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117-468: [REDACTED] Look up ideas in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. IDEAS may stand for: I-DEAS (Integrated Design and Engineering Analysis Software), a computer-aided design software package IDEAS For Us , American environmental organization IDEAS Group , International Defence Enterprise Architecture Specification For Exchange group, developers of

234-609: A result of their being perceived, or by virtue of the fact that they are an entity doing the perceiving. (For Berkeley, God fills in for humans by doing the perceiving whenever humans are not around to do it.) In his text Alciphron , Berkeley maintained that any order humans may see in nature is the language or handwriting of God. Berkeley's approach to empiricism would later come to be called subjective idealism . Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) responded to Berkeley's criticisms of Locke, as well as other differences between early modern philosophers, and moved empiricism to

351-431: A complementary rather than competitive mode, the latter of which had been the primary trend among the educated since David Hume wrote a century before. To this, Peirce added the concept of abductive reasoning . The combined three forms of reasoning serve as a primary conceptual foundation for the empirically based scientific method today. Peirce's approach "presupposes that (1) the objects of knowledge are real things, (2)

468-414: A complex idea may not have any corresponding physical object, though its particular constituent elements may severally be the reproductions of actual perceptions. Thus the idea of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse , that of a mermaid of a woman and a fish . "Ideas are to objects [of perception] as constellations are to stars," writes Walter Benjamin in

585-401: A direct relationship to ideas. In some cases, authors can be granted limited legal monopolies on the manner in which certain works are expressed. This is known colloquially as copyright , although the term intellectual property is used mistakenly in place of copyright . Copyright law regulating the aforementioned monopolies generally does not cover the actual ideas. The law does not bestow

702-472: A distinction is made between simple and complex ideas. The former are unanalysable, and are broken down into primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are essential for the object in question to be what it is. Without specific primary qualities, an object would not be what it is. For example, an apple is an apple because of the arrangement of its atomic structure. If an apple were structured differently, it would cease to be an apple. Secondary qualities are

819-703: A few original cultures, the Adam of the Bible, or several cultural circles that overlap. Evolutionary diffusion theory holds that cultures are influenced by one another but that similar ideas can be developed in isolation. In the mid-20th century, social scientists began to study how and why ideas spread from one person or culture to another. Everett Rogers pioneered diffusion of innovations studies, using research to prove factors in adoption and profiles of adopters of ideas. In 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene , Richard Dawkins suggested applying biological evolutionary theories to

936-470: A general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society. Patent law regulates various aspects related to the functional manifestation of inventions based on new ideas or incremental improvements to existing ones. Thus, patents have

1053-684: A new level of skepticism . Hume argued in keeping with the empiricist view that all knowledge derives from sense experience, but he accepted that this has implications not normally acceptable to philosophers. He wrote for example, "Locke divides all arguments into demonstrative and probable. On this view, we must say that it is only probable that all men must die or that the sun will rise to-morrow, because neither of these can be demonstrated. But to conform our language more to common use, we ought to divide arguments into demonstrations, proofs, and probabilities—by ‘proofs’ meaning arguments from experience that leave no room for doubt or opposition." And, I believe

1170-583: A notion of philosophy as the conceptual clarification of the methods, insights and discoveries of the sciences. They saw in the logical symbolism elaborated by Frege (1848–1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) a powerful instrument that could rationally reconstruct all scientific discourse into an ideal, logically perfect, language that would be free of the ambiguities and deformations of natural language. This gave rise to what they saw as metaphysical pseudoproblems and other conceptual confusions. By combining Frege's thesis that all mathematical truths are logical with

1287-434: A perception are by various authorities contrasted in various ways. "Difference in degree of intensity", "comparative absence of bodily movement on the part of the subject", "comparative dependence on mental activity", are suggested by psychologists as characteristic of an idea as compared with a perception . An idea, in the narrower and generally accepted sense of a mental reproduction, is frequently composite. That is, as in

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1404-427: A piece of music, for example, can both be called 'art' without belonging to the same substance. They are related as forms of art (the term 'art' in this illustration would be a 'mode of relations'). In this way, Locke concluded that the formal ambiguity around ideas he initially sought to clarify had been resolved. Hume differs from Locke by limiting idea to only one of two possible types of perception. The other one

1521-543: A priori ] in nature, Mill set down as founded on induction. Thus, in Mill's philosophy there was no real place for knowledge based on relations of ideas. In his view logical and mathematical necessity is psychological; we are merely unable to conceive any other possibilities than those that logical and mathematical propositions assert. This is perhaps the most extreme version of empiricism known, but it has not found many defenders. Mill's empiricism thus held that knowledge of any kind

