Sorglose Nacht

Overview

Book Three of Locke’s Famous Essay deals with Language. I’ll only outline much of this book very generally, because most of the book is about how words stand for ideas. This means that he goes through simple, complex, relational, etc. ideas again. To me, it just isn’t worth the effort to go through this all again point by point.

Nevertheless, since I didn’t outline every argument in detail, and because this is as far as I am going to take it with him, I’ve included a brief “overview” with a few key points from my notes on the secondary literature about his theory of ideas and his theory of language.

Outline

Chapter I: Words or Language in General

1. God designed humans as sociable - needing other people, and equipped with language, which “was to be the great instrument and common tie of society.”
2. Besides the ability to articulate sounds, humans needed to be able to use these sounds as signs of ideas in order to convey these ideas between minds.
3. Since language would be cumbersome otherwise, it needs to include terms that are general - aka. apply to multiple particular things. Names (nouns) are general if they apply to general ideas, and particular when they stand for particulars.
4. Additionally, we have privative words (nothing, ignorance, barrenness) that relate to positive ideas by signifying their absence.
5. We also have words referring to items far removed from anything of which we have sense-experience. The meanings of many of these words (e.g. imagine, apprehend, adhere, conceive) are borrowed from ideas of sense-perception.
6. Knowledge, which has to do with propositions, has a greater connection with words than perhaps is suspected. In order to investigate this, we have to determine what exactly names are applied to (exactly, what /kinds/ of things - since most nouns are general).

Chapter II: The Signification of Words

1. Since we had to have a way to get ideas out of our heads, we arbitrarily (note: not random or unmotivated) picked sounds to mark the ideas.
2. Words are used to signify ideas in the mind of the speaker (say, his or her representations of stuff in the world), as opposed to directly to stuff out in the world. He thinks our ideas are the medium of access to that worldly stuff and that since this is the case, words can only stand in for them (as opposed to the worldly stuff itself, to which they might still refer, but only indirectly).
3. Each of us uses a word to express the idea that we have associated with it; but obviously we cannot use it to signify a complex idea that we don’t have.
4. Despite the fact that words can only signify ideas in the mind of the speaker, “men in their thoughts” suppose that their words also mark two other things:
   1. Ideas in the mind of the hearer - that is, they presuppose that other literate speakers of the language in question use it in the same “ordinary meaning” way.
   2. Things as they really are - that is, they conflate their mindly ideas of worldly stuff with the worldly stuff itself.
5. Because words because “immediately signify one’s own ideas” the sound of the signifying word can come to evoke the idea it signifies just as strongly as if the relevant kind of object were presented to the senses.
6. Because we often learn words before we have a developed idea of the things they signify, it is easy to direct our thought to the words themselves, rather than the things. And so it happens, Locke cautions, that some people “utter various words just as parrots do.”
7. Each word has its meaning by a purely “arbitrary imposition” - it is ultimately for each individual to decide what idea she will associate with a given word. There are of course good practical reasons for wanting one’s own word-idea pairings to be the same as those of others’ in one’s own society, but this practical concern leaves standing the fact of personal responsibility for the meanings of one’s speech.

Several Remaining Chapter Summaries

1. Chapter iii: Most words are general for practical reasons. If we had names for each particular thing, communication and learning would be slow and difficult. So we generate words for abstract ideas to talk about things in “bundles.”
2. Chapter iv: Names of simple ideas refer (to the ideas). Names of substances refer (to complexes of simple ideas, not to things), but names of mixed modes need not refer (see below). Names of simple ideas are “undefinable,” where names of complex ideas are “definable.”
   1. Note on modes: By contrast with substances, modes are dependent existences - they can be thought of as the ordering of substances. Since these modal ideas are not only made by us but serve as standards that things in the world either fit or do not fit and thus belong or do not belong to that sort, ideas of modes are clear and distinct, adequate and complete. Thus in modes, we get the real and nominal essences combined. (Cf. Uzgalis, John Locke in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
3. Chapter v: Names for abstract ideas (mixed modes) and for relations (those ideas generated without direct reference to the outer world) and are answerable only to internal human interests and needs (which are often normative, evidence for why some words cannot be directly translated from language to language).
4. Chapter vi: Common names for substances stand for “sorts of things” - they are names for complex ideas, and the different common substances are marked out by nominal essences (since we cannot know the real essences of worldly stuff).
   1. Even though the “essences” which we talk about are “made by the mind” and not “by nature”, we are somewhat bound by nature in the case of substances more than in the case of mixed modes. If people fail to conform their ideas to the things they speak of, we’re back at Babel.
5. Chapter vii: In addition to words that signify simple and complex ideas, which function as general or particular terms, Locke knows he needs to account for what he calls “particles,” which are words that signify the logical operations of the mind (syncategorematic terms: the copula, conjunctions, etc.).
6. The remaining chapters discuss the distinction between abstract and concrete terms [viii]; how words may be misused, and how individuals may misuse words [ix and x]; and how such misuse may be overcome [xi].

