as aqa philosophy

1. AS AQA Philosophy Dr. Corrigan

2. Introduction SoW 3 Topics, with 9 weeks for each. Epistemology 1: Reason and Experience (Paper 1, Compulsory Topic) Epistemology 2: Knowledge of the External World (Paper 2, Optional Topic). Mind and Metaphysics 1: Persons (Paper 1, Optional Topic)

3. Epistemology 1:Reason And Experience

4. 1: Mind as a Tabula Rasa

5. Where do Ideas Come From? Most things that we think about are the everyday objects (e.g. tables and chairs) and events (e.g. having lunch) that make up our daily lives. As our ideas are about such things, it seems reasonable to suppose that our ideas derive from or originate in those things.

6. Where do Ideas Come From? In fact, is it not because ideas come from these objects and events that our ideas are about those specific objects and events and not something else? For instance, the idea of my mother is the idea of my mother and not somebody else’s, just because the idea originated in my experience of my mother. My mother has left her stamp on my understanding, and my idea of my mother consequently reflects that original experience.

7. Where do Ideas Come From? Tracing the causal origin of ideas would explain why or how my thoughts and ideas are about the things they are. Where does the causal chain take us if we follow it back?

8. The Origin of Ideas The sense organs are where the world impacts upon our body, presumably causing the processes that lead to our awareness by way of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

9. Where do Ideas Come From? It looks as if our experience of the world is constructed out of the building blocks provided by the senses, presented to us as sensation. So, ideas are constructed from sensation; but presumably they reach further, beyond our awareness or thoughts of these objects and events towards the objects and events themselves.

10. Key Philosopher: John Locke (1632-1704) (Empiricist) One of the most influential English philosophers, who could be described as a founding father of empiricism and also an early psychologist. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke grapples with many of the concerns about reason and experience.

11. Locke on Ideas Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper [tabula rasa], void of all characters without any ideas; 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. Locke (1964, Book 2, chapter 1)

12. Key Term Tabula Rasa: this term means ‘blank slate’ and is used to express the view that at birth the human mind is empty of all ideas and knowledge, and can only be filled through experience.

13. Key Philosopher: David Hume (1711–76) (Empiricist) A Scottish empiricist philosopher and historian best known for his scepticism and atheism. Hume is still very influential in philosophical circles, even amongst those who disagree with him.

14. Hume on Ideas Following Locke, Hume argues that our ideas are copies of original sense impressions. My ideas of ‘white’ and ‘cold’ are faded copies of sensing white or cold by, for instance, originally seeing and feeling snow. Because my original experience of snow was forceful and vivid, it impressed upon me, like a stamp, a copy of itself.

15. Hume’s Theory If it happen, from a defect of the organ, that a man is not susceptible of any species of sensation, we always find that he is as little susceptible of the correspondent ideas. A blind man can form no notion of colours; a deaf man of sounds. Restore either of them that sense in which he is deficient; by opening this new inlet for his sensations, you also open an inlet for the ideas; and he finds no difficulty in conceiving these objects.

16. In a Nutshell So, based on this view, ideas depend upon sense impressions. Let us interpret this view in the ‘strong’ sense that all ideas depend upon sense impressions, so that I will have an idea if and only if I have experienced the corresponding sense impression.

17. Famous Objection One obvious objection to this strong claim is that, as a counter-example, I have ideas about things I have never experienced. Although it might be true that most of our thinking concerns the everyday objects and events we encounter in our daily lives, this is not always so. For instance, I can imagine a golden mountain, but I have never experienced one.

18. Hume’s Response Hume’s response is to suggest that because I have experienced gold and I have experienced a mountain, I combine the two simple ideas to form a complex idea – ‘a golden mountain’. Unless we can think of ideas that cannot be analysed this way – as either simple or complex – then we should accept the ‘strong’ claim.

19. An Austere Conclusion [Although it appears boundless the imagination] is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. Hume

20. Hume’s Philosophical Method Just as the police might construct a profile of a suspect from various eyewitness reports – filling in details here, ignoring this or that feature, stressing prominent characteristics, etc. – so the imagination can build an image of an object or event that we have not yet apprehended in experience, from fragments of evidence.

