Chapter 5 - Philosophy - STOP 337

Three types of Memory

1. Habit 2. Personal 3. Factual

Personal Memory

ability to bring into our present consciousness a representation of events that we personally and directly experienced in the past. Example, when you remember directly remembering talking to someone else yesterday.

Dr. Fane

recovered memories were false memories

Epistemology

study of knowledge deals with the nature, sources, limitations and validity of knowledge

Societal impact of validating repressed memories

then we should accept that recovered memories provide true knowledge of past crimes. Example: 17th century Salem witch trials. Flat earth.

Rationalism

view that knowledge can be obtained by relying on reason without the aid of the senses. reason is key to source of knowledge

Question about Innate

where else could these propositions and concepts come from? Example - Plat's Meno - made a slave boy "remember" his knowledge of geometry by showing him some imperfect figures drawn on the ground. (pythagorean theorm)

Critical Realists 3 factors involved in perception

1) Perceiver, knower, or conscious mind 2)Entity or Object, consisting of primary qualities 3) sense data, which serve as a bridge between the perceiver and the object.

Rene Descartes

17th century scientific giant who invents analytic geometry and influenced the advanced view of knowledge in philosophy. Turned to mathematics as a model of reasoning that leads from basic indubitable truths to new indubitable truths. (more foundational, self-evident, and axiomatic truths)

In modern physics explicitly holds that on principle it is impossible to observe subatmoic particals without disturbing them so much they cannot be sure where they are or how fast they are moving

Because electrons orbiting within atoms can absorb light energy in units proportional to the frequency of the light and that in doing so they shift energy levels. It is impossible to obtain accurate values for the position and momentum of an electron simultaneously.

Sublation

Developed by Shankara. Is the process of correcting an error about reality when it is contradicted by a different but more correct understanding of reality. Example: Thirsty man in desert might run to a mirage of water in the distance, but when he gets there and finds nothing but sand he realizes and corrects his error.

Example of Innate Idea

Every event has to have a cause. Some rationalists believe that not only are propositions like these innate but that the individual concepts are also innate. Concepts: "point", "line", "straight", "equality", "event" and "cause"

Now the mind can do all this, Kant pointed out, only if the mind itself also endures through time.

For my mind to collect, remember and be conscious of the sensations that come to me at different times, my mind has to be present through each of these times. In short, the process of of producing an object that remains the same object as it changes over time (like an egg) requires that my mind also remains the same mind during that process. The mind is a single unified awareness that remains the same unified awareness as time passes.

Friedrich Kekule

Ghent, Belgium. Prof of Chemistry discovered carbon compounds can form rings. Dream lead him to clue that a structure of benzene in his dream was a snake grabbing it's own tail = circle.

In proposing his theory of knowledge, Locke took the second option (PG316).

He asserted not only that knowledge originates in sense experience but also that physical objects exists outside us that cause our perceptions and that are independent of our perceptions of them.

Gottfried Leinbiz (1646-1716)

Innate ideas are tendencies; disagreed with Descartes; does agree we don't acquire knowledge of most basic truths by observation. Agrees they must be innate. But, not willing to claim they are fully formed ideas. Instead tendencies. "This is how ideas and truths are innate in us - as inclinations, dispositions, tendencies, or natural potentials, and not as actualities".

Western Philosophers of Rationalists

Plato, Saint Augustine, Benedict Spinoza, Anne Conway, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Georg Hegel, Rene Descartes

False Mirror

Rene Margritte. Are there different kinds of knowledge.

Critics of Berkeley

Say that he has no more grounds for claiming that God exists outside our minds than he has for claiming that material objects exist outside the mind. Because he rejects material objects he should reject God or accept both. When empirical method seemed to disprove what he wanted to believe, he forsook it. There is a lot of difficulty defending the contention that there are objects that are not objects - objects that are unknown to subjects and that are unthought and unexperienced.

Two basic sources of all of our knowledge and memories

Sense Perception & Reason

Hume

Shows that causality is just a figment of our minds: there is no real causality in the things around so.

Space and Time, Kant

Space and time, Kant claimed, are structures in the mind that we use to organize our many sensations. Geometry consists of the laws of space and arithmetic consists of the laws of time. So, by reasoning about the structures of space and time within us, we can have real knowledge of the synthetic a priori laws of mathematics, that is, of the universal laws of geometry and arithmetic.