Overview of Locke

1. Viz. Locke’s empiricism: “There is a big difference between maintaining that sense experience is the source of all our knowledge and maintaining that sense experience is the ultimate basis for the justification of our knowledge: Locke is not an empiricist in the latter sense.” (Hauptli, here)
2. Locke is a pretty serious representationalist, to the point where he thinks that the object of all cognitive activity of the understanding (thinking, perceiving, but not willing, etc.) has as its object an idea/representation.
   1. This has been roundly criticized for both being pointlessly inelegant and for introducing an apparent “veil” whereby it becomes unclear that we can have accurate knowledge of worldly things. Even many Locke apologists tend to grant this charge, and spend time arguing that Locke didn’t actually believe this.
   2. The validity of this criticism relies on the tacit ontological status of Lockean ideas, which seem to cash out to something intentional objects (or cognitive contents). The contrast between an intentional (say) apple, and some real apple is that “an intentional apple need not have any intentional [e.g.] shape whatsoever, even though its associated material apple - its material counterpart, as we might call it - must have some shape or other.” (Chappell, Vere; Locke’s theory of ideas in the Cambridge Companion to Locke)
3. There are two kinds of general ideas in Locke’s theory of ideas - determinate quality-ideas shared between particulars (whiteness) and indeterminate species-ideas that particulars instantiate (women).
   1. Contrast this to the fact that particular ideas are tokens and abstract ideas are types. This means the former cannot be shared, where the latter can.
   2. This addresses some confusion with regard to the fact that you can have particular general ideas. (Aka. you can have a particular “whiteness” idea token of the general “whiteness” type.)
4. This dovetails with Locke’s first controversial claim about language: that the immediate signification of a speaker’s words is always only his own ideas. This claim is basically that when I say “apple,” that stands in for an intentional apple, regardless of whether that intentional apple represents a real apple or not.
   1. To review, Locke’s strategy about language is in the first place to undercut confusion arising from a falsely essentialist view of language, especially classificatory language (see below). Where it gets complex is that he also believes that a true view reveals inherent liabilities in the ideal of perfect communication through language. Although, of course, he is pragmatic enough to know that we have no other medium for communication.
5. In his second (but related) controversial claim about language, Locke attacks the Aristotelian assumption that the classification of natural objects into kinds or species reflects the natural or objective existence of a determinate number of fixed or unchanging “substantial Forms.”
   1. Locke’s doctrine is thus that while our systems of classification must always be based on what we actually know about objects, no matter how much we know we will never find anything that removes the burden of choice from us in constituting these classifications. (Paul Guyer, Locke’s philosophy of language, in the Cambridge Companion to Locke)
6. These two claims clearly suggest a cautionary view of language.

Overview

After the critique of innate notions in Book I of the Essay, Book II sets forth Locke’s theory of ideas.

Because Book II is quite long, these notes focus primarily on what I understand to be the Book’s most salient chapters (with regard to Hume and subsequently to Kant, which is where I’m going). Generally speaking, the focus is on the Locke’s doctrines of simple and complex ideas, of primary and secondary qualities, and finally his still interesting theories of general and personal identity.

Again, these notes are made on a copy of the Essay usefully excerpted by Jonathan Bennett.

Outline

Chapter I: Ideas in General, and their Origin

1. Since it is beyond doubt that we have ideas, the first question is “how do we acquire them?” Locke’s critique of innate ideas will be received more favorably, he thinks, once he shows how ideas can be acquired.
2. Suppose the mind starts out blank, “like white paper.” If this is so, experience can fill it with ideas. Experience has two forms: (1) experience of things outside the mind and (2) experience of the mind reflecting on its internal operations.
   1. Sensation is the vehicle which conveys to the mind things in the world that produce perceptions (ideas).
   2. Reflection is a type of “inner sense.” By reflecting or becoming conscious of the operations of our mind - believing, reasoning, willing, knowing, etc. - we get a distinct set of ideas that are not triggered by sensations of things in the world.
3. Now Locke then challenges the reader to “search into his understanding” and see whether he has any ideas other than those of sensation and reflection.
4. Locke believes that empirical research into child development supports this theory. Children, he believes, develop ideas of qualities by experiencing them in the world, and eventually cataloging them in memory.
5. How many simple ideas a person has depends for ideas of sensation on what variety there is among the external objects that he perceives, and for ideas of reflection on how much he reflects on the workings of his own mind.
6. This reflection requirement is why it is quite late before most children get ideas of the operations of their own minds, and why some people never acquire any very clear or perfect ideas of most of their mental operations. Unlike the objects of external experience, we are not forced to turn inward and reflect on the mechanism of our thoughts (Locke likens them to the parts of a clock - we can experience the clock without ever having a clear idea of how it works).
7. Since perceptions are the same thing as ideas, people have ideas as soon as they can perceive things.
8. For some rationalists, as long as the soul exists, it actually thinks (much like actual extension is coextensive with the existence of the body).
   1. Contrarily, Locke believes that the perception of ideas is to the soul like motion (as opposed to extension) is to the body. That is, it is not something essential to it, but rather something it sometimes does.
   2. It is at least not self-evident, Locke thinks we can all agree, that the soul always thinks.
9. On the contrary, Locke thinks that when we are asleep, the soul isn’t thinking. If the soul is in some state of thought while the body is sleeping, and when that body wakes, it has no consciousness of those states, then the sleeping and unsleeping version of Socrates seem to be two different people (insofar as they have different sets of mental experience, presumably).
   1. Since we know some people sleep without dreaming, and since it is implausible that someone would think of something for several hours and be able to give no account of it, it is likely that during that time, the person is not thinking at all.
   2. He carries on about this at some length, the basic drift being several versions of the argument that, “Nature never makes excellent things for trivial uses or for no use; and it is hardly to be conceived that…the power of thinking…is so idly and uselessly employed, at least a quarter of the time.”
   3. He writes of thoughts that we do sometimes have in our sleep and remember after waking, pointing out that they are mostly “extravagant and incoherent.” He says that his present opponents, faced with this evidence, will have to say that the soul thinks better when employing the body (in waking, i.e.) that when thinking “apart” from the body. He evidently thinks that this is an intolerable conclusion.
   4. The discussion gradually moves to the thesis that the soul thinks only when it has ideas to think with, and allowing him to return to the discussion of how ideas are acquired. So, finally, the chapter circles back.
10. Since there don’t appear to be any ideas in the mind before the senses have conveyed some in, Locke concludes that the understanding arises at the same time as sensation.
    1. In time the mind “comes to reflect on its own dealing with the ideas acquired from sensation, and thereby stores up a new set of ideas” (ideas of reflection).
    2. Note that this means that in getting ideas, the understanding is passive. It cannot refuse the sense data it receives.

