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Locke 3

 

Contents

 

Locke on (a) substance and (b) generality

 

 

 

 

 

Locke's project

 

 

Locke's views and arguments on topics that concern philosophers today are

presented to us by Locke in an oblique way. His programme is to offer what we

should call a scientific account of thinking. He does this by taking as his main

analytical tool the concept of an 'idea', which he conceives of as a mental

atom. A second analytical tool is the concept of something that can both

'scrutinize' ideas and 'manipulate' them. Locke usually refers to this as the

'mind' itself. Critics have called it an (illegitimate) 'homunculus'.

 

 

He adds to the theoretical apparatus of ideas and scrutineer/manipulator the

claim that all ideas come from either outer sense or inner sense - reflection.

 

 

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Locke's commitment to the claim that all ideas come from sense or reflection

involves him in putting forward a theory about most things. Whatever idea his

critic comes up with, Locke has to give an account of how that idea derives from

sense or reflection, and some of the ideas that the critic puts to Locke, and

which he puts to himself of course, are ideas that have been the topic of

philosophical interest.

 

Some internet stuff:

  • Stanford Encyclopaedia entry for Locke
  • Internet Encyclopaedia entry for Locke
  • List of Locke's works in web editions, courtesy Daniel Kian McKiernan.
  • Some useful prompt questions on our reading of Locke (and Descartes and the others), offered by Peter Suber.

Some relief:

 

We have seen some of these. For example, the idea of 'infinity'. How does Locke

think this is derived from experience? He has an answer, but the point I am

getting at here is not what his answer is but the fact that he has to have one.

He has to be able to show that this idea, like every other, derives from experience,

and in giving his answer he has to take a view on the philosophical question

which we might express by asking what infinity is.

 

 

In this way, Locke's project, which is to give a scientific account of the

workings of the mind, involves him in addressing, or at least taking a view

on, pretty well all the great philosophical problems. His project isn't directly

to address comprehensively all philosophical problems, it is to offer a theory

of the workings of the mind: but that is what he ends up doing.

 

 

Our first topic here is Locke on 'substance'. It is complicated by his approach

to the problem or problems with 'substance', which is why I have just explained

it. The question he is going at directly is how we can have acquired our idea

of substance. But we today, and I think his contemporaries, were not crystal

clear about the idea of substance to begin with, so there are

 

 

two really quite separable issues which get all tangled up. One is what our

idea of substance is, and the second is how that idea , once we are clear what

it is, can have been got from experience.

 

 

Though we ourselves use this word 'substance' and hence can sort of agree

that we have the idea, it seems fairly clear that our idea of substance may not

be the same as the 'idea' of substance that was foremost in Locke's mind as he

addressed the question of where this idea came from.

 

Prompt: what do we mean by 'substance' today?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reprise

 

 

What we have then are two questions:

 

 

 

 

And then perhaps a third:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So what idea or ideas of substance did Locke think we have?

 

 

 

 

 

Substance: the idea of a thing, as distinct from a collection

of ideas of properties.

 

 

A leading thought of Locke's when he is discussing the idea of substance is

this.

 

 

When you see and have other sense experience that we might describe as perceiving

a table for example, what you get through the senses are ideas of qualities:

the idea of brown, the idea of rectangle shape, the idea of polish-smell when

you sniff the table and so on.

 

 

These are all ideas of qualities - properties - of the table. But what of the

idea of the table itself?

 

 

Locke says to himself: I have explained the origin of the ideas of the various

properties of the table - they come through the senses - but what of the idea

of the table as such?

 

 

You may think there is a simple answer open to him: why doesn't he say that

the idea of a table is a complex idea formed by the set of ideas of the table's

qualities?

 

 

 

Prompt: Would you be satisfied by this?

 

 

Locke himself is not completely clear whether he rejects this account or not.

 

 

You can interpret him as saying that there is something more to my

idea of a table than the sum of the ideas of the qualities.

 

 

He would then be saying that the idea of this table is complex, and that belonging

to the complex are the various ideas of qualities we get when we have experience

of a tree: but that there is something else. The 'something else' is our idea

that these qualities inhere in something, belong to something.

On this construal he is saying that when you add the ideas of the qualities

of a table to the idea that all these qualities inhere in something you get

the complex idea of the table.

 

 

Locke seems to be saying that when we have experience of a particular kind

of thing, say a table, the particular thing we are looking at gives us a number

of ideas: for example, the idea of a particular shape, the idea of a particular

polish-smell, the idea of brown, in a certain pattern. These same ideas co-occur

every time we see an item of this type.

 

 

Locke seems next to say: we infer from the co-occurrence of these ideas that

they must belong to one and the same thing.

 

 

And he concludes by saying that it is this single thing, the single bearer

of the set of qualities which gives rise to the recurrent set of ideas that

we call 'substance.'

 

 

A substance is that which bears qualities. It is not a quality itself.

Qualities inhere in it.

 

 

Here is a key passage. See if you think what I have just offered is a correct

interpretation:

 

 

 

 

 

 

'The mind being, as I have declared, furnished with a great number

of simple ideas conveyed in by the senses, as they are found in exterior things,

or by reflection on its own operations, takes notice also that a certain number

of these simple ideas go constantly together; which, being presumed to belong

to one thing, and words being suited to common apprehensions and made use of

for quick dispatch, are called, so united in one subject, by one name; which,

by inadvertancy, we are apt afterward to talk of and consider as one simple

idea, which indeed is a complication of many ideas together: because, as I have

said, not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom

ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which

they do result; which therefore we call substance.'

 

An Essay concerning Human Understanding,

Bk II, Ch. XXIII, Section 1.

 

The alternative reading of this passage, and of Locke's position in general,

is that our experience of sets of qualities always going together is the source

of a kind of illusion. We experience a packet of ideas always going

together and assume that this means they must all inhere in one and the same

thing - but mistakenly.

 

 

He would then be explaining how we can mistakenly think we have a

conception of substance. He would then be saying that it is an illusion

generated by the constant co-occurrence of a set of ideas.

 

 

This in fact would be really helpful to him, because he would then not be obliged

to explain the origin of this idea of substance (since there isn't one really).

Critics say that anyway he can't. As he has described it, the idea of substance,

the critic says, cannot be got through the senses; nor can any plausible account

be given of how it might be got from introspection.

 

 

REPRISE

 

 

Let me give though, as a reprise, the first interpretation of Locke. It goes

like this:

 

 

How, according to Locke, do you get the idea of a particular object?

 

 

When I look at an object, through my senses I get a set of ideas, each corresponding

to one of the object's qualities. E.g. the idea of brown, the idea of rectangularity,

the idea of hardness. I then add to this set of ideas a further idea, namely

the idea that the qualities which have given rise to the set of ideas of sense

'inhere in something' - belong to something.

 

 

This idea that I add is called by Locke 'the idea of substance'.

 

 

If I am looking at a table, I get the ideas of hard, brown, table-shape

(and some more); I add to these to the idea of substance; and

this set of ideas together constitutes my complex idea this table.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

General Ideas

The next problem is: How you get general ideas?

The distinction between particular and 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.)

 

 

This table is a particular; the concept table is a general

concept.

 

 

 

 

 

Locke's account of generality

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Let's try it.

 

 

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).

 

 

 

Dali: Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as A Table (1934)

Courtesy the Dali Museum

 

Discussion

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END

 

 

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