Locke and the Primary Signification of Words: An Approach to Word Meaning

Locke's claim that the primary signification of (most) words is an idea, or complex of ideas, has received different interpretations. I support the majority view that Locke's notion of primary signification can be construed in terms of linguistic meaning. But this reading has been seen as making Locke's account vulnerable to various criticisms, of which I consider two. First, it appears to make the account vulnerable to the charge that an idea cannot play the role that a word meaning should play. I argue that the role Locke actually gives to signified ideas is not susceptible to this criticism. Second, it appears to make Locke guilty of at least some degree of semantic idealism. I argue that Locke is not guilty of this and that he makes a proper distinction between the non-referential relation that holds between a word and its primary signification and the referential relation that holds between a word and things the word is used to speak about.     

Locke on Persons and Other Kinds of Substances

Locke's commentators are divided about whether Locke thinks that the idea of a person is a substance idea or a mode idea. I use Locke's theory of kinds to argue for an intermediate interpretation on which the idea of a person is a substance idea that contains a mode idea. As a result, while proponents of the substance interpretation correctly claim that ‘person’ designates a kind of substance, proponents of the mode interpretation are nonetheless correct in insisting that mode ideas play an important role in Locke's account of persons and personal identity.     

TWO KINDS OF INTENTIONALITY IN LOCKE

Ideas play at least two roles in Locke's theory of the understanding. They are constituents of ‘propositions,’ and some of them ‘represent’ the qualities and sorts of surrounding bodies. I argue that each role involves a distinct kind of intentional directedness. The same idea will in general be an ‘idea of’ two different objects, in different senses of the expression. Identifying Locke's scheme of twofold ‘ofness’ reveals a common structure to his accounts of simple ideas and complex ideas of substances. A consequence is a distinction among substance sorts parallel to one of his distinctions between primary and secondary qualities.     

LOCKE,SUSPENSION OF DESIRE,AND THE REMOTE GOOD

The chapter ‘Of power“ of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a very fine discussion of agency and a very complex piece of philosophy. It is the result of the superimposition of at least three layers of text (those of the first, second and fifth editions of the Essay), expressive of widely differing views of the same matters. The argument concerning agency and free will that it puts forward (as it now stands, reporting Locke's last word on the subject) is thus beset with problems, and even inconsistencies. But these textual and analytical difficulties should not hide from us the relevance and, in a way, the deep coherence of Locke's philosophy of action. In what follows, I will attempt to cast some light on this complicated interpretive and conceptual matter, by a careful reading of some parts of Locke's discussion. The first section shows how accounting for the evaluation and choice of remote goods, in terms of their real value and in preference to smaller, nearer ones, is a crucial problem for Locke's philosophy of action. The second section reads Locke's move from an internalist to an externalist view of motivation as a first, conceptually complex step towards such an account; and shows how this is linked to a change in the concept of will. The third and fourth sections reconstruct Locke's account (a pattern of suspension and examination of occurrent desire); discuss the role of the motivational and normative concept of happiness; and cast some doubt on the consistency of Locke's position.     

LOCKE ON IDEAS OF SUBSTANCE AND THE VEIL OF PERCEPTION

Abstract: John Yolton has argued that Locke held a direct realist position according to which sensory ideas are not perceived intermediaries, as on the representational realist position, but acts that take material substances as objects. This paper argues that were Locke to accept the position Yolton attributes to him he could not at once account for appearance‐reality discrepancies and maintain one of his most important anti‐nativist arguments. The paper goes on to offer an interpretation of Locke's distinction between ideas of substances and modes, a distinction that helps Locke to explain appearance‐reality discrepancies, although not in a large enough range of cases to strengthen Yolton's interpretation.     

Memory,Quasi-memory,and Pseudo-quasi-memory

Bishop Butler objected to Locke's theory of personal identity on the grounds that memory presupposes personal identity. Most of those sympathetic with Locke's account have accepted Butler's criticism, and have sought to devise a theory of personal identity in the spirit of Locke's that avoids Butler's circularity objection. John McDowell has argued that even the more recent accounts of personal identity are vulnerable to the kind of objection Butler raised against Locke's own account. I criticize McDowell's stance, drawing on a distinction introduced by Annalisa Coliva between two types of immunity to error through misidentification.     

LOCKE ON SENSITIVE KNOWLEDGE AND THE VEIL OF PERCEPTION – FOUR MISCONCEPTIONS1

Abstract: Interpreters of Locke's Essay are divided over whether to attribute to him a Representational Theory of Perception (RTP). Those who object to an RTP interpretation cite (among other things) Locke's Book IV account of sensitive knowledge, contending that the account is incompatible with RTP. The aim of this paper is to rebut this kind of objection – to defend an RTP reading of the relevant Book IV passages. Specifically, I address four influential assumptions (about sensitive knowledge) cited by opponents of an RTP interpretation and argue that in each case the assumption is false.     