1638-598: A rational reconstruction of knowledge into the language of an objective spatio-temporal physics. That is, instead of translating sentences about physical objects into sense-data, such sentences were to be translated into so-called protocol sentences , for example, " X at location Y and at time T observes such and such". The central theses of logical positivism (verificationism, the analytic–synthetic distinction, reductionism, etc.) came under sharp attack after World War II by thinkers such as Nelson Goodman , W. V. Quine , Hilary Putnam , Karl Popper , and Richard Rorty . By

1755-438: A second doctor who, when inspecting the sense organs of the first doctor, would himself have to have the sense data a normal observer has when inspecting the sense organs of a subject who is a normal observer. And if we are to specify in sensory terms that the second doctor is a normal observer, we must refer to a third doctor, and so on (also see the third man ). Logical empiricism (also logical positivism or neopositivism )

1872-560: A simple instance posed by Hume, we cannot know with certainty by inductive reasoning that the sun will continue to rise in the East, but instead come to expect it to do so because it has repeatedly done so in the past. Hume concluded that such things as belief in an external world and belief in the existence of the self were not rationally justifiable. According to Hume these beliefs were to be accepted nonetheless because of their profound basis in instinct and custom. Hume's lasting legacy, however,

1989-425: A subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by

2106-450: A theory known as instrumentalism . The role of sense experience in Dewey's theory is crucial, in that he saw experience as unified totality of things through which everything else is interrelated. Dewey's basic thought, in accordance with empiricism, was that reality is determined by past experience. Therefore, humans adapt their past experiences of things to perform experiments upon and test

2223-493: A very influential view wherein the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori , i.e., based upon experience. Locke is famously attributed with holding the proposition that the human mind is a tabula rasa , a "blank tablet", in Locke's words "white paper", on which the experiences derived from sense impressions as a person's life proceeds are written. There are two sources of our ideas: sensation and reflection. In both cases,

2340-421: A view of the mind as an originally blank or empty recorder (Locke used the words "white paper") on which experience leaves marks. This denies that humans have innate ideas . The notion dates back to Aristotle , c.  350 BC : What the mind ( nous ) thinks must be in it in the same sense as letters are on a tablet ( grammateion ) which bears no actual writing ( grammenon ); this is just what happens in

2457-422: A word in which this word has become, and performs, as a symbol." as George Steiner summarizes. In this way techne-- art and technology—may be represented, ideally, as "discrete, fully autonomous objects...[thus entering] into fusion without losing their identity." Diffusion studies explore the spread of ideas from culture to culture. Some anthropological theories hold that all cultures imitate ideas from one or

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2574-526: Is ." "That's so." "And, moreover, we say that the former are seen, but not intellected, while the ideas are intellected but not seen." Descartes often wrote of the meaning of the idea as an image or representation, often but not necessarily "in the mind", which was well known in the vernacular . Despite Descartes' invention of the non-Platonic use of the term, he at first followed this vernacular use. In his Meditations on First Philosophy he says, "Some of my thoughts are like images of things, and it

2691-506: Is a potentiality "that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect ( al- 'aql al-fa'il ), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge". So the immaterial "active intellect", separate from any individual person, is still essential for understanding to occur. In the 12th century CE, the Andalusian Muslim philosopher and novelist Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail (known as "Abubacer" or "Ebu Tophail" in

2808-618: Is a perception of ideas that are in accordance or discordance with each other, which is very different from the quest for certainty of Descartes . A generation later, the Irish Anglican bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) determined that Locke's view immediately opened a door that would lead to eventual atheism . In response to Locke, he put forth in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) an important challenge to empiricism in which things only exist either as

2925-456: Is a two-way street. That is, it can be taken to say that whatever we find in the intellect is also incipiently in the senses. Hence, if theories are theory-laden then so are the senses, and perception itself can be seen as a species of abductive inference , its difference being that it is beyond control and hence beyond critique—in a word, incorrigible. This in no way conflicts with the fallibility and revisability of scientific concepts, since it

3042-424: Is actualized through education , and knowledge is attained through "empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" developed through a " syllogistic method of reasoning in which observations lead to propositional statements which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts". The intellect itself develops from a material intellect ( al-'aql al-hayulani ), which

3159-488: Is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence . It is one of several competing views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism . Empiricists argue that empiricism is a more reliable method of finding the truth than purely using logical reasoning , because humans have cognitive biases and limitations which lead to errors of judgement. Empiricism emphasizes

3276-577: Is called "impression", and is more lively: these are perceptions we have "when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will." Ideas are more complex and are built upon these more basic and more grounded perceptions. Hume shared with Locke the basic empiricist premise that it is only from life experiences (whether their own or others') that humans' knowledge of the existence of anything outside of themselves can be ultimately derived, that they shall carry on doing what they are prompted to do by their emotional drives of varying kinds. In choosing

3393-402: Is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By a universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for

