Epistemological Comparison and Contrast
Dorothy M. Conner
University of Phoenix

Epistemological Comparison and Contrast
Descartes ' Theory of Knowledge
Rene Descartes is one of the most renowned rationalists of the modern age who asserts that knowledge can be obtained by means of reason. He claims that in the acquisition of knowledge one should be able to distinguish what is true and what is false. This leads to his opposition against the idea of experience as a source of knowledge
As Descartes claims it, one should not rely on experience as a source of knowledge for the reason that experience is deceptive as how a person's sensory organs can bring deception with the way he or she perceives things (i.e. the bending of the pencil when submerged in water). Descartes furthers states that because of this fallibility of experience one cannot really arrive at true knowledge by merely being dependent on what he or she perceives through experience.
As a result of Descartes treatment of experience, he suggests that to attain genuine and true knowledge, one should defer his or her judgment on things that are represented to him or her by experience unless such are presently proven to be unquestionable.
Descartes is a perplexity in many ways. Although he has a refreshing distaste for the voodoo logic of his day steeped as it was in the questionable science of the scholastic movement, when provoked he was equally capable of skewing his own thinking when confronted with the entrenched doctrine of the church.
His philosophy and logic, called Cartesian was important because he substituted mechanical interpretations of physical phenomena for the vague spiritual concepts of previous thinkers. At the same time he ended up with elaborate and complicated explanations of a number of physical phenomena which were simply in error.
For instance, although he had at first been inclined to accept the Copernican theory of the universe with its concept of a system of spinning planets revolving around the sun, he abandoned this theory when it was called a heresy by the Roman Catholic church. Instead he came up with a theory of vortices in space, whirling about the sun all bathed in an invisible "fluid" he called ether.
Also despite his mechanistic outlook, he accepted the traditional religious doctrine of the immortality of the soul maintaining that mind and body are two distinct substances. This fundamental separation of mind and body, known as dualism, raised the problem of explaining the way in which two such different substances as mind and body can affect each other, a problem that he was unable to solve and that has been a concern of philosophy ever since.
Locke’s Epistemological Theory
While Descartes is a rationalist defending the idea that knowledge can be drawn from reason, John Locke is an empiricist who claims that only experience can produce knowledge. Locke is one of the most notable critics of the Cartesian Philosophy on Knowledge arguing that a mind, at first, is like a blank slate. According to Dictionary.com (2010), the definition of ‘tabula rasa’ is the mind in its uninformed original state. The concept of tabula rasa directly opposes the Cartesian view that there are innate ideas. Therefore maintaining the fundamental empiricist’s view that there can be no other means to achieve knowledge but through experience alone.
Ideas are very important elements in Locke’s epistemology because only though these ideas that the mind can come up with a particular knowledge about something. Ideas can be produced either through sensation and reflection.
The chief difference between Descartes and Locke is that Descartes was a rationalist, one who holds that knowledge of the world can be gained by exercise of pure reason, while Locke was an empiricist, one who believes that knowledge of the world comes only through the senses. Accordingly, Descartes in his Meditations attempts to deduce from intuitive first principles the existence of the self, of God, of the mind as a thinking substance, and of extended bodies as material substances. Locke, on the other hand, asserts that we acquire knowledge by sensation, direct sensory impressions of the external world, and reflection, the mental process of breaking down complex impressions into simple ones and comparing them, abstracting them, and recombining them to form new ideas.
As is so often the case, Locke's approach to science was a reaction to the prevalent thinking of his day. This was a form of intellectual limitation called Scholasticism, a system based mostly on the beliefs of Aristotle and the church. Locke's answer was a method of scientific study called empiricism.
Locke's empiricism emphasizes the importance of the experience of the senses in pursuit of knowledge rather than intuitive speculation or deduction. The empiricist doctrine was first suggested by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon early in the 17th century, but Locke gave it systematic expression in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).
It is easy to understand Locke's passion for the empirical approach. In the 17th century, science was a mixture of ideas inspired mostly by religious dogma, the ancient Greek wisdom of Aristotle and the rationalism of the likes of Rene Descartes. Much of it ran counter to any reality perceived by the senses.
The church both catholic and protestant was inclined to treat inconsiderately any theories that did not conform to traditional beliefs about creation. Protestants may have disagreed with their catholic brothers on some issues such as the proper route to salvation but when it came to science they agreed up to a point.
Empiricism seems like an ideal antidote to these outdated ideas. Instead of the 'a priori' knowledge of the church, a scientific approach based on experiment and observation; instead of 'original sin', the innocence of a blank slate. Unfortunately, the real world does not really work like that either.
Conclusion
Both Descartes and Locke are initially skeptics about the possibility of certain knowledge. Descartes is a (French) rationalist, believing that there is certain knowledge and that human reason (innate ideas and deductions) is the sole source of such knowledge. Locke, in contrast, is an English empiricist who believes that knowledge is not certain, but that extremely probable knowledge can be gathered from experience. The idea of knowledge arising from experience is inconceivable to Descartes, just as the existence of innate ideas in the mind is unacceptable to Locke. The philosophies of Descartes and Locke diverge irreconcilably on the question of the origin of knowledge.

References:
Tabula Rasa. (2010). In Dictionary.com. Retrieved from
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tabula+rasa