarding our place in the universe,
00:14:42
Speaker
But it's also the case that you see some real changes in the role that religion plays in interstate politics and in individual lives too.
00:14:54
Speaker
In Protestantism, it's much more a personal relationship with God that you're trying to foster and and develop, right? so Lots of changes on the religious front. And finally, even on the in the political front, lots of changes. This must have been, well, it's enough to leave, you know, your mind reeling.
00:15:16
Speaker
So try to do a mind meld with that. It's not really possible, but I want you to get a feel for what was happening at the time.
00:15:27
Speaker
because now we're gonna look at the theories once more and we gotta make some choices. So this is a slide from a few lessons ago and it needs some updating.
00:15:40
Speaker
Let's update it now. We're gonna no longer call the JTB theory Plato's view because I've said it many times, Who knows if he believed it or not?
00:15:52
Speaker
it We do find it in one of his dialogues and that's about all we can say. But we're gonna call it the JTB theory just by itself. And in this particular case, for the rest of the course, we're gonna link that with Cartesian foundationalism.
00:16:09
Speaker
What Descartes essentially did was found found a way to protect the JTB theory against skeptical argumentation. And so we're going to call it JTB theory plus Cartesian foundationalism. To be honest, I'm not even going to call it that. I usually just call it Cartesian foundationalism.
00:16:28
Speaker
But just know that when I say that, I'm including in there the JTB theory. We also have as a contender Bacon's knowledge is power theory.
00:16:40
Speaker
So very pragmatic approach to knowledge. And of course we have Locke's empiricism. Sometimes i will call it Locke's inductive empiricism.
00:16:52
Speaker
Sometimes it is also referred to as indirect realism. The point is basically we have three main players, Descartes, Bacon and Locke.
00:17:06
Speaker
what is important for us to do now is to differentiate these as clearly as possible because if you aren't paying attention sometimes they blur into each other that they do have some similarities and i'll mention them but we want to more than anything ah figure out how they are different because they are actually ah mutually incompatible. You can't pick two of these. You can only pick one.
00:17:36
Speaker
you know You can only be either Lockean or you know a Cartesian or whatever. So let's kind of ah look at some different criteria by which we can distinguish these theorists.
Comparing Bacon, Descartes, and Locke
00:17:53
Speaker
Let's begin with the very straightforward, what knowing is. According to Bacon, knowledge is a capacity to apply information in useful ways.
00:18:04
Speaker
Bacon is all about utility. And so, yeah, just, you know, practical know-how, that's what we want. Descartes is a much more ancient classical um conception of knowledge. Knowledge is rooted in pure reason and self-evident truths. So it's actually much deeper. It's much more than just know-how.
00:18:30
Speaker
According to Descartes, you can actually no the fundamental nature of reality. Like knowledge is much more, I guess the word would be capacious than what Bacon is going for. Bacon is a little too, according to Descartes, a little, you know, he lacks a little bit of ambition. You need to want to know more.
00:18:52
Speaker
Locke for his part is not exactly in between them, but it's it's a different view, right? For Locke, knowledge comes through the senses and then you reflect on what you learned from the senses, right? So it's a combination of those two things.
00:19:09
Speaker
But it's unlike Descartes foundationalism because Locke does not claim we have certainty in what we see, only that we can be fairly confident in it.
00:19:23
Speaker
Okay, what is the primary method of inquiry for these theorists? For Bacon, it is active intervention. I love the way he puts it sometimes in his writing, but interrogating nature through experimentation, that really captures it in a nutshell.
00:19:42
Speaker
For Descartes, of course, he uses introspection. In particular, he uses the method of doubt to figure out what he knows for sure. And it turns out to be a couple of foundational beliefs and the existence of God. And from there, he builds up to the rest of his, you know, his views.
00:20:03
Speaker
For Locke, it is passive reception. I'm putting passive in here to really differentiate it from Bacon's view because for Locke, you are born as a blank slate and then you just kind of go through the world and the world imprints its characters on your mind, right? So it just kind of happens naturally. As you can tell, Bacon is much more proactive. You gotta go and like, you know,
00:20:31
Speaker
Experiment, mess around with nature, see what happens, break stuff, see what but it does So Locke there, passive, at least relative to Bacon.
