philosophy question

[KillerMuffin]

What was the name of the school of philosophy that masturbated itself gaga over the whole concept of tabula rasa and experiential knowledge and junk?

I forgot and my Algebra textbook isn't talking.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

Locke wrote about Tabula Rasa.
Rousseau preached that children should learn by experience.

I think it was naturalism, no?

 

[Pure]

empiricism

 

[KillerMuffin]

Yeah! That's it! Thanks, Svenska, Pure.



Uh, what was the other side called? I forgot.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Locke's theory was the rationalist answer to the Christian spiritual view of man, which sees humanity as being born into sin and, at that time, into a specific place in society. Locke was arguing that all men are essentially created equal and that knowledge could be achieved through other means besides divine revelation. This was back during the English enlightenment with Newton and all those dudes.

Nature and nature's laws lay veiled in night,
God said "Let Newton be" and all was light

Or something like that. That's Pope. And that's all I remember.

---dr.M.

 

[Black Tulip]

Wasn't Popper the one about knowledge? Something to do with only noting the things you're focussed on, so what you find is always just a part, never the whole whatever?

 

[Guest]

 

[Guest]

The empiricist doctrine was first expounded by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon early in the 17th century, but Locke gave it systematic expression in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). He regarded the mind of a person at birth as a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which experience imprinted knowledge, and did not believe in intuition or theories of innate conceptions. Locke also held that all persons are born good, independent, and equal.

1994 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation.

 

[NoJo]

Karl Popper's theory was called falsification.

He said scientist's jobs should be to create theories that can be tested. He called them "strong" theories.

A strong theory" would be "All blondes are dumb". This is something you could go out and test.


It's called falsification becasue to test it, you don't look for dumb blondes, you go out and look for blondes that aren't dumb.

You can never go from seeing one, two, three, .... a thousand dumb blondes to proving that all blondes are dumb.

But you just have to produce one counterexample (a smart blonde) to show the statement is false.


A weak theory is something like "Some blondes are dumb". it's not a good scientific theory because you can't really show it to be false, no matter how many smart or dumb, blondes or brunettes you produce.

This is something non-scientists have difficulty getting to grips with: To be a good theory, it doesn't matter so much whether it's true or not. It's much more important that it's falsifiable.


That's Karl Popper's view, anyway.

Sorry for the wordines, I wrote my dissertation on him many years ago.

 

[Guest]

Joe, I met Popper at Berkeley in '71 (my best mate was with the phil. dept.) Nice man. We didn't talk philosophy or maths though.

Perdita

 

[NoJo]

Wow, Perdita! That must have been a cool time to be there! Did you

a. Turn on
b. Tune in
c. Drop out
d. Drink cappuccinos in the Med
e. Play rumba congas in Telegraph Ave?

 

[Guest]

All but 'e', Joe. I lived a few doors from where Patty H. was later kidnapped. The phil. dept. had great parties. We skinny-dipped in the local h.school pool (entering over a cyclone fence). I had a Black Panther bf. Got tear-gassed accidently once.

My salad days.

Perdita

(thanks again)

 

[damppanties]

Uh, what was the other side called? I forgot.

Nativism.

Nativists believe that humans are born with all their perceptual functions ready to be used, while empiricists believe that perceptual abilities have to be learned and adapted to.


Nativism: Knowledge is part of our innate endowment (already “built in”at the time of birth).
Plato, Socrates, Chomsky.
At some unconscious level, we know everything already but knowledge is hidden. LEarning is merely recollecting some of this knowledge.

Empiricism: Knowledge comes from experience.
Locke.
All knowledge comes from experience. At birth, the human mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate) on which experience writes. Our senses are the initial source of allideas, concepts, and beliefs. Ideas come directly from experience or are derived from simple ideas by abstraction,analogy, and definition.

 

[Pure]

Damp said

//Empiricism: Knowledge comes from experience.
Locke, Chomsky.//

Chomsky? I doubt it. Quote your source.

