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Let me remind you that Locke's programme is to offer what we should call a scientific account of thinking. He does this with the following raw materials:
This apparatus is enough to allow him to state his theories about a number of key questions. What is knowledge? What is reasoning? What is meaning?
Would you like to write in a sentence each Locke's theories on these matters?
| I attempt, with the aid principally of R.I.Aaron's book The Theory of Universals, to give a standalone introduction to the issue of generality here. This simply repeats the most of the discussion offered on the current page, but tries to say also how Aristotle's theory of 'form' fits in. |
The problem I want to discuss now is the problem of generality; or as Locke approaches it: How you get ideas that are general ?
Let us try and have clearly in our minds the distinction between particular ideas and general ideas. (Locke makes the distinction, and although he is addressing a problem we perhaps recognize today, the distinction is not quite one we today find clear.)
Roger Scruton asks:
' How can any of our thought become general in its nature, when experience is itself irremediably particular?' (Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy, London, 1981, Routledge, p.90)
This table is a particular: but when I have the thought that I could make a table by sitting up with the top of my legs flat the thought is a general one.
Plato thought that you could only have general thoughts if there were general objects: Platonic 'Forms'. The alternative is to think that somehow generality can be 'abstracted' from particulars. The Scholastics, deriving most of their philosophical inspiration from Aristotle, thought that a part of the intellect played the role of performing this abstraction. (Kenny's Aquinas on Mind, London, paperback edition 1994, Routledge, on this is clear and engaging.)
From the horse's mouth: Locke's Essay, Book III Chapter III Sections 1-7
Locke's account of 'generality' is this:
We make a pile in our minds of particular ideas and if they have anything in common, that gives us the general idea. E.g., we make a pile in our minds of all the particular ideas we have of particular tables, and by discounting all respects in which those particular ideas differ from each other, we derive the general idea of table.
That is Locke's account of generality.
Please think of one chair you have in your life.
Make a list of ten of its features. Include all the obvious ones.
I read out one of these lists, and each of you puts a ring round the feature I read out if you have it on yours. If having heard this feature listed by someone else, and you had missed it out inadvertently - please add it to your list, and ring it. Remember, you should be thinking of a particular chair you know well.
I will then go through the list again and I will ask: anyone who hasn't ringed such and such a feature. If there is anyone who hasn't, that means that feature is eliminated.
Any feature left is a component of the general idea of a chair (according to Locke).
What does a contemporary person say? I think he or she says What's the problem? Why should the having of general thoughts be any more difficult to understand than the having of thoughts that are not general? Our brains have to manipulate information about categories of things, but where is the special problem with that?
If you try and think about some of the thoughts you have had to day you will find I think that they involve categories.
Think of this thought as an example: 'That's the bus just disappearing!':
This thought surely involves categories.
'Bus' is surely a category for a start? I'm talking about a particular thing, the thing I see in the distance and which is about to disappear, but if I am thinking about it as a bus I am categorising it.
Is 'disappearing' much the same? I am thinking of this particular thing passing out of sight, and this will be, when it happens, a particular event. But in referring to that particular event as 'disappearing' I am placing it in a category.
Another example: 'I should have gone to bed before I passed out last night'.
I am thinking about the time I went to bed last night. This is a particular event. But if I think of that particular event under the description 'going to bed' I am thinking of that particular event as falling under a category, a category to which lots of other events also as a matter of fact belong.
The thought that one event should have been 'earlier' also involves a category, surely. Lots of events are related in time in the way I am thinking of the two events last night - going to bed and passing into oblivion. If I think of one as earlier than the other I am seeing them as falling under the same general category.
The great run of our thoughts are like that you may think - they involve categories. You may find it a challenge to think of a thought which doesn't.
Perhaps when I think 'I' I am not categorising, so if I can treat the thought 'I' as a distinct thought we might have an example there - ??
So there is a real question: Can I have a thought of something without categorising it? We normally perhaps categorise a tree as we think about it. But if we just look at a particular tree, can we count this as a thought, and if so, is it possible to have it without categorising this particular thing as a tree?
So far I have tried to say that in thought at least very often categories are in play. The question I want to raise is: is there a philosophical problem here?
You may think that for the empiricist there is. Roger Scruton expresses the thought when he says (Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy, London, 1981, Routledge, p.90) : experience is irremediably particular.
Let's have a go at understanding this.
Though we can look at this cat or that cat, we never see the category cat. - Is this what is meant? Similar points could be made perhaps for each of the different senses. We can touch the cat, but not the category cat. But the empiricists hold that all our knowledge must be built out of what our senses provide us with. So if we use categories in our thinking and in our developing knowledge those categories must somehow be built by us - built out of the raw material of particular experiences that our senses provide.
This perhaps isn't yet a problem for empiricism - but it is a challenge that empiricists must address. For all we have said so far, they may be able to explain how the job may be done. But if you look at the various answers that empiricists have given to the question of how the categories we use are constructed you may well think none of them are terribly convincing. In that case you will think that empiricism does have problem. It has no terribly good answer to a question that for them certainly arises.
(For example, you may not be convinced by Locke's explanation, that we construct a category by linking together all the ideas that a set of ideas of particular things have in common.)
Familiar in biological classification, the two notions of 'species' and 'genus' (plural 'genera') are two ways of referring to categories. It is common to speak of a set of individual animals as a species and a set of species as a genus. So, understanding 'species' and 'genera' as referring to categories, we can understand the words of Pophyry which launched a great medieval debate about categories.
