CHAPTER ONE
LOCKE’S OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE
1.0 Introduction
John Locke gave an
account of the object of knowledge. Locke held that even though all we
ever have of knowledge is the ideas in the mind, he maintained that at
least some of these ideas actually do represent real things in
the external world, thereby creating an empirical conception of
knowledge and rejection of innate idea. Locke is taking it that
experience of the likes of shapes provide us with knowledge of what the
categorical shape property is. In this chapter, I will attempt a
characterization and articulation the limit, scope and extent of object
of knowledge. Locke’s theory will be examined with arguments that
emanate from his conception of perception, understanding perceptual
knowledge of objects, Lockean arguments for direct realism and Locke’s
theory of ideas argument.
1.1 Locke’s Rejection of Innate Ideas
Locke has two main arguments against the
innateness of ideas, both speculative and practical. First, he
argues, people in fact do not universally hold to these ideas, contrary
to what defenders of innate ideas typically claim. This is particularly
obvious with the laws of thought, which children and mentally challenged
people have no conception of whatsoever. If, therefore, children and
idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they
must unavoidably perceive them, and necessarily know and assent to these
truths. Which since they do not, it is evident that there are no such
impressions. For if they are not notions naturally imprinted, how can
they be innate? and if they are notions imprinted, how can they be
unknown? To say a notion is imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same
time to say, that the mind is ignorant of it, and never yet took notice
of it, is to make this impression nothing.1 Locke’s second
argument is that it makes no sense to hold that such ideas lie dormant
within us and then blossom when we reach a certain age, contrary to what
defenders of innate ideas commonly claim. Again, particularly
with the laws of thought, children reason perfectly well regarding
identity and non-contradiction, yet at the same time are completely
incapable of articulating those specific ideas. If these ideas really
were innate, then children should be able to verbally express them. As
Locke states it, “How many instances of the use of reason may we observe
in children, a long time before they have any knowledge of this maxim,
‘That it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be? 2
Also, it is obvious that may adults have reached the so-called age of
reason, such as the illiterate and those from primitive societies, and
yet lack these ideas. These people “pass many years, even of their
rational age, without ever thinking on this and the like general
propositions.”3. In this vein, Locke offers his causal theory
of perception. This causal theory of perception reveals that the world
interacts with out perceiving organs and causes our ideas in our minds;
Locke’s use of the word idea is very broadly- nearly any mental item can
count as an idea, a concept, a memory or even a simple sensation. As
such, we may accept that the world causes our ideas about (perceptions of) it. What we then call perception is synonymous with ideas in Lockean conception.
It should, however, be
noted that our ideas about reality are different from reality itself;
ideas are mental but reality is extra mental. It is, therefore,
crucial to examine the connection between the two: perceptions and
extra-mental reality in detail. What is the relationship between
our ideas and the world?
` 1.2 What is Perceptual Object?
The object of perception
may appear multi-faceted because it is a term that goes beyond visuals
or oratory, it could be understood in the psychological state, moral
state and even in social settings. However, the conception that is
useful in this project is that which relates to philosophical
understanding across the different types of perception.
In the words of Corsini:
A common finding across
many different kinds of perception is that the perceived qualities of an
object can be affected by the qualities of context. If one object is
extreme on some dimension, then neighboring objects are perceived as
further away from that extreme. “Simultaneous contrast effect” is the
term used when stimuli are presented at the same time, whereas
"successive contrast" applies when stimuli are presented one after
another.4
This distinct is
in furtherance of the belief that there are differences that goes
beyond the context but into interpretation of what is perceived. As an
Empiricist, Locke was committed to the idea that there were no such
things as innate ideas and that the best, indeed the only way, to come
to know objective truth was via sensory experience.5
As such, the only way to
come to know the world is through sensory experience. Locke would agree
with the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas that, nothing is in the mind
without first having been in the senses. This is to corroborate the idea
of that human mind was a blank plate 6; that human sense attracts perception through the five senses.
