Essay Database

Does all knowledge come from experience ? From the classical empiricist point of view, -traditionally associated with John Locke, and primarily his 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding'- almost certainly so. Locke's epistemological contention was that knowledge is derived from experiential concepts acquired in the form of sense-data. These sense-data were supposed, according to Locke, to be of primary and secondary qualities, which when combined with and abstracted from each other gave rise to tertiary qualities. Examples of …

…of the knowledge must entail some form of synthesis of two separate concepts; the subject(1), about which the predicate(2) is asserted. Some form of non-experiential information or faculty is necessary to enable judgement upon it. An example of this is the mathematical truth that 5+7=12, a mere analysis of the two determining variables, '5' and '7' is insufficient to arrive at out recognition of their sum, which requires an additional process to be reached.