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Single Idea 8255
[filed under theme 12. Knowledge Sources / D. Empiricism / 5. Empiricism Critique
]
Full Idea
Davidson urges that we should hold that the world exerts a merely causal influence on our thinking, but I am trying to describe a way in which the world exerts a rational influence on our thinking.
Gist of Idea
Davidson says the world influences us causally; I say it influences us rationally
Source
comment on Donald Davidson (Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge [1983]) by John McDowell - Mind and World II.5
Book Ref
McDowell,John: 'Mind and World' [Harvard 1996], p.34
A Reaction
McDowell seems to be fighting for the existence of 'pure' reason in a way that is hard to defend with a thoroughly materialist view of human brains. If the world is coherent, then maybe it is rational, and so has reasons to offer us?
The
38 ideas
with the same theme
[rejection of knowledge arising just from experience]:
13257
|
The senses are too feeble to determine the truth
[Anaxagoras]
|
23309
|
Aristotle's concepts of understanding and explanation mean he is not a pure empiricist
[Aristotle, by Frede,M]
|
1693
|
Animals may have some knowledge if they retain perception, but understanding requires reasons to be given
[Aristotle]
|
1860
|
Knowledge may be based on senses, but we needn't sense all our knowledge
[Aquinas]
|
24034
|
If someone had only seen the basic colours, they could deduce the others from resemblance
[Descartes]
|
6228
|
Senses cannot judge one another, so what judges senses cannot be a sense, but must be superior
[Cudworth]
|
2793
|
It is unclear how identity, equality, perfection, God, power and cause derive from experience
[Locke, by Dancy,J]
|
5024
|
Knowledge doesn't just come from the senses; we know the self, substance, identity, being etc.
[Leibniz]
|
13001
|
Our sensation of green is a confused idea, like objects blurred by movement
[Leibniz]
|
3902
|
Hume mistakenly lumps sensations and perceptions together as 'impressions'
[Scruton on Hume]
|
23421
|
If a person had a gap in their experience of blue shades, they could imaginatively fill it in
[Hume]
|
6182
|
Even Hume didn't include mathematics in his empiricism
[Hume, by Kant]
|
5538
|
Understanding has no intuitions, and senses no thought, so knowledge needs their unity
[Kant]
|
5559
|
Sensations are a posteriori, but that they come in degrees is known a priori
[Kant]
|
7544
|
Many people imagine that to experience is to understand
[Goethe]
|
19590
|
Empiricists are passive thinkers, given their philosophy by the external world and fate
[Novalis]
|
15622
|
Empiricism unknowingly contains and uses a metaphysic, which underlies its categories
[Hegel]
|
15621
|
Empiricism of the finite denies the supersensible, and can only think with formal abstraction
[Hegel]
|
15632
|
The Humean view stops us thinking about perception, and finding universals and necessities in it
[Hegel]
|
14785
|
The world is one of experience, but experiences are always located among our ideas
[Peirce]
|
4532
|
We can have two opposite sensations, like hard and soft, at the same time
[Nietzsche]
|
16488
|
It is hard to explain how a sentence like 'it is not raining' can be found true by observation
[Russell]
|
16485
|
Perception can't prove universal generalisations, so abandon them, or abandon empiricism?
[Russell]
|
21532
|
Full empiricism is not tenable, but empirical investigation is always essential
[Russell]
|
6431
|
Empiricists seem unclear what they mean by 'experience'
[Russell]
|
5376
|
I can know the existence of something with which nobody is acquainted
[Russell]
|
5199
|
Empiricism, it is said, cannot account for our knowledge of necessary truths
[Ayer]
|
19488
|
The second dogma is linking every statement to some determinate observations
[Quine, by Yablo]
|
8178
|
Empirical and a priori knowledge are not distinct, but are extremes of a sliding scale
[Dummett]
|
8255
|
Davidson says the world influences us causally; I say it influences us rationally
[McDowell on Davidson]
|
6400
|
Without the dualism of scheme and content, not much is left of empiricism
[Davidson]
|
2522
|
Experience cannot teach us why maths and logic are necessary
[Katz]
|
8052
|
To find empiricism and science in the same culture is surprising, as they are really incompatible
[MacIntyre]
|
8881
|
Most of our knowledge has insufficient sensory support
[Sosa]
|
2494
|
Rationalists say there is more to a concept than the experience that prompts it
[Fodor]
|
6081
|
Necessity and possibility are big threats to the empiricist view of knowledge
[McGinn]
|
10404
|
Extreme empiricists can hardly explain anything
[Swoyer]
|
14918
|
The doctrine of empiricism does not itself seem to be empirically justified
[Ladyman/Ross]
|