Breaking Down Of Ideas Research Paper

Breaking down of one’s Ideas

John Locke once said, “Knowledge is based on innate ideas” (Palmer, p76). One’s knowledge creates ideas, of how humans view the world. Everyone is born with a blank slate and the world creates relationships for him or her. However, different philosophers have different explanations of how we create these ideas. John Locke’s theory breaks down these ideas into: simple ideas and complex ideas. In addition, these ideas have qualities that are broken down into: primary qualities and secondary qualities. Humans live in a world with simple ideas and complex ideas that correlate to primary and secondary qualities.

When a baby is born, there mind is open to everything the world has to offer. While a baby grows into a toddler,

Complex ideas can be a collection of simple ideas, association of ideas, or ideas that become generalized. A collection of simple ideas can be a group of people or a women or man. Since a women or men are, consist of of color hair, eyes, arms, legs, and etc. that makes them one complex idea. When making an association of ideas, means one is comparing or contrasting ideas. For instance, grass and leaves are both green in color. Lastly, ideas can be generalized they become abstractions. When humans collect ideas in a group that is an “abstractions, are formed when we recognize a certain characteristic that a group of objects have in common” (Palmer, p79). For example, a towel, sunglasses, sunscreen, sand, water are all simple ideas. These simple ideas are abstracted in one’s brain as one idea the

Primary qualities are the same for everyone. They make human language easily understood. One can think of primary qualities as ideas that are in the external world for example mathematics (Embree, September 14, 2015). Primary qualities are properties of ideas like mass, form, position, and motion/rest. Secondary qualities are qualities “which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations is [humans] by their primary qualities” (Palmer, p79). Secondary qualities exist in one’s mind. Locke impression of one sense are all internal and do not exist in the world.

My opinion is I agree with Locke’s theory of simple and complex ideas. However, I do not agree with his theory of primary and secondary qualities. I feel primary and secondary qualities exist in the mind and in the world. Primary qualities do not just exist in one’s mind. I feel primary and secondary qualities are inherited in humans when one makes the correlation of simple and complex ideas. These ideas are in the external reality that represents the world humans live in today, with gravity, atoms and science (Embree, September 16,