21. Clarity and Vagueness Until the profile has been clarified by encountering the suspect directly, the idea the police have of the suspect might be too elusive for them to fully understand who the criminal is and what happened at the scene of the crime. Likewise, until our ideas are confirmed by sense impressions our apprehension of the reality that our ideas depict will lack the clarity and precision of the sense impressions themselves.

22. The Vagueness of Imagination All ideas, especially abstract ones, are naturally faint and obscure ... they are apt to be confounded with other resembling ideas; and when we have often employed any term, though without any distinct meaning, we are apt to imagine it has a determinate idea annexed to it. Hume

23. The Clarity of Sensation On the contrary, all impressions, that is, all sensations ... are strong and vivid: the limits between them are more exactly determined: nor is it easy to fall into any error or mistake with regard to them. Hume

24. Empty Signifiers Hume and Locke believed that unless a proposed ‘idea’ can be tied to experience so that it ‘stands for’ that experience, then explaining it, or talking about it, produces merely empty words, just as a painting that in no way resembles an object might be dismissed as merely meaningless abstraction. Words without reference to experience are senseless, because they signify no idea.

25. Bogus Ideas And so when we come across some highly abstract, obscure ‘idea’ that has no corresponding impression, ‘this will serve to confirm our suspicion’ that the proposed ‘idea’ is bogus. A police profile that fails to match any possible suspect is not really a profile of a suspect at all.

26. Metaphysical Sophistry Hume says that metaphysical ‘ideas’ that speculate about a reality beyond or behind our experience are ‘nothing but sophistry and illusion’. (For example trying to think about a time when nothing happens).

27. Analysis and Clarity We have now identified a method for analysing ideas into their simple constituents, clarifying them and distinguishing between those ideas that have substance or make sense and those that do not. If we could return ideas to their original sense impressions then the disagreements and disputes characteristic of philosophy could be dissolved as the ‘facts speak for themselves’.

28. Problems for Locke and Hume We are now going to look at some powerful criticisms of Locke and Hume on ideas. These criticisms lead to the conclusion that, as we have understood it, empiricism fails. It fails because sense impressions cannot be the basis of our understanding of the world.

29. The External World Empiricists often claim that ideas are constructed from sense impressions, but presumably reach further out beyond our awareness or thoughts of these objects and events towards the objects and events themselves. This presumption turns out to be unsupportable according to empiricism itself – any such talk of the objects themselves are ungrounded – as all we have are our sense perceptions.

30. Empiricism’s Unanswerable Questions Is there an external world, beyond sense impressions, at all? Even if there is, in what way could our ideas be said to reflect that external reality?

31. Shared Experiences? Empiricism has difficulty with the concept of shared experiences. We take it for granted that I cannot have your sense impressions; you cannot have my sense impressions. Words stand for ideas. Ideas stand for sense impressions. Sense impressions (after scepticism) stand for themselves. Therefore, any meaning words have derived from the sense impression they stand for.

32. Absurd Language My words stand for my sense impressions (which you cannot have) and your words stand for your sense impressions (which I cannot have). So, because words track back their meaning to exclusive sense impressions, we never mean the same thing when we think we are communicating – we cannot mean the same thing. This shows an absurdity.

33. Solipsism Thinking our ideas are ultimately about the sense impressions from which they derive can lead to the following conclusions: the external world might not exist and even if it did it is unknowable, and I can never share ideas with others, neither can they share with me. I appear to be completely self-contained.

34. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) (Rationalist) Descartes was a French rationalist philosopher and mathematician and one of the most influential thinkers of his time. He was best known for his insistence that nothing should be taken for granted; rather philosophy should build afresh on the single thing that, he believed, one can never doubt: the cogito, or ‘I think’.

35. Sense Impressions and Ideas It is not self-evident that ideas follow sense impressions. One could argue that it is more convincingly self-evident that we do in fact share ideas and understand what others mean!

