Transcript Reading: Locke Part 2

We're going to continue with our study of Locke today, but I’m going to pause to review a few things and contrast him with the rationalist we've already finished studying. In particular, I’m thinking of Leibniz, because Leibniz understands Locke to be saying that, since all our information comes through our senses and that’s how ideas enter our minds, Locke is ruling out the very notion that an axiom or a universal truth could be self-evident to someone. To do this review, I want to first consider the idea of self-evidence.

First of all, self-evidence was defined very well by Aristotle as consisting of two characteristics that distinguish it. The first is that whatever is self-evident appears to us as such. We say, on the face of it, that the immediate experience of “one and one is two” convinces us that it’s true and that it can’t be false, as long as we’re talking about whole numbers, the natural number system, and not doing something funny like switching definitions on us or anything like that. On the face of it, it strikes us as completely true. I’m going to call that prima facie truth, a phrase we also use in law.

The second characteristic of self-evident truth is that it is not inferred from other information. These are the two main characteristics. Now, I want to point out right away that, from the standpoint of our experience at any rate, it’s not just propositions, statements, and theories that can seem self-evident. All day, every day, everyone sees the world around them and believes that their perception of it conveys to them the way things are. For example, when I come to an intersection, look up the street, and see that no cars are coming, it’s self-evident to me that nothing’s coming. Experiences of states of affairs are self-evident as to their reality, which is why we consider realistic dreams and hallucinations as counterexamples to self-evidence. These experiences would normally be self-evident, but are not—so we need a way to distinguish them.

That part’s true, but that’s not what happened to the idea of self-evidence as it was developed in the ancient world. It was defined this way and championed by none other than Aristotle. However, at the same time, Aristotle wanted to put restrictions on self-evidence.

I’ll talk about why he wanted to do that after we review what those restrictions are. First, he asserts that everyone who is an expert in the field in which the self-evident truth is experienced agrees that it is self-evident. He’s willing to grant that some people who are totally uneducated might be confronted with, say, a mathematical formula or a logical proposition, which an expert would tell is self-evidently true, but the average potato farmer might not get it. So, he wants to say that an expert in the field in which this purported truth arises must agree. If it’s philosophical, he expects philosophers to agree. If it’s physical, physicists should agree. If it’s in astronomy, astronomers should agree. Now, why do you think he wanted to do that? We’ll get to that in a moment.

The second restriction is that the truth must be a law, a necessary truth. We understand laws as being statements of truths that are necessary. What does "necessary" mean? It means that it’s not just true in this instance; it’s a statement of something that has to be true in all times and all places. When I accept that “one and one is two” is a self-evident truth, I’m saying it always was, always will be, and is so everywhere. Of course, we can see with our eyes that one thing plus another thing makes two things, but how do we know that will always be the case under every condition? We don’t gather that information with our eyes or experience. We can’t experience what things were like a million years ago, and we can’t experience what they’ll be like a million years from now. So, we don’t get the “all” that stands in front of every law statement, like "all bachelors are unmarried." How do you know that? Well, in that case, it’s because "bachelor" means an unmarried man who is otherwise eligible to marry. Some examples are trivial, but I’m trying to keep them simple. Aristotle very much depends on self-evident truths and argues that unless some things are self-evident, known without proof, we can never have proof of anything. The very laws of logic have to be seen as self-evident as well, including the fundamental law of logic: "nothing can be both true and false in the same sense at the same time." How do you know that was true a billion years ago? How do you know it will be true 1565 years from now? The answer is that it’s self-evident. I experience it as having the ring of truth, as something that cannot fail to be true.

So, he says it must be a law, too. Finally, the third restriction he puts on these truths is that if it’s something everyone sees, and it’s a law, it must be infallible. That means it can’t possibly be false. No matter how I come by these truths, if I have truly self-evident truths, then they will also meet these restrictions. I have to tell you, these restrictions—because they had Aristotle’s authority behind them—persisted for centuries. When René Descartes comes on the scene, he’s read Aristotle, of course, and he not only accepts these restrictions but makes them tighter. In my view, he makes them worse. 