1.3 Locke’s Account of Sensitive Knowledge
Locke’s monumental Essay Concerning Human Understanding7
explored the materials and limits of human thinking, setting an
agenda those epistemologists like Hume would follow in similarly
titled Enquiry. Locke’s Essay is infused with an
empiricist spirit, arguing that all our ‘ideas’ that is, the
constituents of our thoughts derive from experience, as does every
objective knowledge. Having started with a vigorous attack on
the theory of ‘innate ideas’, targeting both scholastic and Cartesian
attempts to deduce truths by pure reason based on such supposed
ideas (as, for example, in Descartes’ argument that the perfection of
our innate idea of God implies a perfect cause 8.
Locke then goes on to give a thoroughly empiricist account of the origin
of our ideas, taking an atomistic approach in which complex
ideas are composed of simples, and the simple ideas themselves are
directly derived from experience.
Locke defines sensation as a kind of
perception, a “perception, which actually accompanies, and is annexed to
any impression on the Body, made by an external Object, being distinct
from all other Modification of thinking, furnishes the mind with a distinct Idea, which we call sensation” 9 .This
experience can be of the external world or of our own minds: thus the
senses yield ‘ideas of sensation’ such as the redness of a rose, while
introspection yields ‘ideas of reflection’ such as the pain
when we touch the rose’s thorn.
Since all such experience is of
particular sensations or feelings, the ideas we derive from these
are particular also. General ideas (such as the idea of redness in
general) then get generated from ideas of particular instances.
For example, the colour of different red flowers by ‘abstraction’, in
which the differing details for example, the varying brightness are
ignored, and notice taken only of what is common to all, leaving an
‘abstract idea’ which is able to represent any instance whatever.
Locke finds that experiences in the
world are the vehicles of content. But once we have reached this point,
it is natural to wonder whether experience is really playing any
essential role in the account of content 10. Surely, anything
could serve as a reliable sign of its regular cause. According to
Locke, where veridical sensation results in sensitive knowledge, our
ideas represent the external world “they represent to us in
things,” having a “real conformity” with “things without us” 11.
On a popular reading, the notion of representation at play in veridical sensation involves conformity of resemblance.12
We may then deduce that our ideas are caused by the physical substance;
all ideas are mediated by your senses; what causes the ideas is the
physical substance that never directly has contact with.
While our mental experience is rich with both primary and secondary
qualities, the objective world can only be said to possess the primary
properties while secondary properties would name
subjective experiences only, and not the stuff of serious scientific
inquiry or discourse pertaining to objective truth.
However, what Locke
intends to relay is somewhat a notion of what we perceive through our
five senses. This is the origin of perceptual errors that seem
inevitable. Indeed, some of our judgments in physical world are based on
our sensory perceptual, they cannot be with certainty as perceptual
errors recur perpetually especially in the perception with primary
substance. The primary and secondary qualities are differentiated in the
ideas that they produce in our mind. These qualities are the power the
power that objects have to produce ideas in our mind. The primary
qualities of objects will then be the producer of those ideas that
resembles the corresponding qualities in the objects that caused us to
have those ideas. On the other hand, the secondary qualities of objects
produce ideas that do not resemble the corresponding qualities in the
object that produced those ideas in our mind.
1.4 Understanding Knowledge of Objects in Locke
The way you decide
whether or not a belief is a good belief, that is to say, the way you
decide whether a belief is likely to be a genuine case of knowledge is
to see whether it is derived from sense experience, to see, for example,
whether it bears certain relations to your sensations.13
Just what these relations to our sensations might be is a matter we may
leave open, for present purposes. The point is that Locke felt that if a
belief is to be credible, it must bear certain relations to the
believer's sensations but he never told us how he
happened to arrive at this conclusion. This, of course, is the view
that has come to be known as “empiricism.” For Locke there are limits
to human understanding and it is important to find out what they are.
