Locke and the Problem of Epistemology

 

Locke and the Problem of Epistemology

The Essay is chiefly concerned with issues in what would today be called epistemology (or the theory of knowledge), metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. As its title implies, its purpose is to discover, from an examination of the workings of the human mind, just what we are capable of knowing and understanding about the universe we live in. Locke's answer is that all the materials of our understanding come from our ideas - both of sensation and of reflection (that is, of outward' and 'inward' experience respectively) - which are worked upon by our powers of reason to produce such 'real' knowledge as we can hope to attain. The structure of the Essay and its place in Locke's work LOCKE'S LIFE AND WORK 5 Beyond that, we have other sources of belief--for instance, in testimony and in revelation—which may afford us probability and hence warrant our assent, but do not enlitle us to certainty.

Locke defines an idea as Whatsoever the Mind perecives in itself. or is the immediate object of Perception. Thought or Understanding' (2.8.8), and in doing so he may appear to be guilty of running together two quite distinct fields of mental phenomena-namely, percepts and concepts. When we enjoy sensory experiences of our physical environment-for instance, by opening our eyes and looking at surrounding objects-We are conscious of being subject to states of qualitative awareness. For example, when a normally sighted person sees a red and a green object in ordinary daylight, he or she will enjoy distinctive qualities of colour experience--"qualia', in the modern Locke's uses of the term 'idea' IDEAS 20 jargon which will be absent from the perceptual experience of a red-green colour-blind person in the same circumstances. Locke seems at least sometimes to be using the term 'idea' to refer to such experiential qualia. However, he also uses the term at times to refer to what we would now call concepts-that is, the meaningful components of the thoughts we entertain privately and attempt to communicate to one another in language. The latter sense of idea' is indeed still a commonplace of everyday usage, as when we say that someone has no idea of what the word “trigonometry” means.

Now, it would be precipitate to accuse Locke at this stage of a confusion between percepts and concepts, first of all because the latter distinction is itself one of philosophical making and thus not immune to criticism, but also because it is part of Locke's very project in the Essay to forge a link between perceptual experience and our intellectual resources-a link which would, if it can be sustained, blur this very distinction

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