________________ said - the idea of "substance" is merely an assumption on our part since we can never per

Question

________________ said - the idea of "substance" is merely an assumption on our part since we can never perceive the real substantive world directly.

this is a philosophy question

Answer 1

It was Locke’s idea that there is nothing in existence as innate ideas. The mind of child, he famously said, is a tabula rasa, a blank tablet or clean page to start with. Once we are out in the world, so long as our senses are working, the mind starts to fill up with all kinds of ideas.

Locke believes all objects are made of matter. And it is this matter that has various properties. So a lake is some matter with the properties of being wet, a certain size, and colour, etc. But what is matter itself is impossible to say. Locke says it is "something," but "I know not what." Given his view of how the mind gets its ideas, this is not surprising. We only have ideas of what we perceive. We perceive lakes, trees, people, etc. (in fact what we literally perceive are ideas of blueness, wetness, leafiness, etc.) but never matter itself. So we can, according to Locke’s theory, have no idea of it. And it gets worse.

Like Descartes, Locke believed in the Representative Theory of Perception: the theory that the mind does not directly perceive objects but rather it perceives representations, or ideas, of them. For instance, you do not listen to a CD, it is just that sound waves travel from your CD-player to your ear, then a message is sent into your brain and your mind perceives or decodes this message, and so on. This sounds like common sense, but is it literally true? There are two problems:

(i) it sounds ridiculous to say that I have never heard a CD, or tasted a burger, or seen a football game,
(ii) if all I ever perceive is the contents of my own mind, how do I know there is anything outside it?


Source: http://academics.vmi.edu/psy_dr/locke_and_berkeley.htm

Answer 2

Hmmm... this is just a guess. I didn't google it because I didn't want to cheat. Nietzsche. Am I right?

Answer 3

I won't cheat either. My guess is Plato.