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History of Philosophy Lecture 14 John Locke

History of Philosophy Lecture 14 John Locke. By David Kelsey. John Locke. John Locke 1632-1704 The first philosopher to think Epistemological issues must come first in philosophical thought

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History of Philosophy Lecture 14 John Locke

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  1. History of PhilosophyLecture 14John Locke By David Kelsey

  2. John Locke • John Locke • 1632-1704 • The first philosopher to think Epistemological issues must come first in philosophical thought • Wrote the famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding (first published in 1690) which is said to mark the beginnings of Empiricism.

  3. Locke the Empiricist • Locke the Empiricist: • Empiricism is the view that the senses are our primary access to knowledge • There are no innate ideas & The mind is a blank slate • Observation • Induction

  4. The focus of the Essay • The focus of the Essay concerning Human Understanding: • The Understanding: “the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us…to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities.” (Essay, Intro, 1, 3; vol. 1) • He wants to understand the extent and scope of the understanding • He wants to inquire into the depths of human knowledge… • His method: • he calls a “historical, plain method”…

  5. Ideas • Ideas: • Locke is centrally focused on the notion of ‘idea’ • By idea he means “whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks” • A broad notion including: • Sensations • Memories • Imaginings • Abstract ideas

  6. No innate ideas • No innate ideas: • Locke is concerned with the origin or our ideas… • He argues that there cannot be any innate ideas • Innate ideas are ideas one is born with • His argument comes in 2 steps: • Step 1 • If any idea is innate it must be universally held in all minds • But not even our most plausible cases for such ideas, for example ‘whatever is, is’, are universal • Such ideas are not present in the minds of children or idiots • Step 2 • Universality would prove innateness only if there were no other way such ideas could be acquired.

  7. The mind is a blank slate • The mind is a blank slate: • “Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by the vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.” (Essay, II, I, 2; vol. 1) • The mind is a tabla rasa, blank slate, white paper void of all characters • So we now know how Locke thinks ideas are acquired if they aren’t innate: • Through our experience of the world around us

  8. Experience • There are 2 sources of our experience: • 1. Sensation: • The experience of external objects via our senses, including sight, touch, taste, smell and sound • Examples of ideas we get from sensation: • 2. Reflection: • Reflecting internally on how our minds work • Ideas we get from reflection:

  9. Sensation and Reflection supplyall our knowledge • Sensation and reflection supply all knowledge: • The understanding has no idea “which it doth not receive” from either sensation or reflection • “External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in us; and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations.” (Essay, II, I, 5; vol. 1) • So Locke assumes that there are “external objects” supplying us with ideas of themselves • So there is no question in Locke’s mind that there is an external world around us and our sense perceptions of it resemble this world • Metaphysical Realism… • Berkeley’s question…

  10. Simple ideas • All ideas are either simple or complex • Simple Ideas: • “being in itself uncompounded, contains in it nothing but one uniform appearance, or conception of the mind” (Essay, II, II, 1, vol. 1) • The elements of all our thinking • Through the powers of reflection, the mind can perform operations on simple ideas • We have the power to distinguish one simple idea from another • We can compare them… • We can put them together… • Naming… • Abstract ideas…

  11. Forming abstract ideas • Forming abstract ideas: • It is through observation that we come to notice similarities in things. • Framing an abstract idea is referring to the similarities we find in nature by name. • For example:

  12. Complex Ideas • Complex ideas • Either modes, relations or substances • Modes: • Do not exist on their own but only as modifications of a substance • Locke thinks space, time and infinity are modes • Other examples: • Relations: • One simple idea related to another in some way • Examples: X is before Y, X is next to Y and X causes Y

  13. The Idea of Substance • The idea of substance: • Certain simple ideas always go together so they are presumed to belong to some thing • Is “a complication of many ideas together”; “not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist” on their own we “suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they result…” (Essay, II, XXIII, 1, 2; vol. 1) • We cannot conceive how those simple ideas which are always correlated could subsist alone or in one another, so we suppose them existing in and supported by some common object. So we invent a name for that thing. • Gold example… • But according to Locke, substance is something, we know not what. So we don’t know what substances are. • They are some underlying substratum that supports the qualities that we sense….

  14. Substances have causal powers • The causal powers of substance: • Power: a disposition to affect other things, given suitable circumstances • A dispositional property of a substance such that the power only activates under given circumstances but it does so whenever those circumstances are present. • Magnet example… • Substances have powers to affect our minds: • Substances have the power to produce ideas in us • Yellowness isn’t in the gold but instead it is a power in the gold to produce ideas in us…

  15. Primary and Secondary Qualities • Primary Qualities: • The properties that are actually in a substance, I.e. those the substance really has • Our ideas of the primary qualities of a substance resemble the qualities the object really has • Examples… • Secondary Qualities: • Such qualities are not actually in the object; they do not belong to the object as it is, apart from us • They depend upon the conditions of the perceiver for their being perceived as they are • Primary qualities of the substance itself when joined with the primary qualities of other substances in a set of circumstances bring about secondary qualities. • Gold example…

  16. Locke on the Soul • Locke on the soul: • Locke is a Dualist • The soul is a substratum for mental properties: • We know of the soul through its effects • As substances are only known because they cause ideas in us, so from the ideas of reflection we can know the soul, the immaterial spirit within us • I know by seeing or hearing that there is a material substance that exists without me like I know there is a spiritual substance that sees and hears • Our understanding of spiritual substance, how it works, bottoms out in unintelligibility • “when the mind would look beyond those original ideas we have from sensation or reflection, and penetrate into their causes…it discovers nothing but its own short-sightedness.” (Essay, II, XXIII, 28; vol. 1)

  17. Locke on Personal Identity • Locke on Personal Identity: • What does my persisting as the same person over time consist in? • I am very different from when I was 10 years old… • For Locke, it cannot be my having the same soul substance since I know nothing of it • Personal identity is not sameness of substance… • Locke says “since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, …as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person…” (Essay, II, XXVII, 1 1; vol. 1) • So what makes me the self I am at this moment is my consciousness of myself. • If I were not conscious of myself I would be no more a self than a stone is.

