HCJ: Empiricism - Locke to Hume

Hume is a very important philosopher to know in journalism; he's interesting and fearless. Locke fits in nicely with this as Hume based his ideas on those of Locke.

Empiricism is the complete opposite of rationalism. A rationalist believes he can gain knowledge about the world simply by thinking about it, Descartes being an example, whereas an empiricist believes knowledge comes from experience, Locke being an example.

A prior is knowledge from reason, a posteriori is knowledge from experience.

John Locke

He is considered as one of the first Empiricists. He believes knowledge is derived from experience.

Locke is against the concept of innate ideas; he believes that at birth our minds were simply blank slates. The concept of innate ideas wasn't needed anyway, as God gave us the ability to discover knowledge and morality known as "God given faculties". 

David Hume

Hume was known as 'The Great Infidel' due to his attacks on religion.

Although his ideas were based on Locke's, he disagrees with Locke's idea of God given faculties. He believes experience is processed into thoughts naturally.

Hume has been criticised and called an anti-rationalist due to his skepticism about the pretensions of reason, however, he is pro-science and anti-superstition.

Locke mainly speaks about ideas, which is sensory data acted on by reason, and Hume speaks about perceptions, which is any content of the mind. This refines Locke's ideas.

Perceptions can be impressions or ideas. They can be anything you see, hear, feel or think. Beliefs can be separated into either relations of ideas or matters of fact. A relation of ideas is a priori bond between ideas. For instance, 5+5=10 or all bachelors are unmarried. Matters of fact are to do with experience, a posteriori. We know these through a process of cause and effect. This does, however, rely on a belief in causation and induction. Hume believes that all matters of fact are fundamentally non-rational.

Logic

There are two different types of logic.

Deductive; this is when if all the premises are true, it means the conclusion must be true also. For instance; all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.

Inductive; this is when a conclusion is established which is presumed to be true with some degree of probability.

Induction
As a general, it is considered that what has happened in the past will happen again in the future. For instance, the sun rose yesterday morning, therefore it shall rise again this morning, and tomorrow morning, which is what the whole of science is basically based on.

However, the question is raised of how can we know history will repeat itself... and so begins the search for natural laws.

The scientific method for finding the natural laws is to carry our experiments, make observations and from this information, build up general laws using induction. It is then that induction becomes the demarcation between science and non-science. Hume argued a problem with induction as it is not reliable and cannot be definitively proved but it is human nature to presume what happened in the past with happen again in the future. You can not observe what will happen in the future, as you can not observe the future.

This presumption isn't secure, however it is what we base our entire lives on. It is custom and habit that set out our decisions and ideas for the future. Hume doesn't want us to abandon this but simple states that it is our confidence in the uniformity of nature that might let us down.