Kant claimed, time, like space, is also a structure in the mind.

The mind makes it seem to us as if we and the objects around us exist in time. But time is just another mental structure that the mind uses to organize the many sensations it receives.

Alternative to Rationalism and Empiricism

Transcendental Idealism

Hawthorne Studies

Tries to determine what kinds of job conditions would improve the productivity of workers. Workers were observed under various different working conditions. They found that no matter the conditions while being observed the productivity rose. Observation = attention = productivity

T/F: Memory is not an independent source of knowledge because any knowledge we have in memory had to be acquired from some other source, such as sense experience or reason.

True

Hume - Handling things we haven't experienced

We place two perceptions together -- example golden mountain. We place 'gold' and we place 'mountain' together to get a golden mountain; both ideas which we were formerly acquainted with.

Descartes - Skepticism

able to banish his doubts by reasoning that God would not lead us to think a world outside existed unless such a world really did exist.

Hume no genuine knowledge without corresponding sense impressions

all knowledge derived from impressions that come from either our outer senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, & smell) or from our inner senses (inner feelings, anger, sorrow or pain).

Factual Memory

all the facts that make up our knowledge of the world. But you didn't actually experience them.

Descartes methodological point of departure

an attitude of doubt and skepticism (disillusionment) - suffered from an epistemological 'credibility gap' of sorts.

Example of Rationalism

based on logic, laws and methods that reason develops. Example Mathematics, a realm of knowledge that is obtained entirely by reason and that we use to understand the universe.

Memory is

basically, the ability to bring facts or our past experiences into our present consciousness or activities.

Beliefs of Jainism

even before our senses perceive an object, we already have the knowledge of that object in our minds. When we 'see' an object, our perception of the object merely serves to uncover the innate knowledge of that object that we already had within us. Every human being carries within his or her mind a complete knowledge of everything in the universe. Mind is not limited by space and time, but present everywhere. A veil of impurity covers the potentially limits or 'hides' knowledge because of past unethical actions and decisions (even in past life).

Epistemology task

explaining how we know what we claim to know, how we can find out what we wish to know, and how we can judge someone else's claim to knowledge

Transcendental idealism

holds that the world appears to be around us in a world that our mind constructs by arranging the sensations that come from the senses into whatever structures or patterns the mind itself provides. Because the mind arranges everything we perceive according to its own rational rules or laws, the mind can know these laws that govern everything we perceive.

Sense Data

images or sensory impressions - the immediate contents of sensory experience - that according to critical realists, indicate the presence and nature of perceived objects. ONLY by interference can we go beyond sense data.

Charvaka Philosophers of India

only valid source of knowledge is sense perception. (Empiricism)

Causality

our idea that when one object causes another object to do something, there is some kind of real connection between them, some kind of "power" or foce by which the cause really exerts its causality on its effect.

Descartes Intuition

perceptions of the mind but that are either confused or clear and distinct. Only clear and distinct ideas in our minds provide genuine knowledge.

Kant Synthetic a priori vs analytic statments

synthetic statements are statements that give us information about the world around us -- "every event must have a cause" which tell us how things will happen in the universe around us. Analytic statements that do not give us information about the world because they are true or false by definition. For example -- all triangles have three sides. A priori statements on the other hand are universal and necessary statements that tell us what we must be true of every member of some group - example: geometry tells us that the shortest distance between any two points must be a straight line. a priori statements go beyond what we can observe because normally we can't observe all the members of a group and our senses can't tell us what must be, only what is. We establish priori statements are true by using the reasoning processes of the mind. Priori statements are contrasted with a posteriori statements such as "some swans are black" which we can establish only by observation.

Elements of Empiricism found in writings of

Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Sir Francis Bacon, & Thomas Hobbes. Most noteworthy of modern time: British Empiricist (waged a war on Rationalism) 3 Western Philosophers: John Locke, George Berkeley, & David Hume

Jainism

Important philosophy of India originating 17 centuries before Christ & still embraced by 6 million. Ghandi was a Jain philosopher.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

No fact can be real and no statement true unless it has sufficient reason why it should be thus and not otherwise; Rationalism

Habit Memory

ability to remember how to do something that we learned in the past, such as ride a bike or ski - skills are remembered and reapplied

Hume - Unlike Descartes, Locke or Berkeley

did not rely on God to save him from skepticism. With cold logic, Hume argued that even our ideas about God may not correspond to reality.

