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The Critical Assessment Of Locke And Berkeley Concept Of Knowledge
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On a plausible sense-datum view, I know that
the field is green through having rectangular green sense-data, not
through inference from propositions about them.27It is apparently
true that, as a sense-datum view may allow, perception is not
inferential or epistemically indirect in the way inferentiality
would imply. But, for sense-datum theorists, perception is
nonetheless causally and objectually indirect. The perceived
object is presented to us via another object, though not by way of a
premise. These theories are causally indirect, then, because they take
perceived physical objects to cause sensory experience, say of
colors and shapes, by causing the occurrence of sense-data, with
which we are directly (and presumably non-causally) acquainted in
perceptual experience. Perception is also objectually
indirect because we perceive external things, such as fields, through
our acquaintance with other objects, namely sense-data.
Roughly, we perceive external things through perceptual acquaintance
with internal things. Despite the indirectness of perception
in these two respects, a sense datum theorist need not deny that we
normally do not use information about sense-data to arrive at
perceptual beliefs inferentially, say by an inference from my directly
seeing a grassy, green rectangular expanse to the conclusion that a
green field is before me. Ordinarily, when I look around, I
form beliefs about the external environment and none at all
about my sensory experience. That experience causes my perceptual
beliefs, but what they are about is the external things I
perceive. It is when the colors and shapes do not correspond to
the external object, as when a circle appears elliptical, that it seems
we can understand our experience only if we suppose that the
direct objects of sensory experience are internal and need not
match their external, indirect objects. His representative realism
states that there is an external world that exists independently of
us (that’s the realism part), and we are only indirectly aware of
this world, by means of mental representations (that’s the
representative part).These representations are generated by
your sensory systems, and may be accurate or inaccurate.
1.7 Locke’s Argument on Ideas
Whatsoever
the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception,
thought ,or understanding, that I call idea…28
That is,
Locke believes that in “perception, thought, and understanding,†in all
forms of conscious awareness, what we are “immediately aware†of are
always/only ideas in our minds. The only immediate objects of
thoughts, sensations, perceptions, etc. (of any conscious
experience) are ideas or sensations, that is, things that exist only in
our minds. This is in furtherance of Locke’s dualist stand
that mind and matter are two distinct kinds of substances they have
nothing in common. Locke’s own view, we can only think about ideas.
So, if we can think of material substance at all, it must be an idea.
So, material substance is an idea that is not an idea.
Locke, believe that there is a world (the material world) that exists
independently of whether or not any conscious mind experiences
it.29 These forms of dualism imply that our knowledge of
physical or material things is derived from our knowledge of the
mental or psychical duplicates of physical or material things.
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