00:20:43
Speaker
What about their views on innate ideas? Bacon, we didn't mention this because we hadn't yet introduced Descartes and his innate ideas, but Bacon is not a fan.
00:20:55
Speaker
And instead he says, we need to just, you know, discover natural processes through experimentation. So in a nutshell, Bacon does not like innate ideas.
00:21:06
Speaker
For Descartes, they are essential, right? He literally argues for the existence of God through innate ideas. So that's pretty key. Locke, of course, rejects innate ideas. That is, in fact, the argument that we covered. In a nutshell, Locke says children show no comprehension of what Descartes says are innate ideas is built into us, which means children don't have these ideas inside them, which means the whole idea of innate ideas is bunk.
00:21:41
Speaker
So that is the rejection of any ideas by Locke. What about how each of these addresses the infinite regress argument?
00:21:53
Speaker
So in other words, how do they stop the regress? Bacon changes the goalposts. He is not happy with this idea that you have to conceive of knowledge you know in terms of something that you have to justify with reasons.
00:22:10
Speaker
For him, you justify knowledge claims through their utility. If, you know, claim allows you to predict and control nature or to alleviate human suffering, that's all you need for knowledge. You don't need to justify it with other beliefs.
00:22:28
Speaker
You justify it with practical results. And so that is a stop point for the regress argument. For Descartes, he, of course, has his foundational truths, at least one of which he developed through the cogito argument. That is the I think, therefore I am argument.
00:22:49
Speaker
That's the only one I really covered, but it is his foundational beliefs, right? That he says, well, these are self-evident. You can't really question these. And that's how we stop the infinite regress. The buck stops with them.
00:23:03
Speaker
And for Locke, we didn't talk about this, but... He basically was very dismissive of skeptical argumentation. He more or less said something like, that is just an idea that you can never really understand.
00:23:22
Speaker
examine this idea of infinity, you can never really see it with your senses. So it's just a mathematical abstraction. We really shouldn't take that kind of argumentation too seriously.
00:23:34
Speaker
That's what Locke basically said. and instead he said, but you're right, we can't get you know perfect knowledge of reality, but our senses are pretty good. you know They do a good enough job so we can get, we might call it probabilistic reliability.
00:23:50
Speaker
Our senses are good enough to get us through life and that's what matters. so I also want to give a core metaphor for each of these thinkers. And yeah, let me do this. I'll give you a visual here. So for Bacon, i definitely think that, you know, the tool is a perfect metaphor for his proto-pragmatism.
00:24:15
Speaker
The main reason is that he even calls his, one of his works, Organon, which means tool. And that's what he's doing, right? He's saying, we got to we got to go. yeah I think of a little kid, you know, who has like a a screwdriver or whatever.
00:24:32
Speaker
he's just busting open the toaster or, you know, maybe a toy car that he has to see how it works. That's exactly what Bacon is, you know, telling us to do.
00:24:44
Speaker
Go into nature and, you know, mess with it, see how it works. And then ultimately, if you figure it out, you will be able to control it. And so I think a tool is a perfect metaphor for Mr. Bacon.
00:24:58
Speaker
What about Mr. Descartes? Well, his is kind of an obvious one, right? You got to lay down the foundation and upon that you can build all your other beliefs. Well, that's kind of like a skyscraper.
00:25:11
Speaker
So Descartes foundationalism, we're going just, you know, think of it like a building. That's at least my metaphor. Hey, I hope you come up with a better metaphor, but that's what I got.
00:25:23
Speaker
And John Locke actually also gives us his metaphor. He says we are blank slates. And of course, as you go through life, things get imprinted onto you and that's how you learn. So that is a good metaphor for Locke.
00:25:42
Speaker
ah a whiteboard, right? A blank slate. There is one more item we should address here. and that is a direction of of learning. So for Bacon, i hope you can tell it's outside in.
00:25:56
Speaker
he says you have to go out to nature and interrogate in some way. And then that's how you build understanding. So you have to go manipulate things in the outside world.
00:26:06
Speaker
And that is how, through those interventions, that is how you get your ideas as to how things work. Descartes is very much an inside out kind of person.
