Lockes Attack on Innate Ideas

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Lockes Attack on Innate Ideas
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Essay Statement of Purpose

• search out the Bounds between Opinion and
  Knowledge (I, i, 3)
• Be cautious in meddling with things exceeding
  the Minds Comprehension (I, i 4)
• magnify the bountiful Author of our Being
• Our Business here is not to know all things, but
  those which concern our Conduct
• we need not be troubled, that some other things
  escape our Knowledge (I, i, 6).

3
Lockes Basic Epistemology

• Human being tabula rasa (blank slate)
• receives sense-impressions
• some of these transformed by Mind into Ideas,
  i.e. objects as we represent them to ourselves
• Ideas represented in language by words
• no Ideas are innate no divine archetypes (cf.
  Platonic ideas/forms)
• Mind is independent of any authority
• All concepts from experience, but not all
  knowledge (e.g. of mathematical propositions)
  from experience.

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Attacks Innatism (Descartes)

• Lockes objections to innate ideas (IIs)
• lack of universal assent IIs not known to
  idiots, children, illiterates (Bk I, ch. ii)
• what was imprinted by Nature, as the Foundation
  and Guide of our Reason, should not need Reason
  to discover it (I, ii, 10)
• Rejects dependence on authority emphasis on
  independent thought, of which Essay is itself an
  example (I, ii, 1)
• Epistemological and political commitment to the
  individual (also foundation of political
  liberalism).

5
Lockes Ideas

• Photographic-type images (Ideas) left in the
  mind by sense-impressions
• primary qualities inhere in objects themselves
  (size, shape, number)
• secondary qualities those we assign (color,
  taste, sound) to sense-impressions, e.g.
  vibration produces sound however, the sound we
  hear is not the vibration itself, but its effect
  on our hearing apparatus.

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Role of language

• Bk II new typology of things capable of being
  named or predicatedI.e. Ideas, not things
• Words signs for Ideas imprecise language needs
  clarification, streamlining
• Final goal to be able to speak with clarity
  about
• Organizing natural things
• Morality (mixed modes)
• Existence of God (but not via the proof advanced
  by Descartes).

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Rejects Aristotelian categories

• all the great Business of Genera and Species
  and their Essences, amounts to no more than this,
  that Men making abstract Ideas, and settling them
  in their Minds, with names annexed to them, do
  thereby enable themselves to consider Things, and
  discourse of them, as it were in bundles, for
  the improvement, and communication of their
  Knowledge, which would advance but slowly, were
  their Words and Thoughts confined only to
  particulars (emph. original III, iii, 20).

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Real vs Nominal Essence

• So how are we going to sort things into kinds so
  that we may speak about them with mutual
  comprehension?
• A name for a kind must excite in the name of the
  hearer the same Idea as it does in the mind of
  the speaker
• The real essence of a chemical or kind of animal
  is not known (III, iii, 15)
• Rather, only its nominal essence is, that is, our
  idea of it expressed in language, by one name for
  each kind of thing (vs. one name for each thing).

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Effect of Lockes View

• Skeptical tradition in biological systematics
  (taxonomy) of the reality of taxonomical
  divisions, e.g. of an alleged natural system of
  classification
• Positive programme of improving classification
  schemes, not on the basis of a purported natural
  classification, but rather on an orderly system
  of nomenclature, such that one name stands for
  one thing.

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Locke and Truth

• Is there any universal truth for Locke?
• Given that each of us has a separate and unique
  set of sense-experiences,
• And there are no known real essences?
• If not, then why does Locke talk about searches
  after Truth in the Epistle?
• What Truth could he have in mind?

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Next time Locke vs Bossuet

• Origins of states
• Role of kings in states
• Govts accountability to people
• Role of God
• Absolute rule vs arbitrary rule