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=== Locke on Scientific Methodology ===
The Aristotelian scholastic approach to knowledge saw scientific knowledge as certain knowledge of necessary truths, with conclusions deduced from premises that were self-evident. Like many othersof his times, Locke did not believe that this sort of knowledge was generally possible in natural philosophy. He sought to replace these stringent demands with ones more compatible with the new experimental science, such as that practiced practised by the Royal Society. He takes took knowledge to be "nothing but the perception of the connection and agreement, or disagreement and incompatibility, of any of our ideas", with our ideas derived ultimately from sensations. [[CiteRef::Locke (2015d)|p. 196]][[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)]] Locke distinguishes distinguished between two sorts of knowledge, knowledge of '''nominal essences''' which are the set of observable qualities we use to classify a thing, and knowledge of '''real essences''' which are the causal grounds of a substance's perceivable qualities. For Locke, true the deepest sort of knowledge one might have in natural philosophy would be knowledge of the real essences of material substances and the necessary connections to qualities flowing from them. With Locke imagined this to be knowledge of the corpuscles that make up matter and their sizes, shapes, and arrangements. Given such fundamental knowledge, we could deduce the tertiary qualities of substances; their powers to produce certain effects in other substances. Just as a locksmith knows that a particular key opens one lock but not another, we could know that opium produces sleep, and hemlock causes death and the reasons why. But he further Locke supposed that such knowledge was, for the most part, beyond human facultiesbecause corpuscles are too small to be discerned by human senses. He wrote that "But while we lack senses acute enough to discover the minute particles of bodies and to give us ideas of their fine structure, we must be content to be ignorant of their properties and ways of operation, being assured only of what we can learn from a few experiments. And what we can learn for sure in that way is limited indeed." [[CiteRef::Locke (2015d)|p. 212]] He argued In making this "case, Locke nonetheless felt confident in terms of relying on the corpuscularian corpuscular hypothesis..."because that’s the theory that is thought to go furthest in intelligibly explaining those qualities of bodies; and I fear that the human understanding hasn’t the power to replace it..." [[CiteRef::Locke (2015d)|p. 208]] While knowledge of real essences, was, for the most part, inaccessible to humans, he supposed that certain other epistemic agents, such as God, the angels, and the inhabitants of other planets that might have different and more acute senses, could be capable of such knowledge. [[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)]][[CiteRef::Locke (2015d)]]  Locke believes that there are certain epistemic agents, such as God and the angels, that are capable of such knowledge, but that humans are not.
wledge prevailed prior to Locke’s work stated that scientific knowledge concerned certain knowledge of necessary truths. Locke, upon realization that this demand of scientific knowledge was too strict for the experimental science of his time, developed a new conception that was more appropriate, while retaining the Aristotelian scientific knowledge as an ideal.[[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)|p. 4]] According to Locke, there are two kinds of scientific knowledge, and they differ in their degree of certainty. Intuition is knowledge understood instantly, and demonstration is knowledge understood after a set of intermediate steps. Both intuition and demonstration are forms of certain knowledge.[[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)|p. 8]]
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