Chapter II: Simple Ideas

1. Some ideas are simple. Some are complex. Simple ideas cannot be broken down into smaller component ideas. His examples are sensory: softness, warmth, whiteness, sugariness, etc.
   1. “Nothing can be plainer,” he marks, than the “clear and distinct perception” of simple ideas.
2. Simple ideas are supplied to the mind by sensation and reflection.
   1. Stocked with simple ideas, the understanding can “repeat, compare, and unite them” in an almost infinite variety of ways, thus making new complex ideas.
   2. No one, though, can invent a simple idea - these only come through sensation and reflection - nor force the understanding to destroy those that it has acquired.
3. While it seems sure that there are other possible senses than our five (or six, Locke teases), we, constrained as we are, cannot imagine qualities outside of those delivered by these particular, contingent senses that we actually do have.

Chapter VIII: Some further ideas concerning our simple ideas

1. When an object causes the mind to have a perception, the perception is a positive idea, regardless of whether the quality which is being perceived is positive or negative.
   1. E.g. heat and cold, light and darkness, motion and rest, are all equally clear positive ideas in the mind, despite the fact that one of each pair is (qua the object itself) a mere privation.
   2. To explain this he appeals to the experience of perceiving a shadow: “the shadow of a man consists of nothing but the absence of light, but doesn’t it cause in an observer as clear and positive an idea as does the man whose shadow it is, even though he is bathed in sunshine? And the picture of a shadow is a positive thing.”
   3. Now, if a person can be said to truly see darkness, it is hard to know for sure whether darkness is any more a privation than light is, and thus whether there really are any ideas from a privative cause.
2. For reasons of intelligibility and convenience, it will be useful to distinguish the idea of a thing as it exists in our minds, and the thing itself as it exists in the world.
   1. Call the immediate object of perception an “idea”, and call the power to produce an idea inherent in an object a quality. (E.g. a snowball has whiteness, coldness qualities insofar as it produces white and cold ideas in our minds).
3. There are two kinds of qualities: those that are utterly inseparable from the body, whatever state it is in - primary qualities - and those that that “are really nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities” - secondary qualities.
   1. E.g. An ice cube has the primary qualities solidity, extension, shape, rest, and number, and these produce corresponding simple ideas in us.
   2. Our ice cube also has the secondary qualities of coldness, slipperiness, taste, etc.
   3. A third kind of quality may be called a “power”. Powers are those things by which the primary qualities of a body (e.g. fire) give it a power to affect another body (e.g. wax) in a way as to change the sensible properties of the latter.
4. How do bodies produce ideas in us? Obviously they do it by impact.
   1. But, since external objects are not directly touching our minds, there must be some bodies too small to be seen individually that go from the object to our sense-organ.
   2. We can conceive of these very small particles as conveyances of secondary qualities also (smell, taste, etc.)
   3. But, where the ideas of the primary qualities of bodies resemble them (they exist in the bodies themselves), the ideas of secondary qualities don’t resemble them at all.
   4. “What is sweet, blue, or warm in idea is nothing but the particular size, shape, and motion of the imperceptible parts in the bodies that we call ’sweet’, ‘blue’, or ‘warm’.”
5. Arguments against secondary quality inherence
   1. This only makes sense, too, because while it might be sensible to imagine that an icicle inherently contains the quality “cold”, it seems less sensible to imagine that it contains the quality “pain”, even though I could stab you with one.
   2. Consider a stone that is red and white in the light. Prevent light from reaching the stone, and its colours vanish. Can anyone think that any real alterations are made in the stone by the presence or absence of light?
   3. Imagine that one of your hands is very cold. Now imagine you put both hands in water. The water feels hot to one of your hands (the cold one) and cold to the other.
6. So the qualities that are in bodies are of three sorts.
   1. Primary - the size, shape, number, position, and motion or rest of their solid parts. These are in bodies whether or not we perceive them.
   2. Secondary - the ideas of colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc.. These are the power that a body has, by reason of its imperceptible primary qualities, to operate in a special way on one of our senses.
   3. Powers - the power that a body has, by virtue of the particular set-up of its primary qualities, to change the size, shape, texture or motion of another body so as to make the latter operate on our senses differently from how it did before.
   4. Though the two latter sorts of qualities are merely powers, secondary qualities are often otherwise thought of as akin to primary qualities. However, by understanding one’s self as merely another body on which an object acts, one can easily see that secondary qualities work one’s senses precisely as the powers of one body (fire) work another (wax).
   5. The second sort of qualities “may be called secondary qualities, immediately perceivable,” and the third sort “secondary qualities, mediately perceivable.”