Empricism - true knowledge = psteriori

Depends on experience; it is knowledge stated in empirically verifiable or falsifiable statements.

Priori

Rationalist; knowledge that is known independently of sense perception and that is necessarily true and indubitable. Two Examples: Math and Laws of Logic

Traditional school of Indian Philosophers

hold that the sense perception is a source of knowledge

John Locke

1st to launch systematic attack on rationalist beliefs, that reason alone could provide us with knowledge. He believed rationalists when astray when they claimed "there are in the understanding of certain innate principles... which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it". He thinks they got that from universal consent. Not everyone had the exact same ones - children & idiots he put it.

George Berkeley

Agreed with Locke that ideas originated in sensory experience. Also accepted Locke's argument that secondary qualities are subjective, he insisted (unlike Locke) that primary qualities are as well. Argued that sensations in us and so are mind-dependent. Besides minds and their sensations and ideas, nothing exists. Objects do not exist independent of consciousness.

Hume - Impressions vs. Ideas

An Equiry Concerning Human Understanding - because all our knowledge is derived from sense impressions, he argued that if an idea is not derived from a sense impressions, it is meaningless or nonexistent. Impressions from senses are vivid - color or emotions - vividness declines when we subsequently reflect upon them or have ideas about them.

Subjectivist

Because Berkeley claims that we know only our own ideas, he is sometimes termed subjectivist. Contends that there can be no entity without a perceiver and that everything that is real is a conscious mind or a perception by a conscious mind.

Elizabeth Loftus

Denies it's scientifically valid. Psych Prof at UOW. "She asserts that the theory that people can repress memories of repeated traumatic experiences in childhood and recall them decades later is false". "It flies in the face of everything we know about memory."

Second Meditation

Descartes attempted to explain how thinking and reasoning without the aid of the sense establishes truths about the world. Abstracts from the sense qualities of a piece of wax to demonstrate why sense experience is not the ultimate criterion of knowledge. Our minds know that the wax remains the same piece of wax when it melts, although to our senses all of it's qualities have changed. Therefore, our knowledge of what the wax is does not derive from he sense or the imagination but from the mind. So the knowledge is grasped from the mind not the senses.

Validity

Descartes would probably object to applying his theories to memories of sense experiences (recovered memories - feel photogenic) but he did hold that clarity and distinctness of ideas were indicators of their validity. So... recovered memories fit this clear and distinct so in theory that means they can be accepted as true knowledge. So how do folks handle that -- lawyers, judges etc)

Rationalists claim that not all knowledge of the world around us is acquired through sense observation

Example: Mathematical knowledge is acquired by reasoning alone without observation of the world, yet it tells us how the world works.

Descartes

Extreme rationalism; argues that he could not hve produced the idea of a perfect being, God, and neither could be have acquired it through the senses, only God could have put it into his mind, so God must exist. Because Good is good, he does not deceive, so we can rely on the powers of knowledge He has given us.

Because we have no access to an external world beyond our sense impressions, we have no justification for believe that any external world exists beyond our impressions and ideas.

Hume

Kant wanted to show that, despite Hume, we have real knowledge of statements that are syntheic (give us information about the world) and a priori (universal statements that go beyond what our senses can perceive) in mathematics and natural science

Hume - argued that when scientists observe that sometimes in the past one event cause another and conclude that this will happen every time in the future, they cannot really know this conclusion is true.

Innate Ideas

Ideas that are present in the mind from birth. Rationalists such as Plato, Descartes, Leibinz, and the Indian Jain philosophers believe that the ideas and truths that the mind knows without relying on its senses are innate - in other words, we were born with these ideas in our minds, or they developed from what we were born with. We could not have acquired them by observation because our experience of the world is too limited and it's objects are too imperfect.

Ahimsa

Is the future to our knowledge liberation by avoidance of all aggression, injury or harm to other living things. Until then, we must be satisfied with recovering the innate knowledge that is within us piece by piece through the user of our intellect and our senses.

Hume accepted Descartes basic premise

It is possible that the ideas in our minds may not correspond to a reality outside the mind.

