|
|
|
|
Contents |
Our point of departure from Descartes, with a great deal left unexplored, was his conviction that the methodology for advancing understanding the physical - corporeal substance - was to apply reason.
There were others who argued to the contrary that what you had to do was observe and experiment. But for Descartes reasoning was the key. Observation had a part to play, but the most important method was to apply reason: you would find out what was so in large part by working out what must be so. (His theorizing about the heart and how it worked was an example of his method in action.)
But the sort of reasoning
that he thought would play the most general and fundamental role in discovering
the nature of the Universe was mathematics. - mathematics very much including
geometry.
We have seen him arguing that the defining feature of corporeal substance was 'extension'. This argument was crucial for him, because if it was successful it would entail that the proper way to study corporeal nature would be the science that was appropriate for the study of 'extension'. What science was this? What science studies occupancy of space? His answer was: geometry. If the physical universe had extension as its essence, it would be understood through geometry, a branch of mathematics, a pursuit not involving observation, not involving experimentation, but of reasoning, an activity essentially of the mind turned in upon itself.
You have to remember that if it is obvious now - and is it? - that science must involve empirical study, it was not obvious in Descartes' time. Astronomy and physics were generating exciting new ways of looking at things, and the progressives were wanting to extend what looked like spectacularly successful methodologies to other fields - to understanding animals and plants, magnetism, the mind, politics, the influence of the heavenly bodies on human affairs, the how to make gold etc. etc. Some said the most important thing was to experiment. Others said the most important thing was to 'work it out'. It was to the latter that Descartes belonged.
John Locke belonged to the other. He argued his case in terms of 'innate ideas'. There weren't any 'innate ideas' he said. We get all our ideas through 'observation' of various kinds. And all our knowledge is built up of ideas. So 'observation' (understood very broadly) was the source of all knowledge for Locke, and he starts off a tradition of thought within the
Modern world which has a strictly limited conception of the powers of unaided reason, and attributes all our knowledge to the information that is given to us, one way or another, through our 'senses', very broadly conceived.
From the horse's mouth: Locke's Essay Book I Chapter II Sections 1-28
| Machiavelli | 1469 - 1527 |
| Bacon | c1561 - 1626 |
| Galileo | 1564 - 1642 |
| Hobbes | 1588 - 1679 |
| Descartes | 1596 - 1650 |
| Boyle | 1627 - 1691 |
| Locke | 1632 - 1704 |
| Newton | 1642 - 1727 |
| Leibniz | 1646 - 1716 |
| Berkeley | 1685 - 1753 |
| Hume | 1711 - 1776 |
| Kant | 1724 - 1804 |
Born into the minor gentry of Somerset. Father supported the Parliamentary cause in the Civil War.
Westminster School, then Oxford. The - Scholastic - philosophy he found dull.
Graduated in 1656. Became a don - in philosophy. By this time knew and collaborated with Robert Boyle.
Stimulated at around this time by reading Descartes. And who wouldn't be. Much of his philosophy was framed in response to Descartes.
Pursued medicine, and got a job in 1667 with Lord Ashley (later the Earl of
Shaftesbury), 
who was a politician, as physician to his household. This
involved him in Shaftesbury's opposition to the Catholic King, Charles II. His
position gave him highly influential contacts, many of them the leading virtuosi
(later:'scientists') of the time.
Elected to the Royal Society in 1668. Worked with Sydenham on medical research.
In 1683, feeling threatened after the fall of Shaftesbury, Locke left England for Holland (where he actually wrote out the final draft of the Essay.) Returned in 1689, a year after the accession to the throne of the Protestant William of Orange.
You will gather from this abbreviated curriculum vitae that Locke was no ivory tower recluse. In fact it is striking and dispiriting observation about Locke, and Descartes, and Leibniz, some of the most revolutionary thinkers of our culture, that their writing benefited little from from those supposed powerhouses of the intellect, the universities.
| Locke's Biography - more details |
Locke was a don in Oxford for a period, but it was as a man of affairs, engaged in the cultural and political milieu of an altogether unstable time, that he pursued his writing.
Some internet stuff:
Some relief:
|
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 is an important commitment of Locke's, the one which marks him out as an 'empiricist'.
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.
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.