36. When There Are No Mental Pictures? There is a distinction to be made between understanding the meaning of something and the having of mental pictures. It is possible to do the former without the latter. Descartes made this point with his reference to complex geometric figures. We can understand what a chiliagonormyriogon is without being able to form a mental picture of either.

37. Understanding Is Not Picturing Therefore understanding does not consist of having mental pictures. It is possible to lack the facility for forming mental pictures completely and still be able to understand.

38. Experience But, in a way, everyone might agree that sense impressions are necessary for ideas, if ‘sense impression’ is just a way of saying ‘experience’ as that is commonly understood. This does not however mean that impressions and ideas are identical.

39. Against Empiricism: Logical Connectives We understand that amongst all things, some things can be either red or yellow. If it is red then it is not yellow, and if it is either red or yellow then it is coloured. Notions like ‘all’, ‘some’, ‘if’, ‘then’, ‘is’, ‘is not’, ‘either’, ‘or’ and ‘so’ seem essential for formulating ideas, categorising and giving reasons. But these logical connectives do not seem to find a corresponding sense impression. The same applies to numbers.

40. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Wittgenstein was a Viennese philosopher who studied under Russell and taught at the University of Cambridge. Widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, he published only one book during his lifetime: TractatusLogico-Philosophicus(1981). Of the many posthumously published writings, by far the most important is his Philosophical Investigations (1968).

41. Wittgenstein’s Criticism Suppose someone said ‘This is blue’ whilst holding up a pencil. If sense impressions are sufficient for acquiring ideas you should acquire the idea of blue from your sense impression of the pencil. But the sense impressions are not sufficient because ‘This is blue’ could mean any one of the following: ‘This is a pencil’ ‘This is round’ ‘This is wood’ ‘This is one’ ‘This is hard’

42. Experience and Interpretation Nothing about the experience itself teaches us how we should judge it. Wittgenstein makes the point that sense impressions cannot determine how we ought to interpret them. If we think of sense impressions as images then it is tempting to think that the correct interpretation is somehow compelled by the image itself.

43. The Later Wittgenstein Ideas are shared and passed on by a community of thinkers, ideas can only be exemplified and acquired, our grasp assessed and our understanding corrected if, in principle, those ideas are about a world accessible to that community.

44. Conclusion By thinking of ideas as copies of exclusive sense impressions Locke and Hume missed this point. That there are other thinkers who experience objects and events as I do appears to be a precondition of having ideas at all; that is, not something I might or might not learn through merely opening up an inlet to sensation.

45. Innate Ideas

46. Rationalism – The Primacy of Ideas The real world is the world of moving bodies expressed mathematically. Descartes claims he knows this a priori and shows it by considering his idea of a stone. He classes the variable properties of ‘hardness’, ‘colour ’, ‘heaviness’ and ‘heat’ as merely accidental properties belonging to the idea of a stone.

47. Descarte’s Wax Ball Descartes reinforced the point with his consideration of the wax, e.g. in Meditations II. Here he appeals to a transformation which involves a change in all the sense given qualities. A piece of wax is is melted and becomes liquid. We would still say this was the same wax even though all the sense-given properties have changed. The only property that remains the same is that of extension in space. Descartes concludes that extension in space is the essential nature of the wax.

48. A Priori Knowledge Given that the property of extension is studies by geometry and geometry is purely a priori, it follows that we can have a priori knowledge of the wax.

49. A Priori - Defined A priori: knowledge that is known independently of experience. For example, once I understand the statement ‘no object can be red and green all over at the same time’, I recognise that it must be true. There is no need to check through observation or experimentation. Innate knowledge will be known a priori.

50. Extension Descartes concludes that extension in space is the essential nature of the wax. Given that the property of extension is studied by geometry and geometry is purely a priori, it follows that we can have a priori knowledge of the wax. This applies to all physical objects and is rationalism in its most extreme form.

51. Infinity Descartes also said that the melted wax can adopt and infinite amount of different steps. As the concept of infinity is grouped by the mind not the senses, he claimed that we could know the wax through an inhibition of the mind.