3510-490: Is derived from one's sense-based experience. In epistemology (theory of knowledge) empiricism is typically contrasted with rationalism , which holds that knowledge may be derived from reason independently of the senses, and in the philosophy of mind it is often contrasted with innatism , which holds that some knowledge and ideas are already present in the mind at birth. However, many Enlightenment rationalists and empiricists still made concessions to each other. For example,

3627-412: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages ideas An idea arises in a reflexive, spontaneous manner, even without thinking or serious reflection , for example, when we talk about the idea of a person or a place. A new or an original idea can often lead to innovation . The word idea comes from Greek ἰδέα idea "form, pattern", from

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3744-411: Is his principles of mutually enhanced contrasts and of assimilation and dissimilation (i.e. in color and form perception and his advocacy of objective methods of expression and of recording results, especially in language. Another is the principle of heterogony of ends — that multiply motivated acts lead to unintended side effects which in turn become motives for new actions. C. S. Peirce published

3861-440: Is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking; And I could not avoid frequently using it." He said he regarded the contribution offered in his essay as necessary to examine our own abilities and discern what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with. In this style of ideal conception other outstanding figures followed in his footsteps — Hume and Kant in

3978-663: Is more popular than philosophical, we need but reflect on two very obvious principles. First, That reason alone can never give rise to any original idea, and secondly, that reason, as distinguished from experience, can never make us conclude, that a cause or productive quality is absolutely requisite to every beginning of existence. Both these considerations have been sufficiently explained: and therefore shall not at present be any farther insisted on. Hume divided all of human knowledge into two categories: relations of ideas and matters of fact (see also Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction ). Mathematical and logical propositions (e.g. "that

4095-474: Is not from direct experience but an inductive inference from direct experience. The problems other philosophers have had with Mill's position center around the following issues: Firstly, Mill's formulation encounters difficulty when it describes what direct experience is by differentiating only between actual and possible sensations. This misses some key discussion concerning conditions under which such "groups of permanent possibilities of sensation" might exist in

4212-521: Is not purely logical, or is unverifiable, is devoid of meaning. As a result, most metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic and other traditional philosophical problems came to be considered pseudoproblems. In the extreme empiricism of the neopositivists—at least before the 1930s—any genuinely synthetic assertion must be reducible to an ultimate assertion (or set of ultimate assertions) that expresses direct observations or perceptions. In later years, Carnap and Neurath abandoned this sort of phenomenalism in favor of

4329-519: Is only the immediate percept in its unique individuality or "thisness"—what the Scholastics called its haecceity —that stands beyond control and correction. Scientific concepts, on the other hand, are general in nature, and transient sensations do in another sense find correction within them. This notion of perception as abduction has received periodic revivals in artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, most recently for instance with

4446-411: Is said to be obscure. He argued that to understand an idea clearly we should ask ourselves what difference its application would make to our evaluation of a proposed solution to the problem at hand. Pragmatism (a term he appropriated for use in this context), he defended, was a method for ascertaining the meaning of terms (as a theory of meaning). The originality of his ideas is in their rejection of what

4563-550: Is tentative and probabilistic, subject to continued revision and falsification ". Empirical research, including experiments and validated measurement tools, guides the scientific method. The English term empirical derives from the Ancient Greek word ἐμπειρία, empeiria , which is cognate with and translates to the Latin experientia , from which the words experience and experiment are derived. A central concept in science and

4680-591: Is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over

4797-423: Is the ideas which distinguish mere opinion from knowledge, for unlike material things which are transient and liable to contrary properties, ideas are unchanging and nothing but just what they are. Consequently, Plato seems to assert forcefully that material things can only be the objects of opinion; real knowledge can only be had of unchanging ideas. Furthermore, ideas for Plato appear to serve as universals; consider

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4914-410: Is to have an "idea". Ideas are therefore the faint copies of sensations. Hume maintained that no knowledge, even the most basic beliefs about the natural world, can be conclusively established by reason. Rather, he maintained, our beliefs are more a result of accumulated habits , developed in response to accumulated sense experiences. Among his many arguments Hume also added another important slant to

5031-401: Is to these alone that the name 'idea' properly belongs." He sometimes maintained that ideas were innate and uses of the term idea diverge from the original primary scholastic use. He provides multiple non-equivalent definitions of the term, uses it to refer to as many as six distinct kinds of entities, and divides ideas inconsistently into various genetic categories. For him knowledge took

5148-475: The Middle Ages (from the 5th to the 15th century CE) Aristotle's theory of tabula rasa was developed by Islamic philosophers starting with Al Farabi ( c.  872  – c.  951 CE ), developing into an elaborate theory by Avicenna (c.  980 – 1037 CE) and demonstrated as a thought experiment by Ibn Tufail . For Avicenna ( Ibn Sina ), for example, the tabula rasa is a pure potentiality that

