Locke on Epistemology

The nature of knowledge

  • Locke, Hobbes, and Descartes have very different views on the nature of knowledge

    • Fore Descartes, knowledge is only knowledge if it is impossible to doubt it

      • This is why he must base everything on basic, indubitable axioms

      • This is also why he is a rationalist: everything known through the senses is doubtable, therefore it’s not a sure foundation for knowledge

  • Fore Locke, knowledge is mainly probabilistic

    • We can’t be sure that almost anything, we are talking about a belief built up out of sense perceptions. This is an empirical approach.

What can we know?

  • Locke asks whether or not we can know substances outside of our mind

    • A “substance” is a formally existing object

    • In traditional Aristotelian philosophy, we identify substances through the senes.

  • Lock argues that we cannot know genuine substances:

    • All knowledge comes through the senses

    • The senses do not contain information about substances, just qualities like whiteness, hardness, loudness, etc.

    • None of these qualities are substance, nor would any combination of them form a substance

    • Therefore, we can never know a substance outside of our own minds

Primary vs. Secondary Qualities

  • Locke further divides qualities into the primary qualities (the qualities htings really have) and its secondary qualities (the qualities that are produced in our sensory organs by the object)

  • Shape, motion, impenetrability are primary. We know that they are not just accidents produced by our particular sense organs, because multiple senses attest to them

  • Color, tone, scent, taste are secondary. Objects produce these sensations in our sense organs, but they don’t exist in the objects themselves

    • What an object truly is is just a collection of primary qualities that, in the aggregate, produce certain secondary qualities.

Nominalism

  • This leads Locke to a position called nominalism. In Locke’s case, we can sum up this position with the following claims:

    • Nothing truly can be known to exist outside of our minds except primary qualities

    • When we think of things as substantial, we ar ejust organizing our experience of different qualities

    • When we talk of universals (e.g., whiteness, or elephant), we are just talking about names that we use to organize our experience of different qualities.

The nature of the self

  • Locke and Descartes also have very different views on the nature of the human being

    • Fore Descartes, “I” am a thinking thing

      • When he doubts everything, there is one thing that is impossible to doubt: his existence as a being that thinks

      • Cartesian philosophy proposes an innate knowledge of the self

    • Fore Locke, “I” am primarily a sensing thing

      • Children don’t begin with thought, but with sensation

      • Only later do thoughts develop

      • Before we sense anything, we aren’t “thinking things” — we’re just Blank Slates

Personal identity: what makes “me,” “me?”

  • All of our knowledge can be traced back to experience — including our knowledge of ourselves.

  • That which gives me an idea of myself is my consciousness

  • The self we are “conscious” of being is our self, and our self over time is the self we are conscious of having been

  • What the self is not:

    • A substance

    • A body

    • A soul