 

[snooper]

... A weak theory is something like "Some blondes are dumb". it's not a good scientific theory because you can't really show it to be false, no matter how many smart or dumb, blondes or brunettes you produce. ...

But you can prove it is true by producing two dumb blondes. Of course Popper never did care for true theories, dimissing them, if my memory serves, as not being theories at all, merely facts.

... To be a good theory, it doesn't matter so much whether it's true or not. It's much more important that it's falsifiable. ...

That is merely one philosopher's definition of "good" as applied to theories. Körner (or was it Nidditch) once remarked, in this context, that for a physicist the world view was different. For a physicist the only "good" theory was one that got you a Nobel Prize.

 

[damppanties]

Damp said

//Empiricism: Knowledge comes from experience.
Locke, Chomsky.//

Chomsky? I doubt it. Quote your source.

Sorry, BAD mistake. Chomsky is a nativist. I added his name later, in an edit, and thought I was doing it under Nativism. There's no place to quote from. I wrote that from memory. I did Chomsky in college, his linguistic theories are great. I'm fascinated by the man so couldn't do this without mentioning him.


Thanks for catching that one Pure.

 

[Pure]

There a nice little page on the issues at this site: Note to dr m.

http://www.grsampson.net/REmpNat.html

Empiricism v. Nativism: Nature or Nurture?

by G. Sampson

---
Note to dr m.

Locke is not normally called 'rationalist.' Though some have pointed to 'rationalist elements' in certain areas of his 'empiricist' philosophy. Cite your source. Here is one of mine:

Locke Studies,
http://www.luc.edu/depts/philosophy/LockeStudies/articles/rogers-infinity.htm



Innate Ideas and the Infinite:

The Case of Locke and Descartes

G. A. J. Rogers

Pierre Gassendi, who did not like nonsense, said of the idea of infinity: ‘if someone calls something "infinite" he attributes to a thing which he does not grasp a label which he does not understand’. 1 Gassendi’s is a harsh judgement for, surely, we all do quite cheerfully and successfully use the concept of infinity, and in a variety of contexts. Yet if Gassendi’s judgement is too hard it is easy enough to have sympathy with his claim. For it is a perennial fact that we never, in Descartes’s phrase, seem to have an ‘adequate idea’ of infinity. Nor is this just because it is an abstract noun like friendship or strength, for it retains this familiar lack of adequacy when it appears in its adjectival or adverbial forms: infinite space, infinite power, infinitely large, infinitely good.

It is not my intention in this paper to offer a philosophical account of this familiar state of affairs, though perhaps what I shall have to say will throw some little light on the matter. It is rather to explore how discussions of such questions take us into issues at the heart of the foundations of modern philosophy, and specifically, into the great debate which I will refer to by the usual title as that between the Rationalists and the Empiricists, of whom the protagonists are traditionally identified as Descartes on the one side and Locke on the other.
It would not be out of place for somebody to say in response to that famous contrast that either it is hackneyed or else it is mistaken. It is hackneyed because we all know that Descartes and Locke represent contrasting traditions in modern philosophy and [49] there is nothing new to be said about it. It is mistaken because, as a matter of fact, it is simplistic to set them up as dogmatic exponents of their respective schools.

There are rationalist elements in Locke’s Essay, especially in Book IV, and there is a strong empiricist element in Descartes, especially in his science. Those emphasizing the former, Webb for example in the last century and Aaron in this, 2 have underlined the place of intuition and demonstration in Locke’s account of knowledge. Descartes’s empirical leanings have been noted in his account of the role of experiment in the natural sciences. 3

There is of course no denying these aspects of their philosophies. But my path will be more revisionist than supportive of such readings of their work. I shall argue that the dominant (though not the only) strain in Descartes is a rationalist one and that Locke was keenly aware of this and strongly hostile to it. On the other side, whilst Locke was impressed by much of Descartes’s presentation of knowledge, and borrowed heavily from it, he never looks tike[[presents himself as??]] subscribing at all to the central rationalist doctrines, and indeed saw his work as a major refutation of them. In all of this his account of our idea of infinity plays an exemplary role. But before we reach Locke we should go back to Descartes. [50]



J.