5265-501: The Vaisheshika school of Hindu philosophy , founded by the ancient Indian philosopher Kanada , accepted perception and inference as the only two reliable sources of knowledge. This is enumerated in his work Vaiśeṣika Sūtra . The Charvaka school held similar beliefs, asserting that perception is the only reliable source of knowledge while inference obtains knowledge with uncertainty. The earliest Western proto-empiricists were

5382-425: The determinism of the empirical subject. Kant felt that it is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy exists. The business of philosophy he thought was not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgement of good common sense. Whereas Kant declares limits to knowledge ("we can never know the thing in itself"), in his epistemological work, Rudolf Steiner sees ideas as "objects of experience" which

5499-507: The empiric school of ancient Greek medical practitioners, founded in 330 BCE. Its members rejected the doctrines of the dogmatic school , preferring to rely on the observation of phantasiai (i.e., phenomena, the appearances). The Empiric school was closely allied with the Pyrrhonist school of philosophy, which made the philosophical case for their proto-empiricism. The notion of tabula rasa ("clean slate" or "blank tablet") connotes

5616-436: The philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments . It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition , or revelation . Empiricism, often used by natural scientists , believes that "knowledge is based on experience" and that "knowledge

5733-544: The scientific method is that conclusions must be empirically based on the evidence of the senses. Both natural and social sciences use working hypotheses that are testable by observation and experiment . The term semi-empirical is sometimes used to describe theoretical methods that make use of basic axioms , established scientific laws, and previous experimental results to engage in reasoned model building and theoretical inquiry. Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced unless it

5850-486: The "effectual truth" instead. Their contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) said, "If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings." Significantly, an empirical metaphysical system was developed by the Italian philosopher Bernardino Telesio which had an enormous impact on

5967-451: The 1870s. James popularized the term "pragmatism", giving Peirce full credit for its patrimony, but Peirce later demurred from the tangents that the movement was taking, and redubbed what he regarded as the original idea with the name of "pragmaticism". Along with its pragmatic theory of truth , this perspective integrates the basic insights of empirical (experience-based) and rational (concept-based) thinking. Charles Peirce (1839–1914)

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6084-833: The 18th century, Arthur Schopenhauer in the 19th century, and Bertrand Russell , Ludwig Wittgenstein , and Karl Popper in the 20th century. Locke always believed in the good sense — not pushing things to extremes and while taking fully into account the plain facts of the matter. He prioritized common-sense ideas that struck him as "good-tempered, moderate, and down-to-earth." As John Locke studied humans in his work "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" he continually referenced Descartes for ideas as he asked this fundamental question: "When we are concerned with something about which we have no certain knowledge, what rules or standards should guide how confident we allow ourselves to be that our opinions are right?" Put in another way, he inquired into how humans might verify their ideas, and considered

6201-788: The 18th century, both George Berkeley in Ireland and David Hume in Scotland , all became leading exponents of empiricism, hence the dominance of empiricism in British philosophy. The distinction between rationalism and empiricism was not formally made until Immanuel Kant , in Germany, around 1780 , who sought to merge the two views. In response to the early-to-mid-17th-century " continental rationalism ", John Locke (1632–1704) proposed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

6318-674: The IDEAS ontological foundation IDEAS UAV, a Chinese unmanned aerial vehicle Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs , a Malaysian libertarian think tank International Defence Exhibition and Seminar , a defence sector event, held biennially, in Pakistan IDEAS, a database maintained by the Research Papers in Economics project See also [ edit ] Idea (disambiguation) Ideas (disambiguation) Topics referred to by

6435-492: The West) included the theory of tabula rasa as a thought experiment in his Arabic philosophical novel , Hayy ibn Yaqdhan in which he depicted the development of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a desert island , through experience alone. The Latin translation of his philosophical novel , entitled Philosophus Autodidactus , published by Edward Pococke

6552-529: The Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke 's formulation of tabula rasa in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . A similar Islamic theological novel, Theologus Autodidactus , was written by the Arab theologian and physician Ibn al-Nafis in the 13th century. It also dealt with the theme of empiricism through the story of a feral child on a desert island, but departed from its predecessor by depicting

6669-716: The actual numbers, as believed), and through this and other discoveries that demonstrated the fallibility of traditional authorities, a radically empirical attitude developed, passed on to Galileo, which regarded "experience and demonstration" as the sine qua non of valid rational enquiry. British empiricism , a retrospective characterization, emerged during the 17th century as an approach to early modern philosophy and modern science . Although both integral to this overarching transition, Francis Bacon , in England, first advocated for empiricism in 1620 , whereas René Descartes , in France, laid