Chapter XXIII: Our complex ideas of substances

1. Our complex ideas of substances
   1. The mind is supplied with many simple ideas, and sometimes, when it perceives several simple ideas together regularly, it presumes that they are one thing (with one name).
   2. Then we “carelessly talk as though we had here one simple idea, though really it is a complication of many ideas together.”
   3. We become acclimated to the idea then that these simple ideas are reliant on some substratum, which we call substance.
   4. Pure substance is thus merely the supposition of an unknown support of the qualities that cause simple ideas.
   5. From this we form a “relative” idea of substance in general - that is, our idea of it consists only in how it relates to other things, it has no non-relational content.
   6. From there, we move to the idea of several substances, which are defined by regularly repeating combinations of simple idea producing substances: man, horse, gold, water.
   7. Hence, Our complex ideas of substances are made up of those simple ideas plus the confused idea of some thing to which they belong and in which they exist.
2. When we think of any particular sort of corporeal substance - a stone, e.g. - although our idea of it is nothing but the collection of simple ideas of qualities that we usually find united in the thing called a stone, we think of these qualities as existing in and supported by some common subject.
   1. We give this support the name “substance,” though we have no clear or distinct idea of what it is.
   2. We are led to think in this way because we can’t conceive how qualities could exist unsupported or with only one another for support.
   3. The same goes for the functions of mind, whose substratum we call spirit. We have an equally foggy idea of spiritual substance as we have of bodily substance.
3. The most perfect idea of any particular sort of substance results from putting together most of the simple ideas that do exist in it.
   1. §7-8 is an apology for the remainder of this section referring to all powers as simple ideas for brevity’s sake. They are not actually simple, Locke cautions, but they are “simpler than the complex ideas of kinds of substance, of which they are merely parts.”
4. Again, recall that our complex ideas of bodily substances are made up of primary, secondary, and (passive and active) powers. (E.g. your complex idea of gold involves the power of being melted without being burned away, etc.)
   1. And again, secondary qualities are also powers, this time powers of affecting us, e.g. gold’s “color” is its power to induce the sensation of that color in us.
   2. As further evidence that these secondary qualities are relational, e.g. the color of something appears quite different to the naked eye as it does under a microscope.
   3. Locke is inclined to believe that God has “suited our organs to the bodies that are to affect them, and vice versa.” E.g. if our senses were much more or less acute, Locke observes, we would be less adapted for survival, despite the additional depth of knowledge we may acquire from such senses.
   4. §13 is a great tangent, in which Locke imagines angels that can “flex” their senses (vary their acuteness of perception). He is somewhat obviously jealous of these conjectural angels, but admits that God must have his reasons.
5. Besides the complex ideas we have of material, sensible substances, we can also form the complex idea of immaterial mental (”spiritual”) subject from the simple ideas we have through our minds’ operations (e.g. thinking, willing, understanding, knowing).
   1. Empirical knowledge is always knowledge of both some stuff in the world and of some mindly processes which cohere into the idea of a thinking subject (Locke: a “spiritual” or “immaterial thinking” being).
   2. Again, we /really/ know about as much about bodies as we do about immaterial spirit.
      1. Bodies uniquely have the basic ideas of (1) holding together parts that are solid and therefore separable, and (2) of causing things to move by colliding with them.
      2. Spirit uniquely has the basic ideas of (1) thinking, (2) will - putting body into motion by thought, and (3) liberty.
      3. Bodies and spirit share the basic ideas of (1) existence, (2) duration, and (3) mobility (note that the mind has to go when the body does, and, Locke notes, also has to leave the body at death).
   3. Neither the idea of body (extended thing) nor that of spirit (thinking thing) is very clear.
      1. Body is “an extended solid substance, capable of transferring motion by impact.”
      2. Spirit is “a substance that thinks, and has a power of making a body move, by willing or thought.”
      3. If anyone says “I don’t know how I think,” I respond that he also doesn’t know how he is extended, that is, how his parts cohere.
6. The next three sections deal with the problem of parts cohering. Namely, we don’t have a compelling hard stop for the regress of progressively smaller particles that we use to explain the coherence of each set of immediately bigger particles. (E.g. we explain water wrt molecules and molecules wrt atoms and atoms wrt … etc.)
   1. §27 addresses the appeal to surrounding pressures: if things get held together by pressure, what’s holding the entire finite universe together?
7. From here, Locke addresses bodies’ other quality, the power of transferring motion by impact (alongside the soul’s power of inducing bodily motion by thought). Locke here suggests that we have no more empirically-derivable knowledge about how bodies transfer motion from one to another than we do about how minds transfer motion to bodies.
   1. In fact, minds moving bodies is actually more comprehensible than other bodies doing it, because we intuit that minds have exclusive claim on the active power of moving, and objects on the passive power.
   2. Since minds (created spirits) are not separate from matter, they are both active and passive. God is totally active.
   3. In conclusion: Sensation convinces us that there are solid extended substances, and reflection that there are thinking ones. Experience assures us that one has a power to move body by impact, the other by thought. “That much is sure, and we have clear ideas of it; but beyond those we cannot go.”
   4. So, in sum, “we have as much reason to be satisfied with our notion of immaterial spirit as with our notion of body, and of the existence of the one as well as of the other.”
8. Finally, it may be hard to conceive how thinking could occur without matter, but it’s at least as hard to conceive how matter could think.
   1. We can build up an idea of God as infinitely powerful, wise, etc. through a general procedure that involves taking simple ideas from the operations of our own minds and from exterior things and enlarging them to infinity. (E.g. I know something. From that, I conjecture that I can know twice as many things. And then twice as many again. Etc. And the same way for magnitude/perfection of knowledge.)
   2. “It is infinity - joined to existence, power, knowledge, etc. - that makes our complex idea of God … God may be simple and uncompounded, still our only idea of him is a complex one whose parts are the ideas of existence, knowledge, power, happiness, etc. - all this infinite and eternal.”
   3. §36 brings the angels back, suggesting that we can imagine them as posessing qualities to a degree and extent between those of ours and God. Angels also provide, he thinks, further evidence that we are limited to knowledge by reflection and sensation - we cannot imagine how to communicate or know in a way that is not embodied.
9. The existence, configuration, and genesis of our ideas of substances make three things evident:
   1. All our ideas of substances are collections of simple ideas, along with the supposition of some unclarified substratum (substance).
   2. All of these simple ideas are received either by sensation or by reflection.
   3. Most of the simple ideas that make up our complex ideas of substances are really only ideas of powers, however apt we are to interpret them as ideas of positive qualities.

