Today’s Lecture Preliminary comments on Locke John Locke.

Today’s Lecture

• Preliminary comments on Locke

• John Locke

Clifford’s maxim

“[I]t is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” (CP, p.4).

This is a maxim with which Locke will have a great deal of sympathy. He certainly thinks that to accord a belief more epistemic value than the evidence on which it is based warrants is a misuse of our rational faculties.

Preliminary comments on Locke

• John Locke is often thought of as the “father of British Empiricism”.

• We need to take care here in how we understand Locke to be an empiricist. Locke shares many basic ideas and views with Descartes (who is supposed to contrast with Locke when considered a representative of [Continental] Rationalism).


• As we will see, Locke agrees with Descartes on such things as the mechanistic nature of the universe, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that primary qualities are ‘attached to’ or inhere in the substance of ‘individuals’ in the world, while secondary qualities are, or do, not per se.

Preliminary comments on Locke• Empiricism is primarily a theory in

epistemology (though it has implications for psychology and metaphysics).

• A shared view among empiricists is that experience has primacy in human knowledge or in the acquisition of beliefs enjoying the other positive epistemic values.

• Empiricism can be divided into two general types: Concept Empiricism and Belief Empiricism.


• Concept Empiricists contrast themselves to those Rationalists who hold that we are born with certain innate ideas or concepts.

• Concept Empiricists would contend that no ideas are innate.

• Our simplest ideas, according to Concept Empiricists, arise form our experiences.

• Complex ideas arise as a result of abstracting from, combining and distinguishing our simple ideas.


• Belief Empiricists contrast themselves to those Rationalists who hold that reason is the primary source of human knowledge, and that the senses alone do not yield knowledge.

• For Belief Empiricists, a belief’s positive epistemic status (be it known, justified, warranted or rational) crucially depends upon its relation to experience. Empiricists of this type differ on what the relationship is, and what epistemic value is accorded to beliefs with the to-be-specified relation to experience.


• One example of Belief Empiricism would be the view that only those beliefs that arise out of, or whose content is derived from, experience are properly regarded as known.

• This kind of empiricism is often associated with (at least) some of the philosophers belonging to the Twentieth Century philosophical school of analytic philosophy (or Anglo-American philosophy) known as the Logical Positivists.

John Locke

• Locke was born in 1632 in Somerset England, and died in 1704 (also in England).

• It is thought by some scholars that Locke is a Concept, but not a Belief, Empiricist (I think this view may be incorrect).

• Locke’s epistemology is both foundationalist and internalist.

John Locke

• On the origins of our ideas, Locke disagrees strongly with Descartes.

• Locke also disagreed strongly with Descartes’ view of how we acquire knowledge of substances.

• Locke does not share Descartes’ distrust of the senses or experience (though he concedes that there are limitations to what can be inferred from experience).

“Some farther considerations concerning our Simple Ideas”

• Simple ideas, for Locke, are mental entities (FP, p.183).

• Consequently, simple ideas, and non-simple (or complex) ideas, are, for Locke, perceiver dependent. That is, without a perceiver there are, for Locke, no ideas, simple or complex.

• “Whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call idea” (FP, p.184 [‘verse’ 8]).


• “Thus the ideas of heat and cold, light and darkness, white and black, motion and rest, are equally clear and positive ideas in the mind, though, perhaps, some of the causes which produce them are barely privations in subjects, from whence our senses derive those ideas” (FP, p.183 [emphasis mine]).


• Note from this quote that not only are ideas mental entities, or more particularly ‘things’ that exist and only exist in minds, ideas need not be caused by what we might call positive states of affairs. Even a lack (what Locke calls a “privation”) in the world can cause a ‘positive’ idea.


• This is an important point that Locke is considering here. What he is claiming is that the properties of our ideas, or the content of our minds (which are ideas), need not be caused by external ‘objects’ that resemble them.


• “These are two very different things, and carefully to be distinguished; it being one thing to perceive and know the idea of white and black, and quite another to examine what kind of particles they must be, and how ranged in the superficies, to make any object appear white or black” (FP, p.183).


• Locke offers some reasons for holding this view about ideas and their causes, based upon observations available to us all.

• (1) We have positive ideas of such colors as black even when, as Locke suggests, we have reason to think this is a privation in the object out in the world, rather than some positive property they possess (FP, p.184).


• (2) We have had the experience of seeing a shadow. Yet even though ‘we’ think of this shadow as, in part, caused by a privation of light into the relevant area (so that that area is darker than the surrounding area), our idea of the shadow is positive (i.e. content-full) (FP, p.184).

• (3) We have negative names that refer to the absence of positive states of affairs, and yet these negative terms pick out positive (or content-full) ideas (FP, p.184).


• Locke suggests that we need to distinguish then between ideas and those properties or qualities of objects that causally contribute to the ideas as the appear in our minds.

• This is not an innocent suggestion. If you grant Locke this point, you are granting that our knowledge (if we have any) of the external world cannot be defended by a mere appeal to how the world appears to us, as that would assume that our most clear and distinct ideas are caused by objects that resemble them.


• Locke now offers you a taxonomy of his terms.

