John Locke - Human Understanding
John Locke FRS was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism".
His father was a lawyer and a Puritan . Locke studied medicine at Oxford, assisting in the laboratory of the chemist Robert Boyle, and produced several of his early works. In his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he says the human mind at birth is a “blank tablet” (tabula rasa), on which experience writes the general principles as well as the details of all our knowledge.John Locke was the architect behind the Western democracies as they exist today. He was a very important inspiration to the American Revolution. Several phrases in the American declarations have cited Locke directly.
'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' addresses the question of how ideas are formed. Are we born with them or we develop them later? Locke denies that ideas are inherent and we are wired to develop the ideas later. Some excerpts from 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' along with my reservations.
"All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact."...Synthesis of any sort music/software is not enquiry into Relations of Ideas unless we are talking enquiry for synthesis.
"This proposition, that causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason but by experience" what about scientific theories and predictions?"In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without"
"I have found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect, and I foresee, that other objects, which are, in appearance, similar, will be attended with similar effects" Inductive reasoning, or induction, is reasoning from a specific case or cases and deriving a general rule. It draws inferences from observations in order to make generalizations. In doing so, it recognizes that conclusions may not be certain.https://www.sheldrake.org/research/most-of-the-so-called-laws-of-nature-are-more-like-habits
"But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience"
" A man of mild manners can form no idea of inveterate revenge or cruelty; nor can a selfish heart easily conceive the heights of friendship and generosity." fails to distinguish feeling the revenge and idea of revenge. Implies we cannot have an idea unless we have felt it. It is not necessary that one feel the idea. What is required is adequacy for the task.(fitness for use). one can form the idea without feeling it.(to feel it is more like you gnash your teeth , clench your first and so on)
"we need but enquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived?" Idea in my opinion is roughly the distinct sum of other ideas. Fourier Series of ideas. Every Idea has a distinct set of fundamental and harmonics.
"To me, there appear to be only three principles of connexion among ideas, namely, Resemblance,Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect." Really without including opposites in Resemblance? Aren't there any disjoint ideas electric and magnetic fields ? black and white? There was no resemblance between magnetic and electric fields. The unity was brought about much later by physicists like Faraday , Maxwell and others.
the assistance of observation and experience" Unqualified agreement. Fully agreed.the assistance of observation and experience." Unqualified agreement. Fully agreed.
Predictability of nature - is implicit in science. What if The laws of nature are simply habits of nature and nature changes it's habits? Hume is clear that this cannot be answered ."all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and that all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past."
"..it is not reasoning which engages us to suppose the past resembling the future, and to expect similar effects from causes which are, to appearance,similar""There may be no reason to infer the existence of one from the appearance of the other" -cause and effect
"This principle is Custom or Habit. For wherever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding, we always say, that this propensity is theeffect of Custom"
"All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning." This is why age ( experience) is trusted. Custom preferred over reasoning/speculation."but it must be confessed, that, when a man comes to put these in practice, he will be extremely liable to error,till time and farther experience both enlarge these maxims, and teach him their proper use and application"
All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning.7"If we examine those arguments, which, in any of the sciences above mentioned, are supposed to be mere effects of reasoning and reflection, they will be found to terminate, at last, in some general principle or conclusion, for which we can assign no reason but observation and experience." Except God?
"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man;" Except many lack imagination and still others put it in a locker
"belief is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgement from the fictions of the imagination."
"These principles of connexion or association we have reduced to three, namely, Resemblance, Contiguity and Causation; which are the only bonds that unite our thoughts together, and beget that regular train of reflection or discourse, which, in a greater or less degree, takes place among all mankind"
"As nature has taught us the use of our limbs, without giving us the knowledge of the muscles and nerves, by which they are actuated; so has she implanted in us an instinct, which carries forward the thought in a correspondent course to that which she has established among external objects; though we are ignorant of those powers and forces, on which this regular course and succession of objects totally depends."
