Criticisms of Empiricism

1. Empiricists talk about forming compound ideas by combining simple ideas, but what is a simple idea? If "golden mountain" is a compound idea, what makes "mountain" a simple idea - is it too not a combination of ideas? Is the concept "horse" simple or compound? It is not a clear distinction.

2. Do you agree that all ideas could come from sense experience - not just from experience but from sense experience? Take moods such as joy and melancholy - do we really acquire those through our senses? Also, we have concepts of things that we believe exist but no-one has ever experienced (eg atoms; and we have abstract ideas (such as justice and freedom). How do they connect with sense impressions?

On the other hand, perhaps we do experience justice and freedom in some way. Perhaps we can trace them back to basic human needs and experience. Perhaps we can relate them to evolutionary developments. What do you think? Also, the example of people who are born blind and therefore lack certain ideas may be relevant: they do not seem to form certain concepts or ideas. How convincing is this point?

3. Do you agree that Hume's empriricism about meaning is dodgy? Language doesn't have to relate to sense experience to be meaningful, but that's what the twentienth century Logical Positivists (such as A J Ayer) argued (as well as Hume). They were extreme empiricists. They argued that "metaphysical" words, such as "God" and "soul" were meaningless because they did not connect with things that had been drectly experienced and therfore couldn't be verified. But we do have perfectly meaningful converations about such things. They are trying to restrict what we can talk about, but if we couldn't speculate about such things our lives would be devalued. Do we experience beauty directly? Self? Justice?

Part of the problem is that Hume thought of ideas as images in the mind (copies of impressions), but this is a naive account of ideas, as Wittgenstein showed in "Philosophical Investigations". An account of language that is based on meanings being private images or ideas in the head is fundamentally incoherent: meanings have to relate to what is shared. (Remember the beetles in a matchbox example.)

4. Empiricism, like Descartes' version of rationalism, cuts us off from the physical world, from reality - because we can only know it indirectly, via sense impressions. This means that we can't be certain about anything except our own private sensations, which makes our beliefs subjective, whereas we normally like to think that our knowledge claims (ie good quality beliefs) are objectively true.

Also, it leads us into solipsism - ie scepticism about the existence of other minds - and towards the Matrix/Brain-in-a-Vat scenario: how do we know this isn't all a dream/gigantic illusion/creation of a crazy scientist, etc? So, empiricism leads us towards the trap of scepticism and solipsism - the same trap that Descartes could only escape by relying on God not to be a deceiver, and which Berkeley also required God to save him from. But what if you don't believe in God? Can empiricism avoid scepticism about the external world and soliosism about other minds without invoking God? Hume didn't think so, which is why he gave up the search for rationally justified beliefs and focused on explaining why we believe what we believe, accounting for it by reference to human dispositions.

5. Another form of scepticism concerns our knowledge of the past and of the future. Can empiricism give us good reasons for trusting our memories, the main source of knowledge of the past? Can it justify our beliefs about the future? All our inductive reasoning about the future depends on things continuing as they have done previously - but can empiricism justify our faith in things continuing as they have done up to know. Perhaps the laws of nature will suddenly change. Can experience rule that out?

6. We can question the empiricist account of the relation between concepts and experience. Concepts depend on our forming general categories, but how can we know how to categorize our sense impressions. Sense impressions just arrive - they are pre-conceptual, immediate, "the Given" - but without some kind of conceptualization or categorization they would be simply a "blooming buzzing confusion" (as William James said). This is why Kant and others argued that it couldn't be true that all ideas derived from experience because we need some ideas or concepts to make any sense of sense impressions in the first place. So it might well be that what empiricists such as Locke took to be immediate and incorrigible sense experience, it actually experience which is already filtered through concepts that make sense of it, organise it, conceptualise it. In which case, experience isn't the incorrigible "Given" that empiricists take it to be: it is already the result of intellectual (cognitive) processes.

7. Of course, rationalists criticise empiricism for prioritising sense experience over a priori knowledge. Without inferential reasoning, for example, we would not be able to generalisze from particular experiential cases. If it is reason that makes categorisation or conceptualisation possible, then it is reason that makes self-conscious experience possible. So reason comes first and rationalists are right. But is it?

In the next post I will write about Kant and Conceptual Schemes.