Locke was the first British Empiricist in modern philosophy. This fellow introduced a lot of very key terms including tabula rasa, which is the extremely famous BLANK SLATE. Since it is the basis of his and several other people's philosophies, I will go into excruciating detail about it.
Blank Slate is the idea that all people begin as a blank slate, where their heads are filled with knowledge through their experiences. Remember, Locke is an empiricist, meaning he believed that all knowledge comes from sense data.
Let us assume that Locke's tabula rasa idea is correct so that you can understand it better. You're a little itty bitty baby blank slate, who knows nothing. You first see your mother, and know what a mother is. When you hear language, you learn language. You do not inherently know language. This is OFTEN disputed, this last bit about language acquisition, and I enjoy talking about it so I might go back to it.
Locke studied Descartes (who was into the whole "innate idea" thing) and knew that if hid tabula rasa idea was gonna get published, he had to do some work refuting the rationalist. He did this with my least favorite thing in philosophy (besides ethics): Ockham's Razor. Ugh. I shudder just thinking about it.
The basis of the razor is that more is less and less is more. Simplify. If you have a single thought that works, you do not need to go deeper, and you should cut it out. This is because the simpler ideas are more empirical, and are closer to the original thought. Descartes would say that these "simpler" ideas are more innate than their more complex brothers, and are therefore more accurate.
So why did Locke use the razor as a way to support tabula rosa idea? He went from the statement "simpler ideas are more empirical" to "an absence of idea is entirely empirical." After all, Ockham cuts out any complex idea to simply them. Why not cut out ideas entirely? Would that not be the most simple, and therefore the most accurate form?
Additionally, Locke's tabula rosa is simpler than Descartes in its essence, so it supposedly refutes it. Except.... he forgot about substance. He pretty much figured out innate ideas, but has absolutely no way to deal with anything tangible. Uh oh. Enter a second philosophizer!
George Berkeley was the guy that really started talking about sense data. He looked at Locke's talk, which explained how innate ideas are bunk and everyone is born as a blank slate (I'm sorry I didn't delve into that bit more, I don't really understand it and I don't want to confuse you), and he understood the issues with substances. He came up with a solution that worked well with tabula rosa.
Berkeley agrees with the blank slate, but he added to it by saying that yes, we are born with nothing and gather information through experience. But our knowledge of the tangible world is acquired through our sense data.
In other words, you experience stuff, but you don't know about it until you can experience it through your sense data. This is similar to his work with linguistics.
Most languages in the world do in fact have similar grammatical structures: there are action words, stuff words, and descriptive words. The way these words are presented tend to differ slightly from lingo to lingo, but there are still three basic categories with a fourth thrown in. These are nouns, adjectives, verbs, and time modifiers (time modifiers are sometimes separate words as with Mandarin, or they can be modifiers tacked onto the end of verbs or adjectives).
There is an easily refuted theory that states that language is innate because of the four basic categories being largely uniform across the world. However, this is totally bunk since a baby isn't instantly able to babble in Swahili as soon as it's born, and must be able to acquire language over a period of time. Also, humans find it very tough to learn new languages.
Since I am on a time crunch :( I'll cut this section here for now. See you later...
0 comments:
Post a Comment