Noogony is a general term for any

theory of knowledge Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Ep ...

that attempts to explain the origin of

concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by ...

s in the human mind by considering sense or '' a posteriori'' data as solely relevant.

Overview

The word was used, famously, by

Kant Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aest ...

in his '' Critique of Pure Reason'' to refer to what he understood to be Locke's account of the origin of concepts. While Kant himself maintained that some concepts, e.g. cause and effect, did not ''arise'' from experience, he took Locke to be suggesting that ''all'' concepts came from experience. Historically, Kant presents a caricature of Locke's position, not a completely accurate account of Locke's epistemology. Locke's actual theory of knowledge was more subtle than Kant seems to render it in his ''Critique''. As Guyer/Wood note in their edition of the ''Critique'':

Presumably Kant here has in mind Locke's claim that sensation and reflection are the two sources of all our ideas,Locke, John. ''Essay concerning Human Understanding'', bk. II, ch. i, §§ 3-4 and is understanding Locke's reflection to be reflection on sensation only. This would be a misunderstanding of Locke, since Locke says that we get simple ideas from reflection on the "operations of our own Mind," a doctrine which is actually a precursor to Kant's view that the laws of our own intuition and thinking furnish the forms of knowledge to be added to the empirical contents furnished by sensation, although of course Locke did not go very far in developing this doctrine; in particular, he did not see that mathematics and logic could be used as sources of information about the operations of the mind.

References

Epistemological theories Immanuel Kant Knowledge {{epistemology-stub

Overview

See also

References