00:26:19
Speaker
You begin with what you know, absent the senses. He actually says that no sensory information can provide any foundational beliefs. And he has his argument from dreams and you know the evil demon and all that. And so he starts with what he knows just by thinking and then he builds up to what he sees with his senses so that is inside out and lock is also outside in although as i mentioned earlier it seems similar to that to to the view of francis bacon however for lock it's passive right the world writes its characters upon the mind you don't have to experiment too much
00:27:04
Speaker
You look at a bunch of apples, right? And your mind makes, ah takes like a mental average of all those apples. And that's how you generate your idea of the category of apple.
00:27:17
Speaker
And so it's very much a passive automatic, you know, affair. While on the topic of bacon and lock and differentiating them, I should mention that, you know, it's it's kind of weird because bacon,
00:27:37
Speaker
is, you know, let me let me put it this way. Locke is one of the British empiricists and he gets lumped in with Barclay and Hume.
00:27:48
Speaker
And that's cool. They're like the British empiricists. But it's not like Bacon wasn't an empiricist. Why doesn't Bacon usually get lumped in with them? there's quite a few reasons. I wanted to make a video for for that one. Maybe i'll still I'll do that one day.
00:28:06
Speaker
But there's good reasons for you know calling Bacon an empiricist and there's good reasons for not calling him an empiricist. I won't give you those now. What I wanna do is just make sure you can see that there are differences between Locke and Bacon.
00:28:23
Speaker
so I'm gonna give you one more here so you can convince yourself of this. bacon had a collectivist practical approach and Locke had an individualist, sometimes called subjectivist theoretical approach.
00:28:41
Speaker
So Bacon was very much interested in getting you know practical results. How can we help people today? And that doesn't necessarily involve you know big theories and all that.
00:28:57
Speaker
Just, hey, let's let's fix things. Moreover, he had a collectivist approach. So for him, inquiring research, that was done as a group.
00:29:09
Speaker
In fact, he was one of the first people to say that we need something like academic societies. Meaning, you know, when a bunch of, let's just say psychologists get together and present the results and hey, here's an experiment that I did.
00:29:24
Speaker
And so for Bacon, all research is group research. The process of inquiring ought to be a form of sophisticated group deliberation.
00:29:39
Speaker
That's very interesting. And that is not at all what John Locke is saying. John Locke you know says, we inquire as individuals. We go through the world looking at apples and the mind makes a category of apples for us. And so everything is much more individualistic or subjectivist, as I mentioned earlier.
00:30:01
Speaker
And he also, Locke is, is going after theoretical insights. He wants to know, for example, how good government would work.
00:30:14
Speaker
And so it's much, in ah in a sense, loftier than what Bacon is trying to do. And sure, Bacon had his ideas on politics too, but Locke had, you know, he he would be one of these people that wants to come up with grand theories about how government works. And so Locke definitely has much more of a theoretical ambition, right? He wants to come up with big theoretical frameworks.
00:30:42
Speaker
So there you go. Just a couple of more differences between Bacon and Locke. So those are the three contenders that we have as far as ah epistemic matters go.
00:30:56
Speaker
And we did look at problems with each of these views. For Descartes, as I mentioned before, you know, he says he can build up his whole picture of reality from foundational beliefs. But we looked at those foundational beliefs and we actually questioned two of them.
00:31:17
Speaker
We could have probably questioned all of them. And even if you were to accept the foundational beliefs, It's not clear how successful Descartes is at getting us from those four beliefs and the existence of God to so you know accepting all reality, right? Everything that we know about reality. That's kind of a big gap that Descartes has to bridge. And he uses God sort of as a as that bridge, but people sometimes aren't very persuaded by the Descartes' ontological argument for God's existence.
00:31:59
Speaker
Bacon maybe, perhaps, sets the bar a little too low. For Bacon, you might end up calling some things knowledge that really were just lucky guesses.
00:32:12
Speaker
There's something kind of weird about that, you know? Some people don't quite feel comfortable calling that knowledge exactly. And so there you go. Some issues with Francis Bacon's view.
00:32:23
Speaker
What about John Locke? We haven't covered problems with John Locke. Well, we're gonna get to those next and strap in Some of those a doozy.
Challenges to Locke's Empiricism
00:33:11
Speaker
If we're going to get a handle on some problems with Locke's view, let's go back to the days when he was getting his ideas out there.
