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The Critical Assessment Of Locke And Berkeley Concept Of Knowledge
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1.5 Incorporating Ideas in Perceptual Knowledge Analysis
Descartes was the first to do this, when he claimed to perceive clearly
and distinctly that the essence of matter was different from that of
the thinking self, so that the soul must be immaterial and
hence could potentially survive the body’s dissolution. Locke
followed, giving an argument for the existence of God which depended on
the impossibility of intelligent thought’s arising from the mere
primary qualities of matter. However, Locke ventured the opinion that
God might, if He wished, to add thought to matter (Essay IV
iii 6).20 This provoked a great deal of hostility, since thought
was evidently an ‘active’ power, whereas the mechanical
philosophy that inspired by the concept of inertia encouraged
the idea that matter was purely passive or ‘inert’. Material
things were seen as intricate but lifeless machines, their cogs and
levers static until set in motion by some external power. This
picture would be undermined if a genuinely active power such as
thought, or possibly gravity was to be ascribed to matter itself.
Locke
is certainly an externalist about content: on his view, simple ideas of
perceptions are signs of their regular causes.21 They are signs of
external phenomena in something like the way in which smoke is a sign of
fire. The immediate problem this raises is that although my ideas are
signs of their causes, I do not yet know what any of those causes are
like. If all I ever get is smoke, how do I know what fire is like? Any
causal correlation view will in the end face some version of this
question. How can effects provide you, the subject, with any conception
of what their causes are like? This is where Locke introduces his notion
of ‘resemblance’22: some ideas, the idea of primary qualities,
intrinsically resemble their causes. Those ideas do show what their
causes are like. Ideas of secondary qualities, on the other hand, do not
resemble their causes. They represent the world perfectly accurately,
but they do not show you what the world is like. Now Locke’s notion of
resemblance is generally mocked. One possibility is that ‘resembles’ is
interpreted in representational terms the world is the way represented
in which case it does not get the intended effect; all we have is that
the representations are, one way or another, being interpreted so that
they come out true. Locke is trying to respect the explanatory role of
experience, and merely appealing to it as a bearer of representations
does not acknowledge its role in explaining how we can understand such
representations. Alternatively, ‘resemblance’ requires that the
intrinsic properties of the perceptual idea should be like the intrinsic
properties of the object. That is, the intuitively attractive idea at
this point in the dialectic.
This knowledge from
perception is based on claims that always admit of the
possibility that one might be wrong a margin of error may be assigned
and the less probable the error, the more probable the claim. It
may approach certainty but never achieve certainty. At best, one
might claim to know something without having, at the time, any good
reason to doubt it.
1.6 Lockean Arguments for Direct Realism
Locke, typically, was more modest, acknowledging that even our
scientific understanding of the world is at best ‘probable’
and thus inevitably falls short of the ‘demonstrative’
certainty of mathematics.23Locke on the other hand, will understand
his “way of certainty, by the Knowledge of our own Ideas†(IV.iv.2) to
require this method of dealing with knowledge of the external
world. The distinction of per se and real knowledge thus takes on
enormous significance in Locke’s handling of
existential knowledge. Although our reason might be fallible
and limited, it above all is what elevates us above the other
animals. In this, at least, most early modern philosophers
could agree with Plato, who saw reason as the central function of the
immortal soul, and even Aristotle, who defined man as the one
distinctive ‘rational animal’.
Direct or
naive realism is a theory of perception that holds that our
ordinary perception of physical objects is direct, unmediated
by awareness of subjective entities, and that, in normal perceptual
conditions, these objects have the properties they appear to
have.24 If a fruit tastes sour, the sun looks orange, and the water
feels hot, then, if conditions are normal, the pickle is sour,
the sun orange, and the water hot. Tastes, sounds, and colours are
not in the heads of perceivers; they are qualities of the
external objects that are perceived. Although this theory bears the name
“naiveâ€, and is often said to be the view of the common person, it
need not deny or conflict with scientific accounts of
perception. It need only deny that one's perceptual awareness of
objective properties involves an awareness of the properties of
subjective (mental) intermediaries.25
For Locke, sense-data are copies (“resemblancesâ€) only of the primary
qualitiesof physical things solidity, extension (in space), shape, and
mobility and not of their secondary qualities,26 above all colors,
sounds, smells, and tastes. He took the primary qualities to be
objective and of the kind that concern physical science; and he
considered the secondary ones to be in a sense subjective, not belonging
to physical things but something like representational mental
elements that they cause in us. Colour, for example then,
disappears in the dark, though the physical object causing us to see it
is not changed by the absence of light.
Sense-datum theorists like Lockemight offer several reasons to explain
why we do not ordinarily notice the indirectness of perception. Here
are two important reasons. First, normally what we directly
see, say colors and shapes, roughly corresponds to the
physical objects we indirectly see by means of what we see directly. It
is only when there is an illusion or hallucination that we are forced
to notice a discrepancy between what we directly see and the object
commonly said to be seen, such as a book. Second, the beliefs we form on
the basis of perception are formed spontaneously, not through any
process requiring us to consider sense-data. Above all, we do
not normally infer what we believe about external objects we see
from what we believe about the colors and shapes we directly see.
This is why it is easy to think we “just see†things, directly.
Perceiving is not inferential, and for that reason (perhaps among
others) it is not epistemically indirect, in the sense that knowledge
of external objects or beliefs about them are indirect, in the
sense that they are based on knowledge of sense-data, or beliefs about
them.
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 5]
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