 

[kellycummings]

A strong theory" would be "All blondes are dumb". This is something you could go out and test.


It's called falsification becasue to test it, you don't look for dumb blondes, you go out and look for blondes that aren't dumb.

You can never go from seeing one, two, three, .... a thousand dumb blondes to proving that all blondes are dumb.

But you just have to produce one counterexample (a smart blonde) to show the statement is false.


A weak theory is something like "Some blondes are dumb". it's not a good scientific theory because you can't really show it to be false, no matter how many smart or dumb, blondes or brunettes you produce.

This is something non-scientists have difficulty getting to grips with: To be a good theory, it doesn't matter so much whether it's true or not. It's much more important that it's falsifiable.


That is the way most science is conducted these days. Prove the theory by trying to disprove it. In most cases it works well, especially in quantum and astrophysics.
]

 

[shereads]

What was the name of the school of philosophy that masturbated itself gaga over the whole concept of tabula rasa and experiential knowledge and junk?

The Tallywackers.

 

[shereads]

Wow, Perdita! That must have been a cool time to be there! Did you

a. Turn on
b. Tune in
c. Drop out
d. Drink cappuccinos in the Med
e. Play rumba congas in Telegraph Ave?

And if so, do you know where Spaulding Gray went?

 

[Black Tulip]

Karl Popper's theory was called falsification.

He said scientist's jobs should be to create theories that can be tested. He called them "strong" theories.

A strong theory" would be "All blondes are dumb". This is something you could go out and test.


It's called falsification becasue to test it, you don't look for dumb blondes, you go out and look for blondes that aren't dumb.

You can never go from seeing one, two, three, .... a thousand dumb blondes to proving that all blondes are dumb.

But you just have to produce one counterexample (a smart blonde) to show the statement is false.


A weak theory is something like "Some blondes are dumb". it's not a good scientific theory because you can't really show it to be false, no matter how many smart or dumb, blondes or brunettes you produce.

This is something non-scientists have difficulty getting to grips with: To be a good theory, it doesn't matter so much whether it's true or not. It's much more important that it's falsifiable.


That's Karl Popper's view, anyway.

Sorry for the wordines, I wrote my dissertation on him many years ago.

Thanks Joe,

It was a long time ago. But the falsification was a bit I used to like. But who was that guy about the focussed attention if it was not Popper? That had something to do with reality and human perception. Damn.

 

[Guest]

I don't know who the focussed attention guy was, I must have slept through that lecture.

My all-time hero is J. Austin, who wrote "Sense and Sensibilia", intentionaly giving it that title to confuse students and libraroians.

John Austin was an Oxford philospher of language, who had an unbelievely sharp analytical mind. He looked land acted like Sherlock Holmes.

He always wrote about simple things, in simple language. He believed that "ordinary language" contains very subtle meanings in similar words: We ualmost instinctively know how a word should be used, but it's often hard to explain just how we do it.

One example he gave was was about "By mistake" and "accidentally". Although it may not be immediately obvious what the difference is, we almost never get it wrong when we speak.

For example:
"I took your car keys:" By mistake? or Accidentally?
"I dropped your car keys:" By mistake? or Accidentally?

 

[Guest]

And if so, do you know where Spaulding Gray went?

Sorry, ella; I am wondering too. I like him very much. P.

 

[Guest]

IMy all-time hero is J. Austin, who wrote "Sense and Sensibilia", intentionaly giving it that title to confuse students and libraroians.

Joe/Josh: Thanks for this. I've looked Austin up and find his thinking very interesting, will read more.

For anyone else who's curious, here's a nice link to his key concepts: How To Do Things with Words

I read that his work was posthumously published, so wonder if S&S was his idea or not; perhaps it was taken from something he said or wrote?

Perdita

 

[Svenskaflicka]

Deleted