52. Method for Truth So Descartes regards the new science as exhibiting a method for truth rooted in mathematics and a priori reflection and abstraction. Descartes’ analysis of the idea of a chiliagon showed him that he could conceive of objects independently of being able to sense or imagine them. Unlike the intermingled and confused ideas delivered by the senses and imagination, innate ideas are clear and distinct and present the idea of a chiliagon precisely.

53. Leibniz The innate rational capacity to grasp ideas purely intellectually and work with them is crucial in science. As Leibniz explains: …a corpuscle hundreds of thousands times smaller than any bit of dust which flies through the air, together with other corpuscles of the same subtlety, can be dealt with by reason as easily as can a ball by the hand of a player.

54. God and Truth But although deep, as it stands, this conviction that the universe is intrinsically intelligible to reason is only an assumption. However, Descartes is certain there is a necessary symmetry between his innate understanding and the real structure of the universe – so that he is able to understand how the universe ought to be:

55. Descarte’s God of Laws I noticed certain laws which God has so established in nature, and of which he has implanted such notions in our minds, that after adequate reflection we cannot doubt that they are exactly observed in everything which exists or occurs in the world.

56. God as Guarantor How do we know God sustains this symmetry? According to Descartes: Every clear and distinct perception is undoubtedly something real and positive, and hence cannot come from nothing, but must necessarily have God for its author. Its author, I say, is God, who is supremely perfect, and who cannot be a deceiver on pain of contradiction; hence the perception is undoubtedly something true.

57. Criticisms of Rationalism

58. Hume’s Distinctions Between Ideas and Fact Hume criticised rationalism by claiming that the a priori knowledge that Descartes sets so much store by cannot be substantive knowledge of the world, as it will only tell us about the connections between ideas – what he calls ‘relations of ideas’. Such knowledge turns out to be concerned with definitions, and logical and mathematical relations.

59. Hume and Matters of Fact Matters of fact, on the other hand, are substantial truths about the world but can only be obtained through experience. Hume also denied Descartes’ doctrine of innate ideas and insisted all ideas were based on sense impressions.

60. Hume’s Fork This distinction is often called Hume’s Fork. We can regard the fork as a kind of machine that processes anything that purports to be knowledge. Once all the possibilities have been considered, the purported knowledge will either gain a full bill of health as genuine knowledge or be discarded as mere ‘sophistry and illusion’. According to Hume, a proposition either expresses relations of ideas or matters of fact. Hume says there is no third option.

61. Criticism of Spinoza Hume has in mind here many of the claims made by the rationalist philosophers. For example, Spinoza says: The more we understand individual things the more we understand God.

62. The Fork in Action In terms of Hume’s Fork this claim does not do well. Firstly, is it a matter of fact? If so then the ideas it expresses should be knowable either through ‘outward sense’ or ‘inner sentiment’. This is clearly not so, for what sense impressions or inner feelings could possibly lead us to accept its truth? Secondly, does the statement express a relation of ideas? If so then it will be possible to either demonstrate its truth, as, for example, we can demonstrate Pythagoras’ theorem – or it will be intuitively obvious.

63. Mistaken Necessity? How does Hume explain the feeling that there is necessity in sequences of natural events? Our feeling of necessity at work in nature is ultimately illusory according to Hume. Because ideas are copies of impressions, the force and frequency of similar impressions determines how vividly the resulting ideas are imprinted on the mind. Repeated experience ingrains ideas and triggers feelings of expectation, which we mistake for necessity.

64. Kant on Conceptual Schemes

65. Experience What would it be like to have sensory experience but with no ability to think about it? It would not be experience of anything - the idea of an object is the idea of something that is unified, existing in space and time.

66. Confusion and Experience A confused buzz does not deserve the name ‘experience’ What makes intelligible experience, of objects, possible?

67. Categories Kant’s answer: certain basic concepts, under which sensory input falls, provide experience; Kant calls these concepts ‘categories’ This conceptual scheme is necessary for any intelligible experience at all, i.e. necessary for experience of objects How does Kant show this?