6786-465: The case of the mind. (Aristotle, On the Soul , 3.4.430 1). Aristotle's explanation of how this was possible was not strictly empiricist in a modern sense, but rather based on his theory of potentiality and actuality , and experience of sense perceptions still requires the help of the active nous . These notions contrasted with Platonic notions of the human mind as an entity that pre-existed somewhere in

6903-442: The central role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions . Empiricists may argue that traditions (or customs) arise due to relations of previous sensory experiences. Historically, empiricism was associated with the " blank slate " concept ( tabula rasa ), according to which the human mind is "blank" at birth and develops its thoughts only through later experience. Empiricism in

7020-441: The characters (properties) of real things do not depend on our perceptions of them, and (3) everyone who has sufficient experience of real things will agree on the truth about them. According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism , the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of

7137-402: The closely related term subjective idealism . By the phenomenalistic line of thinking, to have a visual experience of a real physical thing is to have an experience of a certain kind of group of experiences. This type of set of experiences possesses a constancy and coherence that is lacking in the set of experiences of which hallucinations, for example, are a part. As John Stuart Mill put it in

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7254-414: The data given by empirical observation. In later years he even emphasized the concept-driven side of the then ongoing debate between strict empiricism and strict rationalism, in part to counterbalance the excesses to which some of his cohorts had taken pragmatism under the "data-driven" strict-empiricist view. Among Peirce's major contributions was to place inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning in

7371-413: The debate about scientific method —that of the problem of induction . Hume argued that it requires inductive reasoning to arrive at the premises for the principle of inductive reasoning, and therefore the justification for inductive reasoning is a circular argument. Among Hume's conclusions regarding the problem of induction is that there is no certainty that the future will resemble the past. Thus, as

7488-568: The development of later Italian thinkers, including Telesio's students Antonio Persio and Sertorio Quattromani , his contemporaries Thomas Campanella and Giordano Bruno , and later British philosophers such as Francis Bacon , who regarded Telesio as "the first of the moderns". Telesio's influence can also be seen on the French philosophers René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi . The decidedly anti-Aristotelian and anti-clerical music theorist Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1520 – 1591), father of Galileo and

7605-509: The development of the protagonist's mind through contact with society rather than in isolation from society. During the 13th century Thomas Aquinas adopted into scholasticism the Aristotelian position that the senses are essential to the mind. Bonaventure (1221–1274), one of Aquinas' strongest intellectual opponents, offered some of the strongest arguments in favour of the Platonic idea of

7722-463: The distinctions between different types of ideas. Locke found that an idea "can simply mean some sort of brute experience." He shows that there are "No innate principles in the mind." Thus, he concludes that "our ideas are all experienced in nature." An experience can either be a sensation or a reflection: "consider whether there are any innate ideas in the mind before any are brought in by the impression from sensation or reflection." Therefore, an idea

7839-403: The dynamism of the argument over the theory of ideas up to the present. This schism in theory has never been resolved to the satisfaction of thinkers from both sides of the disagreement and is represented today in the split between analytic and continental schools of philosophy. Persistent contradictions between classical physics and quantum mechanics may be pointed to as a rough analogy for

7956-401: The early Wittgenstein's idea that all logical truths are mere linguistic tautologies , they arrived at a twofold classification of all propositions: the "analytic" ( a priori ) and the "synthetic" ( a posteriori ). On this basis, they formulated a strong principle of demarcation between sentences that have sense and those that do not: the so-called " verification principle ". Any sentence that

8073-459: The empirical object is not prior to its perception by a knowledgeable subject, in other words. He also published many papers on logic in relation to ideas . G. F. Stout and J. M. Baldwin , in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology , define the idea as "the reproduction with a more or less adequate image , of an object not actually present to the senses." They point out that an idea and

8190-449: The empiricist John Locke admitted that some knowledge (e.g. knowledge of God's existence) could be arrived at through intuition and reasoning alone. Similarly, Robert Boyle , a prominent advocate of the experimental method, held that we also have innate ideas. At the same time, the main continental rationalists ( Descartes , Spinoza , and Leibniz ) were also advocates of the empirical "scientific method". Between 600 and 200 BCE,

8307-408: The example given above of the idea of a chair, a great many objects, differing materially in detail, all call a single idea. When a man, for example, has obtained an idea of chairs in general by comparison with which he can say "This is a chair, that is a stool", he has what is known as an "abstract idea" distinct from the reproduction in his mind of any particular chair (see abstraction ). Furthermore,

8424-441: The example of beauty as a mode. He points to combinations of color and form as qualities constitutive of this mode. Substances , however, are distinct from modes. Substances convey the underlying formal unity of certain objects, such as dogs, cats, or tables. Relations represent the relationship between two or more ideas that contain analogous elements to one another without the implication of underlying formal unity. A painting or

