Transcript Reading: Lock Part 3

Last time we were talking about Locke and his differences from the Continental rationalists, people like Descartes and Leibniz, and I was saying that, despite some of the changes he made, he's basically a Cartesian. I mean, he adheres to dualism regarding human beings, with a mind or soul and a body. In the wider world, there are physical things, physical properties such as weight, mass, density, solidity, and so on. And then there’s a rational order to the world, which consists of the logic and mathematical order that makes our world a cosmos—something ordered rather than chaotic. So, he's with Descartes up to that point. He’s a Cartesian with differences.

Whereas Descartes wanted to jump right to what is self-evident and necessary—regarding math and logic as the very fabric of reality, so much so that you remember the slogan, “the real is the rational and the rational is real”—Locke doesn’t follow that line of thought. He doesn't agree with that fully. While there is a rational order to the world and we think in accordance with that, when we use math and logic correctly, we get things right. That’s true. But, for Locke, the vast majority of what we know, the ideas that come to us, are ideas of the external world. He understood the world outside of us, outside our minds, in the same way Descartes did—as physical.

Think about what that means. The objects around us have only physical properties—or let’s say, only physical, spatial, and mathematical/quantitative properties. That’s all. The objects around us don’t have sensory properties. You might remember this: the view that these thinkers had of sensation goes something like this. Here’s George Zilch, and George is looking at an object in his house—it’s a vase with flowers in it. What happens, according to what these thinkers believed, is that light comes, strikes the vase, bounces off, and comes through the pupil of George’s eye. It forms a little upside-down image on his retina of this vase with a flower in it, and this stimulates his optic nerve, which travels to the occipital lobe of his brain, where it causes brain processes.

Now, if you’re a materialist, you want the story to end there. As a materialist—someone who believes everything is purely physical—those brain processes are what we call a sensation, and that’s what we experience. The sensations are actually brain processes, but that’s not how we experience them. We don’t experience brain processes. What we experience are sensations, and one of those is the sensation of the vase and the flowers.

If you’re not a materialist, like Locke and others of his time, you believe that somehow those brain processes cause the perception—the copy—of that vase to occur in your non-physical mind. That’s what these dots in the diagram represent, supposedly. The problem of interaction then becomes: how does a physical brain process cause a change in something that is not physical, not in space, and so on? This is the general view of how perception takes place.

Now, as I said last time, Locke misdescribes and never corrects himself on what it is that we immediately experience. Instead of saying we experience concrete objects—objects with all their kinds of properties and laws—he says, no, it’s disparate, discrete sensations that have only sensory properties: color patches, sounds, tastes, touches, smells, and so on. Our mind then puts them together into an object.

Well, if that’s true, it’s not something we’re ever conscious of. We’re not describing an operation of the mind that we can reflect on. We never catch our mind doing it. In fact, what we experience directly—if we reflect on that, as Locke calls on us to do—is whole objects with a multiplicity of properties, both active and passive in relation to us. That’s what I proposed to call concrete objects last time.

So, what argument can Locke give? How does he show us that what we experience initially is not whole objects, but individual sensations of different sorts—visual, auditory, gustatory, tactile? Well, here’s what he says:

“Though the qualities that affect our senses are in the things themselves so united and blended, with no separation or distance between them, it’s plain that the ideas they produce in the mind enter through the senses as simple and unmixed. For though sight and touch often take in from the same object at the same time different ideas—sight and touch take in color patches and tactile sensations—they take them in separately. These simple ideas, thus united in the same subject, come in through the senses. The coldness and hardness that a man feels in a piece of ice are distinct ideas in the mind, just as its coldness and its hardness are as distinct as the smell and whiteness of a lily, or the taste of sugar, or the smell of a rose. And there is nothing plainer to a man than the clear and distinct perception he has of these simple ideas, each uncompounded, containing in itself nothing but one uniform appearance or conception in the mind.”

That’s all Locke gives us as a reason for this mistaken idea. What he’s doing is drawing an inference from this picture. I used the sense of sight, but according to Locke, George Zilch here might reach out and try to touch the object, in which case he gets a tactile sensation—let’s say it feels smooth and cool. He’s getting color patches when he looks at it, and when he touches it, it makes a noise. Sound waves then travel to his ear and register there.