68. Causality To experience a (physical) world of objects, we must be able to distinguish the temporal order of our experiences from the temporal order of events.

69. Comparison Compare two easily made judgments: Look around the room - your perceptual experience changes, but the room itself has not changed. Imagine watching a ship sail downstream - your perceptual experience changes, and you say that the scene itself has changed (the ship has moved).

70. Judgment How can we make this judgment? The room: we could have had the perceptions in a different order, without the room being different.

71. Order of Perceptions The ship: we could not have had the perceptions in a different order, unless the ship was moving in a different way With the ship, the order of perceptual experience is fixed by the order of events; the order must occur as it does.

72. Cause and Effect This is the idea of a ‘necessary temporal order’, which is captured by the concept CAUSALITY. Effects must follow causes - where one event does not repeatedly follow another, there is no causal link between the events. CAUSALITY is the concept that events happen in a necessary order.

73. Causality Without this concept, I cannot distinguish between the order of my perceptions (my perceptions changing) and the order of events (objects changing). But this distinction is needed to experience objects at all. So CAUSALITY is necessary for experience.

74. Conceptual Scheme Kant provides other argues for necessity, unity, substance… They are each aspects of ‘the pure thought of an object’ They are not derived from experience, but logically precede experience - hence they are a priori and innate, part of the structure of the mind.

75. Conceptual Scheme and Experience We do not apply these concepts to experience - there is no experience without these concepts. At best, there is a ‘confused buzz’ - but do you experience a confused buzz? Does it even truly occur, at some moment before applying the concepts?

76. Schemes and Categories All conceptual schemes must include the categories - this is not given by empirical argument, but a priori argument. There is therefore a limit on conceptual relativism.

77. Mind and world What is the world like independent of these concepts? We cannot say, we cannot even imagine. All thought about the world presupposes these concepts.

78. Physical World This casts no doubt on the physical world as we experience it - this we can know contains physical objects etc. - anything that takes the form of an ‘object’ is something to which our concepts have already been applied.

79. Knowledge and Concepts There is nothing we could know here, but don’t. What would it be to know anything without using concepts? What is experience that is not experience of objects?

80. Conceptual Schemes

81. Different Concepts Since the turn of the 20th century, a number of thinkers have pointed out that human beings don’t all have the same concepts. Instead, different cultures and different languages work with different sets of concepts or ‘conceptual schemes’. How should we understand this?

82. Elements of Experience Philosophers and anthropologists who were interested in the differences in the ways in which people think of the world argued that there are two distinguishable elements to our experience – the data of the senses and then the interpretation of this data by a set of concepts.

83. Senses and Ideas Our senses do not ‘let in’ ideas; rather, before we can form ideas, we must interpret what our senses tell us. (The data of the senses was sometimes thought of as purely physiological – the image on the retina, the vibrations of the ear drum, or the firings in the brain that these cause immediately.)

84. Culture and Ideas On this data, different people would impose different conceptual schemes (usually thought of as cultural in some way).

85. Irreconcilable Conceptual Schemes It was then argued that these different conceptual schemes may be irreconcilable – that we can’t translate from one into another.

86. Conceptual Relativism The strongest form of this ‘conceptual relativism’ claims that because their conceptual schemes are fundamental to how people experience and understand reality, people with different conceptual schemes have different ‘realities’.

87. Sapir-Whorf One famous version of this view is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, deriving from the linguist Edward Sapir and anthropologist Benjamin Whorf. They were struck by the difficulties in translating between languages.

88. Concepts and Expression For example, Whorf worked with Hopi Indians, and argued that the way they talked about time could not be expressed in English. But this isn’t just a matter of language – their language is a reflection of how they think, of their concepts.

89. Language and World-Order “We are inclined to think of language simply as a technique of expression, and not to realize that language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world-order.”

90. On Hopis and Time “We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence [i.e. stream of sensory experience] to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated” (Language, Thought and Reality, p. 55).