What Descartes says here is that not everyone who is an expert in the field in which the self-evident truth is experienced. No, Descartes says everyone who is in the least degree rational will see it.

So, in Descartes' view, if something is a genuine self-evident truth—if it's prima facie true to me, not inferred from other information, and I can’t derive it from any other information—then, if I am in the least degree rational, and it really is a self-evident truth, I’ll see it as such. All people who are in the least degree rational will as well. Descartes is trying to rule out people who may be insane, mentally disabled, or have some other mental defect, since they’re not normal. But any normal person who is in the least degree rational will see it, provided they understand it, of course. Then it’s also going to be a law, and it’s going to be infallible—it just can’t be wrong.

Aristotle and Descartes both believe that things we see by intuition—and this is a kind of intuition, a direct seeing of the truth—are infallibly true.

This is what Locke wants to attack, and he thinks he can defeat the idea of self-evidency by giving an explanation of how ideas reach our minds. His account, as we saw last time, is that the mind is like a camera—a little dark room with slits that let in sensations. These slits let in colors, tastes, touches, sounds, and smells. They come from different slits because they are delivered by different senses—eyes, tongues, organs of touch, taste, smell, and so on. These sensations come in piecemeal, and our minds put them together into the objects we perceive. That’s how all information gets into our minds, and Locke thinks that this will rebut the idea of self-evidence.

I don’t see how it does, and neither did Leibniz. Leibniz wrote an extensive rebuttal of Locke’s work, responding line by line, and defended the notion that while Locke is right about sensation, there are still self-evident truths that we grasp—like one and one is two. What the rationalists wanted to justify were logic and mathematics (which they saw as largely the same thing), as well as belief in God. They believed both could be, and are, self-evident. Locke, on the other hand, wants to say no—all that comes into our minds are sensations, which we put together into the objects we perceive. And we can’t say that these are self-evident, because the same ones aren’t self-evident to everybody, they aren’t laws, and they aren’t infallible.

We can make mistakes about them, and some sensations that reach our minds are intrinsically misleading, like hallucinations, holograms, and realistic dreams. So, in Locke’s view, these perceptions don’t qualify as self-evident. He wants to say nothing does. But, in fact, he accepts logic and uses it, though he has no justification for it other than self-evidence.

Now let’s pause for a moment and reflect on why I think these three extra restrictions are all nonsense.

Take number one: If you see something as self-evident—suppose I put a logical formula on the board and it’s a tautology—if you understand it correctly, it can’t be false. Take, for example, “everything is visible or it’s not,” which is a tautology mentioned in the New Testament and one I’ve appealed to several times. It can’t be false. So, I look at that and say, “Yep, that’s self-evident to me,” but suppose it’s not to someone else. Someone else looks at it and says, “I don’t know. I don’t get it.” Why should I concede that it’s not a self-evident truth just because they reject it? According to Aristotle’s restrictions, it’s not truly self-evident if not everyone sees it as such—but it bloody well is!

Or take “one and one is two.” If you don’t like the previous illustration, this one can’t be anything else. It never has been anything else, and it never will be. How do I know that everyone who ever lived agreed with that and that everyone who ever will live will agree? How could I possibly know that? But that’s what this first restriction demands. It says that everyone who is in the least degree rational sees its truth and its self-evidence, but I don’t know that. How could I find that out? As I said, a universal proposition has the word “all” in front of it, and “all” means everywhere and at all times—but I can’t know the distant past or the far-distant future.

And why isn’t it possible that some things are self-evident to us, but not to anyone else? Suppose my dear aunt, whom I love and help care for in her old age, has a mole on her shoulder that embarrasses her, so she always keeps it covered. Whenever she meets anyone else, she covers the mole, and I’m the only person besides her who knows she has it. It’s self-evident to me that she has a mole on her shoulder. It’s a normal sense perception, and it’s a fact. If she dies and is cremated, and no one else ever sees the mole, why should that mean it wasn’t self-evident to me?

I think that’s absurd.