Fairly certain knowledge is the most reasonable goal of perceptual
knowledge and notabsolutecertainty.14The empiricists were
looking for a construct of knowledge within the framework of sense data
whose aim was to develop a probable hypothesis about the world. However,
three major challenges are inevitable;
First, we would deduce the high
probability of perceptual error and perceptual relativity, as regular
features of everyday life. It is thus unlikely that Locke never
noticed their existence. Second, the nature of Locke’s project in the Essay suggests
that he must have thought about perceptual error at some point. Locke’s
over- arching goal is to delineate “the original, certainty, and
extent of human knowledge; together, with the grounds and degrees of
belief, opinion, and assent”15. It is surely relevant to
that project to examine the circumstances under which we can arrive at
true beliefs based on perception and the ways we can tell when we are in
such truth- conducive circumstances. Someone who attempts to
ground all knowledge and probability in the ideas received through sense
should, surely, be concerned with cases where sensory ideas are
misleading or false. Third, the tradition Locke wrote and was
educated in was intermittently obsessed with perceptual error. Such
concern was primarily, although by no means exclusively, connected with
the alleged skeptical implications of such error. Works ranging
from Descartes’ 1st Meditation to Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of scepticism discussed
standard skeptical tropes involving perceptual error, relativity and
disagreement: the straight stick that looks bent in water, for instance,
and the water that feels warm to one hand and cool to the other.16 Indeed, Locke himself uses a number of these traditional examples to illustrate or develop17 the distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities.18
Thus, there is at least, a good reason
to think Locke must have considered error and its significance. However,
an argument on why Locke might not have considered it comes to mind.
Locke might not discuss perceptual error because he thought that doing
so would lead to a form of skepticism that is unprofitable and an
unworthy subject of philosophical reflection. It is often said
that Locke is simply not interested in skepticism, whether of the
Pyrrhonian or the Cartesian variety, or that he does not take it
seriously.19 Thus, he might think that we should avoid those
philosophical topics that give the skeptic a way in. However, it is
simply not true that any attempt to address perceptual error would be
fodder for the sort of skepticism about the external under Pyrrhonian
suspension of judgment about the qualities of things. One might instead,
for instance, respond to perceptual error by providing a detailed
account of the way that reason can correct the senses or that
the senses can correct each other. Alternately, one might discuss
perceptual error in strictly naturalistic terms.
Thus, it is implausible that Locke does
not discuss perceptual error because he thought any attempt to do so
would lead him towards skepticism about the external world or the
qualities of the bodies in it.
1.5 Incorporating Ideas in Perceptual Knowledge Analysis
Descartes was
the first to do this, when he claimed to perceive clearly and distinctly
that the essence of matter was different from that of the thinking
self, so that the soul must be immaterial and hence could
potentially survive the body’s dissolution. Locke followed,
giving an argument for the existence of God which depended on the
impossibility of intelligent thought’s arising from the mere primary
qualities of matter. However, Locke ventured the opinion that God
might, if He wished, to add thought to matter (Essay IV iii 6).20 This
provoked a great deal of hostility, since thought was
evidently an ‘active’ power, whereas the mechanical philosophy that
inspired by the concept of inertia encouraged the idea that
matter was purely passive or ‘inert’. Material things were seen
as intricate but lifeless machines, their cogs and levers static until
set in motion by some external power. This picture would be
undermined if a genuinely active power such as thought, or
possibly gravity was to be ascribed to matter itself.