91. An Implication If there are different schemes, but we can translate between them, then Whorf is wrong – this doesn’t lead to ‘relativity’. However, the view that there are different conceptual schemes and that we cannot translate between them leads to the conclusion that truth is relative to conceptual schemes.

92. Reality and Schemes Some thinkers have gone so far as to claim that reality is relative to conceptual schemes, so that people with different conceptual schemes experience different worlds. But this is very difficult to defend, and it may not even make sense.

93. The World Came First! First, it supposes that language somehow ‘constructs’ reality – but the world would still exist even if no one spoke any language. It existed before language, after all!

94. Reality Precedes Interpretation? Second, as the quotation from Whorf indicates, the theory is usually developed by contrasting something that is the ‘same’ (physical evidence, sensory experience) with the differing interpretations imposed by different conceptual schemes. So there is something that is ‘real’ which is ‘outside’ or ‘before’ or ‘beyond’ all interpretations.

95. A Weaker Claim The weaker claim, that truth is relative to conceptual schemes, says this: because there are conceptual schemes which cannot be translated into each other, a proposition in one scheme can be true without being something that the other scheme can express at all.

96. Truth? So there is no one set of truths – or Truth – which describes how the world is. (Again, if we can translate between the schemes, then any true proposition in one scheme has an equivalent translation in another – so truth is not relative.)

97. A Problem Conceptual relativism looks like an empirical claim – we need to go and find out whether there are any conceptual schemes which are not translatable. But some philosophers have argued that the account of the relation between experience and conceptual schemes given above doesn’t make sense.

98. Organization and Experience Whorf says that language (or the conceptual scheme embodied in a language) ‘organizes’ or ‘arranges’ our experience of the world. You can only organize something if it has parts or contains objects – you can organize the clothes in a wardrobe, but you can’t organize a wardrobe itself.

99. Sets of Experiences If we claim that a conceptual scheme organizes our ‘experience’, then there is something that different conceptual schemes all have in common – the set of experiences (that they organize differently).

100. Translating Schemes But in talking about these experiences, how do we pick them out? We can only do so in familiar ways – feeling cold, seeing a plant, smelling a rose. Any conceptual scheme which starts with these sorts of experiences will end up very similar to our own, and so we will be able to translate between the two schemes.

101. Mild Relativism Of course, there may be parts of a scheme that cannot be translated. And perhaps this leads to a mild form of conceptual relativism. But it will be very mild.

102. Expansion of Concepts Because there are parts of the scheme that can be translated, we can use these to understand the parts that we cannot translate. We can then add these new thoughts into our conceptual scheme – we can expand our concepts.

103. Expanded Conceptual Schemes So we don’t end up with the view that there is no one set of truths that describes reality, just that we will need a very expanded conceptual scheme to provide the means for expressing these truths.

104. More Difficulties The metaphor of ‘organizing’ should perhaps be rejected. But that doesn’t mean we avoid conceptual relativism. The second part of the answer assumes that we can always combine different conceptual schemes. But this is questionable.

105. Colour A popular example is given by colour concepts. Different cultures, it seems, carve up the colour spectrum differently.

106. Concepts and Colours Suppose that one culture uses just one concept in thinking about what we think of as two colours, blue and green. We cannot combine all three concepts in one scheme, since they conflict.

107. Translation and Thought? In our scheme, we can say – truly – ‘it is green but not blue’; in theirs, it is impossible to say this. Either you think of blue and green (as we would say) as two separate colours or as one colour.

108. Misleading Truth However, it is misleading to say that ‘truth is relative to conceptual schemes’. This would suggest that that what is true according to one scheme is false in another. But what we have said is that what is true in one scheme cannot be expressed in another.

109. Disagreement and Expression In this situation, there is no disagreement over what is true – to disagree, the two schemes would have to be able to express the same proposition (e.g. ‘it is green but not blue’). But this is what they cannot do.

110. Self-Evident? We end up with the somewhat unsurprising position that in order to state something true, you must be able to state it. But what you can state depends on what concepts you have. However, we have not established just how different such conceptual schemes can be.