Locke's life and works are placed in their historical context to help the student understand the importance of the essay in his time. The book assumes no prior knowledge of Locke's work and only a basic grounding in philosophy.
J.LOWE July 1994
Chapter 6, on Locke's theory of action, is placed after an examination of his views on substance and identity - contrary to the order of these topics in the essay itself - because I think it is useful to be aware of Locke's views -t about persons and personal identity before discussing his concept of personal agency. Portions of the Essay quoted within the text are taken from the now standard 1975 Clarendon edition of Peter H. Nidditch, and their location in the Essay is indicated as follows: '2.8.13'.
Introduction
Locke’s life and work
Without such communication we could not hope for mutual understanding, given Locke's view of the origins of our ideas in widely varying individual experiences. All in all, then, there is no point in trying to simplistically locate the position of Locke's Essay within the history of philosophy.
Ideas
Indeed, it may have been too difficult, in the sense that it may have prejudiced him against some legitimate ones. First, we must be clear about the precise nature of the nativist position.
Perception
Here it is worth briefly mentioning the role of the retinal image in visual perception. Precisely this, I think: there is the problem of the ontological status of “ideas” as this view conceives of them.
Substance
Aristotle saw the human mind or soul as nothing more than the 'form' of the human body, rather as a separable thing in its own right (although some passages of De anima in which he speaks of the thinking or rational part of the human soul presents a different view). Locke's extensive discussion of the subject of substance in the Essay is highly complex and seemingly inconsistent in places - although I think it is ultimately possible to unravel a more or less coherent account from what he says. However, Locke's problem is not, I think, simply an artifact of the incorrect 'inherence' model of the substance/quality relation.
He claims that in the "proper original sense" of the word "essence" it denotes "the very being of anything, by which it is, which is a definition which is, it must be admitted, far from being apparent). But we must distinguish this claim both from the stronger Berkeleian claim that the notion of any kind of mind-independent "external" world is unintelligible and also from his specific objections to the material doctrine. We can also question the assumption Hume's apparent that the only conception of the substance/quality distinction offered is the seriously flawed one offered by the 'being' account.
Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that the term 'matter' is ambiguous between meaning 'what a thing is made of' and meaning 'thing of a certain kind'. But such a view of the ultimate constituents of physical reality is now believed to be incorrect. Rather, these qualities are best conceptualized as 'the way the ball is' - literally how. modifications' or 'ways' of the ball.
Identity
An implication of the relativistic view is that it can make sense to say that an individual thing x is the same F as an individual thing y and yet that x is not the same G as y: for example, that A.B. In the state of living beings their identity does not depend on a mass of the same particles; but on something else. This statement corresponds to that of the 'absolutist' concept of identity mentioned in the previous section, according to which one and the same individual thing cannot apply to it two different kinds of terms which - like 'oak tree' and 'package of matter' - are different have criteria of identity related to their use.
And yet, on Locke's account, my soul is not the same person as me because I can take on a new one. Sometimes he implies that they are persons who do or do not 'take the same consciousness', and consequently are or are not identical (2.27.19). On this view, 'participation in the same consciousness' is a relationship between a person identified in one way and the same person identified in another, such as—to use Locke's example, Socrates waking up' and 'Socrates sleeping' (if indeed these partake of the same consciousness and are therefore the same person).
Here 'participation in the same consciousness' is better understood, it seems, in terms of Difficulties for Locke's account of personal identity. In these, as I have just noted, 'participating in the same consciousness' seems to be understood by Locke as a way of speaking of memory. After all, with this revision, Locke has the right to claim that the old general is the same person as the boy.
Action
Not only do I not think that Locke considered a causal view of the role of the will to be absurd. Clearly, Locke considered an involuntary act to be one in which no volition on the part of the agent was causally operative (2.21.5). Such actions as these are still voluntary on Locke's account (though arguably excusable) because they involve the involvement of the agent's will.
Let me say at the outset that I would agree with this objection if it were directed against the proposal that what causes a will is the agent's corresponding action: that, for example, A's will to raise his arm causes A's voluntary action of raising his arm causes arm. It is true that in specifying the intentional content of A's will in terms of it being a will to raise his arm, we are implicitly referring to the event that is the intended 'result' of the will - the event where A's arm goes up. . And indeed it seems to be a proposition that Locke would readily accept as representing precisely the kind of situation illustrated by his example of the man in the locked room (an example to which I will return shortly).
The answer is that Locke's alleged examples do not in fact serve to illustrate his thesis that 'Voluntary ... is not opposed to Necessary', interpreted in the light of his own definitions of the relevant concepts. Locke's exploration of the problem - or, as he sometimes seems to view it, the pseudo-problem - of 'free will' in the essay is long and winding, seemingly inconsistent in places, and ultimately somewhat inconclusive. Another important feature of the intentional content of volition is what we might call its self-referential character.
Language
First, they assume that their Words are signs of ideas in the minds of other people with whom they communicate.... Seen in this light, Locke's point about words properly signifying only ideas in the speaker's mind makes perfectly good sense: it is true that a person can only use words—mostly, at least—to express thoughts. own. The difficulty can be made more vivid by reference to the notorious 'inverted spectrum' problem.
The first point to be made in response to this objection is that Locke clearly did not actually think that success in communication requires the production in the mind of the hearer of ideas similar to those in the mind of the speaker. All he has to say is that communication is successful when the idea produced in the mind of the hearer is correspondingly connected—in a sense I will explain in a moment—to the idea of which a given word is a sign in the mind of the speaker. . The conflict with the first law, of course, almost seems to be admitted by Locke in a famous passage in which he speaks of the general idea of a triangle as one.
The critic cheerfully asks: what is the meaning of the sentence 'The cat is not on the mat'. But then how would the meaning of that sentence differ from the meaning of the sentence 'The dog is not on the mat'. Locke is certainly right to suggest that this is one of the most valuable services that language provides.
Knowledge
At the same time, it creates a certain tension with his own rejection of the doctrine of innate ideas (see Chapter 2). Second, all our complex ideas, except those of substances which are archetypes of the mind's own creation... cannot lack any correspondence necessary to true knowledge. Locke was too modest in his claim to the knowledge we can have of the powers of objects to produce simple ideas in us.
In all these matters Locke was generally representative of the enlightened intellectuals of his time. To understand the significance of Locke's criticisms, we must be clear about the nature of the syllogistic method. Clearly, if we do not need to use such principles in order to reason evidentially, after all there may be no basis for assuming that we are equipped with tacit knowledge of the principles from early childhood.
To what extent can Locke's view of the extent of human understanding and knowledge be defended today. Why should genetic evolution have given us an ability to discern the true nature of the world of which we are a part. In earlier sections, I did indeed point to the apparent success of modern science in investigating the microstructure of the physical world as evidence of Locke's excessive modesty regarding the availability to us of the 'real essences' of physical things.