On the Metaphysics of Rationalism and the Distinction between Ideas and Qualities

This paper presents an alternative argument to Locke's, "Essay Concerning Human Understanding," which states that matter causes ideas. The causes of our ideas center on questions of inference, such as, "What is the nature of a logical relation?" and "How are the processes of interpretation represented to be called true knowledge?" Metaphysics analyzes the contents of the senses in order to distinguish belief from reality. As a result, perception is critiqued in terms of its presumptions that are not related to natural reason. Descartes' theory of ideas is an objection to the pragmatic conception of thought and gives alternative contexts to associate scientific principles such as Ockham's Razor with logical syllogisms. Such order is regarded as a property of mind that we may call a Platonic 'form' because it does not contain falsehoods since it is proposed to be part of universal conceptions between separate minds. This leads us to an investigation of the source of ideas and what the possibility is of a secrete faculty that knows why simple ideas are produced from the objects of perception, and believes that complex ideas are not part of more substantial claims about the world, such as motion. Thus, we have two areas of conception, between the associations of our mind, and representations of the world that are guided by different processes. The latter is the essence of empiricism, and is seen to exist as a modal stage of inference, which unites time with ideas. The benefits of this metaphysical idea of empiricism include phenomenological instantiations of approval concerning the meaning of true descriptions. What we call true is grounded in reasoning about real concepts, which are different from actual objects. Thus, quality refers to a ground that changes through choice and necessity.