Chapter XXVII: Identity and Diversity

1. Leading up to xxvii, Locke had been talking about our understanding of various relational properties (duration, place, etc.) Now he introduces identity, in which we compare something at time t1 with itself at t2.
   1. Two things can’t exist in the same place at the same time, nor can one thing exist in two places at once.
2. We have ideas of three types of substances: God, finite intelligences, and bodies.
   1. God is without beginning, eternal, unalterable, and everywhere; and so there can be no doubt concerning his identity.
   2. Finite spirits and bodies have determinate times and places of beginning to exist. Each one’s relation to it’s beginning time and place will determine its identity for as long as it exists.
   3. While we can conceive of overlap of all three kinds (e.g. God, a person, and some matter can occupy the same space), we can’t conceive that two of any single kind can occupy the same place at the same time.
   4. Modes and relations ultimately depend upon substances and therefore the identity and diversity of each of them will be determined in the same way as the identity of particular substances.
   5. Finally questions of identity and diversity don’t arise for things whose existence consists in a succession of events, such as actions (thought, movement) - these are ephemeral, and don’t have the requisite parts for identity, namely substantiality.
3. Hence, the principle of individuation is “existence itself,” by which a being is tied to an unsharable particular place and time.
   1. While this seems straightforward qua simple substances, it seems equally clear that you can’t just linearly apply it to complex ones. E.g. a living creature is self-identical throughout periods of fatness and thinness.
   2. This imples that such an identity doesn’t depend on merely accounting for the same particles at different times.
4. So, for one mass of matter (an oak tree): where the mass of matter is merely a cohesion of particles, the oak tree is the disposition of particles such that they consist in an individual life.
5. If we imagine a watch whose parts are “repaired, added to, or subtracted from, by a constant addition or separation of imperceptible parts, with one common life, it would be very much like the body of an animal.” The unique bit of animality being that motion comes from within, not without.
6. If you don’t conceive identity as the participation of some matter in a unified life, your only recourse to an intuitive concept of identity is by the soul.
   1. But if you do this, then you run the risk of leaving open the possibility that a single soul has inhabited many men over time (e.g. that Socrates, Pilate, and St. Augustine are the same man).
7. So there are at least three different types of identities: “it is one thing to be the same substance, another the same man [e.g. animal], and a third the same person.” (Assuming these three are different ideas.)
   1. To be clear, although man is an animal, the idea of a “rational animal” is wrong. There’s a long story about a rational parrot here. The point is that even if you believe there was a rational parrot, it’s still a parrot, not a man, and hence, rationality is not necessarily exclusively criterial for man-ness.
8. So much for the identity of a unified life (animal/man identity). Now, what about “same person”?
   1. Well, what’s a person? Locke thinks it is a “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing at different times and places.”
   2. The enabling faculty for this is consciousness: “Consciousness always accompanies thinking, and makes everyone to be what he calls ’self’ and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things; in this alone consists personal identity…”
9. While it may be reasonable to question whether (e.g. you or I) are self-identitical thinking substances (res cogitans) - e.g.when we are asleep, or focused on the present moment, or forgetful - this is not the same question as whether we are self-identical as persons.
   1. What makes a person self-identically him- or herself is his or her selfsame consciousness, regardless of whether the consciousness is tied to one substance (res cogitans, again) throughout.
   2. The classic appeal to amputation: if I cut off your hand, you’re still the same person, hence, personal identity isn’t constituted substantially.
   3. If you hold that thought is instantiated immaterially, you can appeal to a sameness of immaterial substance as criterial for personal identity, but these immaterialists have to explain why personal identity /couldn’t/ be preserved through a change of immaterial substance (since, by analogy, animal identity - unity of an individual life - can be preserved through a change of material substance).
   4. Either way, until we have a clearer idea of the nature of thinking substances, “we had better assume that such changes of substance within a single person never do in fact happen, basing this on the goodness of God. Having a concern for the happiness or misery of his creatures, he won’t transfer from one (substance) to another that consciousness that draws reward or punishment with it.”
   5. Locke finally dismisses reincarnation theories: his thought experiment involves showing that while it is logically possible that you and Nestor share a soul, you can’t really conceive of yourself and Nestor as one identical person.
10. Let’s now agree that the some sort of non-stringent body identity settles the “man” question. Hence, the same immaterial substance or soul does not by itself necessarily make the same man. Although this is the case, it is clear that consciousness unites actions into the same person, and thus is the basis of selfhood.
11. Personal identity is the basis for the justice of reward and punishment.
    1. “…to punish Socrates awake for something done by sleeping Socrates without Socrates awake ever being conscious of it would be as unjust as to punish someone for an action of his twin brother’s merely because their outsides were so alike that they couldn’t be distinguished.”
    2. If one man could have distinct disconnected consciousnesses at different times, that same man would be different persons at different times.
    3. This is intuitively understood by the fact that someone’s insanity can legally disprove their guilt: we don’t punish the sane man for what the madman did; they are treated as two persons.
    4. Meanwhile, we sometimes justly punish sober men for their bad actions while drunk, Locke thinks, because while their bad actions are proved against them, their lack of consciousness of those actions can’t be proved for them. It’s a sort of rough and ready juridical heuristic.
12. Whatever substance there is, and whatever it is like, there is no person without consciousness.
    1. On the question of contingent fact, “the more probable opinion is that this consciousness is tied to, and is a state of, a single immaterial substance.”
13. “Person” is a legalistic name for a self which applies only to active, thinking beings capable of law, happiness and misery.
    1. Through consciousness, this personality is concerned and accountable for its past and present actions.
    2. That concern and ownership derives from a fundamental concern for happiness which necessarily accompanies consciousness.
14. Thus, it appears that the obscurity that people have found in matters of identity has arisen from the sloppy thinking rather than from any obscurity in things themselves. To wit:
    1. Any substance that begins to exist must necessarily be the same substance so long as it continues to exist.
    2. Any complex of substances that begins to exist must during the existence of its component parts be the same.
    3. Any mode that begins to exist is throughout its existence the same.
15. The general point is that the complex idea we use when classifying a thing as being of a certain kind also determines what it is for a thing of that kind to continue in existence.
    1. Suppose a man is a “rational spirit”: then it is easy to know what is the same man, namely the same spirit - whether or not it is embodied.
    2. Suppose a man is a “rational spirit vitally united to a body with a certain structure”: then such a rational spirit will be the same man as long as it is united to such a body, though it needn’t always be the same body.
    3. Suppose a man is a “vital union of parts in a certain shape”: as long as that vital union and shape remain in a compound body, remaining the same except for a turnover in its constituent particles, it will be the same man.

