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Karina asked:
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We study at the tecnologico de Monterrey and would like to request a favor. Could you please tell us
what you think an empiricist would respond as an answer when questioned: " How would you explain
the reality of someone who is blind or deaf, or not able to use his five senses, would he be considered
as an non-existing person since he can not conceive his reality through his five senses? or is he
considered to see another reality?
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For the empiricist, a deaf or blind person would not be considered a non-existing person. According to
the empiricist John Locke, the defining characteristics of personhood are rationality and
self-consciousness (see Essay Concerning Human UnderstandingBk II 27.9) A being unable to use
certain senses would not normally fail this test.
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What could this individual know about reality? Consider the question Molyneux posed to Locke.
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Consider a man born blind...and taught by touch to distinguish between a Cube and a Sphere...[he
is]...then...made to see. [Mr Molyneux asks] Whether by his sight...he could now distinguish them,
and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube...To which the acute and judicious proposer answers:
Not.
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Primary qualities in the world like shape and extension can be seen and felt by more than one sense
modality; secondary qualities like colour and warmth can only be felt or seen by one sense modality.
Does the visual idea of a cube correspond to the tactual idea? Locke (inconsistently in my view)
agreed with Molyneux that it does not. So knowing the tactual idea would not mean knowing the
visual idea; but one could still know something about cubes if one could not see their cubic shape.
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The blind or deaf person would not be seeing another reality; whatever he could sense would be
'reality' but he would be more limited than a person whose senses all worked properly. On this
picture, a blind person cannot know what colour is, a deaf person cannot know what Chopin sounds
like etc. So for the empiricist, such a person would be able to make fewer claims to knowledge, since
all knowledge to the empiricist is acquired in sense experience. But any quality in the world which
could be sensed by more than one sense modality could be known about because, so the doctrine
goes, our ideas of these types of quality closely resemble the actual qualities of objects.
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Adam Gatward
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