AQA A LEVEL PHILOSOPHY Essay Plans - EPISTEMOLOGY
A* Level Essay Plans which are concise and easy to understand.
Written by a student predicted 4A*, with an offer to study Philosophy & Economics at the LSE.
Very helpful to write a top grade essay.
Essay plan: there is no such thing as innate knowledge.
Intro
- Definition: Innatism is claim we have some innate knowledge (exists before experience at
birth)
- Innate knowledge is knowledge we are born with (hard wired into our minds). Propositional
Knowledge “that”.
- Thesis: Plato, Leibniz, Descartes, fail. Hume’s Fork – crucial argument against – both
explanations don’t require innate knowledge.
Outline (Plato’s Innatism):
Outline Plato’s paradox: trying to gain knowledge by looking for evidence is pointless.
According to empiricists if you know the answer, then you shouldn’t need to find anything
out. If you don’t know the answer, then you should go and find it out through experience.
But you’ll never know if you’ve found out the answer to a question, because you don’t know
what you’re looking for. Shows plausibility of innate knowledge.
Cue slave boy argument (hasn’t experienced geometry before so not due to experience):
Slave boy knows answers but never experienced math’s before remembering from world
of perfect forms and people like Socrates help us recollect this knowledge.
Para 1:
Assumes metaphysical world of forms, immortality of souls, and transmigration of souls. Not
compatible with science.
Also, slave boy has experience of mathematical concepts (e.g., shapes) and then is using
innate logic and reason; this is not innate knowledge.
Locke agrees: tabula rasa and no universal knowledge. Haven’t proved innatism.
Issue (cont.): Tabula Rasa & Copy Principle.
- Simple and complex concepts deriving from impressions.
- Hume suggests copy principle: all ideas (concepts) are copies impression (sense experience)
- Locke suggests complex concepts are just a culmination of simple concepts associated with a
singular object.
- Locke also introduces “tabula rasa” – the mind at birth is a blank state.
Response (innatism)
- Missing shade of blue – if you have a colour spectrum of shades of blue and there is one
missing shade, using imagination one can form a conception of that shade even if they’ve
never seen it before.
- So perhaps other ideas could be formed without deriving them from an impression.
Response to response:
- You think of another shade which resembles this missing shade, acquired through
experience.
- Shades of blue are all related to each other, they can be arranged in terms of how they
resemble each other as well (for example, from dark to light).
- So, using other similar impressions (experiences), we form our conception of the missing
shade.
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