Overview

Book I of Locke’s Famous Essay is a sustained argument against the rationalist notion of innate ideas. These notes are made on a copy of the Essay usefully excerpted by Jonathan Bennett. Welcome to British Empiricism.

Outline

Chapter I: Introduction

1. Since the understanding is (a) the distinctive feature of humans, and (b) not self-critiquing, it is useful - if difficult - to inquire into it.
2. This book, then, will inquire into the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, as well as the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent.
3. It is useful to know where the line gets drawn between opinion and knowledge. This entails knowing just how confident we should be that our opinions are right. The method:
   1. Find the origin of ideas and how the understanding “comes to be equipped with them”.
   2. Show what knowledge the understanding has by means of these ideas.
   3. Finally, briefly take a look at faith and opinion.
4. The therapeutic aim of this project is to “to be peacefully reconciled to ignorance of things that turn out to be beyond the reach of our capacities.”
5. This should not distress us: God has given humans everything they need to discover how to thrive in this life and how to find their way to a better one (by forming of virtuous characters).
6. Scoping our mental powers is useful in setting our expectations neither too low nor too high.
7. It’s a bit of hubris to attempt to plumb deep concepts like being in the way we have until now (presumably this is a reference to Descartes). By creating our knowledge boundaries we can have a more satisfying and realistic kind of philosophical discourse.
8. Heretofore, “idea” means “whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks” - first up: how do ideas come to mind?

Chapter II: No innate principles in the mind, and particularly no innate speculative principles