For since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate objects but its own ideas, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them

John Locke - mind is a blank slate "latin - tabula rasa" - on which experience makes its mark. Material for filling the slate comes from experience. However, other folks argue his mind is blank by asking someone how they 'know it's raining outside' to which a person replies go outside and 'see'.

Mind organizes its sense impressions into the world we know, it inserts rational structures into this world and these structures are universal laws that the mind can know because the mind put these structures into the world.

Kant

Kant agreed with Hume that our senses bring us a chaotic multitude of ever-changing sensations. But he argued.

Kant agreed with Hume that our senses bring us a chaotic multitude of ever-changing sensations (colors, smells, sounds, etc.). But Kant argued that the mind organizes these constantly changing sensations by arranging them into objects that we experience as located in space and time. He argued that we cannot get our ideas of space and time from experience because experience presupposes space and time.

Hume wrote, "The mind is a kind of theater where several perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations."

Kant agreed. But Kant noticed something both empiricists and rationalists had missed. It is true that sensations stream through our senses. Yet we do not experience a mere display of sensations streaming through us.

Causality and the Unity of the Mind

Kant said we perceive objects that change over time. To perceive such an object, the mind has to collect and remember sensations, and be aware these belong to the same object. But to collect, remember, and be aware of sensations in this way, means that the mind is a unifi ed awareness that endures through time. And because the mind is a unifi ed awareness, it can know the many sensations it receives only if it connects them all into a unifi ed world of interrelated objects. 332

Empiricism

Knowledge can be attained only through sense experience. Based on sight, hearing, smell and other senses.

Martin Luther

Launched Protestant revolution. Engulfed all of Europe and gave birth to the religious wars that rocked the continent for decades.

Primary Qualities

Locke - objects had inherent qualities that can be measured: size, shape and weight which 'give us an idea of the thing as it is in itself'. Because our experiences of primary qualities are 'copies' of the primary qualities that are really in objects, these experiences are reliable indicators of the world 'outside' of us.

Locke VS Berkeley

Locke acknowledged that there is difference between our experiences of things and things themselves and, as we saw, that opened the door to the object that we can never know whether our experience is an accurate representation of external objects. Berkeley, kept the door to that object firmly shut by claiming that there is no different between our experience and the things we experience. The things we experience are nothing more than ideas in the mind. There are no objects external to the mind.

Judie Alpert

Prof. Applied Psychology at NYU - for recovered memories. "...absolutely no question that some people have repressed some memories of early abuse that are just too painful to remember. In their 20s and 30s some event triggers early memories, and slowly they return."

Critics of Locke

Say we have no way of knowing whether our experiences are accurate copies of objects outside us. In Locke's own time other empiricists objected that he had not fully accounted for the representative nature of our ideas. They seriously questioned whether he had fully explained who we can be sure that our sensory experiences accurately represent

Others say it's erroneous (sense perception)

Shankara (788-822) found Advaita Vedanta school of philosophy. "Brahman [Ultimate Reality] is real, the world is false, and the self is not different from Brahamn." Ultimate reality is not acquired through our senses but through reasoning and meditation.

Laws of Logic

Such as "at least one of any two contradictory propositions must be false" and "No proposition can both be and not be true at the same time" are also not established by observation; yet they underlie all our reasoning.

Immanuel Kant

Turned his attention to question about the nature of knowledge. His investigations eventually resulted in a unique blend of empiricism and rationalism called transcendental idealism. The only way of resolving the skepticism of the rationalists and empiricists.

Plato's Answer to Innate

We must have acquired this knowledge before we were born! Before we were born our souls must have lived in a perfect universe where we actually observed perfectly shaped lines, squares, and triangles, along with other perfect ideas. When were are born into this imperfect world, w carry those perfect ideas within us, buried in the depths of memory.

Barry Stroud

argues that we have to accept Descarte's claim that because we might be dreaming, the sensations and thoughts in our minds might not correspond to any reality outside the mind. But once we accept the possibility that the sensations and thoughts within us might not represent a real world outside or independent of the mind, Humean skepticism is inevitable.

Hume - Causality

because the idea of causal connection is not derived from any sense impression, it does not exist in the real world; causality is nothing more than the habitual expectation that events in the future will be followed by the same kind of events that followed them in the past. This habitual expectation is formed by repeatedly seeing the same sequence of events.

