John Locke (1632–1704) trained at Oxford as a physician, served the Earl of Shaftesbury as doctor and adviser, and wrote founding documents for two traditions at once: empiricist epistemology and liberal political theory. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), nearly twenty years in the writing, gave the theory of mind its “way of ideas” and the representative theory of perception its first systematic statement. The Two Treatises of Government (1689) did comparable work for constitutional democracy.
Major Works
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) — the systematic epistemology; the way of ideas, primary/secondary qualities, personal identity
- Two Treatises of Government (1689) — the political philosophy
- A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
- Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Key Positions
The way of ideas. Locke calls an idea “whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks” and traces ideas to sensation or reflection. What that makes an idea remains contested. On the influential veil reading, ideas become the immediate objects of awareness and the external world is reached through them. On the gentler reading defended by John Yolton and qualified by Michael Ayers, an idea can name an act or content of perceiving rather than a third object inspected in the world’s place. The first reading shaped the textbook tradition and much later talk of inner representations; it should not pass without qualification as the only historical Locke.
Primary and secondary qualities. Locke’s distinction (Essay II.8) divides the qualities of bodies into two kinds. Primary qualities (solidity, extension, figure, motion, number) genuinely inhere in objects, and our ideas of them resemble the qualities themselves. Secondary qualities (color, sound, taste, smell, texture as felt) are powers in bodies to produce ideas in us by virtue of their primary-quality constitution. Nothing in the object resembles the idea. The redness produced in us by a rose corresponds to no redness in the rose itself, only to a configuration of colorless particles.
The storehouse of memory. Locke’s images for memory and understanding place the mind in the role of a container. The understanding works like a “dark room” into which pictures of external things enter through narrow openings; memory serves as a storehouse where ideas are “laid up” for later retrieval. These images saturate the Essay and supply the philosophy of mind with some of its most durable metaphors: the mind as container, the idea as inner picture, the understanding as an inner viewer examining its contents.
Personal identity through consciousness. Locke argued that personal identity consists in continuity of consciousness (memory) rather than substance. What makes me the same person as the child of thirty years ago is not that I have the same soul or the same body, but that I can remember being that child. This account was immediately contested (Reid’s objection, Butler’s objection) and remains influential.
My View
Locke matters to the book chiefly through the interpretation his Essay set loose. The influential Cartesian-Lockean reading furnished the inner theater with ideas, relocated secondary qualities toward the perceiver, and helped later philosophers and scientists treat inner representations as the immediate objects of awareness. That reception, rather than an uncontested verdict on Locke himself, forms the book’s target.
The structural mistake runs from we perceive by means of representational states to those states are what we perceive. Causal mediation does not make the vehicle of perception its object. Austin’s attack on the sense-datum descendants of the view and the transparency of experience supply two routes back to the world. The historical caveat matters: if Locke’s ideas name acts or contents of perceiving, the sharpest form of the charge lands on the veil tradition built from him rather than on Locke alone.
The book keeps Locke’s naturalism and the empiricist insight that traffic with the world shapes a mind. Semantic externalism carries that insight farther by locating content in world-involving history while discarding the inner intermediary. See Indirect Realism and Sense-Data, The Inner Theater, Direct Realism, and Qualia.
Related Concepts
- Indirect Realism and Sense-Data — the veil reading of Locke became the canonical empiricist statement of the representative theory the book dismantles
- The Inner Theater — Locke furnishes the Cartesian chamber; the storehouse and the dark room are his images
- Direct Realism — the position the book recovers by drawing the vehicle/content distinction Locke lacks
- The Myth of the Given — Locke’s ideas as a paradigm of the Given that Sellars and McDowell attack
- Anti-Reification — the storehouse-and-viewer regress as a reification of memory’s representational activity
- Qualia — the secondary-quality move relocates the qualitative inward; the root of qualia realism