John Locke

John Locke (26 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was a British philosopher, writer, political activist, medical researcher, Oxford academic, and government official. John Locke was a British philosopher, writer and political activist. Among his most notable works is An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which provides a defense of empiricism and the origins of ideas and understanding. Locke has also written on religious toleration and social contract theory.

Historical Context

Locke was heavily involved in religion and politics in the 17th century. His participation in the modern science resulted from his close ties with Robert Boyle. Locke ascribed to Boyle’s Corpuscular Hypothesis, which stated that the natural world was composed of small, invisible pieces of matter called corpuscles. The empiricism and epistemology Locke presents in his most notable work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is considered a response to the two dominant schools of thought at that time: Aristotelian-influenced Scholasticism—which had been dominant since the Medieval era—and Cartesian rationalism, which was challenging the former. Locke wanted to find a middle ground.

Major Contributions

Locke On Innate Principles

Locke begins his Essay by setting up reasons, as well as responses, to why he believes there are no innate notions or principles of the speculative (descriptive) or practical (moral, prescriptive) kinds. Locke treats innateness—the theory that there are innate notions—as a sort of hypothesis and proceeds to provide arguments against it (SEP, Locke). He first rejects the argument from universal consent:

“Nothing is more commonly taken for granted than that certain principles … are accepted by all mankind. Some people have argued that because these principles are … universally accepted, they must have been stamped into the souls of men from the outset.” (Essay 1.2.2)

identifying the defect wherein that universal agreement does not entail innateness, as well as the fact that the argument from universal consent can be turned into evidence for a lack of innateness.

Locke states that speculative principles cannot be innate simply because “children and idiots” are not aware of them. He considers it a contradiction that there would be certain truths imprinted in a person that said person could not understand—he regards ‘imprinting’ as ‘perception.’ (Essay 1.2.5) He entertains a response that says that innate propositions could be capable of being perceived under certain circumstances, and until those circumstances occur, the propositions would remain unperceived. However, Locke responds that this account fails to distinguish between innate propositions and any other propositions that a person may come to know (SEP, Locke).

Locke also considers the account that people “know and assent to these truths when they come to the use of reason,” (Essay 1.2.6) and that this is sufficient to prove those truths innate. He considers two version of the phrase, “use of reason” and argues how both are incorrect. Firstly, he takes it to mean that people use reason to discover innate propositions. He argues against by showing how this definition fails to distinguish between mathematical theorems and axioms, where axioms are supposed to be innate, and theorems not. However, if both axioms and theorems are to be discovered by reason, then there is no way to separate the two (Essay 1.2.10)

Second, he takes “use of reason” to mean that people come to understand innate propositions once they are able to use reason, without using reason to understand those innate propositions. Locke says this, too, is incorrect, as “we observe ever so many instances of the use of reason in children long before they have any knowledge of [innate propositions” (Essay 1.2.12). In addition, even if this interpretation of “use of reason,” were true, Locke says it still would not entail that said propositions were innate.

Regarding practical (moral, prescriptive) innate propositions, there are additional arguments Locke makes against innateness. First, practical propositions are not self-evident like speculative propositions—one could question why practical propositions could hold, and receive a response (Essay 1.3.4). This, says Locke, makes them even less likely to be innate. Moreover, because practical propositions can be broken by someone, somewhere (Essay 1.3.13)—and because obedience to them can be worn down by exposure to customs and education (Essay 1.3.20)—they cannot be innate.

Locke states that innate principles prevent inquiry and exempted lazy people from the efforts of further research (Essay 1.4.24)

Locke On Experience

In Book Two of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke discusses how it is that people come to have knowledge, and from whence their ideas originate. He holds that the mind is a blank sheet of paper, and it comes to be written on through experience, and people’s understandings derive from their observations (Essay 2.1.2)

Experience, according to Locke, comes from sensation and reflection. Sensation is when a person’s senses are applied to specific perceptible objects, where the senses convey an object’s qualities into the mind. (Essay 2.1.3) Reflection occurs when a person is able to perceive the operations of their own mind from within their own mind, in a way that produces ideas which could not come from external objects. Reflection is when the mind is aware of what it is doing. (Essay 2.1.4)

While Locke holds that the mind is a blank slate regarding content, he believes that people are born with faculties with which to manipulate said content. Through sensation and reflection, the mind can, first, organize simple ideas into complex ideas—the independent existences of substances and the dependent existences of modes. The mind can also combine simple and complex ideas and regard them together without uniting the two—what Locke calls relations. Furthermore, the mind can produce general ideas by extracting particulars in order to limit the application of that idea. Sensation and reflection can also give rise to other ideas like: numbers, space, time, power and moral relations (SEP, Locke).

Locke On Primary and Secondary Qualities

Also in Book Two, Locke also distinguishes between two kinds of qualities that objects or substances can have. “Whatever the mind perceives in itself—whatever the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding—I call an idea; and the power to produce an idea in our mind I call a quality if the thing that has that power.” (Essay 2.8.8).

The first kind of qualities an object may have are primary qualities. These are qualities that are impossible to separate from the object, no matter how finely one divides it. Locke gathers that these primary qualities are how people can observe the simple ideas such as occupying space (extension), having shape, being in motion or at rest, and having texture (Essay 2.8.9). The second types of qualities an object may have are called secondary qualities. These, according to Locke, are objects’ abilities to produce in people sensations that occur through people’s interactions with the objects’ primary qualities. These sensations consist of: color, sound, taste and smell (Essay 2.8.10).

Locke also discerns a third kind of quality: tertiary qualities, which is defined as object or substance’s power to affect another object, like fire melting wax. He maintains that objects produce ideas in the minds of people through physical impact upon them, through small particles that travel from the object to the mind of the person, a view that was common at the time (Essay 2.8.12).

Criticism

Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was heavily criticized. Gottfried Leibniz responded, point-by-point, to Locke’s work in his rebuttal, New Essays on Human Understanding, where he disagreed with Locke’s rejection of innate ideas. Leibniz writes that there is no way all our ideas could come from experience since there are no real causal interactions between substances. In addition, Locke’s claim that the mind was a blank paper at birth violated Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (SEP, Leibniz). Fellow empiricist George Berkeley was also critical of Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities—Berkeley claimed that primary qualities as well as secondary qualities were a product of the human mind, and not a part of the object.

Publications

Here are the works of Locke included in the bibliographic records of this encyclopedia:

• Locke (2015a): Locke, John. (2015) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book I: Innate Notions. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/locke1690book1.pdf.
• Locke (2015b): Locke, John. (2015) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book II: Ideas. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/locke1690book2.pdf.
• Locke (2015c): Locke, John. (2015) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book III: Words. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/locke1690book3.pdf.
• Locke (2015d): Locke, John. (2015) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book IV: Knowledge. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/locke1690book4.pdf.
• Locke (2015): Locke, John. (2015) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Early Modern Texts. Retrieved from http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/locke.

To add a bibliographic record by this author, enter the citation key below:

 

Citation keys normally include author names followed by the publication year in brackets. E.g. Aristotle (1984), Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen (1935), Musgrave and Pigden (2016), Kuhn (1970a), Lakatos and Musgrave (Eds.) (1970). If a record with that citation key already exists, you will be sent to a form to edit that page.