00:33:22
Speaker
It is 1689 and some interesting things about the objections to Locke's view. they come in at least two varieties first and foremost there are philosophical objections and that's kind of what we're used to this is after all a philosophy class but then there's empirical objections that's a ah different kind of beast altogether Locke made some very you know explicit empirical claims, that is, views that can be checked by science. Let's define it like that for now. Views about how things are.
00:34:07
Speaker
For example, how the mind is. And, you know, when you make those kinds of claims, first of all, it might be laudable. It might be awesome, right? That's that's good philosophy, you could say.
00:34:19
Speaker
But then that means you are hostage to empirical ah findings. There might be some findings in the future that end up proving your view wrong.
00:34:30
Speaker
And that is what happened to Mr. Locke. We'll get to those in a bit. Let's begin with the philosophical objections.
00:34:41
Speaker
And let's say this. Locke did not directly deal with the infinite regress problem. He basically dismissed the whole notion, arguing that our very idea of infinity, as in the infinite regress, is just a mathematical abstraction, not something you ever actually experience with your sensory organs.
00:35:06
Speaker
So forget about it. Focus instead on sensory information, which is pretty darn reliable, right? That's basically his argument. The senses are good enough, right? They they portray reality more or less as it is because if they didn't, we would die.
00:35:28
Speaker
So you can trust your senses. Okay. Well, in all of that, you know, those are the seeds of the objections to Locke. So let's begin with an objection from a fellow empiricist, quote unquote, George Barclay, arguing, by the way, in 1710. So now we are in the 1700s.
00:35:54
Speaker
His objection to Locke is that the Lockean system direct realism basically also leads to skepticism. Just notice this for a second.
00:36:08
Speaker
You can never check that your ideas of the world, of reality, actually match the world itself.
00:36:20
Speaker
Locke says this pretty blatantly. You don't ever see the world itself, only your ideas of the world. That's why it's called indirect realism, right? So,
00:36:34
Speaker
Locke admits to this and what Barkley is saying is, well, that's kind of weird because that means that if your ideas of reality are completely wrong, you would never know on the Lockean system.
00:36:50
Speaker
That basically leaves the looming threat of skepticism open. Maybe you are wrong about everything.
00:37:02
Speaker
Your senses, in other words, are maybe not reliable and you can't prove that they are because you can never check them with reality itself.
00:37:14
Speaker
Okay, that is ah that's something. In 1739, yet another empiricist, David Hume, raised a disturbing question.
00:37:27
Speaker
What justifies inductive reasoning at all? Now, I should be clear here that John Locke likes inductive reasoning, as I mentioned earlier.
00:37:39
Speaker
You look at a bunch of apples, you take a a mental average of that. And taking averages, by the way, is a form of inductive reasoning. And that's how you come up with your category of apple.
00:37:51
Speaker
So John Locke likes inductive reasoning and David Hume here is asking, how do you know inductive reasoning is any good?
00:38:02
Speaker
Put another way, there's actually quite a few ways you can frame the the kind of argument that Hume is proposing here, but here's another way you can ask the question.
00:38:14
Speaker
Why should past patterns hold in the future? Or why trust experience if it only shows us what has happened, not what must happen?
00:38:31
Speaker
Well, this line of reasoning has become known as the problem of induction and a lot of ink has been spilled over this. ah You know, it's basically a couple of passages from David Hume.
00:38:46
Speaker
So we're going to go into some food for thought because I know that you don't
Hume's Problem of Induction
00:38:51
Speaker
get it. And I know that there's actually resistance to getting this because it just sounds so outlandish, but I'm gonna try to present this to you Honestly, I'm gonna do it in the only way I can.
00:39:05
Speaker
You ready? We're going to pretend we are turkeys. Why not? And this is weird because I don't know much about turkeys. So let's just say that we are a turkey. You are a turkey.
00:39:18
Speaker
And well, you know, you're not super smart or anything. I don't know, again, anything about turkeys. Maybe they are smart. ah But in this turkey is, you know, it takes it a while to learn.
00:39:31
Speaker
So day one, sun rises the farmer comes out with a bucket and he gets some feed right he gets fed cool day two sunrise farmer bucket food day three sunrise farmer bucket food day 50 sunrise farmer bucket food day 100 sunrise farmer bucket food whatever i don't know how long turkeys live to be honest but let's just say on day 200
00:40:02
Speaker
By that point, you are basically taking a mental average of everything that's happened so far. In other words, you are engaging in inductive reasoning.
