Power Your Mind With Empiricism
Put Your Senses To Use With Understanding The Powerful Philosophical Theory That Is Empiricism
By the time you are done reading this article, I just might have you questioning whether the device that you are reading this article in is real or not, think I can’t do it? Give me about 5 minutes and I’ll have you wondering whether you are real or whether the house you are in is real or everything around you is real or not? How? By unleashing the power of empiricism.
History
Before we start, let’s talk about the 17th century philosopher “Rene Descartes” who firmly believed in the idea of skepticism. This one idea allowed him to build a backup, one by one, more belief that he thought he could rely on. But as time progressed, most of the belief Descartes had was connected to the idea of immaterial world. He believed that some of our thoughts are clear and distinct in a way that somehow guarantees its truth.
But this idea wasn’t accepted by most of the philosopher. They argued that thinking on its own wasn’t enough and thoughts doesn’t necessarily corresponds to materials in any reliable way. This gave rise to two different set of philosophical understanding of how one can get to the nature of reality, and ultimately, the truth. These were a response to this constant questioning that is skepticism, namely “Rationalism” and “Empiricism”.
Rationalism v/s Empiricism
Like mentioned before, the philosophers were majorly divided between supporting the two topics. Descartes, like Plato was a lover of reason. He believed that the most important things in life were ideas — propositions that can be known through pure reason. Deductive truth and mathematical truth falls under this belief. But, by contrast empiricism believes that the five external sense experience is the most reliable source of knowledge. But what actually leads us to the truth or gives us the best possible chance of getting there is induction and the scientific methods — ways of thinking that tell us about the material world.
The most famous among philosophers between these two ideology came from the life-long debate between Plato and Aristotle. Plato believed that truth resided in the immaterial worldly ideas, while Aristotle’s attention focused on the ground. Another supporter of the latter idea was John Locke, he believed that all humans are born as Tabula Rasa or blank state. He argued that all knowledge is obtained through experience thereby rejecting the concept of innate ideas — the view that we’re born with pre-loaded information.
We’re born knowing nothing. And Instead, all of our knowledge comes to us through our sense data.
- John Locke
Primary vs Secondary Qualities
But at some fronts, Locke did agreed with Descartes wherein he believed that one could not entirely depend on sense data. For example often we do hear or see things but in reality it is not actually there, therefore in order to figure out whether senses accurately reflected the outside world, he introduced a distinction between what he called “Primary Qualities” and “Secondary Qualities”.
Primary Qualities are qualities that physical objects themselves have. These qualities comprises of solidity, density, weight, mass, height, depth and width. He also included the figure/shape and mobility. These elements in entrity belonged to the object itself. Take an apple for example, it weighs maybe 150 Gm, has a size which fits in your palm, firm, and stationary since it is in your palm. But the apple has secondary qualities too, this is something which Locke believed that the object does not have and resides only in our mind, these in turn are derived from primary qualities, this include things like colour, sound, taste, texture, and smell. The apple here can be described as red in colour, along with whether it has a sweet or sour taste and the sound it makes when one takes a bite. This distinction between the two qualities explained disagreement that we all have about our perception of the outside world. Sure we can have a disagreement on it’s secondary qualities and we might be correct from our point of view, but when it comes to primary qualities, one of us would be clearly wrong. This reasoning of Locke’s empiricism was so simple and elegant that most philosopher agreed with it, one who seemed to resonate with it the most was an Irish philosopher “George Berkeley”, who took the idea so seriously that he ended up using Locke’s idea against him.
Berkeley’s Idea of Perception
Berkeley took empiricism to its logical conclusion, thereby dismantling the whole process of perception to such an extent wherein he wondered whether anything existed at all?
Berkeley began by taking apart the distinction between the two qualities.
Locke said that the apple’s shape as a primary qualities is immediately perceivable. But Berkeley believed that you don’t perceive some quality of an object, while totally disregarding others.
For example, you cannot detect a shape of an apple (primary) before detecting the colour of the apple (secondary) as well, come to think of it, you cannot detect either the primary or secondary qualities. You cannot see a colourless apple or cannot feel a textureless apple, if you try to think of it without using secondary quality, you end up with no apple at all.
Locke asserted secondary quality are not objectively real and is derived from primary quality. But now Berkeley has shown that the two in fact are linked together meaning you can’t have one without the other, thereby proving that primary quality aren’t real too and in reality is only what your mind percieves.
This lead Berkeley to a conclusion which was:
There’s no such things as matter. There can’t be! Instead, there is only Perception.
- George Berkeley
Berkeley’s famous assertion was “ESSE EST PERCEPI” meaning “To be is to be perceived”. He opinionated that there are no objects, only perceivers, and even then perceiver don’t really have any physical form but just minds perceiving thing that aren’t really there.
Therefore, in this scenario, we are all set adrift in a world of nothing but thoughts. And if everything is just perception, then when perception goes away, there can’t be anything left. In the end, he believed that there was only one thing that kept it from disappearing and that was God who he regarded as an ultimate perceiver who was always watching with unblinking perception that holds the world as it is.
The difficult aspect to Berkeley’s idea is that we all believe that he has to be wrong and only a handful of people might be willing to give up on our belief and physical world no matter who’s watching. This in-fact tells us a lot about philosophy over which most people base their ideologies, sure we believe this to be a critical aspect for our survival, and therefore know that everyone has certain ideologies within themselves.
