Name: ロック、バークレー、経験主義。クラッシュコース哲学#6 (Locke, Berkeley, & Empiricism: Crash Course Philosophy #6)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T06:06:02.000Z
Duration: 9 min 52 s
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程度の副詞

By the time we’re done today, I just might have you questioning whether this apple is

real or not. Think I can’t do it? Gimme about ten minutes! I might have you wondering

And the same goes for all of this stuff, and your computer, and Nick behind the camera! And … you!

How? By unleashing the power of empiricism.

Last time, we learned about 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes, and how he upended the apple-basket

that was his entire personal belief system, and descended into a radical skepticism, only

to emerge with his conviction that: Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am.

This one idea -- the fact that he was thinking -- or really, the fact that he was doubting

-- allowed him to build back up, one by one, more beliefs that he thought he could rely on.

But in the end, most of the beliefs that Descartes ended up putting back into his intellectual

apple-basket had to do with the immaterial world.

Like, he decided that he could believe that he existed, as a thinking thing.

Ultimately, he lit upon the idea that some of our thoughts are clear and distinct in

a way that somehow guarantees their truth.

But, a lot of philosophers disagreed. They argued that thinking on its own wasn’t enough.

Like, just because you’re thinking, doesn’t mean that your thoughts correspond to material

Basically, Descartes’ philosophical opponents thought that the Cogito was a dead end.

So here, we start to see a split between two different understandings of how we can most

reliably get to the nature of reality, and therefore truth. Both were responses to the

constant questioning that is skepticism. On the one hand, there was rationalism.

Descartes, like Plato long before him, was a lover of reason. He met skepticism with rationalism.

He believed that the most real things in life were ideas -- propositions that can be known through pure reason.

Deductive truths, which we talked about before, fall into this category. And mathematical truths do, too.

But by contrast, empiricism is based on the principle that the most reliable source of

knowledge isn’t our ideas, or our reasoning, but our senses.

Sure, we can know things through deduction and basic logic.

But what actually leads us to truth, or at least gives us our best shot at getting there,

are things like induction, and the scientific method -- ways of thinking that tell us about the material world.

Probably the most famous split among philosophers between these two camps was the life-long

Plato was convinced that Truth resided in the immaterial world of Ideas, while Aristotle’s

attention was focused firmly on the ground.

But what about in Descartes’ day? If he was the original prototype of the navel-gazing

philosopher -- a living example of rationalist thinking — then his foil was was the 17th

century English thinker John Locke. This is where he was born.

Locke believed that we’re all born as a tabula rasa, or a blank slate.

He argued that all knowledge is obtained through experience.

He rejected the concept of innate ideas -- the view that we’re born pre-loaded with certain

information, like what’s good versus what’s bad, or what is the nature of God.

Locke thought that we are born knowing nothing.

And instead, all of our knowledge comes to us through sense data.

But one place where Locke agreed with Descartes was in the idea that, just because your senses

tell you something, that doesn’t mean you can trust it.

After all, sometimes your senses give you false information, like when you think you

see or hear something that’s just not there.

Descartes’ response to this, of course, was to just throw out all sense experience

But Locke didn’t go that far. Instead, in order to figure out whether the senses accurately

reflect the outside world, he introduced a distinction between what he called the primary

Primary qualities are qualities that physical objects themselves have. They’re not in

our minds, Locke argued -- they’re actually in the stuff. These primary qualities include

things like solidity -- the density, weight, and mass of an object. And also extension

-- the height, depth, and width that a certain thing has. He also included figure, or the

shape of an object, as well as mobility, which is this – whether it’s stationary or in motion.

So primary qualities, Locke said, belong to the thing itself.

Take this apple. It weighs maybe 150 grams, is the size of my palm, roundish, but firm,

with the slightest bit of give, and right now it’s moving through the air.

And by Locke’s standards, they are not real. At least not in any objective, agreed-upon way.

They’re just in our minds. But they get there through the primary qualities.

I’m talking about things like its color, taste, texture, smell, and sound.

The secondary qualities of this apple are its redness, and how it tastes and smells

and feels on my tongue and hand. Even how it sounds when I bite into it.

Locke believed that the distinction between primary and secondary qualities explained

the disagreements that we all have about our perceptions of the outside world.

Like, we could measure this apple in a bunch of ways and all agree on its primary qualities,

but its secondary qualities would no doubt lead to some disputes.

Like, is it really red? What kind of red exactly? Cardinal red? Or carmine red? It’s kind

of dark purple at the top -- or is it just like a dark pink?

What about the sound it made? Would I call that crunchy? Or crispy? Or...bite-y? It’s like, apple sound.

We could argue about that kind of stuff til the cows came home.

But if we disagree about its primary qualities – one of us is simply wrong. Because primary

qualities have nothing to do with you, or me. Instead they have everything to do with the object itself.

Locke’s reasoning was simple, even elegant, extracting a lot of explanatory power out

of very few basic concepts. As a result, it resonated with a lot people.

And one person it resonated strongly with was the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.

He was moved by Locke’s empiricism and took it seriously -- so seriously, in fact, that

ended up using Locke’s own logic against him.

He basically took empiricism to its logical conclusion, dismantling the whole process

of perception to the point that he had to wonder whether anything existed at all.

Berkeley began by taking apart the distinction that Locke made between primary and secondary qualities.

Like, think about this apple again. How do you know its shape?

Locke said that the apple’s shape, as a primary quality, is immediately perceivable.

But Berkeley pointed out that you don’t perceive some qualities of an object, while

totally disregarding others. Like, you can’t detect an apple’s shape without first --

or at least without also -- detecting its color. When you think about it, you can’t detect

any of the primary qualities without also considering the secondary ones.

You can’t see a colorless apple. You can’t feel a textureless apple.

In fact, if you try to strip away the apple’s secondary qualities in an effort to get at

the primary ones, you end up with no apple at all.

Try it: Close your eyes and imagine an apple made of only primary qualities -- so, it has