• An idea is a mental entity arising either directly from perception or from introspection (or what “the mind perceives in itself” (FP, p.184)).

• The power to produce an idea in our minds is a quality of that which is causally responsible for that idea (FP, p.184).


• Qualities as they inhere in or attach to bodies in the external world cannot be separated from those bodies (FP, p.184).

• The thought behind this seems to be that if a perceived quality of an object disappears in a context where the body remains, it is best to see that quality as something that emerged from the interaction of that body with something or someone rather than having been a quality of the object itself.

• Think back to Descartes’ wax example.


• If we divide up, or otherwise manipulate, an object in the environment we notice that various qualities we thought to be in the object undergo change.

• Given what we have said, these should not be regarded as being in those objects in themselves.

• Locke thinks that there are certain properties that do remain in these bodies, however: “solidity, extension, figure, and mobility” (FP, p.184). Does this sound familiar?


• What’s more, no matter what is done to bodies in the world, certain properties or qualities are associated with what remains of what we divide or manipulate, namely that they are solid, that they are extended in space, that they are a certain number and that they are at rest or in motion.

• Qualities that we can reasonably presume to be in external bodies are primary qualities (FP, pp.185, 187).

• These form simple corresponding ideas of themselves in our minds (FP, pp.185, 187).


• Secondary qualities are the powers that objects have by way of their primary qualities to produce ideas in our minds either by ‘acting’ on our senses or by affecting how the primary qualities of another object act on our senses (FP, p.185).

• Secondary qualities are not literally in the objects out in the world (FP, pp.185, 187).

• These do not form simple corresponding ideas of themselves in our minds (FP, pp.185, 187).


• Note that ‘verses’ 12 and 13 suggest a corpuscular theory of how we perceive primary and secondary qualities ‘in’ bodies in the outside world (FP, p.185).

• (He appeals to corpuscular theory in another area of our readings [see p.187].)

• Note he doesn’t merely assume this theory, but tries to argue that it best explains how we come to have ideas of objects that are not directly attached to our minds.


• Note that Locke’s division of primary and secondary qualities resembles that which Descartes has already supplied in the Second Meditation (though Descartes didn’t use these terms).

• Compare Locke’s example of fire and snow with Descartes’ discussion of the piece of bees wax.


• Note that verse 17 nicely anticipates and may even contain a possible response to Berkeley on the issue of secondary qualities and whether they are ‘real’.

• Locke contends that secondary qualities such as temperature and color are no more in bodies out in the world than the affective states proximity to, or contact with, such bodies elicit in our minds (FP, p.186, see also verse 21 on p.187).


• Consider fire as a body out in the world. According to Locke, the color orange or the feeling of warmth are no more actually in fire than are the secondary qualities of pain or pleasure elicited by being near or too close to fire.

• The appearance of both sets of secondary qualities require the right conditions, and this includes the presence of a perceiver.


• Take manna. Locke contends that we already associate secondary qualities with such an object that we do not suppose to be really in the object, namely “the pain and sickness caused by manna” (FP, p.186).

• That we cannot analyze such qualities as sweetness and whiteness in a similar vein is testament to the confusion of our understanding of properties, commonly understood as qualities of the bodies in the outside world.


• “.... as if it could not operate on the eyes and palate, and thereby produce in the mind particular distinct ideas, which in itself it has not, as well as we allow it can operate on the guts and stomach, and thereby produce distinct ideas, which in itself it has not” (FP, p.186 [part of verse 18]).


• “Pound an almond, and the clear white colour will be altered into a dirty one, and the sweet taste into an oily one. What real alteration can the beating of the pestle make in any body, but an alteration of the texture of it?” (FP, p.187 [verse 20]).

• In this passage Locke is trying to suggest that changes in the primary qualities of a body, in this case an almond’s texture, is the best explanation for why there is a corresponding change in its secondary qualities, in this case the almond’s color or taste.

• Inferences to the best explanation are sometimes referred to as abduction in logic (they are a form of induction).


• Locke offers what he thinks is the reason for our confusion on the nature of qualities and their origins in the world.

• One the one hand, we do not suppose that the secondary qualities of an effected object are copies of qualities in the cause when we can see or perceive that the qualities produced in the effected object are not seen or perceived in the cause. In this case we recognize that the cause has the power to produce the qualities perceived in the effect without having to have such qualities in itself. This, however, requires a perception of both cause and effect (FP, p.188).


• On the other hand, when we cannot perceive both the cause and effect because we are the effected ‘object’, we cannot see or perceive that the secondary qualities we see in the objective cause are in fact the effects of that object’s real qualities on our sense faculties, real qualities that do not bear a resemblance to the secondary qualities we see or perceive (FP, p.188).

“Of our Complex Ideas of substances”

• A preliminary note for this section of The Essay.

• Simple ideas are mental entities immediately arising from the senses or introspection.

• Complex ideas result from our combining, abstracting or distinguishing between simple ideas.

• Complex ideas, then, have their cause in our minds rather than in the world and they cannot exist without us first having simple ideas out of which they are created.

Today’s Lecture Preliminary comments on Locke John Locke.

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