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John Locke: The Theory Of Knowledge And Personal Knowledge

1476 Words6 Pages

John Locke, a famous empiricist philosopher, believed that the mind of a newborn infant is a tabula rasa (Latin word for “blank state”) . He had also claimed that knowledge comes to us from our senses, entirely provided by experience and there is no built-in knowledge. These claims expanded the notion of nature vs. nurture whereby knowledge is not as a matter of heredity, but is rather shaped by the environment through the sharing and learning processes. Locke’s idea leads us to question the originality of the knowledge we claim to own. To what extent do we own knowledge or are we actually a part of the shared knowledge system? In order to unravel this ambiguity, I will be looking at two specific areas of knowledge: human science (specifically psychology) and ethics. I will also be discussing the way shared knowledge can shape personal knowledge by using the ways of knowing such as reasons, imagination, intuition and emotion. Using the foundation of Locke’s argument –that we are born with a blank state – it would be fair to suggest that primarily, personal knowledge does not exist. This is because, the basis of all knowledge begins from the first thing that we learnt when we were infants which was definitely not created on our own but was a manifestation of shared knowledge gained from the environment. The concept can be seen from the social learning theory in social psychology proposed by Bandura (1963) where he was able to show the influence of observational learning

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