131
See also: Plato 50–55 ■ Thomas Aquinas 88–95 ■ René Descartes 116–23 ■ Benedictus Spinoza 126–29 ■
Gottfried Leibniz 134–37 ■ George Berkeley 138–41 ■ David Hume 148–53 ■ Noam Chomsky 304–05
In fact, the division between these
two groups is not as clear-cut as
is often assumed. The rationalists
all accept that in practice our
knowledge of the world ultimately
stems from our experience, and
most notably from scientific enquiry.
Locke reaches his distinctive views
concerning the nature of the world
by applying a process of reasoning
later known as abduction (inference
to the best explanation from the
available evidence) to the facts of
sensory experience. For example,
Locke sets out to demonstrate that
the best explanation of the world
as we experience it is corpuscular
theory. This is the theory that
everything in the world is made
up of submicroscopic particles, or
corpuscles, which we can have no
direct knowledge of, but which, by
their very existence, make sense of
phenomena that would otherwise
be difficult or impossible to explain.
Corpuscular theory was becoming
popular in 17th-century scientific
thinking and is fundamental to
Locke’s view of the physical world.Innate ideas
The claim that man’s knowledge
cannot go beyond his experience
may therefore seem inappropriate,
or at least an exaggeration, when
attributed to Locke. However,
Locke does argue at some length,
in his Essay Concerning HumanRENAISSANCE AND THE AGE OF REASON
But this is not borne
outby the fact that...Rationalists believethat we are
born with some ideas and concepts;
that they are “innate.”...there are no truths
that are found in
everyone at birth....there are no universal
ideas found in people of
all cultures at all times.Everything we
know is gained from
experience.Understanding, against the theory
proposed by the rationalists to
explain how knowledge could be
accessed without experience. This
is the theory of innate ideas.
The concept that human beings
are born with innate ideas, and that
these can give us knowledge about
the nature of the world around us,
independently of anything we may
experience, dates back to the dawn
of philosophy. Plato had developed
a concept, according to which all
genuine knowledge is essentially
located within us, but that when
we die our souls are reincarnated
into new bodies and the shock of
birth causes us to forget it all.
Education is therefore not about
learning new facts, but about
“unforgetting”, and the educator
is not a teacher but a midwife.
However, many later thinkers
countered Plato’s theory, proposing
that all knowledge cannot be innate
and that only a limited number of
concepts can be. These include the
concept of God and also that of a
perfect geometric structure, such
as an equilateral triangle. This ❯❯If we attentively consider
newborn children, we
shall have little reason
to think that they bring
many ideas into
the world with them.
John Locke