Porphyry lived in the 3rd Century AD and wrote an introduction (in Greek) to Aristotle's Categories. It was called the Isagoge. The Isagoge impacted on medieval philosophy two centuries after it had been written, via a thinker called Boethius. He translated the Isagoge and offered his own commentary on it. (In this and in other ways Boethius was a key channel of communication between the classical world and the medieval.)
Here is the brief, almost throwaway, passage which exerted (via Boethius) an enormous influence:
The question suggested and taken up by medieval philosophers was the question of the existence of categories. Did they exist, and if so in what way? Were they actual bodily things, or things but not bodily things, or perhaps they didn't really exist independently at all?
If this is the question, Plato is usually interpreted as answering: categories do indeed exist. Their existence is actually superior to the existence of bodily things, rather in the way that bodily things have a superior existence to that of shadows. But they don't exist in the world to which we have access through our senses. These categories as he thought of them are sometimes called Forms and sometimes Ideas, and they belonged he taught to a world of their own.
Of course there had to be connections between the world of Ideas and the world we have access to via our senses. What is it that makes this animal that we see in the world of sense a horse? The answer that Plato's theory gives is that it is somehow a horse in virtue of there being an Idea of Horse in the world of Ideas, and in virtue of the animal that we see somehow being 'informed' by that. So on Plato's view there are categories and they are the 'things' which populate the World of Ideas.
Rejecting the state thought had got into under Scholasticism, the Modern John Locke is as aware as Aristotle had been that the things in the world appear to fall into a limited number of sorts and of faces afresh the question: what is their ontological status? These sorts that things appear to fall into - do they somehow 'exist'? Are there categories?
His answer - a famous one-liner - is that categories are 'the workmanship of the understanding'. What our sense experience provides us with are lots of ideas of individual things. Locke sometimes suggests that we get these straightaway just by looking or otherwise having sensory experience of a thing, but he also suggests that we construct them out of sensory experiences of different modalities. Anyhow, he thinks sense gives us ideas of individual things. He thinks each of these ideas is complex, consisting of several component simpler ideas. For example my idea of an individual table that I have just worked at may contain the simple idea of hardness and the simple idea of brownness, as well as lots of others. My 'understanding' generates a category out of a number of ideas of individual things by identifying all the component ideas which the ideas of individual things have in common. This collection of ideas which are common to all the ideas of individual things that my understanding is considering constitute the 'essence' of the category I am in this way constructing. (He calls this its 'nominal' essence.)
If this is Locke's account of how there come to appear to be categories in nature, what is his answer to Porphyry's question of whether (and in what sense) those categories exist?
In saying that our understanding constructs them, Locke is making the point that in his view there aren't any Scholastic forms. A thing is the sort of thing that it is, according to Scholastic thought, in virtue of its possessing a form, be it the form of a horse, or the form of a worm or whatever. Locke is rejecting this. There aren't forms in this sense, and the appearance the things we observe present to us of existing in limited variety is not due to there existing a limited number of forms.
What is it due to then?
Locke's answer is that it is due to the 'atomic' constitution of things.
He was a 'corpuscularian', one who believed that individual physical things were made up of configurations of tiny hard particles, too small to see directly, but through their various shapes and motions and the fact that they occupied space (and perhaps some more properties) endowed the everyday-sized objects they made up with whatever properties they possessed. So if a table was flat-topped, that would be because of the configuration its constituent particles had entered into, if it made a noise when tipped over, it would be because the accident would have created disturbances in the particles of air adjacent to the particles that made up the table, disturbances which would ripple through the air until they impacted upon the ear drum and 'so' come to be heard as sound.
So the properties of individual things were down to the properties of the particles that made them up and their configuration. And if those properties exhibited patterns - another way of putting the point that individual things appeared to fall into a limited number of categories - the patterns would be explicable in terms of the properties of their constituent particle as well.
We look at the world and see things fall into categories. This is not down to forms, it is down to the atoms that make individual things up. So Locke's position is that sorts are human constructs, but they are human constructs which reflect the real state of the world - the real properties of atoms, and the real state of their configuration.
(Locke's view has therefore nothing to do with the notion that human beings can construct whatever sorts they like.)
Aaron calls Locke's position 'conceptualism', distinguishing it from what he calls 'nominalism'. Nominalism is taken to be the view that there aren't forms, and there aren't general concepts (Locke calls them 'abstract' ideas) constructed by the understanding. It recognises that there are words that appear to refer to categories (for example 'cat' in the sentence 'the cat has too many orifices') but says that there is nothing more to generality than this - words.
The suggestion is that we can explain all that needs to be explained regarding categories, as distinct from individual things, by recognising a certain type of word.
In the sentence 'This cat is smiling' 'cat' naming an individual. In the sentence 'Cats don't often smile' 'cat is not.
Berkeley is often said to be a nominalist in this sense, and perhaps he was one. But it is difficult to work out what positive defensible doctrine he has to offer. Much more developed and trenchant is his attack on the claims about generality he thought he had identified in Locke.
Aaron argues that what remains is a question about thinking. We don't yet have a 'theory' of thinking, and understanding the nature of the categories we employ in thought (i.e. what is sometimes known as 'universals') must be an important step towards that: ''to understand universals is to begin to understand thinking'. (Aaron, TU, p.vii)
If understanding thinking is taken to be a matter of psychology (of the best kind) I agree: for one enormously suggestive way of posing this question would then be: how can we program a machine to handle categories with human sophistication?
VP
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Dali: Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as A Table (1934) Courtesy the Dali Museum |
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Revised 10:11:03
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