8541-458: The experimental method failed, he turned to other objectively valuable aids , specifically to those products of cultural communal life which lead one to infer particular mental motives. Outstanding among these are speech, myth, and social custom. Wundt designed the basic mental activity apperception — a unifying function which should be understood as an activity of the will. Many aspects of his empirical physiological psychology are used today. One

8658-458: The external world . In so doing, he includes not only ideas of memory and imagination , but also perceptual processes, whereas other psychologists confine the term to the first two groups. One of Wundt's main concerns was to investigate conscious processes in their own context by experiment and introspection . He regarded both of these as exact methods , interrelated in that experimentation created optimal conditions for introspection. Where

8775-429: The eyes (re. ἰδέα ). As this argument is disseminated the word "idea" begins to take on connotations that would be more familiarly associated with the term today. In the fifth book of his Republic , Plato defines philosophy as the love of this formal (as opposed to visual) way of seeing. Plato advances the theory that perceived but immaterial objects of awareness constituted a realm of deathless forms or ideas from which

8892-428: The first full statement of pragmatism in his important works " How to Make Our Ideas Clear " (1878) and " The Fixation of Belief " (1877). In "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" he proposed that a clear idea (in his study he uses concept and idea as synonymic) is defined as one, when it is apprehended such as it will be recognized wherever it is met, and no other will be mistaken for it. If it fails of this clearness, it

9009-562: The first place. Berkeley put God in that gap; the phenomenalists, including Mill, essentially left the question unanswered. In the end, lacking an acknowledgement of an aspect of "reality" that goes beyond mere "possibilities of sensation", such a position leads to a version of subjective idealism. Questions of how floor beams continue to support a floor while unobserved, how trees continue to grow while unobserved and untouched by human hands, etc., remain unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable in these terms. Secondly, Mill's formulation leaves open

9126-491: The following passage from the Republic : "We both assert that there are," I said, "and distinguish in speech, many fair things, many good things, and so on for each kind of thing." "Yes, so we do." "And we also assert that there is a fair itself, a good itself, and so on for all things that we set down as many. Now, again, we refer to them as one idea of each as though the idea were one; and we address it as that which really

9243-412: The form of ideas and philosophical investigation is devoted to the consideration of these entities. John Locke 's use of idea stands in striking contrast to Plato's. In his Introduction to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Locke defines idea as "that term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, I have used it to express whatever

9360-647: The gap between the two schools of thought. Plato in Ancient Greece was one of the earliest philosophers to provide a detailed discussion of ideas and of the thinking process (in Plato's Greek the word idea carries a rather different sense of our modern English term). Plato argued in dialogues such as the Phaedo , Symposium , Republic , and Timaeus that there is a realm of ideas or forms ( eidei ), which exist independently of anyone who may have thoughts on these ideas, and it

9477-424: The globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be

9594-474: The heavens, before being sent down to join a body on Earth (see Plato's Phaedo and Apology , as well as others). Aristotle was considered to give a more important position to sense perception than Plato , and commentators in the Middle Ages summarized one of his positions as " nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu " (Latin for "nothing in the intellect without first being in the senses"). This idea

9711-420: The introduction to his The Origin of German Tragic Drama . "The set of concepts which assist in the representation of an idea lend it actuality as such a configuration. For phenomena are not incorporated into ideas. They are not contained in them. Ideas are, rather, their objective virtual arrangement, their objective interpretation." Benjamin advances, "That an idea is that moment in the substance and being of

9828-413: The inventor of monody , made use of the method in successfully solving musical problems, firstly, of tuning such as the relationship of pitch to string tension and mass in stringed instruments, and to volume of air in wind instruments; and secondly to composition, by his various suggestions to composers in his Dialogo della musica antica e moderna (Florence, 1581). The Italian word he used for "experiment"

9945-466: The issue rest on human instinct, custom and habit. According to an extreme empiricist theory known as phenomenalism , anticipated by the arguments of both Hume and George Berkeley, a physical object is a kind of construction out of our experiences. Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects, properties, events (whatever is physical) are reducible to mental objects, properties, events. Ultimately, only mental objects, properties, events, exist—hence

10062-505: The late 1960s, it had become evident to most philosophers that the movement had pretty much run its course, though its influence is still significant among contemporary analytic philosophers such as Michael Dummett and other anti-realists . In the late 19th and early 20th century, several forms of pragmatic philosophy arose. The ideas of pragmatism, in its various forms, developed mainly from discussions between Charles Sanders Peirce and William James when both men were at Harvard in

10179-417: The latter. But it came to be realized that there is no finite set of statements about actual and possible sense-data from which we can deduce even a single physical-object statement. The translating or paraphrasing statement must be couched in terms of normal observers in normal conditions of observation. There is, however, no finite set of statements that are couched in purely sensory terms and can express

