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The Critical Assessment Of Locke And Berkeley Concept Of Knowledge
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Since all such experience is of particular sensations or feelings,
the ideas we derive from these are particular also. General ideas
(such as the idea of redness in general) then get generated from ideas
of particular instances. For example, the colour of different
red flowers by ‘abstraction’, in which the differing details for
example, the varying brightness are ignored, and notice taken only of
what is common to all, leaving an ‘abstract idea’ which is able to
represent any instance whatever.
Locke finds that experiences in the
world are the vehicles of content. But once we have reached this point,
it is natural to wonder whether experience is really playing any
essential role in the account of content 10. Surely, anything could
serve as a reliable sign of its regular cause. According to Locke, where
veridical sensation results in sensitive knowledge, our ideas represent
the external world “they represent to us in things,†having
a “real conformity†with “things without us†11.
On a popular
reading, the notion of representation at play in veridical sensation
involves conformity of resemblance.12 We may then deduce that our ideas
are caused by the physical substance; all ideas are mediated by your
senses; what causes the ideas is the physical substance that
never directly has contact with. While our mental experience
is rich with both primary and secondary qualities, the objective world
can only be said to possess the primary properties while
secondary properties would name subjective experiences only,
and not the stuff of serious scientific inquiry or discourse pertaining
to objective truth.
However, what Locke intends to relay is somewhat
a notion of what we perceive through our five senses. This is the
origin of perceptual errors that seem inevitable. Indeed, some of our
judgments in physical world are based on our sensory perceptual, they
cannot be with certainty as perceptual errors recur perpetually
especially in the perception with primary substance. The primary and
secondary qualities are differentiated in the ideas that they produce in
our mind. These qualities are the power the power that objects have to
produce ideas in our mind. The primary qualities of objects will then be
the producer of those ideas that resembles the corresponding qualities
in the objects that caused us to have those ideas. On the other hand,
the secondary qualities of objects produce ideas that do not resemble
the corresponding qualities in the object that produced those ideas in
our mind.
1.4 Understanding Knowledge of Objects in Locke
The
way you decide whether or not a belief is a good belief, that is to
say, the way you decide whether a belief is likely to be a genuine case
of knowledge is to see whether it is derived from sense experience, to
see, for example, whether it bears certain relations to your
sensations.13 Just what these relations to our sensations might be is a
matter we may leave open, for present purposes. The point is that Locke
felt that if a belief is to be credible, it must bear certain relations
to the believer's sensations but he never told us how he
happened to arrive at this conclusion. This, of course, is the view
that has come to be known as “empiricism.†For Locke there are limits
to human understanding and it is important to find out what they are.
Fairly certain knowledge is the most reasonable goal of perceptual
knowledge and notabsolutecertainty.14The empiricists were looking for a
construct of knowledge within the framework of sense data whose aim was
to develop a probable hypothesis about the world. However, three major
challenges are inevitable;
First, we would deduce the high
probability of perceptual error and perceptual relativity, as regular
features of everyday life. It is thus unlikely that Locke never
noticed their existence. Second, the nature of Locke’s project in the
Essay suggests that he must have thought about perceptual error at some
point. Locke’s over- arching goal is to delineate “the original,
certainty, and extent of human knowledge; together, with the grounds
and degrees of belief, opinion, and assentâ€15. It is surely relevant to
that project to examine the circumstances under which we can arrive at
true beliefs based on perception and the ways we can tell when we are in
such truth- conducive circumstances. Someone who attempts to
ground all knowledge and probability in the ideas received through sense
should, surely, be concerned with cases where sensory ideas are
misleading or false. Third, the tradition Locke wrote and was
educated in was intermittently obsessed with perceptual error. Such
concern was primarily, although by no means exclusively, connected with
the alleged skeptical implications of such error. Works ranging
from Descartes’ 1st Meditation to Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of
scepticismdiscussed standard skeptical tropes involving perceptual
error, relativity and disagreement: the straight stick that looks bent
in water, for instance, and the water that feels warm to one hand and
cool to the other.16 Indeed, Locke himself uses a number of
these traditional examples to illustrate or develop17 the distinction
between primary qualities and secondary qualities.18
Thus, there is
at least, a good reason to think Locke must have considered error and
its significance. However, an argument on why Locke might not have
considered it comes to mind. Locke might not discuss perceptual error
because he thought that doing so would lead to a form of skepticism that
is unprofitable and an unworthy subject of philosophical
reflection. It is often said that Locke is simply not interested in
skepticism, whether of the Pyrrhonian or the Cartesian variety, or that
he does not take it seriously.19 Thus, he might think that we should
avoid those philosophical topics that give the skeptic a way in.
However, it is simply not true that any attempt to address perceptual
error would be fodder for the sort of skepticism about the external
under Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment about the qualities of things.
One might instead, for instance, respond to perceptual error by
providing a detailed account of the way that reason can
correct the senses or that the senses can correct each other.
Alternately, one might discuss perceptual error in strictly naturalistic
terms.
Thus, it is implausible that Locke does not discuss
perceptual error because he thought any attempt to do so would lead him
towards skepticism about the external world or the qualities of the
bodies in it.
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 5]
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