Contents introduction main Part chapter 1

Locke’s books
Because his objective is "to investigate into the Original, Certainty, and Extent of human knowledge, together with the bases and degrees of Belief, Opinion, and Assent," Locke begins An Essay Concerning Human Understanding with ideas—the ingredients out of which knowledge is produced. His first objective is to "enquire into the Origin of these Ideas...and the Means by Which the Understanding Comes to be Endowed with Them." The purpose of Book I of the Essay is to demonstrate that being innate is not a means of providing concepts and ideas to the understanding. Innateness is treated as an empirical hypothesis by Locke, who claims that there is no good evidence to support it. "Some essential notions...Characters as it were inscribed onto the Mind of Man, which the Soul gets in its very first Being; and brings into the world with it," Locke writes (I.2.1, N: 48). Locke rejects the claims that there are theoretical inherent principles (I.2), practical innate moral principles (I.3), or that we have innate concepts of God, identity, or impossibility in order to pursue this investigation (I.4). Locke dismisses universal assent arguments and criticizes dispositional theories of innate principles. Thus, he claims that children and idiots should be aware of such truths if they were innate, but that they "have not the least apprehension or thought of them" when considering what would count as evidence from universal assent to propositions like "What is, is" or "It is impossible for the same thing to be and not be at the same time." Why should children and fools be aware of such ideas and able to articulate them? According to Locke:

To suggest that there are facts imprinted on the Soul that it does not perceive or understand seems to me to be a near contradiction; imprinting, if it means anything, being nothing more than the creating of certain Truths to be perceived. (N: 49, I.2.5). So, if propositions were innate, they should be instantaneously perceived—by infants and fools (and indeed everyone else)—but there is no evidence that they are. Locke then goes on to criticize dispositional views, which claim that innate propositions can be perceived in particular conditions. The propositions will stay unperceived in the mind until these conditions are met. The propositions are then viewed as a result of the occurrence of these conditions. The following is Locke's counter-argument against inherent propositions being dispositional: For if any one [proposition] may [be in the mind but not be known], then, by the same Reason, all true propositions that the Mind is ever capable of assenting to may be said to be in the Mind, and to be imprinted: because if any one can be said to be in the Mind, which it has never known, it must be only because it is capable of knowing it; and so the Mind is of all Truths it will ever know. (N: 50, I.2.5). The essence of this argument, as well as many of Locke's other arguments against dispositional theories of innate truths, is that they do not provide an appropriate criterion for differentiating innate propositions from other propositions that the mind may come to discover. As a result, even if a criterion is presented, it will fail to perform the task at hand.

