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 (1632-1704) 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. In this work, Locke rejects the idea of innate principles, and argues against their existence, offering his own methods as to how humans generate knowledge. Locke has also written on religious toleration and social contract theory.

Historical Context

While studying at Oxford, Locke was exposed Scholasticism—the Aristotelian-influenced course of study at the time—and found that he did not like it and had no use for it. He left this course of study 1p. 4 and picked up medicine and chemistry, where he became acquainted with Robert Boyle 1p. 5 and ascribed to his Corpuscular Theory, which stated that the natural world was composed of small, invisible pieces of matter called corpuscles. To Locke, this was simpler and more appealing than Scholasticism. 1p. 6 While writing An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke traveled to France, where met Descartes, and was impressed by his anti-Scholasticism philosophy, Cartesian rationalism. 1p. 5 The empiricism Locke presents in Essay, is considered to be a response to both Scholasticism and Cartesian rationalism, especially as a rejection of the latter.

Major Contributions

Locke's Empiricism

Locke on Innate Principles

Locke begins Essay Concerning Human Understanding 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 hypothesis and proceeds to provide arguments against it. 1p. 15 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." 2p. 3

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.’ He entertains a response that innate propositions could be capable of being perceived under certain circumstances, and until those circumstances occurred, 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. 1p. 16

Locke also considers the account that people "know and assent to these truths when they come to the use of reason," 2p. 5 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. 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].” 2p. 5

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. This, says Locke makes them even less likely to be innate. Moreover, because practical propositions can be broken by someone, somewhere—and because obedience to them can be worn down by exposure to customs and education—they cannot be innate.

Locke states that innate principles prevent inquiry and exempted lazy people from the efforts of further research. 1p. 18

Locke on Sensation and Reflection

In Book Two of Essay, 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.3p. 18

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. 3p. 18 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. 3p. 18

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. 1p. 19

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.” 3p. 28

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. 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.

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.3 He maintains that objects produce ideas in the minds of people through physical impact upon them, through small particles—corpuscles—that travel from the object to the mind of the person.3p. 29

Locke's Scientific Knowledge

The Aristotelian conception of scientific knowledge 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.4p. 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.4p. 8

Locke’s conception of scientific knowledge concerned certain kinds of objects: real essences and the connections that flowed between them. Locke drew a distinction between real and nominal essences. While nominal essences consisted in the observable qualities used to describe and organize a thing, the real essence is what makes the thing what it is.4p. 9 To Locke, people have scientific knowledge of a thing if they know both its real essence and the necessary connections between the real essence and other qualities.4p. 10 This also holds for scientific knowledge in natural philosophy. However, says Locke, accessing either is impossible for people, due to the fact that real essences escape them.

Later, Locke saw that this conception, too, was strict, so he relaxed his condition that knowledge must be absolutely certain, and held that although genuine knowledge was absolutely certain, lack of certainty did not entail ignorance. When knowing truth via intuition or demonstration is not possible, people can still judge it true or false.5p. 15

Locke's Influence

Locke’s Essay posited an argument for rejecting the older, scholastic model of knowledge and science in favor of his empirical one, and it was very successful.1p. 77 Although Locke’s Essay contained much of Cartesian thought, Locke’s work was seen as refutation of Descartes, and moved philosophy toward that.6p. 261

Locke’s arguments against innate ideas was part of his support of the importance of “free and autonomous inquiry”. Locke’s ultimate goal was to show his readers that they could be

"free from the burden of tradition and authority, both in theology and knowledge, by showing that the entire grounds of our right conduct in the world can be secured by the experience [they] may gain by the innate faculties and powers [they] are born with."6p. 252

Locke’s Essay was also considered the start of British empiricism, which became the preferred mode of philosophy among future Anglophone thinkers such as Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Russell and Ayer.6p. 261

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.7 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.8

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.

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