"As a great number of views do here concur in one event, they fortify and confirm it to theimagination, beget that sentiment which we call belief, and give its object the preference above the contrary event, which is not supported by an equal number of experiments, and recurs not so frequently to the thought in transferring the past to the future."
"The chief obstacle, therefore, to our improvement in the moral or metaphysical sciences is the obscurity of the ideas, and ambiguity of the terms." As far as I am concerned there is no such animal as metaphysical sciences. The ideas of morality have more to do with culture than obscurity of ideas.
" that our idea of power is not copied from any sentiment or consciousness of power within ourselves, when we give rise to animal motion, or apply our limbs to their proper use and office. That their motion follows the command of the will is a matter of common experience, like other natural events: But the power or energy by which this is effected, like that in other natural events, is unknown and inconceivable."But the power or energy.. many are now known and are conceivable.
" First, it seems to me that this theory of the universal energy and operation of the Supreme Being is too bold ever to carry conviction with it to a man, sufficiently apprized of the weakness of human reason, and the narrow limits to which it is confined in all its operationsWere our ignorance, therefore, a good reason for rejecting anything, we should be led into that principle of denying all energy in the Supreme Being as much as in the grossest matter. We surely comprehend as little the operations of one as of the other. Is it more difficultto conceive that motion may arise from impulse than that it may arise from volition? All we know is our profound ignorance in both cases." Injection of God doesn't do anybody any good.
Hume justifies the logic of induction, but how many conjunctions or conjoinings or pairs of cause and effect are sufficient to warrant conclude effect from cause? 1000, 2000....The answer is that we can never be certain logic of induction can fail unless we put every law in a probabilistic form.
"Beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects,and the consequent inference from one to the other, we have no notion of any necessity or connexion"
"Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular."
"That to us it must often appear very uncertain in its operations:And that therefore the irregular events, which outwardly discover themselves,can be no proof that the laws of nature are not observed with the greatest regularity in its internal operations and government"
Hume keeps repeating the same arguments and justifications so many times , I am forced to wonder whether philosophical writing needs literary devices . May be style those days was to use a thousand words where one would do as a form of argumentation. Also sentences are so long I loose track by the time I come to the end. Sentence is convoluted rather than direct and to the point.In my opinion a philosophical writing should aim to illuminate rather than obfuscate
"In all these cases, we may observe, that the animal infers some fact beyond what immediately strikes his senses; and that this inference is altogether founded on past experience, while the creature expects from the present object the same consequences, which it has always found in its observation to result from similar objects."Can all human behavior be reduced to stimulus response?
"When we reason from analogies, the man, who has the greater experience or the greater promptitude of suggesting analogies, will be the better reasoner."---All analogical reasoning can fail!
"Though the instinct be different, yet still it is an instinct, which teaches a man to avoid the fire;"--A and B have the Same source does not imply the two are identical A=B. Devil lies in the details!
" Thirdly. It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations;"--whotta joke! British are a barbarous nation.
"What we have said of miracles may be applied, without any variation, to prophecies; and indeed, all prophecies are real miracles, and as such only, can be admitted as proofs of any revelation"
"It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another.Such is the foundation of moral reasoning, which forms the greater part of human knowledge, and is the source of all human action and behaviour."moral reasoning? How is it supposed to follow from observation pairs?Morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment--nearer to truth.
Closing observations on John Locke's political philosophyHe expressed his view that government is obligated to serve the people, by protecting life, liberty, and property. Also, he went about limiting power of the government.In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch
To discover truths beyond the realm of basic experience, Locke suggested an approach modeled on the rigorous methods of experimental science.Locke also developed a definition of property as the product of a person’s labor that would be foundational for both Adam Smith’s capitalism and Karl Marx’s socialism.Most of what today is Science and technology has the work of our philosopher as the backdrop.
According to Locke, the executive authority must moreover be limited by some specific areas of human behavior, which are immune against the decision of a government. He called them "rights". The right to own property was the most important; the others were the rights to life, health and freedom. As time passed by, the list of rights has grown somewhat longer. It is about the right to believe what you want, the right to think and speak as you like and so on. They have now a days become known as the human rights.