  18. Implications of Locke’s view on Personal Identity • Implications of his view: • If consciousness ends so does the person: • “If a substance were stripped of all consciousness of its past experience…beyond the power of ever retrieving it again…” this would constitute the end of one person and the beginning of another • If one and the same soul substance was present in you and Nestor: • You aren’t the same person as Nestor unless you find yourself conscious of any of the actions of Nestor (Essay, II, XXVII, 14) • If upon removing your little finger: • Should your consciousness go along with the finger, the little finger would be the person, the same person and self would then have nothing to do with the rest of the body (Essay, II, XXVII, 17) • My person extends itself beyond present existence to what is past only by consciousness • So a man is only accountable for his past actions if he is conscious of them…

  19. Locke on Language • Locke on language: • The principal function of words is to stand as signs for ideas • Communication: • The speaker uses words to stand for ideas in his mind with the aim of awakening similar ideas in the hearer • The connection between a word and the idea it stands for is arbitrary • Words represent, not things themselves but, ideas which stand for things.

  20. General words and Abstract Ideas • General Words and General Ideas: • Abstract ideas do not belong to the real existence of things. • They “are the inventions…of the understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern only signs, whether words or ideas.” (Essay, III, III, 1 1; vol. 2) • General words are signs for general ideas • General ideas represent many particular things • So Everything is particular: • Universality is to be found only in the way certain particular things function. • So ideas and words are universal in their use, not in their nature. • Real essence is nothing over and above the particulars we observe. • This view is contrary to Aristotle’s view of form…

  21. Nominal Essences • Nominal Essences: • abstract ideas present essences to us but are merely nominal essences; • they are attached to names only; • are made by man, not copied from precise boundaries set by nature • are invented from our observation of the sensible qualities of things • The species are creations of men who, taking occasion from the qualities they find united and common to the particulars, arrange them into groups and sets of things according to a name, merely for the convenience of the use of a comprehensive sign (Essay, III, VI, 36)

  22. Knowledge • Locke on the extent and limits of our Knowledge: • “Since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them. • Knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connexion of and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists.“ (Essay, IV, I, 1; vol. 2) • “We can have knowledge no further than we have ideas.” (Essay, IV, III, 1, vol. 2)

  23. Knowledge only in ideas • Knowledge: • For Locke, we only know when we are certain… • Knowledge consists in the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. 4 kinds of agreement or disagreement: • 1. Concerning the identity or diversity of ideas: • Preliminaries for knowledge • Making sure our ideas are clear and distinct • Examples: • 2. Concerning the relations between ideas • Locke has in mind what we call now Analytic truths, which are propositions we can know because one idea is included in another • Mathematical examples: • Other examples:

  24. Necessary connections andreal existence • The final 2 kinds of agreement or disagreement between ideas: • 3. Concerning coexistence or necessary connections: • What we can know of substances is just that certain simple ideas tend to coexist or to come always together in our experience. • These are necessary connections such that if we have Gold then we have such and such qualities. • Gold example… • 4. Concerning real existence: • As “of actual real existence agreeing to any idea.” • Seems to be an agreement between our ideas and an external reality

  25. What has real existence • What has real existence: • My own existence is real: • No proof is needed • God’s existence is real: • He demonstrates god’s existence through his own existence and the principle, from nothing you get nothing. • Sense objects are real: • It is therefore the actual receiving of ideas from without that gives us notice of the existence of other things, and makes us know, that something doth exist at that time without us, which causes that idea in us…And of this, the greatest assurance I can possibly have…is the testimony of my eyes,…whose testimony…I can no more doubt, whilst I write this, that I see white and black, and that something really exists that causes that sensation in me, than that I write or move my hand… • The notice we have by our senses of the existing of things without us, though it be not altogether so certain as our intuitive knowledge, or the deductions of our reason employed about the clear abstract ideas of our own minds; yet it is an assurance that deserves the name knowledge. (Essay, IV, XI, 1-3)

  26. Questions about Locke’s view • Locke insists that our knowledge reaches no further than our own ideas. • Question: How do we know these ideas are being received by something outside us, let alone something outside us which our ideas may be said to resemble? • Question: How can we have knowledge of what the senses tell us if they aren’t as certain as intuition or demonstration?

  27. The Problem of the criterion again • The Problem of the Criterion again: • For Locke, sensation and reflection supply all knowledge. • We gain knowledge first through the 5 senses, through which we can come to have knowledge of a wholly external reality • And we can then use reflection to gain further knowledge about the ideas we have received through the senses; Knowledge of relations and necessary connections… • Reflection also tells me that I exist and God exists • But we must ask: how do we know that sensation in particular is the correct criterion by which to judge truth? • What about the arguments of the skeptics? • What about Descartes arguments from the 1st meditation?

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