Now, look at the second restriction: it has to be a law. Who says it has to be a law? Isn’t normal sense perception—our experience of the world around us every day—also self-evident? Don’t we experience things as real and as being where we see them? If I’m stopped at a traffic light and the light turns green, that means I can go. But I still look to see if anyone is violating their red light. All of that, I take to be real. I don’t take it to be a dream. I understand what I’m seeing to be real in the sense that if I pull out and another car is still coming, I may be seriously injured or killed. Why doesn’t that count as self-evident? Why would self-evidence have to apply only to laws? Surely there are laws that are self-evident, but I think there are others that are not, and I think many things that aren’t laws are self-evident. Whenever we’re giving an account of how we know something and we come to the point where the only way to know it is through direct experience, then we’ve reached a dead end in terms of proving or demonstrating it. At that point, we have to say, “You’d have to experience this.” And if we’ve reached that point, it could only be because it’s self-evident, in the sense that Aristotle originally recognized—prima facie true and not inferred from other information.

That sounds good, but these other restrictions sound bogus.

The third restriction is that self-evident truths must yield knowledge that is infallible. Infallibility means that self-evident intuitions are a power we possess that delivers truth and only truth, and they cannot be mistaken. My first objection to that comes from my Christian background. The story of Adam and Eve violating God's law in Genesis makes it clear that only God is infallible. Some of us may like to think we have some power of knowing or perceiving that can’t be wrong, but why would we think that? From the very beginning, people had powers of observation, perception, and reasoning, but they still got things pretty fouled up. I think infallibility should be left to God alone.

Infallibility means something can’t possibly be wrong, which is very much tied to the idea that it must be a law. This one follows from the previous one—if it’s a law, it’s universally true, and therefore infallible. The difficult part is that it implies we humans have some power of knowledge that cannot possibly make a mistake, and I can’t think of any evidence for that.

Let’s consider the idea of an intuitive grasp of self-evidence, or what I’ll call our “self-evidency antennae.” These antennae pick up on things as being self-evident, but they’re not infallible. People have defended certain propositions and beliefs as self-evidently true that have later been decisively shown to be false. So why should we think that our ability to perceive self-evident truths can’t possibly be mistaken?

Aristotle and Descartes reaffirm that what is delivered to us by intuition cannot be mistaken, but there’s no evidence for that—tons of evidence against it, in fact. I believe things are self-evident to us, and there are many things we can’t know any other way—like the laws of logic, which we need—but that doesn’t make us infallible in any of our powers of observation or knowledge. Not a bit.

So that’s my take on self-evidence. While I agree with Leibniz against Locke that we do know some things to be self-evident, that includes even the perceptions Locke says come through the slits in the little dark room that is our mind. These perceptions are self-evident to us, but not infallibly so. I can see something and be confused about what I’m seeing. I can make an error in judgment—it’s always possible. This also includes the laws of logic, which Leibniz wanted to protect. After all, Locke uses logic all the time to make his theories and argue for them, so he’s accepting them. But on what grounds? Leibniz points out that Locke can’t give any grounds other than the intuition of self-evidence. How else could Locke defend the laws of logic? He can’t defend them using the laws of logic—that would beg the question and assume they’re already true. The answer, of course, is that they appear prima facie true, and we can’t imagine how they could be false. How could anything be both true and false in the same sense at the same time? It can’t be.

That was a bit of an excursus, but a necessary one. We need to see what Locke was trying to do and what Leibniz was trying to prevent. So, now, I want you to hear Locke in his own words as he explains his theory. I brought some Locke with me today. 

Here we are. All ideas come from sensation or reflection. That means reflecting on what we've sensed. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, a white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. How does it come to be furnished? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this, I answer in one word: from experience. I think that’s right. But then he goes on to foul up what counts as experience. All our knowledge, Locke claims, is founded in experience and from it is ultimately derived. Our observation, employed either about external sensible objects or about the internal operations of our mind, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is what supplies our understanding with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge from which all ideas that we have, or can naturally have, spring.