00:40:13
Speaker
So day 200, what are you going to expect? A couple of different things, right? Sunrise, a farmer, a bucket, food.
00:40:24
Speaker
That is perfectly good inductive reasoning, except Day 200, little did you know, is Thanksgiving.
00:40:36
Speaker
So the sun does rise and the farmer does come out, but this time there's no food for you. You are the food. How do you like them apples?
00:40:49
Speaker
Well, That is more or less the point that David Hume is making. Yeah, sure, I'm taking some liberties here, but how do you know what's happened in the past will continue to happen?
00:41:07
Speaker
How do you know inductive reasoning will continue to work? Because it did work for a while, some 200 days, right? But how do you know it will always work?
00:41:19
Speaker
Let's move into a more scientific example. And again, the basic idea behind induction is that what has happened in the past will likely happen again. Imagine you're doing that experiment where you dissolve some copper and nitric acid.
00:41:35
Speaker
So you throw the copper in and what happens? It dissolves, awesome. And you do it, you know, tomorrow, the day after that, and it keeps happening. Cool, what are you going to inductively learn from all this?
00:41:49
Speaker
Whenever you throw copper in some nitric acid, it dissolves. The question is how do you know that will happen forever? If you're an empiricist, that means you would literally have to have seen forever to know that it will always happen, right? You would have to have seen every single instance of copper dissolving in nitric acid to be convinced. Yeah, it always happens.
00:42:17
Speaker
And so what Hume is suggesting is that, well, you can't be sure about that. Maybe here's another way to put it.
00:42:28
Speaker
You only trust in induction because in the past, what happened in the past was happened again. in other words, you only trust an induction because in the past, induction has worked.
00:42:46
Speaker
Just like the turkey, right? But what Huma is asking is how do you know it will always work? Well, what someone might say is well, it's it's worked in the past, so I'm guessing it'll continue to work.
00:43:04
Speaker
And so here's maybe another point or one interpretation of what Hume is saying. That means that the only justification for induction is more induction.
00:43:19
Speaker
So Hume is asking, hey, how do you know induction works? And someone is responding, induction. that is assuming what you are trying to defend which is of course fallacious circular reasoning and so there is maybe a problem there as i said This has been an issue in philosophical writing forever. I don't really think that we are gonna get to the heart of it right now, but Hume is raising at least an interesting question, if not an interesting point,
00:44:02
Speaker
how do we justify induction if not through induction? And I guess a follow-up question is, is that okay? Can you justify induction through itself?
00:44:17
Speaker
Is that circular or is that okay? I don't know. Well, those are the philosophical objections to Locke's project. Let's move into the empirical objections now.
00:44:33
Speaker
Locke claimed that the mind comes as white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.
Innate Mechanisms vs. Blank Slate
00:44:42
Speaker
But some scholars from the mind sciences say that that claim is demonstrably false.
00:44:52
Speaker
For example, Mr. Steven Pinker says, we actually have several mental mechanisms built into us by evolution.
00:45:04
Speaker
In other words, we come out of the box knowing certain things, right? Not completely blank, but with certain structures already in place that helps us that that help us make sense of our situation more quickly.
00:45:23
Speaker
So the book here by Steven Pinker called The Blank Slate, it covers a little bit of Locke's view. um I actually like this book a little bit more for for what we're doing here.
00:45:37
Speaker
and This gentleman, his name is Stanislas D'Anne. I think he's, that's how you pronounce it because he's French, but D'Anne, he is a cognitive neuroscientist. And he actually tells you in chapter three of how we learn what exactly these, you know, um knowledge packages that we come preloaded with are.
00:46:04
Speaker
So one of them is an intuitive physics. What does that mean? it means that when we're infants, when we're very, very young, we already have some expectations about how it is that objects work.
00:46:20
Speaker
When we have them way sooner than we could have learned them, which means that, well, they were there when we were born. We also have a number sense. In fact, Deanne has a whole book on that very topic called a The Number Sense.
00:46:38
Speaker
What he's basically saying is that we have some intuition about numbers, which he calls, by the way, numerosity. And what that means is that we kind of come out of the box with some basic you know capacity to distinguish different quantities.