To read: Locke, Essay, Book II Chapter 23 Sections 1-6
Descartes spoke about 'substance' and 'substances', and we got fairly lost if you remember trying to get a clear understanding of what he was was saying. What he seemed to be saying, if you remember, was that there were two types of substance: corporeal or physical on the one hand and and mental or spiritual on the other. And there was just one substance of the corporeal kind - the plenum - and many substances of the mental kind. When we tried to get clear what he meant by 'substance' or 'kind of substance' we took note of the Scholastic notion that some things were dependent on others (properties on things, God's creation on God) and that one thing that might be meant by 'substance' was 'a thing that didn't depend on anything else'.
Locke did his best to establish some clearer thinking about the cluster of problems you seem to get into when you try and pursue Scholastic and Cartesian arguments about 'substance'.
I put it like this, as though the Scholastics and Descartes were muddled and Locke tried to bring clarity, but this is misleading. What was actually happening I think was that the rise of the scientific world view involved the wholesale collapse of the Scholastic framework (which Descartes was too close too to reject in its entirety) and the elaboration of new framework of thought altogether. So Locke was not so much clearing up muddles so much as constructing the new concepts.
Locke was an atomist - a 'corpuscularian', as they were called in his time. He thought corpuscularianism provided the framework which would allow an understanding of physical things to grow, and he thought a sort of 'mental corpuscularianism' - which later came to be known as 'associationism' - offered the framework in which an understanding of behaviour and thought could be developed.
So what Locke is saying basically is that the Scholastic notion(s) of substance, heavily drawn on by Descartes, must be swept away. In the light of new thinking - especially in the light of a determined exclusion of notions for which no basis in sense experience can be found, they are irretrievably muddled. And also: we need new conceptual tools in their place.
The first confusion Locke wishes to identify and clear away is the notion that it is helpful to think of properties as needing a kind of 'substrate' to 'support' them.
You might think, with Descartes, that properties are 'dependent' and that unless there was something for properties to 'depend on' - something to 'support' properties - there couldn't be any properties.
Locke thinks if you say Yes to this you are positing something about which we are totally ignorant, and leaves it to be understood that we may as well not bother. It doesn't advance understanding much to say 'there must be something supporting properties' if we can't say anything at all about the 'support' we are positing.
A person who tries to operate with the concept of substance doesn't really have any firm idea of it at all, he says - "only a supposition of he knows not what support of such qualities which are capable of producing simple ideas in us..." Locke, Essay, Book II Chapter XXIII Section 1.
In trying to bring out the emptiness of the claim that properties need a 'substrate' to 'support' them Locke says... [MORE]
I think what Locke is saying is that some people operate with a notion (which they call 'substance') of a kind of substrate in which properties inhere. But they can't say anything more about this supposed 'substrate'. So it's too vague a notion to be really meaningful or useful.
There is a second notion of 'substance' that again I think Locke wants to rubbish. The Scholastics spoke of individual 'things' like a horse or a tree as 'substances' and thought of these as terribly important. These 'substances' had 'qualities' (which Locke says were all called 'accidents'). But the main thing was that the world was populated by 'substances', so that if you wanted to understand anything it was a substance or substances you had to grasp.
Locke wants to say: the important items are not substances at all but qualities. Insofar as we are to understand anything it is qualities we must concentrate on.
I think Locke is doing something absolutely revolutionary here. He is constructing our modern notion of a 'thing' and a thing's 'properties' , against a Scholastic background which didn't have 'things' in the modern sense but 'substances' and 'accidents' and 'forms'.
This is the revolution: the senses now give you access only to qualities, whereas for the Scholastics the senses had allowed you to share on a temporary basis the form of the 'substance' perceived. For the Scholastics through perception you encountered directly whatever populated the universe. For the new framework, those 'things', insofar as there were any, were mysterious and shadowy, unplummable, and what perception was thought of as giving access to were qualities. If we wanted to make scientific progress we should concentrate on qualities and the relations between them (eg weights, or smells and shapes).
It is worthwhile approaching Locke's articulation of the new concept of a thing here from another direction, the direction actually taken by Locke.
In developing a systematic empiricist philosophy, working with his conception of 'ideas' as the atoms of mentality, Locke is committed to the thesis that all ideas come from experience, from our senses (internal and external).