But instead of telling us that this is a result of us abstracting from the big picture given to us—the concrete objects that come to us in perception, from which we can separate off different kinds of properties and say that some come through this sense and some through another—Locke says we first sense the entire object, with all its properties. Then, we abstract from that. “Abstract” means to separate off. We separate off the sensory from the physical, from the mathematical, from the spatial, from the logical, and so on.

But no, Locke has it backward. What comes to us, according to him, are the individual sensations, and they have to be pieced together. And what’s his argument for that? Listen again: “There can be nothing plainer to a man than the clear and distinct perception he has of these simple ideas.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me like an appeal to self-evidence. “Nothing’s more obvious. Well, you can just see it’s true, can’t you? It’s self-evident.” So, after wanting to rule out self-evidence, Locke appeals to it. He hasn’t got any other reason for this view except to claim it’s self-evident.

And anyway, I don’t think it’s self-evident. What’s self-evident to me is that he flipped the picture. What we experience are concrete objects, and we abstract different kinds of properties and laws from them. But, in a way that we can’t explain, our senses take in different sorts of phenomena, and they’re already combined into things when we experience them. Our mind doesn’t piece them together, as far as we can know by reflecting on it and reporting the operations of the mind that are conscious to us. If the mind does something that extraordinary, it must be unconscious. And I don’t know any way to confirm that.

My take on Locke: he sets us off in a healthy direction but immediately falls into a significant error, because thinkers after him are going to follow him in this, and they’re not going to sniff out the mistake. They’re going to go with the idea that what we experience is purely sensory. What comes into our minds, what gets there, are only colors, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells.

But wait a minute—if that’s all that’s in our mind to represent the external world, remember how that external world has already been described according to Descartes, whose views dominated this era. Everybody had to deal with Descartes in some way.

So, what can Locke say about this? He’s now arguing that what’s in our mind are only disparate sensations that our mind combines to represent objects—this is called the copy theory of perception. What we perceive in our minds are little copies of what’s outside. But those outside objects have already been defined by Descartes as purely physical—Descartes was following Galileo in this. Galileo wanted to say there’s a purely physical world external to human minds, and that purely physical world operates however it operates. We’re going to investigate it, discover laws, and explain how the external physical world works. And all of that has nothing to do with things like ethics, religion, or belief in God—there’s a complete separation between the two. He wanted that separation because he didn’t want the church censoring his work. He didn’t want the church saying, “Oh, you can’t say that the Earth travels around the Sun. If you do, it’s heresy, and you’ll be excommunicated, or worse.” So he wanted to say, "No, the external physical world is off-limits to theology and ethics." Physics is one thing, and theology is another. His famous remark is very clever: “The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” So it’s not going to give you your astronomy, but it is going to give you God’s plan of salvation. I think he got that right.

But anyway, Locke is following that here. There’s an external world that’s purely physical, and what comes into our minds—whoa, wait a minute. What did he say? He said what comes into our minds is purely sensory—it has only colors, tastes, touches, sounds, and smells as properties. But the external world doesn’t have them at all. The external world has only mass, weight, solidity, density, charge—physical properties—the properties studied by physics that relate to one another by physical laws.

Well. Now tell me this, this is going to be a good one. How can something that is purely sensory and has no physical properties be a copy of something else that has only physical properties?

You explain that trick, and you’ll go down in history. People will read you hundreds of years from now—it can’t be done. And the next thinker we’re taking up, George Berkeley, says exactly that to Locke: “What’s in the mind is purely sensory; it can’t be a copy of anything that’s purely physical. And you can’t tell me it’s a miracle caused by God, because even miracles can’t be self-contradictory.”

Now, they all believed that too. They all believed that what was possible was whatever was not self-contradictory. You remember, the rationalists wanted to say in that case, “It’s not only possible, it’s real.” And these empiricists wanted to say, “No, it’s only possible; we have to look in experience, look in the world, and see if it’s real.” But they all believed that even miracles couldn’t be self-contradictory. They believed that because they thought the laws of logic were part of the being of God, so even God couldn’t violate them.

Alright, I won’t dredge all that up again—I’ve already critiqued it—but I want to say right here and now that what happens after Locke is because of Locke. He gives us the proposal that purely sensory perceptions in our minds are faithful representatives and copies of external, purely physical objects. But how something that’s only sensory can be a faithful copy of something that isn’t sensory at all is not a trick he can pull off.

