Understanding Empiricism, Causality, and Perception: A Humean Analysis

Understanding Empiricism, Causality, and Perception

2. Identified with the new licenses, empiricism maintains that experience is the basis of all knowledge. It rejects any conclusion not derived from experience and repudiates hypothetical thought. Locke, the creator of psychological empiricism, opposed innate ideas.

3. Most sciences have a link with human nature. Logic concerns knowledge and its foundation. Politics deals with humans living in society, depending on each other. Morality concerns our feelings, and criticism concerns taste. This text attempts to bring together a system of science.

4. This paper discusses the theory of knowledge, including both inductive and deductive reasoning. Deductive thinking demonstrates that conclusions are equivalent to the relation of ideas, and their truth is undeniable. The concept of contingency relates to issues of fact, supporting a truth opposite or contrary to another.

5. Perception encompasses everything in our mind, senses, passion, or thinking. Perceptions are impressions and ideas, differentiated by their force or intensity. Feeling a passion through the senses produces an impression in the mind; reflecting on this produces an idea. Perceptions are strong and weak ideas.

6. Impressions precede ideas, allowing the denial of innate ideas. Locke was mistaken; if perceptions are ideas, then if we have innate ideas, all impressions are innate. Father Malebranche could never prove that innate ideas are not the result of previous impressions. All ideas arise from previous ideas.

7. Impressions are prior to ideas, and ideas of the imagination each first appeared in a corresponding impression. Impressions do not support any discussion. This does not happen with ideas that the mind cannot identify their source. Ideas of substance and essence are discussed, asking for their impression.

8. All arguments concerning facts are governed by the cause-effect relationship. Causality is a principle that explains what has happened and what will happen. Cause and effect are questions of fact, as we cannot infer the existence of one object from the existence of another.

9. Consider two balls in motion as an example of cause and effect. What occurs is:

• Contiguity: The movement and shock.
• Temporal priority: The first ball is the cause, and the second is the effect.
• Constant conjunction: Other similar objects, given the same circumstances of contiguity, will behave similarly.

10. Seeing one ball move towards another, we deduce that it crashed into the second. This is a common reason for our inferences.