Descartes: Perceptions, Ideas, and Association Laws

Descartes: Impressions and Ideas

Impressions: Our perceptions are more intense when we hear, see, feel, love, hate, desire, or want. We feel so strong and alive.

Ideas: The copy is saved in the mind as diffused memory and representation. Impressions and ideas can be simple or compound.

Work Experience and Association of Ideas

Work experience is the association of ideas by space-time contiguity. Experience is a product of custom and habit that leads us to relate ideas and to expect that events will occur in a certain way.

Laws of Association

Ideas mutually attract; this attraction is not arbitrary but responds to certain laws.

• Similarity Law: Act 1 is the association of ideas designed to compare ideas with others.
• Contiguity Spatial-Temporal Law: Ideas attract because they are perceived mutually together in space and successive time.
• Customs and Habits: Experience is defined as a product of custom and habit that leads us to relate ideas and to expect that events will occur in a certain way.

Cause

Causality, therefore, is not a rational principle, but a belief based on this custom.

• Relations of Ideas: of the imagination: they are the result of the law of similarity in contact ideas, something that occurs in the sphere of reason. They are a priori equivalent and that Leibniz had named truths of reason.
• Issues of Fact: that come from experience and are therefore retrospective, which Leibniz called truths of fact. They are based on empirical science, where the test describes certain events, i.e., associations of ideas based on spatial-temporal contiguity.

Problem of Induction or Hume

Science is characterized by wanting to establish truths as universal and necessary. But that fact is confirmed empirically, that does not mean it can be established as a necessary truth, but only as a contingent (possible) can never be a true fact. Do not pass the legitimate assertion individuals <> the universal proposition .

Substance

The idea of substance is, for example, an idea made up by association: is not derived from any impression, internal or external, is nothing more than "the collection of simple ideas united by the imagination," which attaches the feature set to something unknown, like its continued support.

I (Self)

Hume says that as a substrate-going, unitary and identical to the myriad of sensations and experiences is entirely fictitious. There is nothing in us that remains unchanged in perceptions. The self or soul does not exist. Identity is only one set of perceptions and a chain of ideas.

World

The idea of the world does not come from experience because it is not derived from any particular impression, which is not an inference of reason because we cannot infer the existence of anything other than a perception. Only the continued presence in the mind of a different set of impressions, to which our imagination gives perseverance and consistency, helps explain the belief in continuous existence in the world.

God

Hume denies that God can also be considered due the world to the concept of "cause" for he has no legitimate sense. Only the ideas come from impressions. We have, however, an impression about God and, therefore, answer the question whether God exists is impossible, because the impressions are the limits of knowledge.

Motivism

The theory that ethical and moral ideas come from emotion or sentiment and have no rational justification.

Utilitarianism

The theory that ideas are based on ethical and moral criteria of utility and pleasure. Useful for understanding what leads to happiness or satisfaction to a maximum number of people (humanist hedonism).

Naturalistic Fallacy

That universal validity is attributed action that has aroused feelings of approval. Passing the "is" (called a good action) to "ought to be" (moral).