But he is also persuaded that what our external senses give us directly are ideas of qualities (eg red, warm, rough).
The question then arises very acutely: if we have find in ourselves an idea not of a quality but of a thing, where can that have come from?
Reprise
Locke is committed to the thesis that in looking at what we call a 'table' we get a number of ideas of qualities: for example, the idea of a particular shape, the idea of a particular polish-smell, the idea of brown, in a certain pattern.
This contrasts with saying that when you look at a table you get directly through your senses the idea of a table.
Crucially, Locke is thus rejecting the thesis that when you perceive an object you get directly an idea of that thing. Instead he held that what you get through the senses are ideas of qualities. He thinks what you get from your sense experience of a table is a set of different sense experiences, corresponding roughly to the different modalities of sense.
His next thought is this: as a separate thing you - your mind - combine these different ideas into a complex, the idea of the table.
What would psychology today say about this? Would it broadly agree with Locke? Is he broadly right that you get information of different modalities which your brain subsequently works up to form a complex data-structure which uses the concept of a thing?
Locke's picture is: you get a set of 'simple' ideas of sense when you look at the tree and it is your mind that forms out of them the idea of the tree. The idea of the tree for Locke is a complex idea, made up of several simple component ideas.
How exactly do our minds construct the idea of a tree from the set of ideas of qualities we get when we 'look at a tree'?
Locke assumes that when we have sense experience relating to, say, a tree we get a set of simple ideas of sense.
His next point is: this set of simple ideas of sense seems to be an item. That is, the different ideas that make up the set on one occasion often seem to go together on other occasions. That is, Locke suggests that when we look at this tree now, and again in an hour say and then again tomorrow we find that a certain set of simple ideas of sense seem to go together, to keep company.
Locke says when we notice this the thought occurs to us that something must be responsible for it - for the way in which this set of ideas always seems to occur as a batch. And he suggests that what we think is that they go together because they all flow from one and the same "something".
Heavy, heavy quotation marks round "thing" here to indicate that we are trying to say something very peculiar! But let me complete the thought before returning to the difficulty these quotation marks point to.
Locke's point seems to be: the idea of a particular substance is the idea of "whatever it is" which gives rise to the set of simple ideas of sense which we are noticing stick together or co-occur.
"... we come to have the ideas of particular sorts of substances, by collecting such combinations of simple ideas as are, by experience and observation of men's senses, taken notice of to exist together; and are therefore supposed to flow from the particular internal constitution, or unknown essence of that substance." Essay, Bk II Chapter XXIII, Section 3.
When we think that there is a "something" which somehow "brings it about" that a set of qualities keeps recurring as a package, are we making a mistake? Are we moving illegitimately from co-occurence to a "something" tying the package together? Maybe the set of qualities is all there is to a 'thing' and our inferring to the existence of something "holding the package together" is invalid?
Locke isn't crystal clear what his answer is to this question.
Here is what he says:
Locke's Essay, Bk II, Ch. XXIII, Section 1.
One reading of this passage, and of Locke's position in general, is that his answer to the question we put above is No: the movement of thought from co-ocurrence to a "something" responsible for the co-occurrence is illegitimate. That is, 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 "inhere" in "something" - but mistakenly.
Putting this now as Locke's answer to the question of where we get our idea of a "particular substance" from. On this interpretation, Locke is explaining how we can mistakenly think we have a conception of "particular substance". He would 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.
1. Locke was an empiricist.
2. Locke on substance:
This is one interpretation of what Locke is arguing:
He asks: How do you get the idea of a particular object? and answers:
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. Such sets of qualities appear to recur repeatedly. I infer from this fact that the set of qualities "inhere" in "something".
Our idea of a 'something' which we think of a set of qualities as 'inhering in' is our idea of a 'particular substance'. It is really a confusion on our part.
The key point is that he is rubbishing the Scholastic concept of 'substance' (which Descartes has not demolished) and putting in place the Modern concept of a thing.
 |
||
Last revised 03:11:04 |
||
A module of the BA Philosophy programme Institute of Environment Philosophy and Public Policy | Lancaster University | e-mail philosophy@lancaster.ac.uk |