Locke is certainly an externalist about content: on his view, simple ideas of perceptions are signs of their regular causes.21 They
are signs of external phenomena in something like the way in which
smoke is a sign of fire. The immediate problem this raises is that
although my ideas are signs of their causes, I do not yet know what any
of those causes are like. If all I ever get is smoke, how do I know what
fire is like? Any causal correlation view will in the end face some
version of this question. How can effects provide you, the subject, with
any conception of what their causes are like? This is where Locke
introduces his notion of ‘resemblance’22: some ideas, the
idea of primary qualities, intrinsically resemble their causes. Those
ideas do show what their causes are like. Ideas of secondary qualities,
on the other hand, do not resemble their causes. They represent the
world perfectly accurately, but they do not show you what the world is
like. Now Locke’s notion of resemblance is generally mocked. One
possibility is that ‘resembles’ is interpreted in representational terms
the world is the way represented in which case it does not get the
intended effect; all we have is that the representations are, one way or
another, being interpreted so that they come out true. Locke is trying
to respect the explanatory role of experience, and merely appealing to
it as a bearer of representations does not acknowledge its role in
explaining how we can understand such representations. Alternatively,
‘resemblance’ requires that the intrinsic properties of the perceptual
idea should be like the intrinsic properties of the object. That is, the
intuitively attractive idea at this point in the dialectic.
This knowledge from
perception is based on claims that always admit of the
possibility that one might be wrong a margin of error may be assigned
and the less probable the error, the more probable the claim. It
may approach certainty but never achieve certainty. At best, one
might claim to know something without having, at the time, any good
reason to doubt it.
1.6 Lockean Arguments for Direct Realism
Locke,
typically, was more modest, acknowledging that even our
scientific understanding of the world is at best ‘probable’
and thus inevitably falls short of the ‘demonstrative’
certainty of mathematics.23Locke on the other hand, will understand his “way of certainty, by the Knowledge of our own Ideas” (IV.iv.2) to require this method of dealing with knowledge of the external world. The distinction of per se and real knowledge
thus takes on enormous significance in Locke’s handling of
existential knowledge. Although our reason might be fallible
and limited, it above all is what elevates us above the other
animals. In this, at least, most early modern philosophers
could agree with Plato, who saw reason as the central function of the
immortal soul, and even Aristotle, who defined man as the one
distinctive ‘rational animal’.
Direct or naive
realism is a theory of perception that holds that our ordinary
perception of physical objects is direct, unmediated by awareness of
subjective entities, and that, in normal perceptual conditions, these
objects have the properties they appear to have.24 If a
fruit tastes sour, the sun looks orange, and the water feels hot, then,
if conditions are normal, the pickle is sour, the sun orange,
and the water hot. Tastes, sounds, and colours are not in the heads of perceivers; they are qualities
of the external objects that are perceived. Although this theory
bears the name “naive”, and is often said to be the view of the
common person, it need not deny or conflict with scientific
accounts of perception. It need only deny that one's perceptual
awareness of objective properties involves an awareness of the
properties of subjective (mental) intermediaries.25
For Locke, sense-data are copies (“resemblances”) only of the primary qualities of physical things solidity, extension (in space), shape, and mobility and not of their secondary qualities,26
above all colors, sounds, smells, and tastes. He took the primary
qualities to be objective and of the kind that concern physical
science; and he considered the secondary ones to be in a sense
subjective, not belonging to physical things but something like
representational mental elements that they cause in us. Colour, for
example then, disappears in the dark, though the physical
object causing us to see it is not changed by the absence of
light.
Sense-datum theorists
like Lockemight offer several reasons to explain why we do not
ordinarily notice the indirectness of perception. Here are two important
reasons. First, normally what we directly see, say colors
and shapes, roughly corresponds to the physical objects we
indirectly see by means of what we see directly. It is only when there
is an illusion or hallucination that we are forced to notice a
discrepancy between what we directly see and the object commonly said to
be seen, such as a book. Second, the beliefs we form on the basis of
perception are formed spontaneously, not through any process
requiring us to consider sense-data. Above all, we do not normally infer what
we believe about external objects we see from what we believe
about the colors and shapes we directly see. This is why it is
easy to think we “just see” things, directly. Perceiving is not
inferential, and for that reason (perhaps among others) it is not epistemically indirect, in the sense that knowledge of
external objects or beliefs about them are indirect, in the sense
that they are based on knowledge of sense-data, or beliefs about them.
