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But Locke supposed that such knowledge was, for the most part, beyond human faculties because 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]][[CiteRef::Anstey (2011)|pp. 31-45]] In making this case about the limits of our knowledge of a corpuscular world, Locke nonetheless felt confident in relying on the corpuscular hypothesis itself "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, Locke imagined that it was not inaccessible to other epistemic agents with different or more acute senses, such as God, the angels, and the inhabitants of other planets. [[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)]][[CiteRef::Locke (2015d)|p. 211]]
Locke supposed that human knowledge was limited to what he called '''sensitive knowledge'''; knowledge of nominal essences that comes every day within the notice of our senses. [[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)]][[CiteRef::Osler (1970)]] Like Francis Bacon, he maintained that an important part of the methodology of natural philosophy is the construction of natural histories giving systematic accounts of phenomena. Hypotheses played only a minor role in natural philosophy, though he did accept the value of the theories expressed in Newton's ''Principia''. [[CiteRef::Anstey (2011)|p. 70]] He wrote that "We should not take up any one [hypothesis] ''too hastily'' ... till we have very well examined particulars and made several experiments in that thing we would explain by our hypothesis, and see whether it will agree to them all". [[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)|p. 231]] Like Newton, he supposed that knowledge could be obtained by observation, experiment, and inductive generalization. Locke’s ''Essay'' came to be considered the start of '''British empiricism''', with contributions by subsequent Anglophone thinkers including Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Russell and Ayer.[[CiteRef::Chappell (Ed.) (1994)|p. 261]]
|Criticism=In some quarters, Locke’s ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' was heavily criticized. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) responded, point-by-point, to Locke’s work in a book length rebuttal, ''New Essays on Human Understanding'', which he finished in 1704, but wasn't published until sixty years later. [[CiteRef::Look (2017)]] Leibniz rejected Locke's claim that the senses were the ultimate source of all our ideas and that there were no innate ideas. He wrote that "Experience is necessary...if the soul...is to take heed of the ideas that are within us. But how could experience and the senses provide the ideas? Does the soul have windows? Is it similar to writing tablets or wax? Clearly, those who take this view of the soul are treating it as fundamentally corporeal", a possibility that Locke was willing to countenance, but Leibniz found abhorrent. [[CiteRef::Look (2017)|p. 40]]