Empiricism And Logic Essay Sample

Rene Descartes’ Discourse on the Method is one of the most important philosophical texts of all time. In it, the philosopher attempts to determine how he should correctly determine his lines of logic in order to ascertain truth. He believes that this may only be possible when one puts into question the judgments and prejudices that one has formed across one’s life. These jumps in logic are usually kept uncontested throughout one’s life, leading reasoning astray. This skeptical method is necessary because these preconceived notions lead thinking astray, making it jump to answers that are not necessarily true.
This obviously leads him to doubt basically everything around him, including the outside world. He believes that the greatest source of knowledge is that achieved a priori, so he resolves that he can only determine that he exists due to the fact that he thinks. Furthermore, he attempts to provide a proof of God, providing as evidence that he is able to think of God, an infinite being. It is only then that he can state that the external world exists, supporting himself on the infallibility that a good God would certainly provide.
John Locke similarly asked himself about the existence of the external world, yet he provided another answer to it, which has to do more with reality than Descartes’. He basically asks himself where one gets the idea that there is an outside world at all. He answers himself that one receives ideas from the stimuli that the outside world proposes, making a copy of them in order to process them through one’s mind.
Locke scathingly attacks Descartes, decrying him for using principles that one did not gain from experience. According to Locke, one’s mind was a tabula rasa when one was born, meaning a blank slate with no preconceived notions. Subsequently, this philosopher believed that Descartes had committed an error when he had postulated his “truths of reason”, as this would be something that was already written in this slate.
This would be something that Descartes might have agreed to. In his search to do away with all prejudices, he may have gone along with the fact that he was still establishing some guiding principles. Nevertheless, he could have also argued that without certain concessions, reasoning and truth-seeking would have no sense at all. One would have to ask one’s self where these ideas come from, or what one should base knowledge on at all. This is not found through experience, so there should be some foundations that lead a person to be able to establish a certain, rudimentary system for evaluating truth and reason.
Locke’s account of how one knows about the external world seems to be more reasonable, but actually falls apart in the end. It is true that Descartes ultimately failed in his attempt to do away with all his prejudices; nevertheless, it would be hard to conceive a way to draw knowledge from experience without establishing, at least, some preliminary principals. Furthermore, it would seem that Locke’s point of view constantly shies away from one of the greatest questions that Descartes is proposing: that of the evil demon. By not questioning the experience that he obtains, Locke’s point of view ends up sounding naïve. While it is true that experience is important, if one does not reason about it, analyzing even its fallibility, it is impossible to produce knowledge and search for truth.
Nevertheless, there is a grave problem with induction. The philosophers David Hume and Bertrand Russell are two of the most important that present the problem with this type of production of knowledge. The main problem is that just because something happens once and again, does not mean that it will certainly happen the next time or all the time.
Hume believed that induction was something almost natural to human beings. He believed that people had something special that led them to believe that one phenomenon caused another when they were frequently seen together. Hume found that people believed nature is uniform. Therefore, they could deduce the rules, much as classical science attempted to do, in order to understand it completely.
Nevertheless, this obviously poses a great problem to empiricism. These latter philosophers used experience as their source of information to convert to knowledge in an empirical manner. The perception of the outside world and the experience that came from it was not the only thing they sought; the empiricists looked to gain knowledge from this too.
As the most radical empiricists did not admit any preconceived ideas, there would be no other way to gain knowledge other than through inductive reasoning. This type of logic is the only one founded on the patterns and consequences of direct experience.
Even though this may all be theoretically true and logically valid, scientists like Isaac Newton showed that this type of reasoning did produce knowledge that was valid a useful in the real, natural world. For example, if one sees an apple falling all the time, it is a pretty safe bet that an apple will fall the next time as well. They attempted to be able to predict the future based on past and present events. Nevertheless, the proponents of the problem of induction decried this as being impossible, due to the faultiness of their logic.
However, this should not be completely considered as a serious problem because all theoretical systems have problems. There is no one theory that completely understands the whole universe and itself. This is especially true when one looks at a theory through the lens of another, as the philosophers that presented the problem of induction attempted to do.
On the other hand, if one were to turn the tables around, one would see that empiricism would also have a couple of critiques to make with respect to the problem of induction. First, they could state that induction is not, itself, created by induction. In other words, that it is not the true cornerstone of the theory, but that common sense is.
Furthermore, as stated before, there is a functional, practical component that validates the knowledge that one can obtain from induction. Deduction can only go so far because the statements that may be used as premises are limited. Nevertheless, induction is more useful in terms of gaining new knowledge, as it implies compiling information from nature. Not everything is known about nature yet, and some would even contend that it is so complex that it is impossible to completely comprehend. This would thus mean that it would be an infinite source of inductive knowledge. Deduction seems to be too logical and idealist at times, while induction has more realist, experimental characteristics.