The objects of sensation are, first of all, that our senses are acquainted with particular sensible objects and convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things according to the ways in which those objects affect them. That’s what I’m saying. That’s why Locke thinks that what we experience by sense perception—what first enters our mind—is not, say, an image of a house, a car, a tree, or a landscape. Instead, it’s color sensations, auditory sensations, tactile sensations, gustatory sensations, and so on, because they come through different senses. So it has to be that we experience these sensations. They come in separately, and our minds put them together, melding them into objects. Thus, we come by those ideas we have, such as yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, bitter, or sweet. These, he says, are sensible qualities. I use the term sensory or phenomenal properties—what we see as the surface of our experience. When I say the senses convey these into the mind, I mean from external objects conveyed by what the mind produces in those perceptions. So here we get, again, the copy theory of perception—what occurs in our minds are little, tiny copies of what’s going on outside in the real world.

Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnishes our understanding with ideas is the perception of the operations of our own mind within us. It's employed about the ideas it has gathered, which operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider them, furnish the understanding with another set of ideas which could not be had from thinking about external things. These are things such as perception, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actions of our own minds, which we, being conscious of and observing in ourselves, come to understand as distinct ideas—just as our bodies are distinct from our minds. I call this reflection, the ideas it affords being only what the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself. These two, sensation and reflection, are, to me, the only original sources from which all our ideas take their beginnings.

Now, I think that contains a mistake, though it’s not a terrible one. What he’s saying here is that experience can be of the external world—these he calls perceptions—or of our own minds, or of how our minds operate. Okay, so far, I’d agree with that. But what’s the problem? Well, the problem isn’t so much with two. We might need to say a bit more about it, but it’s with one. Because he takes the sensations of the external world not to be sensations of this chair, this table, this house, this crowd of people, or the road with the cars on it. No, he says the sensations of the external world are things such as color patches, sounds, smells, tastes, and what I’ll call tactile properties. This feels smooth and cool, for example—right now, this desktop.

These come in disparately, and then our minds put them together. Wait a minute, you say—he’s trying to describe the operation of our minds.

But I’ve never experienced that. When I reflect on my mind, what I perceive is entire objects—the wall, the ceiling, the cars outside the window, and so on. And I think that’s right, and Locke is wrong. We don’t experience color patches, individual sounds, tastes, touches, and smells, and then put them together into an object. Here’s the guy saying that the only two ways information comes to us are by sensation or by reflecting on how our minds operate. But he can’t, with a straight face, tell me that we all experience disparate sense perceptions and then, through an unconscious activity of the mind, put them together into things. Whoa, wait a minute. He’s the guy who’s against unconscious processes, right? He doesn’t like it when Leibniz writes that we have the experience of self-evidence, whether we’re conscious of it or not. We don’t take normal perception to be self-evident. We take the axioms of logic to be self-evident, even if we’ve never heard that term. It just means they’re not proven on the basis of anything else—they’re directly experienced as true, period. We have that experience, but we cannot isolate and point to the experience of piecing together distinct and separate little sensations to make an object. No, what we experience are whole objects, and we abstract from them that, among other kinds of properties, they exhibit taste, color, sounds, touch, and smells—what we call sensory properties.

They’re just one kind of property that what we perceive exhibits. You say, “Well, what other kinds?” Well, what we perceive exhibits quantity—it can be numbered or counted. What we perceive exhibits spatiality—it has shape, size, and location. What we experience has physical properties—weight, mass, and density. What we experience has logical properties—it can be distinguished, abstracted from, and conceived of. We can form a concept of it. It has linguistic properties—it can be named. And it has many more. I think the things we perceive have, for example, social properties, economic properties, and ethical properties, at least potentially. Take a rock. It has quantity, spatial size, location, and physical properties. I’ll say it possesses these actively because it has them independently of whether anyone knows it. It doesn’t depend on anyone to have those properties, and therefore it possesses them actively. But it is only passive perceptually—it has color, taste, touch, and smell, but only in relation to us when we perceive it. So those things are only potential—they’re not actual or active, they’re passive, and they’re known in the passive relation of being our objects of perception.