10296-432: The legal status of property upon ideas per se. Instead, laws purport to regulate events related to the usage, copying, production, sale and other forms of exploitation of the fundamental expression of a work, that may or may not carry ideas. Copyright law is fundamentally different from patent law in this respect: patents do grant monopolies on ideas (more on this below). A copyright is meant to regulate some aspects of

10413-486: The main groundwork upholding rationalism around 1640. (Bacon's natural philosophy was influenced by Italian philosopher Bernardino Telesio and by Swiss physician Paracelsus .) Contributing later in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza are retrospectively identified likewise as an empiricist and a rationalist, respectively. In the Enlightenment of the late 17th century, John Locke in England, and in

10530-457: The material world emanated. Aristotle challenges Plato in this area, positing that the phenomenal world of ideas arises as mental composites of remembered observations. Though it is anachronistic to apply these terms to thinkers from antiquity, it clarifies the argument between Plato and Aristotle if we call Plato an idealist thinker and Aristotle an empiricist thinker. This antagonism between empiricism and idealism generally characterizes

10647-407: The means to those ends, they shall follow their accustomed associations of ideas. Hume has contended and defended the notion that "reason alone is merely the 'slave of the passions'." Immanuel Kant defines ideas by distinguishing them from concepts . Concepts arise by the compositing of experience into abstract categorial representations of presumed or encountered empirical objects whereas

10764-512: The method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth". In his Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism" (1903), Peirce enumerated what he called the "three cotary propositions of pragmatism" ( L: cos, cotis whetstone), saying that they "put the edge on the maxim of pragmatism ". First among these, he listed the peripatetic-thomist observation mentioned above, but he further observed that this link between sensory perception and intellectual conception

10881-453: The mid-19th century, matter is the "permanent possibility of sensation". Mill's empiricism went a significant step beyond Hume in still another respect: in maintaining that induction is necessary for all meaningful knowledge including mathematics. As summarized by D.W. Hamlin: [Mill] claimed that mathematical truths were merely very highly confirmed generalizations from experience; mathematical inference, generally conceived as deductive [and

10998-481: The mind apprehends, much as the eye apprehends light. In Goethean Science (1883), he declares, "Thinking ... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye of perception perceives colors and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." He holds this to be the premise upon which Goethe made his natural-scientific observations. Wundt widens the term from Kant's usage to include conscious representation of some object or process of

11115-463: The mind. In the late renaissance various writers began to question the medieval and classical understanding of knowledge acquisition in a more fundamental way. In political and historical writing Niccolò Machiavelli and his friend Francesco Guicciardini initiated a new realistic style of writing. Machiavelli in particular was scornful of writers on politics who judged everything in comparison to mental ideals and demanded that people should study

11232-444: The moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it

11349-423: The most general and most popular explication of this matter, is to say [See Mr. Locke, chapter of power.], that finding from experience, that there are several new productions in matter, such as the motions and variations of body, and concluding that there must somewhere be a power capable of producing them, we arrive at last by this reasoning at the idea of power and efficacy. But to be convinced that this explication

11466-411: The origin of ideas, for Kant, is a priori to experience. Regulative ideas , for example, are ideals that one must tend towards, but by definition may not be completely realized as objects of empirical experience. Liberty , according to Kant, is an idea whereas "tree" (as an abstraction covering all species of trees) is a concept . The autonomy of the rational and universal subject is opposed to

11583-469: The original creation and fixation thereof, without any extra steps. While creation usually involves an idea, the idea in itself does not suffice for the purposes of claiming copyright. Confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements are legal instruments that assist corporations and individuals in keeping ideas from escaping to the general public. Generally, these instruments are covered by contract law. Empiricism In philosophy , empiricism

11700-470: The perception that there can be any value added by seeking supernatural explanations for natural phenomena . James' "radical empiricism" is thus not radical in the context of the term "empiricism", but is instead fairly consistent with the modern use of the term " empirical ". His method of argument in arriving at this view, however, still readily encounters debate within philosophy even today. John Dewey (1859–1952) modified James' pragmatism to form

11817-476: The root of ἰδεῖν idein , "to see." The argument over the underlying nature of ideas is opened by Plato , whose exposition of his theory of forms —which recurs and accumulates over the course of his many dialogs—appropriates and adds a new sense to the Greek word for things that are "seen" (re. εἶδος) that highlights those elements of perception which are encountered without material or objective reference available to

11934-407: The same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title IDEAS . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=IDEAS&oldid=1123005486 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description

12051-428: The satisfaction of the condition of the presence of a normal observer. According to phenomenalism, to say that a normal observer is present is to make the hypothetical statement that were a doctor to inspect the observer, the observer would appear to the doctor to be normal. But, of course, the doctor himself must be a normal observer. If we are to specify this doctor's normality in sensory terms, we must make reference to

