Z S's List: Epistemology Paper

• How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself
• is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking
• What is, is," and "It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be," not universally assented to.  But, which is worse, this argument of universal consent, which is made use of to prove innate principles, seems to me a demonstration that there are none such: because there are none to which all m
• For to imprint anything on the mind without the mind's perceiving it, seems to me hardly intelligible. If therefore children and idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they must unavoidably perceive them, and necessarily know and assent to these truths; which since they do not, it is evident that there are no such impressions. F
• To say a notion is imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same time to say, that the mind is ignorant of it, and never yet took notice of it, is to make this impression nothing.
• He that attentively considers the state of a child, at his first coming into the world, will have little reason to think him stored with plenty of ideas, that are to be the matter of his future knowledge. It is by degrees he comes to be furnished with them.
• I think, it will be granted easily, that if a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he would have no more ideas of scarlet or green, than he that from his childhood never tasted an oyster, or a pine-apple, has of those particular relishes
• But how can these men think the use of reason necessary to discover principles that are supposed innate, when reason (if we may believe them) is nothing else but the faculty of deducing unknown truths from principles or propositions that are already known?

6 more annotations...

• Ideas and sensations cannot exist unperceived.
• Knowledge through our senses only gives us knowledge of our senses, not of any unperceived things

• For I imagine any one will easily grant that it  would be impertinent to suppose the ideas of colours innate in a  creature to whom God hath given sight,

  • ,
• all children and  idiots have not the least apprehension or thought of them. And the  want of that is enough to destroy that universal assent which must  needs be the necessary concomitant of all innate truths

  • .
• to imprint anything on the mind without the mind's  perceiving it, seems to me hardly intelligible. If therefore  children and idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions  upon them, they must unavoidably perceive them, and necessarily know  and assent to these truths; which since they do not, it is evident  that there are no such impressions.

  • ,
• To say a notion is imprinted on  the mind, and yet at the same time to say, that the mind is ignorant  of it, and never yet took notice of it, is to make this impression  nothing.

  • .
• if they are notions  imprinted, how can they be unknown?

  • .

3 more annotations...

• when he first has any sensation" that "a man begins to have any ideas" (Bk. 2:1:23)

• passively acquired simple ideas, such as "red," "sweet," "round,"
• complex ideas, such as numbers, causes and effects, abstract ideas, ideas of substances, identity, and diversity.

• Chapter ii
• criticizes the possibility of innate theoretical principles.

• t implies the existence of God: if we can conceive of God, it asserts, He must exis

• Our innate knowledge is not learned through either sense experience or intuition and deduction. It is just part of our nature. Experiences may trigger
• Our innate knowledge is not learned through either sense experience or intuition and deduction. It is just part of our nature. Experiences may trigger
• Our innate knowledge is not learned through either sense experience or intuition and deduction. It is just part of our nature. Experiences may trigger
• Our innate knowledge is not learned through either sense experience or intuition and deduction. It is just part of our nature. Experiences may trigger
• Our innate knowledge is not learned through either sense experience or intuition and deduction. It is just part of our nature. Experiences may trigger
• Our innate knowledge is not learned through either sense experience or intuition and deduction. It is just part of our nature.
• Our innate knowledge is not learned through either sense experience or intuition and deduction. It is just part of our nature. Experiences may trigger a
• Our innate knowledge is not learned through either sense experience or intuition and deduction. It is just part of our nature. Experiences may trigger
• Our innate knowledge is not learned through either sense experience or intuition and deduction. It is just part of our nature. Experiences may trigg
• xperience does not provide the concepts or determine the information they contai
• Locke's position (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, Chapter IV, Section 1, p. 91)
• knowledge in S that are innate to us, could not have been gained by us through sense experience.
• innately is superior to any knowledge gained by sense experience.
• Descartes (Rules for the Direction of our Native Intelligence, Rules II and III, pp.1-4)
• innate knowledge, we obviously reject scepticism with regard to those truths.

13 more annotations...

• John Locke
• Hume held simila
• a priori knowledge

1 more annotation...

• innate
• children to acquire any human language on the basis of invariably incomplete and even incorrect data is proof of the existence of innate linguistic structures

  • innate
• all knowledge, including linguistic knowledge, is the product of learning through environmental conditioning by means of processes of reinforcement and reward.

1 more annotation...

• Plato's Republic contains one of the earliest systematic arguments to show that
• sense experience cannot be a source of knowledge
• Plato concludes that such knowledge is “recollected” by the soul from an earlier existence.

1 more annotation...

• human intellect at birth is rather like a tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to know.
• Knowledge is attained through empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts.

• Aristotle writes of the unscribed tablet

• must be pure  from all admixture; for the co-presence of what is alien to its nature  is a hindrance and a block: it follows that it too, like the sensitive  part, can have no nature of its own, other than that of having a certain  capacity

  • ....
• What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a  writingtablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written: this is  exactly what happens with mind.

  • tabula rasa
• no one can learn  or understand anything in the absence of sense, and (when the mind is actively  aware of anything it is necessarily aware of it along with an image; for  images are like sensuous contents except in that they contain no  matter.

  • We learn from seeing and experience.

1 more annotation...