Empricism

belief that all knowledge about the world comes from or is based on the senses. Human mind contains nothing but what the mind 'puts' there.

Rationalists contend that some of our knowledge is not a product of experience

but depends solely on our mental processes. Acquire accurate knowledge about the world around us by simply looking into our minds without observing the world.

Secondary qualities

colors, tastes, and sounds are not 'in' an object we perceive but are sensations in us that objects cause us to have.

Hume - Skepticism

concludes that we can never know whether or not any of our ideas about the external world are accurate, or even whether there is an external world. We cannot know whether anything really causes anything else to happen. We cannot know whether there is a God.

Critical Realists

early part of 20th century, group of philosophers composed a book. Their view showed a marked Lockean flavor. Did not believe perception of entities is so direct as to be indistinguishable from things themselves. Its not our outer object that is present in the consciousness, they argued, but sense data.

A problem that empiricists face

is that if we know only what our sense experiences show us, then we have no way of knowing whether our sense experiences 'match' the world beyond our sense experiences, or even whether there is a world beyond our sense experiences.

Other Rationalists on Plato's Perfect Universe before birth theory.

just say that we still don't acquire these innate ideas (math and science) from observing or being told of what's around us, but also don't agree with Plato's perfect universe from birth theory.

Rationalists hold

knowledge that reason discovers without making experiments or relying on the finds of sense experience underlies our understanding of the universe. (Black holes, examine chemistry of DNA - math)

Intuition

labels a certain kinds of experiences characterized by a conviction of certainty that comes upon us quite suddenly.

Galileo

looked through telescope and discovered, moon has mountains, that there are spots on the sun, and that the Milk Way is composed of countless stars. Also threw out ideas of motion that dated back to Greeks that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones or must come to a rest. Proved instead that all bodies fall to earth at the same rate, and moving bodies continue in motion unless stopped by friction or another external force.

Nyaya Philosophers of India

means "logic" school can also be classified as empiricists. There are other valid sources of knowledge besides sense perception. reasoning or inference we must ultimately reason from knowledge that we acquire from perception, whereas knowledge acquired from the testimony of others must ultimately depend on what someone witnessed through sense perception.

Solipsism

position that only I exist and that everything else is just a creation of my subjective consciousness. this position contends that the only perceiver is myself. Other persons and objects have no independent existence but exist solely to the degree that I am conscious of them. Berkeley avoided this by saying God exists and that He produces the sensations in my mind.

Perception

processes of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting by which we become aware of or apprehend ordinary objects such as chairs, tables, rocks and trees

David Hume

pushed Locke's empiricism to a thorough skepticism - that is to a denial of the possibility that we can have certain knowledge about much of what we all take for granted. asserts all contents of the mind can be reduced to those given by senses and experiences - "perceptions". Perceptions take two forms 'impressions' and 'ideas'.

Copernicus

rejected the ancient view that the earth was at the center of the universe and that the sun revolved around it. Proposed instead, earth and plants revolved around the sun.

Epistemology addresses a variety of problems

reliability, extent, and kinds of knowledge; truth; language; and science and scientific knowledge

Fundamental Epistemological problem that arises with all sense-based knowledge claims

things in reality can differ from what they appear to be to our senses, this difference can undermine our claim to know something on the basis of our senses. Two responses result from this either: 1) claim that no qualitative distinction exists between the experience and the object of the experience (example your experience of coffee and a tea flavored like coffee). OR 2)agree that experience must be distinguished from the thing itself.

Kant's special term for unified awareness

transcendental unity of apperception

Descartes on Indubitable Foundational truths

tried to doubt all of his beliefs by realizing that everything might be a dream or an illusion of a powerful god; any beliefs that could not be doubted would be basic indubitable truths. One was "I think, therefore I am." (sense perceptions may be illusions or the products of our own dreams or hallucinations -- or of an evil, all-powerful devil) Even if he was being deceived about everything else, he could not be deceived about the fact that he was thinking he was being deceived.

Kant

tried to show that an empiricists claimed our knowledge begins with the sense, but as rationalists claimed, the mind is a source of knowledge of universal laws. - both reason and senses contribute to our knowledge of the world