12168-441: The sensory information we can perceive from its primary qualities. For example, an apple can be perceived in various colours, sizes, and textures but it is still identified as an apple. Therefore, its primary qualities dictate what the object essentially is, while its secondary qualities define its attributes. Complex ideas combine simple ones, and divide into substances, modes, and relations. According to Locke, our knowledge of things

12285-421: The spread of ideas. He coined the term meme to describe an abstract unit of selection , equivalent to the gene in evolutionary biology . It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property

12402-436: The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides") are examples of the first, while propositions involving some contingent observation of the world (e.g. "the sun rises in the East") are examples of the second. All of people's "ideas", in turn, are derived from their "impressions". For Hume, an "impression" corresponds roughly with what we call a sensation. To remember or to imagine such impressions

12519-423: The time Mill wrote, fall under the agreed meaning of induction . The phenomenalist phase of post-Humean empiricism ended by the 1940s, for by that time it had become obvious that statements about physical things could not be translated into statements about actual and possible sense data. If a physical object statement is to be translatable into a sense-data statement, the former must be at least deducible from

12636-449: The unsettling possibility that the "gap-filling entities are purely possibilities and not actualities at all". Thirdly, Mill's position, by calling mathematics merely another species of inductive inference, misapprehends mathematics. It fails to fully consider the structure and method of mathematical science , the products of which are arrived at through an internally consistent deductive set of procedures which do not, either today or at

12753-462: The usage of expressions of a work, not an idea. Thus, copyrights have a negative relationship to ideas. Work means a tangible medium of expression. It may be an original or derivative work of art, be it literary, dramatic, musical recitation, artistic, related to sound recording, etc. In (at least) countries adhering to the Berne Convention , copyright automatically starts covering the work upon

12870-625: The work of Irvin Rock on indirect perception . Around the beginning of the 20th century, William James (1842–1910) coined the term " radical empiricism " to describe an offshoot of his form of pragmatism, which he argued could be dealt with separately from his pragmatism—though in fact the two concepts are intertwined in James's published lectures. James maintained that the empirically observed "directly apprehended universe needs ... no extraneous trans-empirical connective support", by which he meant to rule out

12987-499: Was esperimento . It is known that he was the essential pedagogical influence upon the young Galileo, his eldest son (cf. Coelho, ed. Music and Science in the Age of Galileo Galilei ), arguably one of the most influential empiricists in history. Vincenzo, through his tuning research, found the underlying truth at the heart of the misunderstood myth of ' Pythagoras' hammers ' (the square of the numbers concerned yielded those musical intervals, not

13104-411: Was accepted as a view and understanding of knowledge as impersonal facts which had been accepted by scientists for some 250 years. Peirce contended that we acquire knowledge as participants , not as spectators . He felt "the real", sooner or later, is composed of information that has been acquired through ideas and knowledge and ordered by the application of logical reasoning. The rational distinction of

13221-513: Was an experience in which the human mind apprehended something. In a Lockean view, there are really two types of ideas: complex and simple. Simple ideas are the building blocks for more complex ideas, and "While the mind is wholly passive in the reception of simple ideas, it is very active in the building of complex ideas…" Complex ideas, therefore, can either be modes , substances , or relations . Modes combine simpler ideas in order to convey new information. For instance, David Banach gives

13338-553: Was an early 20th-century attempt to synthesize the essential ideas of British empiricism (e.g. a strong emphasis on sensory experience as the basis for knowledge) with certain insights from mathematical logic that had been developed by Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein . Some of the key figures in this movement were Otto Neurath , Moritz Schlick and the rest of the Vienna Circle , along with A. J. Ayer , Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach . The neopositivists subscribed to

13455-409: Was highly influential in laying the groundwork for today's empirical scientific method . Although Peirce severely criticized many elements of Descartes' peculiar brand of rationalism, he did not reject rationalism outright. Indeed, he concurred with the main ideas of rationalism, most importantly the idea that rational concepts can be meaningful and the idea that rational concepts necessarily go beyond

13572-497: Was later developed in ancient philosophy by the Stoic school, from about 330 BCE. Stoic epistemology generally emphasizes that the mind starts blank, but acquires knowledge as the outside world is impressed upon it. The doxographer Aetius summarizes this view as "When a man is born, the Stoics say, he has the commanding part of his soul like a sheet of paper ready for writing upon." During

13689-417: Was the doubt that his skeptical arguments cast on the legitimacy of inductive reasoning, allowing many skeptics who followed to cast similar doubt. Most of Hume's followers have disagreed with his conclusion that belief in an external world is rationally unjustifiable, contending that Hume's own principles implicitly contained the rational justification for such a belief, that is, beyond being content to let

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