Nature and Narture: Where Does Knowledge Come From?
philosophers and psychologists have long been interested in determining where our knowledge comes from. As noted earlier, Aristotle adopted an empiricist position: He believed that knowledge comes directly from our day-to-day experiences. Empiricism can be contrasted with a philosophical position called nativism. which holds that certain kinds of knowledge and ideas are inborn, or innate.
The Nativist Argument Nativists believe That we arrive in the world knowing certain things. Th German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) proposed that humans are born with a certain mental "structure" that determines how they perceive the world. People,he argued,are born with a natural tendency to see things in terms of cause and effect and to interpret the world in terms of space and time (Bolles, 1993; Wertheimer, 1987). Of course, nativists don't believe that all knowledge is present at birth we certainly learn a variety of things but some kinds of knowledge, they argue, do not depend on experience.
As you can probably guess, the question of whether humans are born knowing fundamental things about their world is difficult to answer. For one thing, no one is really sure at what point experience begins. We could draw a line at birth and say that any knowledge or abilities that exist at that very moment are innate. but, as you’ll see in Chapter 4, the environment exerts tremendous influences on embryos as they develop in the womb. We can never eliminate the influence of experience completely; so we're always faced with the tricky problem of disentangling which portions of the knowledge we observe are inborn and which are produced by experience.
It is possible to demonstrate that people use certain organizing principles of perception that cannot be altered by experience. Take a look at Figure 1.3. if I showed you (a) and then (b), do you think you could easily recognize that (a) is in fact embedded in (b)? It's not easy to see, is it? More important, it doesn't really matter how many times I show you (a). Even if I force you to look at (a) one hundred times, it's always going to be difficult to find when you look at (b). The reason for this, according to a movement called Gestalt psychology, is that humans are born with a certain fixed way of viewing the world. The visual system, in this case, naturally orga nizcs the sensory input in (b) in such a way that (a) is hard to see. These organizing principles are innate, and experience cannot change them (Ellis, 1938).
I'll have more to say about organizing principles of perception, and about Gestalt psychology. when we take up the topics of sensation and perception in Chapter 5. At till time, we'll return to this issue of experience and its effects on perception, and you'll see that experience is not always irrelevant to perception. In fact, very often the knowledge we gain from experience fundamentally affects the way we perceive the world.
Nature and Narture: Where Does Knowledge Come From?philosophers and psychologists have long been interested in determining where our knowledge comes from. As noted earlier, Aristotle adopted an empiricist position: He believed that knowledge comes directly from our day-to-day experiences. Empiricism can be contrasted with a philosophical position called nativism. which holds that certain kinds of knowledge and ideas are inborn, or innate.The Nativist Argument Nativists believe That we arrive in the world knowing certain things. Th German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) proposed that humans are born with a certain mental "structure" that determines how they perceive the world. People,he argued,are born with a natural tendency to see things in terms of cause and effect and to interpret the world in terms of space and time (Bolles, 1993; Wertheimer, 1987). Of course, nativists don't believe that all knowledge is present at birth we certainly learn a variety of things but some kinds of knowledge, they argue, do not depend on experience.As you can probably guess, the question of whether humans are born knowing fundamental things about their world is difficult to answer. For one thing, no one is really sure at what point experience begins. We could draw a line at birth and say that any knowledge or abilities that exist at that very moment are innate. but, as you’ll see in Chapter 4, the environment exerts tremendous influences on embryos as they develop in the womb. We can never eliminate the influence of experience completely; so we're always faced with the tricky problem of disentangling which portions of the knowledge we observe are inborn and which are produced by experience. It is possible to demonstrate that people use certain organizing principles of perception that cannot be altered by experience. Take a look at Figure 1.3. if I showed you (a) and then (b), do you think you could easily recognize that (a) is in fact embedded in (b)? It's not easy to see, is it? More important, it doesn't really matter how many times I show you (a). Even if I force you to look at (a) one hundred times, it's always going to be difficult to find when you look at (b). The reason for this, according to a movement called Gestalt psychology, is that humans are born with a certain fixed way of viewing the world. The visual system, in this case, naturally orga nizcs the sensory input in (b) in such a way that (a) is hard to see. These organizing principles are innate, and experience cannot change them (Ellis, 1938).จะได้เพิ่มเติม เกี่ยวกับการจัดระเบียบหลักการของการรับรู้ และจิตวิทยา Gestalt เมื่อเราใช้ค่าหัวข้อของความรู้สึกและรับรู้ในบทที่ 5 ที่จนถึงเวลา เราจะกลับไปปัญหาของประสบการณ์และผลการรับรู้ และคุณจะเห็นว่า ไม่มีประสบการณ์มักจะเกี่ยวข้องรับรู้ ในความเป็นจริง บ่อย ๆ ความรู้ที่เราได้รับจากประสบการณ์พื้นฐานที่มีผลต่อเรารับรู้โลก
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