John Locke | Empiricism

Who was John Locke?

Locke was the most important early-modern English philosopher. He was born in 1632 and died in 1704, he was a medical doctor and his political writings are some of the most influential writings for Anglo-American political philosophy to this day.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

He wrote this essay while on exile in Holland, after a plot to assassinate Charles II was discovered and Locke was a suspect, as he was associated with the assassins. He returned with the soon to be Queen Mary and returned after the Glorious Revolution of 1689.

Locke offered an empiricist counter point  to Descartes. All ideas and knowledge come from experience for Locke. This means in particular, that there can be no innate ideas. For Locke, the mind is an empty cabinet or a blank slate, which is also known as tabula rasa on which experience writes.

The crux of the rationalist and empiricist debate really lies on how we explain our possession of ideas that seemingly could not come from experience. For example – infinity or perfection.

An empiricist will have no problem explaining how we can get the idea of the color grey, or red, or the idea of a chipmunk. These are things that I experience. Some are simple ideas, some are complex ideas, but I can get these from experience.

On the other hand, rationalists like Descartes would point out, there are some ideas in our mind that seem like they could not come from experience. Infinity is one of them. How could we get the idea of infinity from experience? How could we get the idea of perfection from experience?

For example: how many geometrical points lie along a line segment that is six inches long? The answer is that we know there is actually an infinite number, why? The points are infinitely small.

How could that idea come from experience? Rationalists say they couldn’t, hence they must have some other source.

It might be worth mentioning that we could say that the empiricist might declare how we get the notion of infinity from experience as- you get the notion of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and then dot dot dot. What the rationalist says is what does ‘dot dot dot’ mean? 😀 It does mean in fact, ‘go on listing numbers forever’; forever already presumes the idea of infinity.

Like all empiricists, Locke is compelled by his view to a psychological inventory of the ideas of the mind. He starts with essentially, all the ideas in the mind, he’s got to do an inventory, explain them, describe them. Why? Does he want to be a psychologist? No. We have to do an inventory of the mind and then figure out what ideas represent real things in the world. This will then allow us to give a critical analysis of our knowledge.

For Locke, we receive simple, indivisible ideas from sensation and reflection.  
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[*]Sensation: This means whatever I perceive in the world through my five senses, also, although Locke doesn’t say much about this, it also refers to internal physical sensations, i.e. stomach aches.
[*]Reflection: This means my own awareness of my own mental phenomena. It is the fact of how I can reflect on the ideas of my mind.
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In terms of the basic categories of all types of ideas, we receive either from sensation or reflection, they all divide for Locke into a few basic categories.

Locke’s basic categories 
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[*]Extension
[*]Solidity
[*]Motivity – the ability to affect something else
[*]Mobility – the passive ability to be affected by something
[*]Perceptivity or thinking
[*]Existence
[*]Duration
[*]Number
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What matters here is these are in effect, the main categories of all possible properties that anything in the world can have. Our mind takes these simple ideas in and the combines them into complex ideas.

For example, the idea of a table has to be a complex idea. It has lots of characteristics, it has mass, color, shape, texture – all of these are simple ideas but combined, form a complex idea of a table.

Ideas received through sensation correspond to qualities in objects having the power to cause the ideas. This is a very simple and straight forward view, my mind is being affected by objects in the world that cause sensations in it.

Here, Locke makes a famous distinction between what he calls primary and secondary qualities.
 
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[*]Primary qualities: in the subject and in the object – size, volume, mass, velocity and number. These are what physical sciences such as Newtonian physics of his day were concerned with. They cause the simple ideas. The property I perceive, that is the property ‘in my mind’ is also ‘in the object’.
[*]Secondary qualities: color, taste and sound. These are different. They are powers of the objects primary qualities to cause ideas in my mind, that do not resemble anything in the object.
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Let’s see if we can’t break this down. The table for instance, is brown in color, is an idea in my mind, it is being caused by something real in the object, BUT, brown is a secondary quality so Locke is not assuming that ‘brownness’ is not a property of the real ‘object in the world’. It may just be a secondary quality, that is to say he is not assuming that the table really is brown.

If you are wondering why this happening, here is a very simple example. You look up at night at the stars, they appear to twinkle, although it is a real experience we have, but we know that the stars aren’t actually twinkling, it is the result of turbulence in the atmosphere. The twinkling is a secondary quality, it is something real we are experiencing, but it’s not actually true of the star itself.

What lies behind this distinction is that Locke actually assumes the metaphysical truth of the atomic theory or the corpuscular account of matter. This is to say that Locke thought that all these physical substances are composed of tiny, insensible atoms. We can’t experience them, but that’s probably what the material substance is composed of. He is assuming that what the objects are composed of don’t have secondary qualities. Atoms don’t have color, sound, but they cause color and sound to appear in our minds.