Rocco D’Ambrosca: 12/07/2009
Epistemology along with metaphysics is one of the oldest philosophical pursuits. As far back as Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and even the Pre-Socratics, epistemology was of paramount importance. By the time of the Enlightenment, epistemology was expected to achieve far more. It was no longer enough to just have a rough idea of what is truly real and knowable. Epistemology, by this period, had now given birth to foundationalism. Foundationalists, like Descartes and Locke, were determined to discover the foundations or basic beliefs that could serve as the groundwork for all scientific knowledge. Galileo’s New Science demanded a strong footing that would ground all efforts to gain empirical scientific knowledge. A foundationalism of science is required for certainty in scientific inquiry and all future scientific experimentation, just as an axiom, or self-evident proposition, is required in a geometric proof; because without such grounding certainty, there can be no confidence in action when following this discipline. Descartes and Locke represent the two sides of the foundationalist movement with Descartes on the side of rationalism, believing reason to be the source of knowledge and justification; and Locke on the side of empiricism, believing sense experience to be the source of knowledge and justification. In the end, both views will be found lacking, and even when combined they may still leave cracks in the foundation.
Descartes foundationalism began with radical doubt or overthrow of all his existing former opinions. He didn’t know if any knowledge he had gained up to this point was based on false beliefs and therefore wanted to start with a clean slate. He like other foundationalists, wanted to find undoubtable beliefs as their starting place. As a rationalist his first and greatest doubt was of his senses. He didn’t believe he could trust his senses saying, “Let us suppose, then, that we are dreaming, and that all these particulars—namely, the opening of the eyes, the motion of the head, the forth- putting of the hands—are merely illusions; and even what we really possess neither an entire body nor hands such as we see.” (Descartes 11). He accepted that he could easily be fooled by his senses just as in a dream; and not being able to tell a dream from waking reality he was forced to believe that he could only rely on reason within his capacity for thinking as the only trustable source.
This next led him to doubt thinking and reason as trustable or that he himself even exists; because after all what he sees outside of himself as a chest, stomach, arms, hands, legs, and feet, may just be some kind of mentally projected hallucination as experienced in a dream. These two new doubts led him to say, “Thinking is another attribute of the soul; and here I discover what properly belongs to myself. This alone is inseparable from me. I am—I exist: this is certain; but how often? As often as I think; for perhaps it would even happen, if I should wholly cease to think, that I should at the same time altogether cease to be. I now admit nothing that is not necessarily true. I am therefore, precisely speaking, only a thinking thing, that is, a mind” (Descartes 15). Descartes had now discovered through his radical doubt that because he was able to think he therefore must exist. His ability to doubt his existence cognitively proved he existed. With such profound insight coming from reason and his total distrust in the senses, he was even more convinced of reason’s total domination over the senses as a far superior foundation for truth and knowledge.
John Locke stands opposed Descartes as an empiricist against rationalism. John Locke places his foundationalism upon common sensual experimental or experiential data as his basis for knowledge. He had strong practical faith in his sense organs taking in what he saw with his eyes and other senses and then storing that processed, computated, or contemplated data as a mental thought or idea stored in his memory. His ultimate authority for knowledge was the outside world and his senses. But he believed that for sense perception to be useful and truly foundation worthy, they must be used at full power, with all capable attention set forth in a truly earnest effort.
“The causes of obscurity in simple ideas seem to be either dull sense-organs, or weak and fleeting impressions made by the objects, or else a weakness in the memory which can’t retain them in the condition in which they were originally received. Think of the sense-organs or perceptual faculties in terms of sealing wax. Frozen wax is too hard and won’t take an impression when the seal is pressed down on it in the usual way; the wax that is all right won’t take an impression because the seal isn’t pressed down hard enough; and very warm wax is too soft to retain the impression the seal gives it. In any of these cases the print left by the seal will be obscure. It is presumably clear enough how this applies to the obscurity of ideas.” (Locke 121).
It was essential Locke believed for a clear perception to be captured so that the mental idea that will be stored in memory is of use as a trustworthy foundation for knowledge and all future knowledge based upon it. “A clear idea—·I repeat·—is one of which the mind has a perception that is as full and evident as it receives from an outward object operating properly on a healthy sense-organ. And a distinct idea is one in which the mind perceives a difference from all other ideas, and a confused idea is one that isn’t sufficiently distinguishable from another idea from which it ought to be different.” (Locke 121). Once a clear and complete sample was taken in by the senses it was determined by Locke to be a firm brick fit for use as foundation for future knowledge to be laid upon.
In between these two world views on foundationalism you may find a version of what we consider modern science. Modern scientists conduct empirical experimentation under the procedure of what is now known as the scientific method. They take in sense data as precisely as possible to use “empirically” in an attempt to use their training in respective fields, along with their mutual combined capacity for reason, to achieve some possible “rational” understanding or knowledge into what they were trying to determine. Here we see the marriage of the empiricist and the rationalist to create what we know today as our modern scientist. The two are completely inadequate without the other and any argument for one over the other is complete foolish madness. Descartes was forced to consider God as a protector from what can be seen as insanity. Descartes needed God’s existence to dispel the notion that he might constantly be deceived, forcing him to hide away in his mind completely paranoid of trusting the outside world. Locke although an empiricist was also very close to the modern scientist, relying on his mind as a workspace for any gathered sense data. Locke considered sense data to be his foundation but would never deny that he relied upon his mind and reason to discern and process the collected information.
In the end it is only acceptable to say that any single foundation cannot be determined, but a combination of factors lead to some varying level of acceptable or useful knowledge to be attained for future foundations of other knowledge. Everything is constantly changing and only an approximation or as Plato stated, only a likely story can ever be truly positively absolutely known. However close you are to one-hundred absolute percentage points of certainty in knowing something in the physical world, or even about yourself in the thought world, you will blink, sneeze, cough, or otherwise glitch yourself out of sync with it and in that total micro/nano/fraction of a millisecond that object has changed, and so have you, and you will need to reexamine yourself and the object a trillion times over again and still be that farther from true absolute knowledge because even more time and inevitable change has occurred in the mean while of your reexamination and study. So although the foundationalists’ undertaking is a hopeless one, which could only be achieved by a being outside of time and space, it is not fruitless. The lesson learned from the foundationalists is that although they may not have ever truly found a perfect foundation for Galileo’s New Science, their thought experiments and logic, birthed through their philosophies on the subject, served future scientists, today and tomorrow, with an astounding and awe inspiring blueprint or general guide for all scientific intellectual inquiry in every possible field of scientific thought.
Descartes – pg 11 and 15 from Meditations of First Philosophy
Locke – pg 121 from Locke Essay II, Chapter xxix
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