The Mind as a Tabula Rasa - The mind as a blank sheet (Strengths)

-Trace causal origins of ideas
-World constructed from building blocks provided by the sense i.e sight, sound, smell, touch, taste
-Ideas constructed from sensation - reach further beyond consciousness
-Locke and Hume (Empiricists)

-Locke - mind is a tabula rasa furnished by experience

-Hume - develops - ideas are copies of sense impressions
i.e Ideas of white and cold are faded copies of sensing white and cold - connotations associated with the experience i.e. experience of snow - forceful and vivid "impressed upon me like a stamp, a copy of itself"

HUME'S ARGUMENT - IDEAS DEPENDENT ON SENSE IMPRESSIONS
-Defect or deficiency of a sensory organ - little susceptibility of corresponding ideas
\"blind man no notion of colours; a deaf man of sounds"
\If they were to be restored, an inlet for sensation would be opened- also open inlet for ideas & finds no difficulty making those ideas.

= Gives the view that you will only be able to have an idea about something if and only if you have experienced it
Hume's response to "but you can have ideas about something you haven't experience, for example, a golden mountain"
is that of complex ideas, that you can combine the idea of gold and a mountain for you've experienced both.
Hume - "Imagination confined to no more than the brains ability to augment, compound, transpose and diminish materials afforded to us by the sense and experiences"
**to actually experience a gold mountain would give us a better idea of it in the same way that a police profile would only give us a vague, confused idea that only sense impressions could confirm and clarify = as sensations are strong and vivid

LOCKE'S ARGUMENT - WORDS WITHOUT EXPERIENCE SIGNIFY NO IDEA
-Unless an idea can be tied to experience then it is meaningless for it signifyie no idea
\In the way a painting that resembles no object may be dismissed as a meaningless abstraction.
Locke - "Words in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them"
**without the required corresponding idea, words would just be meaningless noises, marks on paper or patterns on a screen.

	Created by yasmyncharles over 10 years ago

The strengths and weaknesses of the view that all ideas are derived from sense experience and of the view that claims about what exists must be ultimately grounded in and justified by sense experience.