Many of the reasons against innate speculative principles apply when Locke shifts his focus from speculative principles to the question of whether there are innate practical moral principles, but there are some new considerations. Practical concepts like the Golden Rule are not as self-evident as speculative ideas like "What is, is." As a result, one can inquire clearly and rationally why one should believe in or obey the Golden Rule (I.3.4, N: 68). People have significant disagreements over the content of practical principles. As a result, they're even less likely to be innate propositions or fit the universal assent condition. Locke makes similar observations regarding the ideas that make up both speculative and practical principles in the fourth chapter of Book I. The point is that if the ideas that make up the principles aren't intrinsic, we have even more reason to believe that the principles aren't. To make these conclusions, he investigates the concepts of identity, impossibility, and God. In Book I, Locke explains very little about who embraces the innate principles theory that he is criticizing. As a result, he's been accused of attacking "straw men" on occasion. John Yolton has convincingly argued that the belief that innate ideas and principles were necessary for the stability of religion, morality, and natural law was widespread in England in the seventeenth century, and that Locke is attacking positions that were widely held and continued to be held after the publication of the Essay by attacking both the naive and dispositional accounts of innate ideas and innate principles. As a result, the claim that Locke's concept of innate principles is based on sand is unjustified. However, there are some noteworthy connections with certain philosophers and schools, as well as some points concerning innate ideas and inquiry.
At I. 4. 24, Locke claims that once adopted, the idea of innate principles "assuaged the pains of quest" and that the doctrine is an inquiry stopper employed by those who "pretended to be Masters and Teachers" to establish illegitimate control over their pupils' thoughts. The Aristotelians and scholastics at the universities are plainly in Locke's thoughts. As a result, Locke's anti-authoritarianism is linked to his attack on innate principles. It reflects his belief in the significance of free and independent inquiry in the pursuit of truth. In the end, according to Locke, this is the finest path to knowledge and happiness. Locke, like Descartes, is knocking down the ancient Aristotelian scholastic house of knowledge's foundations. But, whereas Descartes concentrated on the empiricism that underpins the structure, Locke is more concerned with the claims that innate concepts provide the system's first principles. As a result, attacking innate notions is the first step in destroying the scholastic model of science and knowledge. Ironically, Locke interprets Descartes' argument that his nature is to be a thinking creature as implying a theology of innate ideas and principles, as evidenced by II.1.9. Locke presents his positive account of how we acquire the materials of knowledge in Book II of the Essay. In Book II, Locke distinguishes between many types of concepts. The mind, according to Locke, is a tabula rasa, or blank sheet, until experience in the form of sensation and reflection provides the basic materials—simple ideas—from which most of our more complicated knowledge is built. While the mind may be a blank slate in terms of content, it is clear that Locke believes we are born with a range of capacities for receiving and manipulating or processing content. When putting simple thoughts together, for example, the mind can participate in three different forms of behavior. Combining them into complicated thoughts is the first of these types of actions. There are two types of complex concepts: substance ideas and mode ideas. Substances are self-contained entities. God, angels, humans, animals, plants, and a variety of created things all count as substances. Modes are existences that are reliant on one another. These include mathematical and moral concepts, as well as every religious, political, and cultural jargon. The mind's second activity is to bring two thoughts, whether simple or complicated, together so that they can be viewed at the same time without being joined. This informs our concepts of relationships (II.12.1, N: 163). The third act of the mind is the abstraction of particulars from general ideas, leaving aside the specific circumstances of time and place that would limit the applicability of a thought to a specific individual. There are also faculties like memory that allow for the storage of thoughts in addition to these talents.
Locke explains how a variety of particular kinds of ideas, such as the ideas of solidity, number, space, time, power, identity, and moral relations, arise from sensation and reflection after laying out the general machinery of how simple and complex ideas of substances, modes, relations, and so on are derived from sensation and reflection. Several of these are really intriguing. The subject of free will and voluntary action is sparked by Locke's chapter on power. In the field of philosophy of mind, Locke proposed a number of fascinating claims. For all we know, God could add the powers of sight and cognition to matter organized in the proper way as readily as he could add those powers to an immaterial substance that would then be connected to matter organized in the right way, he claimed. In II. xxvii, he made a novel claim about personal identity. The supplemental document, Some Interesting Issues in Locke's Philosophy of Mind, covers both of these themes and others.
We'll concentrate on a few key points in Locke's explanation of physical objects in the sections that follow. These include Locke's views on natural philosophy's knowledge, the corpuscular philosophy's limitations, and Locke's relationship to Newton.
Locke presents a mechanical philosophy and corpuscular hypothesis-based description of physical objects. Mechanical philosophers believed that matter in motion and the action of one body on another could explain all material events. They thought of matter as a passive entity. They opposed Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophy's "occult characteristics" and "causation at a distance." The corpuscularian hypothesis of Robert Boyle considered the material world as a collection of particles. Some corpuscularians believed that corpuscles could be subdivided further and that the universe was entirely made up of matter with no emptiness space. Atomists, on the other hand, believed that particles are indivisible and that the material universe is made up of atoms and the void or empty space in which they move. Locke was a physicist and an atomist.
Atoms have characteristics. They are stretched, solid, have a specific shape, and are either in motion or at rest. They mix to create the familiar things and physical items of our world, such as gold and wood, horses and violets, tables and chairs. These well-known objects have their own set of characteristics. They are solid, extended, have a specific shape, and are both in motion and at rest. They have other attributes, like as colors, odors, and tastes, that they obtain by standing in relation to perceivers, in addition to the properties that they share with the atoms that make them up. The Greek atomists were the first to distinguish between these two types of characteristics. Galileo and Descartes, as well as Locke's instructor Robert Boyle, all expressed it.