So Berkeley jumps on this and says that even that can’t even be a miracle caused by God because it’s self-contradictory. You can’t say that what’s purely sensory is a faithful copy of something that has no sensory properties whatever but only physical ones. So Berkeley is going to proceed—we’ll soon find out—to argue that all reality consists of God, human minds, and the perceptions that God gives to human minds. What we call, what Descartes called, the external physical world is actually the internal sensory world. They’re the same thing in Berkeley’s view. Clever.

Okay, but we’re not done with Locke. There are some other things we need to talk about, and one is Locke’s endorsement of the idea of substance. I already read the section where he says, “Nothing can be plainer”—sounds like self-evidence—“than that his description is right.”

Well, what about the idea of substance? You remember that I spoke about this earlier, and I said that doing away with the idea of substance is, I think, the key to a distinctively Christian take on philosophy. That’s because—I’ll call this the Christian view—it says that only God is the self-existent being, meaning in a logical sense, self-existent, the origin of all else. Everything other than God has been brought into existence by God. But in my understanding of the Christian view, a second thing comes from that: only God is self-existent. And we must say that God’s power is what holds all things together, as the expression goes. It establishes the network of relations between all kinds of things, events, and states of affairs—between the whole world and ourselves.

And it’s that second part that the vast majority of Christian thinkers missed. They said we could single something out of the creation, as long as we don’t say it’s self-existent—it could be what holds everything together, provided we add the statement, “And this, in turn, depends on God.” And we find Locke doing exactly that. Descartes did it too. Descartes said it’s minds and bodies, minds along with the rational order of the universe. So, there’s a rational order to creation, and God gives humans minds that are in tune with that rational order. They can just intuitively see rational truths because of the experience of self-evidence. Humans also have bodies that participate in the physical world. Descartes calls mind and body, the rational order and physical things, “secondary substances” because those two things stand under and support all other things. They hang them together and guarantee their relationships. Neither of them is self-existent—they’re both created by God—but they give you the account of the world the rest of the way. So you just add, “And God created these,” and you’ve Christianized it.

Now, Locke is going to do the same thing. He’s going to talk about substance, and substances are going to be, again, very similar to what Descartes said. Locke sees the substance of any object as what holds together its various properties and makes it that particular kind of thing. This idea we have, he says, to which we give the name “substance,” is nothing but the supposed but unknown support of those qualities we find existing, which we imagine cannot exist without being supported by something else.

So, we experience the kinds of properties that objects exhibit to us as dependent—none of them is the kind that can exist on its own. And I think that’s absolutely right. I’ll close this course with an argument that I think definitely establishes that, which has no comeback—you can judge for yourself when we come to that last lecture. I’ll give you an argument in favor of this: none of the properties that we experience things around us as having could be the nature of what is self-existent because none of them can be conceived of as existing on its own.

So Locke, very wisely, says about substance, “It’s something we know not what. It’s not any of the properties that we see.” Descartes said it’s the rational order plus the physical order of the universe. Locke won’t say that. He says, “We can’t do that. Neither physical things can exist on their own, nor can the rational order exist on its own.” So there must be something else that is the substance, and what does he call it? Substance is what holds things together. But it is a “something I know not what.”

And it’s a great pity, it seems to me, that having come to this realization—which is better than anybody before him, including Descartes—he sees that he can’t put into that slot any created property of any created thing. It doesn’t occur to him to say, “Oh, according to Colossians chapter one, it’s God that does that. It’s only God’s power that goes into that slot. That’s what holds all things together.” You remember, we went over this at some length: God has created all things visible or invisible through Jesus Christ, and in Him, all things hang together.

Had Locke seen that, he would have discovered the key to a truly Christian approach to philosophy, I think. Because after him, everyone goes back to the idea of substance, and they’re still doing it. Even the pragmatists of our day—this is for a later session, with more detail—who want to get rid of all religious belief and not have anything in philosophy either explicitly taken to be self-existent or just tacitly assumed to be self-existent, are still tacitly assuming that something is self-existent. It can’t really be escaped. These are some of the ideas we’ll explore in the final lectures.

So, the properties of things as we find them are such that they cannot exist on their own. To support them, we call that support "substance," which, according to the true import of the word, in plain English, means "standing under" or "upholding." We come to have ideas of particular sorts of substances by collecting combinations of simple ideas which, in our experience and observation, we notice coexist. They’re therefore supposed to flow from a particular internal constitution or unknown essence of the substance.