1. Locke does not believe that there are innate ideas, and this chapter will present his reasons for that belief.
2. People often evidence the idea of innate ideas by reference to putatively universal speculative/theoretical and practical principles.
3. This universal consent does not necessarily imply innate ideas, especially if there are other candidate explanations.
4. Worse still, there is no universal consent in the first place.
5. “Children and idiots” do not subscribe to putatively universal speculative (e.g. logical) principles. Since this is the case, it seems clear that human brains tout court don’t merely arrive with some “imprinted” principles.
   1. Even those who think that all knowledge is acquired believe the capacity for knowledge is innate.
6. To avoid this problem, philosophers often suggest that humans come to these truths when they arrive at the use of reason.
7. That claim must in turn mean either that (a) as soon as people come to the use of reason they also automatically arrive at these so-called innate truths, or that (b) reason helps humans arrive at them.
8. If the claim is (b), then what they seem to mean is that “whatever truths reason can enable us to know for certain are all innate.”
   1. This eradicates the distinction between maxims (innate or - I think - what Kant will call analytic truths) and theorems (non-innate or - again, I think - synthetic truths).
9. The idea that “Reason shows us those truths that have been imprinted” amounts to saying that “the use of reason enables a man to learn what he already knew.”
10. In short, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to suppose that all of reason’s flailing and floundering should be needed to discover something that was imprinted on us by nature.
11. It is therefore false that reason could assist us in knowing innate truths, if it did, that would prove that they are not innate.
12. On the other hand, if the claim [from 7, above] is (a), then it is both false and frivolous.
    1. It’s false because we can empirically observe the emergence of reason before the approval of so-called innate maxims.
    2. It’s frivolous because there’s no justification for believing it unless you’re deeply invested in its utility as an argument for innate truths.
13. All this adds up to entail that maxims may be assented to after the emergence of reason, but this is true of all knowable truths, and thus has no power to cordon off innate from non-innate truths.
14. (§§14-16) How can x’s innateness be derived from the premise that a person first knows x when he comes to be able to reason? Why not derive something’s innateness from its being first known only when a person comes to be able to speak? (Or to walk? to sing?)
    1. There is some truth to the thesis that basic general maxims are not known to someone who doesn’t yet have the use of reason.
    2. He has alternative to innateness for how this works. His theory rests on the assumption - which he doesn’t declare until later - that to think a general maxim one must have general ideas, and that to express a general maxim one must be able to use general words.
15. Some people have tried to secure universal assent to so-called innate ideas by saying that they are generally assented to as soon as they are proposed, and the terms they are proposed in are understood.
16. But can prompt assent given to a proposition upon first hearing it and understanding the terms really is a certain mark of an innate principle? If so, there are apparently a lot of innate principles (about number, physics, metaphysics). Locke’s point is that self-evidence does not imply innateness.
17. There is good evidence that we can’t specific principles can’t be accepted on the strength of general ones, as the former often empirically precede the latter.
18. There doesn’t seem to be a reason for connecting usefulness to innateness, and in any case Locke plans to question whether the more general maxims are of any great use.
19. Put another way - if these putatively innate principles were really innate, why would they need to be proposed in order to be assented to?
20. Locke is unsympathetic to the suggestion that the knowledge of innate principles is implicit knowledge (which would be made explicit upon their being proposed).
21. The idea that a proposition counts as innate if it is assented to when first proposed and understood looks plausible only because it assumes that when the proposition is proposed and made to be understood, nothing new is learned.
    1. The idea that these truths are taught might seem objectionable.
    2. But in truth, they are taught: They have learned the terms and their meanings, neither of which was born with them; and they have acquired the relevant ideas, which were not born with them any more than their names were.
    3. Locke then presents his account of what happens when someone assents to a self-evident proposition. We’ll come back to this in detail in Book 2.
22. Since the putatively innate principles are not universal, they are not, in fact, innate.
23. (§§25-26) It may be objected that Locke doesn’t really know what the thoughts of infants are like. But he thinks that we do.
24. The innatist must allow that the truths innately implanted in our minds don’t always present themselves to our consciousness, and he is forced to explain that this happens because our innately given intellectual possessions may be “corrupted by custom or borrowed opinions, by learning and education.”
    1. However, if this was the case, those innate truths “should appear fairest and clearest” in the minds of “children, idiots, savages, and illiterate people,” yet we find no trace of them in such people.