00:46:56
Speaker
And based on this adaptation, that's actually how we build up our mathematical abilities. In other words, you can try to teach an orangutan calculus all you want because it doesn't have an evolutionary built number sense.
00:47:16
Speaker
It's not going to work. We have the number sense and that's why we can do more complex mathematics. We also have a theory of mind. What that means is that we have an ability to sort of guess what the intentions and desires and emotions of other people are.
00:47:37
Speaker
So when I see ah my wife and she's, you know, I don't know, maybe her head's down and she's kind of being quiet or something. I know she's upset, right? So, you know, I have a way, even though she didn't say, hey, I'm upset. i can kind of tell, oh, you're upset, you know, or you're sad or or, you know, you're hungry or whatever, right? I can kind of just tell.
00:47:59
Speaker
um Well, that's because i have a theory of mind. I can sort of guess as to the mental state of another person. And we all have that. Dogs, I think, also kind of have it right. They can kind of guess what their owner or master or whatever wants or needs sometimes. So that is also something that we have basically when we're born or soon after when we're born. And that means that we didn't learn it. It was already kind of built in.
00:48:34
Speaker
Face recognition is another skill that we are way too good at to have learned it you know coming at a zero, like a blank slate. But we have some sort of built-in ah structures to to be able to do that more quickly. Maybe the best example is the language instinct. There is a book by that title by Steven Pinker that really is a great example of how we come with an evolutionary adaptation that enables us to learn whatever language the people around us are speaking. In fact, whatever language is the people around us are speaking.
00:49:17
Speaker
And we do that way faster than you would expect if we started at zero, which means we have a language instinct. I have one more I can share with you here just because I think it's very interesting.
00:49:30
Speaker
This book is by a philosopher named Richard Joyce. And he says that we have an innate morality module. What in the world is an innate morality morality module?
00:49:47
Speaker
Basically, you got to remember that we are fundamentally a social species and everything that we do throughout most of our evolutionary history was in groups. It's only recently that you can sort of survive more or less alone, although I wouldn't call that thriving exactly, but we are social animals.
00:50:10
Speaker
so Because most of our history, we had to work together as a group. We evolved an adaptation where we can easily you know talk about how good someone is behaving within our group.
00:50:28
Speaker
Because we need to tell each other about who's a good foraging partner. who's a good foraging partner Who's a liar, right? And by being able to you know pick these traits out, that person is good for the group.
00:50:42
Speaker
That person is bad for the group. um By being able to do that, we actually made our groups stronger. So this tendency to see good behaviors and bad behaviors that Richard Joyce says is an adaptive trait, something that we evolved because we lived in groups or we live in groups. It's just our evolutionary um state of being.
00:51:08
Speaker
And so there you go. There is yet another adaptation. that shows that we don't come as blank slates, but we come with some sort of knowledge structures embedded in us.
00:51:22
Speaker
What does this mean? Well, for one, it means that this whole blank slate idea, maybe it's not true. Actually, that's what a lot of people think. So that's problematic for Mr. Locke. I mean, that sort of was his whole shtick, right? So that's a big deal.
00:51:41
Speaker
What else does it mean? Well, here's what it actually, what it doesn't mean. um Some people might think that, hey, that means Descartes is right because these are innate ideas.
00:51:55
Speaker
Well, these built-in um you know mental mechanisms that we just went over none of them are the ones that descartes brought up as being his you know foundational ideas so it's not clear that this really helps either lock or descartes i don't think it helps anyone right so it just it's mostly a problem for lock okay What else do we wanna cover here?
00:52:28
Speaker
um i'm gonna tell you a little bit about this, but I'm really trying to not go super deep into it. But remember that Locke says that our senses are mostly reliable and some people think that that is false. Now, here's why this matters.
00:52:46
Speaker
He believed that our impressions that we get from our sensory organs about the outside of world pretty much resemble the outside world. We can be reasonably sure that the world is somewhat the way our senses interpret Well, just take the work here of Donald Hoffman as an example.
00:53:12
Speaker
Some cognitive scientists think that your senses do not at all, like literally zero, ah represent reality as it really is. They only track what is fitness enhancing, that might be the way to put it.
00:53:27
Speaker
But I don't, I really don't wanna get into this because this is so complicated. i have an analogy and hopefully it's good enough for you.