The same applies to conception. We have a concept of a rock, but the rock doesn’t have any logical properties—it doesn’t think. It doesn’t have any active properties, but passively, yes—it can be distinguished from other objects around us, defined, and conceived of. So things have their properties either actively or passively. The ones they have passively are all the kinds of properties and laws we find in the universe—the active versus passive distinction applies to properties that exhibit themselves only in relation to us. So I think that’s a legitimate reply to the different ways things possess their properties—actively or passively. The passive ones are passive until we activate them by thinking of them, or some other creature does—animals can do it too. For example, a rock has quantity, spatial size and location, physical solidity, mass, and density, and so on. A tiny rock can be swallowed by a bird like an Abigail dominiak and help to digest its food. It has a passive biotic property that’s activated only in relation to the bird making use of it, or the bird might take a clam, fly up high, and drop it on the rock to crack it open. The rock’s passive properties are activated by the bird’s biological needs.

I won’t go on, as this is not the time or place to spell out an alternative philosophy. But it seems to me that these are fairly obvious points and that they seriously disagree with this one part of Locke’s account. Do we have perceptions of the world around us? Absolutely. Do those perceptions come to us from things distinct from us? Absolutely. Can we reflect on how our own minds operate? Yes, we can. But when we reflect on how our minds operate, we never find the activity of piecing together a bunch of disparate sensations to form an object. What we can be conscious of is the reverse. We experience entire objects, and we abstract different kinds of properties from them, which is how Locke came to this idea of sensations in the first place.

So, there are two really important points of disagreement with Locke so far. The first is that he equates experience with sensations only, and he calls them sensitive. I call them sensory, and others have called them phenomenal properties. In other words, sensations have only color, sound, taste, touch, and smell, but that’s not an accurate description of what we experience all day, every day. No, what we experience are landscapes, streets, cars, houses, people, and whole objects that have far more than just sensory properties. See, it’s a fateful equivocation on the term sensory. You can use that to talk about the senses—seeing, hearing, tasting, touching—but from that, it doesn’t follow that what passes through them to our minds are only sensory properties. That’s one specific kind, distinguished from the other kinds of properties we experience. What other kinds? I’ll list them again: quantitative, spatial, kinematic (things move, change, and remain the same), physical, biotic, and so on.

These are all kinds of properties and laws. We could name more—many have been distinguished by various sciences and thinkers over centuries. Not only sensory properties but also logical, and what I’ll call technical properties—that is, properties related to human activity, like making something new out of an object. That includes, as one of the first things humans do, linguistic properties. Humans take sounds and signs and use them symbolically to represent something else, leading to the beginnings of language. And on the basis of that, they can have social properties—there are standards of politeness and so on. And they can have economic properties and ethical properties. We experience some actions as intrinsically bad or wrong—people shouldn’t be doing that kind of stuff. Sure we do. The distinction between something being ethically wrong and something being red, warm, solid, or a certain distance away reflects the variety of kinds of properties we experience, and no one can doubt that we all experience these every day, all the time. We can abstract these kinds of properties and laws from the objects we perceive, but what we experience are whole objects with a multiplicity of kinds of properties.

So, I’m going to use the term concrete object for this, meaning that what we perceive is a concrete object having a multiplicity of kinds of properties and laws. By this, I mean that the laws are what relate those kinds of properties. My contention is that this is what we really experience—concrete objects around us—and we abstract from them various kinds of properties and laws. You don’t have to agree with my list. It doesn’t matter what list of kinds of properties you come up with—the same problems result, and the same benefits result, regardless of the list.

So, we have Locke here preaching this gospel of experience as the foundation of all knowledge, whether it’s the experience of external objects or the experience of how our minds operate. That’s all that gets into this little room of ours. And Leibniz is saying, “Wait a minute, pal, you’re forgetting that some of that stuff is experienced as self-evidently real, self-evidently true, or self-evidently false.” What’s self-evidently true doesn’t need proof. What’s self-evidently false doesn’t need proof that it’s false. If I say one plus one makes six and a half, you’re not going to accept that. You’re not going to believe it, and you don’t need to construct a proof that it’s not true. Don’t throw out the overemphasis of the rationalists on what’s self-evident when you come to emphasize, as a good empiricist, the experience that comes into our minds. What is given to our consciousness is the world around us, as well as the operations of our own minds.

So we can see Locke as a step in the right direction, but the next step falters and gets ensnared in a bad mistake. We’ll come back and look at that in more detail next time. Meanwhile, do the reading, reflect on it, and get this stuff down so you can handle it in an essay or an exam.