We see all these properties combined in things, and we distinguish things by the kinds of properties they have—both active and passive. We then attribute what hangs all that together, what organizes a thing into a law-governed entity, so that it’s not just a heap of properties. It’s law-organized, and all of its properties are so thoroughly integrated that we can’t even conceive of any kind apart from all the others. I’m adding this, but that’s essentially what Locke is saying—we can’t separate them, even mentally.

That’s what gives us the idea that there must be something that supports and unifies them all into one thing. So, I experience this stylus as one thing, or this book I’m reading as one thing. Burn them up, and there's no longer a thing. That’s true. But as long as they exist, they are one thing, held together by something Locke wants to call substance—"I know not what." And I think that’s where Christians can say it’s nothing more than the power of God, exercised and mediated to all creation through Jesus Christ in his divine and human nature.

This is how we come to have ideas of a man, horse, gold, water, and so on. Of which substances—whether anyone has any other clear idea, other than of simple ideas coexisting together—I appeal to everyone’s own experience. It’s in the ordinary qualities observable in iron or a diamond, put together, that make the true complex of those substances, which a smith or jeweler commonly knows better than a philosopher. And I think that's right too.

So, we have as clear an idea of spiritual substance as we do of physical things. The same thing happens concerning the operations of our minds—thinking, reasoning, fearing, and so on—which we conclude cannot subsist by themselves. There’s no such thing as “fearing,” “thinking,” or “feeling” just existing on its own. These are properties of minds. So, the mind is the substance of these mental things. They don’t exist in themselves, nor do we see how they could be produced or belong to the body. It doesn’t make much sense to say that.

Now, Locke is thinking of the body as purely physical, right? Does a purely physical body fear something, know something, or explain something? No, that’s nonsense, he says. We’re apt to think of these actions as inhering in something—as a substance. And so, we use the word "spirit." There are spirits and bodies, and they interact. This is the same problem Descartes had: he couldn’t explain the interaction. But it’s our common experience that these capacities—by which we know, decide, judge, feel, and perceive—have to be the properties of a non-physical thing.

Whereas the properties by which we stand up, sit down, move, and eat are properties of a physical thing—a body. The others are not of the body—we call them spirit. And by supposing a spiritual substance when we are thinking, knowing, doubting, or moving, we have as clear a notion of spiritual substance as we do of the body. In both cases, it is the substrate, that which lies underneath and supports all else.

So, Locke endorses the idea of substance, and he’s building his theory of reality. Just as these considerations lead us to the idea of substance, they also lead to the concept of cause. Without causality, we’re not going to explain anything about the natural world around us. We need a clear concept of causality to explain how physical things interact, how biological or living things interact, and how human bodies act in response to the command of the mind, or spirit, or soul.

That’s why Locke is saying it’s the idea of substance that leads to the idea of causality. Here’s what he says: we directly experience, in our own mind, spirit, or soul, that we want our arm to move—and then our arm moves. That’s the sense in which we directly experience causality. We don’t perceive an object called "causality." It’s not that, in addition to our arm, we perceive some force with color, shape, size, location, and quantities, and that’s causality. No. We come to the idea of causality because we experience our bodies responding to our mental commands.

So, when I will my hand to take the fork, pick up a piece of steak, and put it in my mouth—that’s what happens. And if it doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t happen repeatedly, we call for medical attention because something is really wrong. So, we all come to the idea of causality because we experience it as part of our personal experience. We make a command to our arm, and we don’t even have to say the words; we can just will it. The result is that the arm moves, and that’s where we get the idea of cause. That’s why, when we see in the natural world around us, one rock crashing into another and one of them falling apart, we say it’s the crash that caused the rock to rupture into pieces. We attribute this causality because it’s so similar to what happens when we will our bodies to move, stand up, sit down, eat, and so on.

So, Locke not only endorses the idea of substance, but he also says we then attribute to inanimate things in nature the same sort of relationship. It’s not that one rock wants to break the other; we’re not saying that it has mental properties. But it does have physical causality.

Now I’m finding a spot in Locke I wanted you to hear.

"Since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, has no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it’s evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them." Knowledge, then, seems to Locke to be "nothing but the perception of the connection of an agreement or disagreement of any of our ideas." So what we’re aware of, what we explain, and what we know is in here—all our thoughts.