The Reliability of the Senses
00:53:37
Speaker
And if it isn't, go read that book.
00:53:39
Speaker
Okay, you got a video game, right? Video games have fairly complex physics engines, right? They have their own little physics inside those little worlds.
00:53:52
Speaker
Well, you probably know how to how those physics engines work, right? You don't like have, you know, formulas in your mind about how the law of gravity works inside the video game that you're playing because you don't need to to pass the video game.
00:54:14
Speaker
that is not at all what hoffman is saying that's that's what i'm saying hoffman is saying hoffman has like sophisticated arguments from evolutionary game theory and all that here's my way of oversimplifying it just like you don't need to know exactly how the physics engine in a video game works to pass the game You also don't need to really see a reality exactly the way it is to do the basic things that biological organisms have to do to eat, to find shelter, find water, to procreate.
00:54:57
Speaker
you don't really need to know all the details. You could have gone your whole life and most people that have ever lived have gone their their whole life without knowing anything about quantum mechanics or anything about the way the world really works.
00:55:14
Speaker
And so from there, we're just kind of a skip hop and a jump away from the idea that, well, maybe your senses don't really present reality at all the way it is. In fact, reality is way more complex than the reality in a video game.
00:55:35
Speaker
And so it would be so, you know, metabolically expensive for your sensory organs, your eyes and ears to capture everything exactly the way it really is. So the very fact that reality is very complex makes it highly unlikely that natural selection actually went through all the trouble to get you to see things as they really are. Instead, it was just good enough, barely good enough to like, there's some food, there's some water, there's a mate, go
00:56:10
Speaker
So that is, wow, I can't believe I explained it that well. I'm kind of surprised. Okay.
00:56:23
Speaker
Each theorist that we are covering eventually hits a wall. I hope you can tell. For Bacon, maybe the bar is a little bit too low.
00:56:35
Speaker
such that we maybe temporarily accept what are ultimately false claims as true, right? Sometimes things are good for us, but they're just lucky guesses. And you don't wanna call that knowledge, do you?
00:56:51
Speaker
Okay, well, that's Descartes. Sorry, that's Bacon. Descartes is in a different camp. He relies on some foundational truths and, of course, knowledge of God's existence to establish deductive certainty in everything that we see.
00:57:09
Speaker
Yet quite a few people said, hey, I'm not sure that these allegedly unquestionable truths are actually unquestionable.
00:57:20
Speaker
And if you recall, we questioned two of them. And of course, we just examined how Locke hits the wall and he hits the wall in at least two ways.
00:57:33
Speaker
He made some probably false empirical claims and that's not that's not good. And there's also quite a few skeptical philosophical objections to his project.
00:57:48
Speaker
And so none of these theorists comes comes out unscathed from this analysis. What are we supposed to do now?
00:58:00
Speaker
Where do we go from here?
00:58:06
Speaker
Here's a thought.
Skepticism and Inner Peace: Pyronian View
00:58:09
Speaker
Maybe the right approach is the Pyronian approach. Maybe you should just embrace skepticism.
00:58:19
Speaker
Remember, for the skeptics, it appears to them that strong theoretical convictions, such as about the nature of knowledge, ultimately do us no good.
00:58:35
Speaker
Think about this for yourself. Do you know the ultimate nature of reality? Probably not.
00:58:48
Speaker
And here's what the Pyronian is saying. You don't know. You can't know. You don't need to know.
00:59:00
Speaker
Knowing that doesn't help you achieve inner peace, ataraxia. And ultimately, that's all that matters. so why do you insist on wanting to have this deep theoretical knowledge maybe you might object here and say well it's not like this theoretical knowledge is you know just for for kicks and giggles the people that are building these theories like descartes like locke
00:59:34
Speaker
They're trying to address the human suffering that arises due to people's misplaced confidence in their beliefs.
00:59:45
Speaker
Okay, well, so people have a little bit too much confidence in their beliefs. That's exactly the Pyronian point. In fact, if everyone were Pyronist,
00:59:59
Speaker
we wouldn't have religious wars no one would kill someone else because of what they believed because they wouldn't have that kind of confidence in their beliefs knowledge after all is impossible knowledge about the fundamental nature of reality is impossible if everyone endorsed Pyronian skepticism, there also wouldn't be any inquisitions. No scientist would be put in house arrest.
