Final answer:
John Locke's theory of knowledge, as outlined in his work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, includes three categories of mental content: Sensation, Reflection, and Complex Ideas, all built on the premise that the mind at birth is a blank slate that acquires knowledge through experiences.
Step-by-step explanation:
List and Describe Locke's (3) categories of mental content:
John Locke, in his influential work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, lays out a theory of human knowledge that suggests we acquire understanding solely through our experiences. The three categories of mental content Locke identified are:
- Sensation: This refers to the immediate experience that we have through our senses. When we interact with the world around us, our senses provide us with information that forms the basis of our empirical knowledge.
- Reflection: This is the process of the mind contemplating what it has learned from sensations. Through reflection, individuals can form complex ideas by thinking about their own thought processes.
- Complex Ideas: These are built from simple ideas that are derived through sensation and reflection. Complex ideas include attributes such as beauty, causality, or morality, which are not provided directly by the senses but constructed in the mind through combining and comparing simple ideas.
Locke's philosophy states that at birth, our minds are tabula rasa, or blank slates, and all our knowledge is constituted by the information we gain from sensation and reflection, discounting the notion of innate ideas. Thus, our mental content is continually shaped and expanded upon by our experiences.