Chapter III: No innate practical principles

1. It is even more obvious that no practical principles are universally assented to than that no speculative principles are, as none of them are even self-evident.
2. Further, it is empirically clear that no moral principles enjoy universal assent. The closest examples are justice and the keeping of contracts, which criminals flaunt.
3. You may want to say that criminals accept those principles even though they don’t act on them. Locke argues that it is “very strange and unreasonable” to suppose that there are innate practical principles that show up in what men think but don’t affect their behavior, because what makes a principle practical (rather than speculative) is its bearing upon action.
4. Another reason for doubting that there are any innate practical principles is that the truth of all these moral rules depends on some underlying rules from which they must be deduced; and this could not be so if they were innate, or even if they were merely self-evident.
5. Exempli gratia, a Christian, a Hobbsean, and a Greek philosopher would all give different reasons to justify the widely accepted moral principle that one ought not to lie.
6. This doesn’t detract from the moral and eternal obligation that these rules evidently have. It does show, though, that the outward acknowledgment men pay to them (in their words) does not prove that they are innate principles.
7. Further, this verbal justification may simply be lip service. If we take people’s actions to show what they think, “we shall find that they have no such inner respect for these rules, and are not so sure they are bound by them.”
8. You might urge that people’s consciences help to prevent them from breaking the rules. But “if conscience is a proof of innateness, contraries can be innate principles; because sometimes men will conscientiously promote what others conscientiously avoid.”
9. Locke inclines to believe that if moral rules were innate, people wouldn’t break them. To the contrary, he gives quite a few examples of people doing unpleasant things.
10. History teaches us that practical principles are not universal. Those that seem to be are pragmatic - they hold society together, and subsequently are not taken to hold between societies (e.g. murder is forbidden intra-society but war is sanctioned).
11. It may be objected that a rule’s being broken doesn’t prove that it is not known. This is true, but it seems inconceivable that entire societies could defy a universal rule in speech and action. Locke insists that for any practical rule, there is an example of this.
12. Practical rules, though, may not be propositions at all (and therefore incapable of being true or false), but rather commands.
    1. To make it capable of being assented to as true, we must turn it into a proposition (e.g. “It is the duty of parents to preserve their children).
    2. But duty cannot be understood without reference to law; and a law cannot be known or supposed without even more supporting infrastructure.
13. Locke now sees it safe to conclude that “no principle is innate if it is in any place generally allowed to be broken.”
    1. If a practical principle were innate, men would have to know that it was set by God who would certainly punish breaches of it very severely, and someone who knows that about a law will certainly be deterred from breaking it.
    2. The last (unrelated) point is that denying innate laws (”something imprinted on our minds”) does not preclude the existence of laws of nature (”something we can come to know of through the proper use of our natural faculties”), in which Locke believes.
14. For all the talk about innate moral laws, no one seems to be able to provide a clear catalog of them, which is in itself counter-intuitive.
15. (§§15-19) Here Locke discusses a writing by Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
    1. After completing the previous sections, he reports, someone told him that Lord Herbert had given a list of innate principles and an account of the criteria by which they can be classified as innate.
    2. Locke says that not all the items on the list satisfy all the criteria, and that they are satisfied by plenty of things not on the list. Some are criticized as vague or ambiguous, some as trivial, etc.
16. There’s often an appeal made to universal moral laws as those laws which are universally agreed upon by “men of right reason” (who are always the men speaking at the time). Locke disdains this line, calling it a “short cut to infallibility” and an “absurd approach.”
17. §§21-6 discuss the absolute confidence that people have in the truth of certain doctrines - different doctrines in different societies. Locke offers to explain this phenomenon, largely in terms of early education.
    1. §23: Since the normative principles of an individual in formation are the oldest thing in his or her mind, and since the individual in question can’t remember the source of them, it is natural to attribute them to God or nature.
    2. §24: Everyone has some revered principles, “on which he bases his reasonings, and by which he judges of truth and falsehood, right and wrong.”
    3. §25: Social pressure stops people from examining the revered propositions critically.
    4. §26: The effects of habituation allow us to fancy that the products ouf our education and the fashions of his country (however absurd) are innate practical principles.
18. This explanation is the only one that can explain why so many conflicting propositions are thought to be innate.

Chapter IV: Other considerations about innate principles

1. If the ideas that make up putatively innate truths are not themselves innate, then the propositions made up of them can neither be so.
2. If we “attentively consider new-born children,” we can supposedly empirically tell that they don’t have preformed ideas, but rather acquire them through experience.
3. If there are any innate principles, then surely this is one: It is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be.
   1. But can anyone think, or will anyone say, that impossibility and identity are two innate ideas?
4. Identity is itself a philosophically problematic concept, and this evidences that the idea isn’t “clear and obvious” to us.
5. These questions aren’t trivial, since the actions they motivate are those by which we will be judged by God.
6. “The whole is bigger than the part” can neither be innate, as the ideas of whole and part themselves cannot be innate.
7. That God is to be worshiped is a great practical truth, but it can’t be innate unless our ideas of God and worship are as well.
8. It seems that the closest candidate for an innate idea is “God,” but we know that both the ancients and those of other cultures (Locke appeals in some detail to Brazil and China) don’t seem to have this idea.
   1. Even in Europe, if the fear of legal or social consequences didn’t tie up people’s tongues, many more people would proclaim their atheism openly.
9. Even if all mankind, at all times and places, had a notion of God, this would not be good evidence that the idea was innate.
   1. Since “the visible marks of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of the creation that any rational person who thinks seriously about them must conclude that they are the work of a God,” this belief could then spread through the world through communication amongst humans, so that the (supposed) universality of the idea of God could be explained in epidemiological terms (so to speak) rather than through innateness.
10. Locke thinks it a very good argument to say: “The infinitely wise God has made it so; and therefore it is best.” But, he says, we put too much confidence of our own wisdom if we argue: “I think it best, and therefore God has made it so.”
    1. Thus it is futile to argue that God has innately imprinted our minds with an idea of him·
11. Here again Locke insists that if there were an innate notion, it would be God, but that our empirical evidence of children’s faith development does not support this conclusion.
    1. “The truest and best notions men have of God were not (innately) imprinted, but acquired by thought and meditation and a right use of their faculties.”
    2. In §18, Locke engages in a less than pertinent discussion of substance. He will develop this at length in II.xxiii.
    3. He then recapitulates some of his earlier anti-innateness arguments, before introducing a new one:
12. The memory argument
    1. Any ideas we have must be stored in memory.
    2. To access them thus means to remember them.
    3. Remembering means perceiving an idea with a consciousness that has perceived it before.
    4. If innate ideas are then in memory, they can be revived without any impression from outside.
    5. Locke thinks that the possibility of this is dubious.
13. Since God is infinitely wise, it is hard to see what reason would God have to inscribe on the mind of man messages that are no clearer than (or can’t be distinguished from) messages that came there later?
14. §22 is an admonition that we have to work for knowledge, and not expect it to be handed to us on a plate,
15. §23 suggests that Locke’s aim in disrupting the foundations of knowledge has been his quest for truth, and continues with a long attack on the practice of basing one’s beliefs on what authorities say rather than on one’s own investigations.
16. The idea of innate ideas, Locke thinks, is lazy and inculcates laziness in its adherents.
17. The rest of the book intends to show how the understanding comes to knowledge of universal truths, if not by innate ideas.