01:00:31
Speaker
No one would be burned at the stake. Right? So that is the Pyronian take. Maybe we can take this even further. Pyronism is perfectly compatible with practical skills like healing or the practice of medicine and applied science, meteorology, right? You need to know how the weather is going to go this season so that you can, you know, harvest the crops at the right time and all that.
01:01:03
Speaker
What skeptics are more than anything opposed to as one very famous skeptic argued, his name was Sextus Empiricus, what they're opposed to is this need for theoretical knowledge. Why must you insist?
01:01:21
Speaker
on figuring out and trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality why is it that you constantly pursue that when you have those kinds of convictions lots of things happen first and foremost that cognitive intensity we talked about that gets ratcheted up moreover you end up wanting other people to believe what you believe.
01:01:49
Speaker
And that's where the conflict starts, right? So maybe we should all be Pyronians. Okay. I know.
01:02:01
Speaker
You're not ready yet. You think that Pyranism is a little too out there. Okay, I understand. And I'm guessing that is exactly what what people in the 18th century were thinking. So now we're moving into the 1700s.
01:02:21
Speaker
And yeah, Pyranism just wasn't that popular. There were some, David Hume claimed to be a Pyronist, but that was not the most popular view.
01:02:36
Speaker
Who was actually fairly popular? massively influential was renee descartes he died basically a legendary figure and so in this course what we're going to do is we're going to continue with the cartesian foundationalist project Maybe there's just more to explore there.
01:03:03
Speaker
So let me give you a couple of reasons for this and then I'll tell you about the more to explore part.
Cartesian Foundationalism's Appeal
01:03:11
Speaker
If you're living, you know, now we're in the 1700s, right? The 18th century.
01:03:17
Speaker
This probably looks pretty appealing to you, this Cartesian foundationalism. First and foremost, It claims to give you certainty and that is massively appealing. Remember, the Aristotelian worldview had a lot of that certainty going for it too.
01:03:37
Speaker
People just let go of that view, but wouldn't it be nice to get the certainty back, right? That seems mighty appealing. Here's another reason that might not be immediately obvious or intuitive to you.
01:03:54
Speaker
But the proto-pragmatism of Francis Bacon, you might sort of be leaning in that direction, but it's because you know how things play out, right?
01:04:11
Speaker
You know that eventually science would become immensely successful. And so you kind of want to go in that direction, but At the time, this whole approach was A, new, and that means B, unproven, right?
01:04:29
Speaker
Not only that, it was C, associated with epistemic crisis. I mean, this whole thing, was probably very you know discombobulating when you go from one world system to another, one worldview to another.
01:04:45
Speaker
And so people didn't wanna get behind Baconian proto-pragmatism exactly. Remember, experimentalists were kind of seen as weird still. And so this matters, right? we are getting into the age of enlightenment now, but you know we're just getting there.
01:05:05
Speaker
Here's one final reason for why we are gonna stick with Descartes, trying to mirror what might've been the feeling in the 1700s. Locke really couldn't ensure his readers that we could rely on the senses. And you know now we know couple of centuries after the fact that maybe that claim by Locke is false, right? So a lot left on the table.
01:05:35
Speaker
if you want to adopt uh loc's views you you don't end up getting to trust your senses maybe that's that's a little weird right so for these reasons descartes foundationalist project uh seemed to be very appealing to people at the time and that is the one that we're gonna sort of you know explore further and see how it plays out okay What does that mean for us?
01:06:08
Speaker
Well, Descartes needed God to help him escape the pit of skepticism. He's down in a hole.
01:06:19
Speaker
He believes apparently only four foundational truths, and he's trying to figure out how he can claim to have certainty about the rest of his worldview, right?
01:06:30
Speaker
How can he trust his senses? How can he know that science is the right approach? Well, he relies on God for all of this because he says, God will not let us be deceived about you know reality itself.
01:06:48
Speaker
Okay, well, Descartes' argument for God's existence wasn't that great. But we don't have to leave it at that.
01:07:00
Speaker
So what we'll do now is we'll transition into philosophy of religion and we'll see about, you know, maybe some other arguments for God's existence.
01:07:14
Speaker
Can we establish that God exists?
01:07:20
Speaker
We'll see.