On a plausible sense-datum view, I know that the field is green through having rectangular green sense-data, not through inference from propositions about them.27It
is apparently true that, as a sense-datum view may allow,
perception is not inferential or epistemically indirect in the way
inferentiality would imply. But, for sense-datum theorists,
perception is nonetheless causally and objectually indirect. The
perceived object is presented to us via another object, though
not by way of a premise. These theories are causally indirect, then, because they take perceived physical objects to cause sensory experience, say of colors and shapes, by causing
the occurrence of sense-data, with which we are directly (and
presumably non-causally) acquainted in perceptual experience.
Perception is also objectually indirect because we perceive external things, such as fields, through our acquaintance with other objects, namely sense-data.
Roughly, we perceive
external things through perceptual acquaintance with internal
things. Despite the indirectness of perception in these two respects, a
sense datum theorist need not deny that we normally do not use
information about sense-data to arrive at perceptual beliefs
inferentially, say by an inference from my directly seeing a
grassy, green rectangular expanse to the conclusion that a green field
is before me. Ordinarily, when I look around, I form beliefs
about the external environment and none at all about my
sensory experience. That experience causes my perceptual beliefs, but
what they are about is the external things I perceive.
It is when the colors and shapes do not correspond to the
external object, as when a circle appears elliptical, that it seems we
can understand our experience only if we suppose that the direct
objects of sensory experience are internal and need not match their
external, indirect objects. His representative realism states that
there is an external world that exists independently of us (that’s
the realism part), and we are only indirectly aware of this world, by
means of mental representations (that’s the representative
part).These representations are generated by your sensory
systems, and may be accurate or inaccurate.
1.7 Locke’s Argument on Ideas
Whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought ,or understanding, that I call idea…28
That is, Locke believes that in “perception, thought, and understanding,” in all forms of conscious awareness,
what we are “immediately aware” of are always/only ideas in our
minds. The only immediate objects of thoughts, sensations, perceptions,
etc. (of any conscious experience) are ideas or sensations,
that is, things that exist only in our minds. This is in
furtherance of Locke’s dualist stand that mind and matter are two
distinct kinds of substances they have nothing in common. Locke’s own
view, we can only think about ideas. So, if we can think of
material substance at all, it must be an idea. So, material
substance is an idea that is not an idea. Locke, believe that there is a
world (the material world) that exists independently of whether or not any conscious mind experiences it.29
These forms of dualism imply that our knowledge of physical or material
things is derived from our knowledge of the mental or psychical
duplicates of physical or material things.
1.8 Summary
I have attempted an analysis
of the general conception of perception against the Lockean conception
by considering the classical doctrines and operations across disciplines
and processes. I went further to discuss Locke’s account of sensitive
knowledge. I also characterized perceptual knowledge as analyzed in
Lockean epistemology and in relation to object knowledge specifically.
The process of incorporating ideas in perceptual knowledge was
articulated. I attempted an analysis of Locke’s argument for direct
realism with questions on the certainty and uncertainty in mind.
References
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- 13. Hall, R. (1987). Locke and Sensory Experience: Another Look at Simple Ideas of Sensation. Locke Newsletter, 18, 11-31.
- 14. Glasersfeld, Ernst von (1995), Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning, London: Routledge Falmer; Poerksen, Bernhard (ed.) (2004), The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism, Exeter: Imprint Academic; Wright. Edmond (2005). Narrative, Perception, Language, and Faith, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- 15. Hall, R. (1987). Locke and Sensory Experience: Another Look at Simple Ideas of Sensation. Locke Newsletter, 18, 11-31.
- 16. Rene Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: J. Vrin, 1996), VII.118. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of scepticism, translated by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), I.35ff.
- 17. There is some dispute over whether these are
meant as arguments for a distinction between primary qualities and
secondary qualities or simply as illustrations of that distinction. For
the former, see Margaret Atherton, “Ideas in the Mind, Qualities in
Body”, in Ideas in Seventeenth Century Philosophy, edited by Philip Cummins and Günter Zoeller (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1993), 117-118.
For the latter, see Peter Alexander, Ideas, Qualities, and Corpuscles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 124.