In Book II Chapter 8 of the Essay, Locke establishes this difference, referring to the two groups of traits as an object's fundamental and secondary qualities in Boyle's language. Both of the main divisions of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century mechanical philosophy make this distinction. The distinction between these two classes of properties was made by both the Cartesian plenum theorists, who held that the world was full of infinitely divisible matter and that there was no void space, and the atomists, such as Gassendi, who held that there were indivisible atoms and void space in which the atoms moved. Nonetheless, the contrasts between these two areas of mechanical philosophy have an impact on how they view primary attributes. Locke disputes the Cartesian concept of body as simply extended in the chapter on Solidity (II.4), arguing that bodies are both extended and impenetrable or solid. Locke's explanation of bodies and essential attributes includes solidity, which distinguishes them from the vacuum space in which they move. The essential attributes of an item are those that it possesses independently of us, such as the ability to occupy space, be in motion or at rest, and have solidity and texture. Secondary characteristics are the abilities of bodies to produce ideas in us such as color, taste, and smell, which are caused by the interaction of our perceptual apparatus with the object's primary qualities. Our perceptions of primary qualities are similar to those of the object, whereas our perceptions of secondary qualities are not similar to the powers that create them. Locke also identifies a second category of secondary qualities, which are the abilities of one material to affect another, such as the ability of a fire to melt wax. The details of Locke's account of the distinction have been the subject of much scholarly dispute. The traits Locke attaches to each of the two categories is one of the concerns. Locke provides a number of lists. Another difficulty is what criteria are used to determine whether a quality belongs on one list or another. Does Locke believe that all secondary quality ideas arrive to us through one sense whereas primary quality ideas come to us through two, or does Locke not make this distinction? Another question is whether atoms have only primary attributes or if atom compounds have primary qualities as well. And, while Locke states that our thoughts of primary qualities resemble primary qualities in objects, our concepts of secondary qualities do not resemble their causes in the object, what exactly does'resemble' mean in this context? The question of how we are expected to know about particles we can't see is related to this one. It appears that Locke believes that there are certain parallels between the particles that make up the middle-sized macroscopic items we experience in the world, such as porphyry and manna. The term 'transdiction' was used by Maurice Mandelbaum to describe this phenomenon. We can say certain things about the nature of particles and primary and secondary attributes using these analogies. For example, we can deduce that atoms are solid and that heat causes atoms to move faster while cold causes them to move slower. These parallels, however, may not carry us very far in understanding the required relationships between natural qualities. Another point to consider is whether Locke considers the distinction to be reductionistic. There does not appear to be a clear solution if what we mean by reductionistic here is that only the core traits are genuine, and these explain the secondary qualities. Secondary qualities are unquestionably just a subset of basic qualities that have an impact on us. This appears to be a reductionist approach. However, both main and secondary attributes count in Locke's description of "actual conceptions" in II.30. While Locke claims that primary qualities influence our perceptions of secondary qualities, the primary qualities do not explain them in all cases. We can't imagine how the size, shape, and motion of particles might generate any sensation in us, according to Locke. As a result, knowing the particle's size, shape, and speed would be useless in this situation (see IV.3.11–40, N: 544–546).

Although some researchers disagree, Locke is thought to have held some variation of the representational theory of perception. According to this theory, what the mind experiences first are thoughts, which are caused by and represent the objects that cause them. As a result, rather than being a dyadic relationship between an object and a perceiver, perception is a triadic relationship. Because it implies that the perceiver is directly observing the object, such a dyadic relational theory is commonly referred to as naive realism, and because it is subject to a range of major problems. Some versions of the representational theory are also vulnerable to serious criticism. If one treats ideas as things, for example, one could suppose that seeing ideas actually prevents one from seeing things in the outside world. The concept is similar to that of a painting or drawing. The picture would replicate the original object in the external world, but we wouldn't be able to view the original because our immediate object of vision is the picture, just as standing in front of a painting on an easel may prevent us from seeing the person being painted. As a result, the picture/original theory of perception is sometimes referred to. Jonathan Bennett, on the other hand, dubbed it "the curtain of perception" to stress how "seeing" thoughts stops us from perceiving the outside world. Nicholas Malebranche, a Descartes follower, was one philosopher who arguably held such a viewpoint. Antoine Arnauld, on the other hand, believes in the representational nature of ideas but is a direct realist when it comes to perception. Malebranche and Arnauld had a long debate in which Arnauld rejected Malebranche's explanation of thoughts. On this point, Locke agrees with Arnauld in his criticism of Malebranche (Locke, 1823, Vol. IX: 250). Despite this, Berkeley, like many later critics, including Bennett, attributed Locke's veil of perception interpretation of the representational theory of perception to him. A.D. Woozley clearly summarizes the difficulty of doing so:

...it is difficult to believe that Locke could perceive and explain the main problem to the picture-original theory of sense experience so clearly, and that he himself believed the same theory. Scholars disagree about just what Locke's account of perception entails. A symposium featuring John Rogers, Gideon Yaffe, Lex Newman, Tom Lennon, and Vere Chappell at a meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2003, which was later expanded and published in the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2004, volume 85, issue 3) found the majority of the symposiasts holding the view that Locke holds a representative theory of perception but is not a skeptic about the external world in the way that. Another topic that has sparked debate since the Essay's first publication is what Locke means by the term'substance.' The primary/secondary quality divide helps us grasp physical objects in certain ways, but Locke is perplexed as to what lies behind or supports the main qualities themselves. He's also perplexed as to what material and immaterial substances have in common, leading us to use the same term for both. These kinds of musings lead him to the ephemeral and ambiguous concept of substance in general. This is a "I'm not sure what" that supports attributes that cannot exist on their own. We see properties in clumps, but we must assume that something maintains or 'holds together' those qualities. We have no prior experience with such bolstering chemical. Locke clearly sees no alternative to the assertion that there are substances that support qualities. He doesn't, for example, have a tropes theory (tropes are traits that exist independently of substances) that he could use to do rid of the concept of substance. As a result, he is not a skeptic of'substance' in the same manner that Hume is. But it's also evident that he's always emphasizing the limitations of our understanding of substances. Locke was accused by Bishop Stillingfleet of removing matter from the realm of reason. Locke, on the other hand, is not doing so.
Locke's notion of the substratum, or substance in general, has been criticized as incoherent since Berkeley. It appears to imply that we have a singularity devoid of attributes, which appears to be incompatible with empiricism. We have no prior knowledge of such a thing and so have no method of inferring such a notion from it. This is something Locke himself acknowledges (I.4.18, N: 95). To avoid this problem, Michael Ayers proposes that we should think of'substratum' and'substance in general' in terms of Locke's distinction between real and nominal essences, and especially his doctrine of real essences developed in Book III of the Essay, rather than as a separate issue from knowing real essences. The atomic structure of a material object is its true nature. This atomic constitution is the causal basis for all of the thing's observable properties, from which nominal essences are derived. All visible properties may be drawn from the real essence if it were known. According to Locke, the true essences of material objects are unknown to us. In general, Locke's idea of substance is a'something I don't know what'. Thus,'substance in general' means 'whatever it is that supports attributes,' whereas the true essence means 'this precise atomic constitution that explains this set of observable qualities,' according to Ayers. As a result, Ayers wants to consider the unknown substratum as if it were choosing out the same thing as the true essence, obviating the requirement for particulars without attributes. Scholars have questioned this proposed method of understanding Locke, citing a lack of textual evidence as well as the fact that it contradicts certain of Locke's statements. This is a strong indicator that Locke considers language to be extremely important in the pursuit of knowledge. He emphasizes the importance of abstract general ideas to knowledge at the start of the book. These are the categories in which we categorize the large number of different kinds of existences. Thus, in Locke's examination of language and its usefulness for knowledge, abstract notions and classification play a vital role. We would be faced with the impossible task of trying to comprehend a vast world of particulars if we didn't have general terminology and classes. In that Locke says that words stand for ideas, there is a strong connection between Books II and III. Locke categorizes words in his consideration of language using the categories of ideas established in Book II of the Essay. So there are concepts like substances, simple modes, mixed modes, and relations, among others. Locke makes the distinction between actual and nominal essences mentioned earlier in this context. Locke gives far greater attention to nouns than to verbs, perhaps because of his stress on the significance of kind terms in classification. Not all words correspond to concepts, according to Locke. There are also several particles, or words, that "...signify the connection that the Mind offers to Ideas, or Propositions, one to another" (II.7.1, N: 471). Still, in Book III, Locke focuses most of his emphasis on the relationship between words and ideas.

"Words in their essential or immediate connotation signify nothing but the concepts in the mind of someone who uses them," Norman Kretzmann claims. (III.2.2) "The primary semantic premise of Locke" (see Kretzmann 1968:179). This thesis has been widely criticized as a classic semantic error. "When I say, 'the sun is the cause of the day,' I don't mean that my concept of the sun creates or excites in me the idea of day," Mill stated. This criticism of Locke's explanation of language is similar to the "veil of perception" criticism of his account of perception, in that it implies that Locke does not distinguish the meaning of a word from its reference. However, Kretzmann convincingly argues that Locke distinguishes between meaning and reference, and that concepts produce the meaning of words but not their reference. As a result, the line of criticism indicated by Mill's quotation is unfounded.

There are special and abstract thoughts in addition to the types of ideas mentioned above. Particular ideas contain concepts of specific locations and times, limiting the idea's application to a single individual, whereas abstract universal ideas do not contain ideas of specific periods and places, allowing the idea to apply to other similar qualities or objects. The nature of the abstraction process, as well as Locke's depiction of it, has sparked a lot of philosophical and intellectual discussion. Berkeley claimed that Locke's conception of the process is incoherent. This is due in part to Berkeley's status as an imagist, or someone who believes that all thoughts are images. If you're an imagist, it's hard to imagine a concept that encompasses both the right and equilateral triangle concepts. Michael Ayers recently claimed that Locke was an imagist as well. As a result, Berkeley's criticism of Locke would be razor-sharp. However, Ayers' allegation has been contested. The abstraction process is extremely important in human understanding. Most of the words we employ, according to Locke, are generic (III.1.1, N: 409). Obviously, only general or sortal ideas can be used in a classification method.

A number of noteworthy characteristics of Locke's beliefs on language and knowing arise from his examination of names of substances and the contrast between names of substances and names of modes. Atoms and anything made up of atoms are physical substances. However, we are unfamiliar with the atomic structure of horses and tables.