Week 3

It is easy for me to agree with empiricists that all of our knowledge comes from sense experience. Someday, I think we will prove that we are born with certain "innate" ideas or prior structures in the mind. For now, though, there is absolutely no evidence that people know anything when they come into the world. 


Let's take my little sister, Sylvie, for example. When she was 3 years old, she burnt her hands on the stove not once, not twice, but three times. The only previous experience she had with the stove was that macaroni and cheese came from it. She had no way of knowing the feeling of a hot pot on bare flesh. No one else's knowledge (my mother's, in this case) can prove to your own senses the truth. So, she touched the stove the first time and burnt her fingers. How was she to know that it was not a one time thing? She needed regularity in order for it to become a certain truth. The third time she finally pieced together the puzzle. This is a silly example, I know, but as adults we do the same thing everyday on a less severe scale. We have to teach ourselves something through our own senses, rather than getting it secondhand from someone else's.


So yes, I believe we get most of our knowledge from the use of our senses. This does not mean that knowledge does not exist outside of our senses though. Before we realized that the Earth revolved around the Sun, before we created the science of Geometry, and before God blessed us with linear equations (sarcasm)....all of those truths were already true. Just because I can add one block and one block to make two blocks, does not mean that those blocks do not still equal two when my senses aren't around. That claim would mean that all math and science cease to exist unless there is someone there to observe. If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it still make a sound? Yes, it absolutely does.