And the argument for that is, listen closely, "it’s evident that our knowledge..." Does that sound like self-evidence to you? I have to say it does to me. Locke is saying, "given the theory that I’ve outlined so far, it’s self-evident that we know only what’s inside our minds." If you thought Descartes was bad because he ended up with what we know being inside our heads, Locke’s just as bad in that respect. What we don’t know is the external world. Why? Why should we take that view? I think it stems from viewing the external world as purely physical. It goes back to Galileo’s proposal—that’s the way we see things, so that we can separate science from concerns of theology or ethics. Why consider the external world purely physical? Why isn’t it the case that the objects around me are what I perceive? I perceive the external world, and the colors that these things have are the colors of the surfaces of those objects.

I don’t see anything bad that follows from that. And a proponent of a Cartesian or Lockean view would say, "Well, I do. How do you explain this? Isn’t it the case—you’re going to have to agree with me—that if we put a stick into water, it looks bent? The part that’s underwater looks as though it’s bent to us, when in fact the stick is straight, right? Well, doesn’t that show you then that the stick is one thing and our perception is another? The stick can’t be both bent and not bent at the same time, but our perception says it’s bent. Therefore, our perception is not of the stick itself; it’s something produced in us by light bouncing off the stick, and so on. The stick can’t be both bent and not bent, so we’ve got to be dealing with two things here."

Or take another example: we’re standing on a railroad track, and we see the tracks going off into the distance. The tracks appear to converge in the distance. Do the tracks really converge? Do they really come together? If we walk down to that spot where it looks like they converge, we’ll see that the railroad tracks are just as far apart there as they were when we thought they converged. So, our perception must be something different from the object. The light is bouncing off of something and coming into our sight, but our perception is not of the object itself.

There are other examples, of course. Things we perceive appear smaller the farther away they are, but they’re not really smaller, are they? Doesn’t all of this show that our perceptions are one thing, and the objects are something else? We’ve got to have two things here.

And my answer to that is: no, we don’t have to do that at all. What we can say is that the railroad tracks have the sensory property of appearing to converge at a distance. Why can’t they have that property, along with all the other properties they have? Any object has the property to appear diminished in size the farther away it is from my eyes. Why can’t it have that, just as it has the property of appearing yellow or appearing heavy, or any other characteristic I want to name?

I’m thinking of things as having many kinds of properties and laws. I maintain that all of those kinds are conveyed through normal sense perception. It isn’t just because the eye is sensitive only to light, the tongue only to taste, the nose only to smell, and the fingertips only to touch, that those are the only properties that enter through the senses. What comes in through the senses are entire objects, landscapes, and more. What comes in has many kinds of properties, not just sensory ones. The sensory is one kind that we abstract from what we experience. To then turn around and try to reduce everything to that—saying, “Oh, that’s all that really comes in”—doesn’t follow.

It’s a leap, and it’s never been justified. Neither has it ever been justified that Galileo was right in proposing that the external world is only physical. Well, then nothing can be a copy of it, because copies can only be sensory—they have to be things perceived. It’s a hopeless mishmash, and one piece of it is failing to see that the idea of substance is, in fact, an idea of a God-substitute, in the place where only God should go. That is, God has not only created but maintains and holds together, in functional coherence, all of creation. Don’t give that role to anything or anyone else.

A Christian philosophy must start by putting nothing into the slot of being the substance on which everything else depends—nothing in creation is that. That’s only the power of God. Through Christ, God not only mediates His saving power to His creatures; through Jesus Christ, He maintains His sustaining power through His creative and sustaining power. That’s what Colossians 1 says: "Through Christ, He has created all things, and in Him, all things hang together."

Don’t put matter into that slot, or matter plus form, or the rational order of the world plus physical things. None of those candidates are right. That would give us an ontology where we would look for the nature of kinds of things but not the overall nature of all creation. Because the overall nature of all creation is not to be physical, or to be physical and rational, or any of the other choices. The overall nature of the entire cosmos is to depend on God. It’s to be God’s creation. So, we’re not looking for the same thing that other philosophies look for when they start with the idea of substance.

I’m happy when I see that Locke realizes he can’t put any kind of properties and laws that he can distinguish in the things we experience into that slot. None of them are going to work as substance. Descartes thought you could—the physical and the rational. Locke says no, we can’t put any of them there. They all look dependent to him. That’s his Christianity showing through: God created them all. They all look dependent—yes, that’s right, Locke. And none of them, therefore, can be the substance that holds the whole creation together, with all kinds of properties and laws that make them what they are, sustain them in existence, and ensure that everything hangs together.

But then Locke says, “Well, there has to be something doing that, so it must be something I know not what,” and that’s very disappointing. He leads you right up to the step where he needs to see a Christian take on philosophy, then steps back. It’s a pity and a regret, seeing that.

But then Locke speaks of how we know the external world and how we know other people. Locke’s answer about the external world is that we see and feel it. We know it through our sensory apparatus, and that satisfies everyone. He doesn’t use the term “self-evidence,” but I would. I think what we experience, we experience as self-evident—unless we can detect a hologram or hallucination, or have reason to believe someone drugged us, causing us to see the world in a crazy way. But Locke himself puts it this way:

“The idea of anything in our mind no more proves that it exists than a picture of a man is evidence of his being in the world, or visions of a dream make a true history. For example, the whiteness of this paper is not proof of its existence. The actual receiving of ideas from outside ourselves is what gives us notice of the existence of other things and makes us know that something does exist and has a being independent of us. While I write this, I have, by the paper affecting my eyes, the idea produced in my mind of white paper. Whatever object causes this, I call white, and by that I know that the quality really exists and has a being independent of me."

And of this, the greatest assurance I can possibly have, and to which my powers can attain, is the testimony of my eyes, which are the proper and sole judges of this thing. And that’s a certainty as great as human nature is capable of, concerning the existence of anything except a man’s self and God.

So, he’s saying, in effect, that normal sense perception conveys certainty about itself, and that’s what I mean when I say it’s self-evident. And Locke says it’s as certain as anything, except our own existence and the certainty we have that God exists. The certainty of ourselves and God may be more intense and thorough than our certainty about what we see around us, but what we see around us comes in second—and not by a lot. When we have normal perception, such as seeing this paper as white, that’s as good as we’re going to get. We shouldn’t ask for proof that the paper is real and white, because that’s conveyed in normal perception. In normal perception, it’s evident to us.

I said that Locke would do away with self-evidence, then turn around and use it. That’s what we’re catching him doing. I said that because I’ve read Locke before.

So what about real existence? How can we tell whether what we’re experiencing is a realistic dream, a hallucination, or, we could add, a hologram? How do we know we’re not being fooled? Some of the time, Locke assumes that all our simple ideas simply represent real realities. At other times, he seems to realize it’s a problem he hasn’t solved.

Keep in mind, Locke still wants reality to be rational. He’s not going to say “the rational is real”—it’s not that whatever fantasy picture you can contrive, like that of monads, is real if it’s rational and has no contradiction. He doesn’t believe that. But he does believe the real is rational. The real is permeated by laws—laws of mathematics, laws of logic—and those laws apply to the world. The world really has the property of conforming to those laws, and it has other kinds of order: physical order, biological order, and so on.

He wants to take the first part of that slogan, “the real is rational”—that’s okay. The world is capable of being explained, and he’s going to do that. But it doesn’t follow that whatever is rational, whatever we can invent as long as it doesn’t contradict itself, is real. No, he’s not going to go along with that.

So, Locke gives an account of how people become aware of sensations as revealing objects external to them. This is knowledge of relations:

"It is the first act of the mind when it has any ideas at all, to perceive its ideas, and as far as it perceives them, to know what each one is, and therefore also to perceive their differences—that one idea is not another. This is what we would call perceptions, but he calls them ideas—things that exist in the mind. This is so absolutely necessary that without it, there could be no knowledge at all. By this, the mind clearly and infallibly perceives each idea to agree with itself and to be what it is, and all distinct ideas to be different. That is evident without proof, not inferred from any other information, and infallible."

But Locke doesn’t use the term “self-evident.”

I think the three restrictions on self-evidence are false, and we’ll talk about that. The requirement that everyone agree with you is one you could never know was true or false because you can’t know what people a million years ago thought, or what people a million years from now will think. Just because you can’t check it doesn’t mean it couldn’t be right. It’s worse than not being able to tell.

We’ll get into this in more detail down the line. You can see how Locke is appealing to self-evidence without using the word because he doesn’t want to show that everyone agrees with him or that he’s only talking about laws. Because right here, he’s not talking about laws—he’s talking about perceptions, which are not laws. He’s saying each perception is perfectly consistent with itself and different from the others, and that’s so obvious as to be infallible.

Sorry, Charlie. It doesn’t have to be infallible or any of those things to be self-evident.