God,Mixed Modes,and Natural Law: An Intellectualist Interpretation of Locke's Moral Philosophy

The goal of this paper is to explicate the theological and epistemological elements of John Locke's moral philosophy as presented in the ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ and ‘The Reasonableness of Christianity’. Many detractors hold that Locke's moral philosophy is internally inconsistent due to his seeming commitment to both the intellectualist position that divinely instituted morality admits of pure rational demonstration and the competing voluntarist claim that we must rely for our moral knowledge upon divine revelation. In this paper I argue that Locke is guilty of no such contradiction. In doing so, I attempt to accommodate Locke's position in the ‘Essay’ that moral principles are demonstrable a priori with his views on the sanctity of Christian revelation. I then consider Locke's conception of moral ideas as a species of mixed modes, or arbitrarily constructed complex ideas, and attempt to navigate the mechanism whereby human understanding can recognize these ideas as conforming to, or straying from, divinely appointed natural law. I conclude that despite Locke's failure to actually provide a full-fledged moral theory, he lays a rationally coherent groundwork for the fulfilment of such a project that accommodates a-priori rational reflection and divine revelation as complementary paths to moral understanding.     

Lockean Empathy

This paper offers an epistemic defense of empathy, drawing on John Locke's theory of ideas. Locke held that ideas of shape, unlike ideas of color, had a distinctive value: resembling qualities in their objects. I argue that the same is true of empathy, as when someone is pained by someone's pain. This means that empathy has the same epistemic value or objectivity that Locke and other early modern philosophers assigned to veridical perceptions of shape. For this to hold, pain and pleasure must be a primary quality of the mind, just as shape is a primary quality of bodies. Though Locke did not make that claim, I argue that pain and pleasure satisfy his criteria for primary qualities. I consider several objections to the analogy between empathy and shape‐perception and show how Locke's theory has resources for answering them. In addition, the claim that empathetic ideas are object‐matching sidesteps Berkeley's influential objection to Locke's theory of resemblance. I conclude by briefly considering the prospects for a similar defense of empathy in contemporary terms.     

Two Puzzles Concerning Spinoza's Conception of Belief

Spinoza's account of belief entails that if A has two ideas, p and q, with incompatible content, A believes that p (and not that q) if the idea of p is stronger than the idea of q. This seems to leave little space for dominant non‐beliefs, or cases in which there is discord between one's beliefs and one's affective‐behavioral responses. And yet Spinoza does allow for two classes of dominant non‐beliefs: efficacious fictions [fictiones] and ideas that conduce to akrasia. I show how Spinoza can account for dominant non‐beliefs within his model of cognition by distinguishing between the doxastic and the affective powers of ideas and by suggesting that doxastic power is best understood diachronically. While other scholars have stressed the elegance of Spinoza's account of ideas, this paper highlights the sophistication and flexibility of his account.     

Reflection,Nature, and Moral Law: The Extent of Catharine Cockburn's Lockeanism in her Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay

This essay examines Catharine Cockburn's moral philosophy as it is developed in her Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay on Human Understanding. In this work, Cockburn argues that Locke's epistemological principles provide a foundation for the knowledge of natural law. Sheridan suggests that Cockburn's objective in defending Locke's moral epistemology was conditioned by her own prior commitment to a significantly un‐Lockean theory of morality. In exploring Cockburn's views on morality in terms of their divergence from Locke's, the author hopes to underscore the extent of Cockburn's intellectual independence and her philosophical creativity.     

THE LOGIC OF IDEAS AND THE LOGIC OF THINGS: A REPLY TO CHAPPELL

Abstract: A continuation of the debate over the intelligibility, and plausibility, of Yolton's reading of Locke's account of perception. Here, the issue turns on the de‐reification of ideas and its implications for the putative axioms of symmetry and transitivity governing the identity of ideas. The issue is illustrated by what Locke says about confused ideas.     

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: MORE ON LOCKE'S LOGIC OF IDEAS

Abstract: An attempt at defending a version of John Yolton's non‐representationalist reading of Locke's account of perception against Vere Chappell's very threatening criticisms. Concerning this version, which takes ideas to be appearances, Chappell questioned their identity criteria, their relation to what they are appearances of, and their nature in general.     

Fixing Descartes: Ethical Intellectualism in Spinoza's Early Writings

This paper aims at reconstructing the ethical issues raised by Spinoza's early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Specifically, I argue that Spinoza takes issue with Descartes’ epistemology in order to support a form of “ethical intellectualism” in which knowledge is envisaged as both necessary and sufficient to reach the supreme good. First, I reconstruct how Descartes exploits the distinction between truth and certainty in his Discourse on the Method. On the one hand, this distinction acts as the basis for Descartes’ epistemological rules while, on the other hand, it implies a “morale par provision” in which adequate knowledge is not strictly necessary to practice virtue. Second, I show that Spinoza rejects the distinction between truth and certainty and thus the methodological doubt. This move leads Spinoza to substitute the Cartesian Cogito with the idea of God as the only adequate standard of knowledge, through which the mind can attain the rules to reach the supreme good. Third, I demonstrate that in the Short Treatise Spinoza develops this view by equating intellect and will and thus maintaining that only adequate knowledge can help to contrast affects. However, I also insist that Spinoza's early epistemology is unable to explain why human beings drop conceive of the idea of God inadequately. Thus, I suggest that in his later writings Spinoza accounts for the insufficiency of adequate knowledge in opposing the power of the imagination and passions by reconnecting the nature of ideas with the mind's conatus.     

THE BIBLICAL ROOTS OF LOCKE'S THEORY OF PERSONAL IDENTITY

Locke's consciousness‐based theory of personal identity resulted not only from his agnosticism on substance, but also from his biblical theology. This theory was intended to complement and sustain Locke's moral and theological commitments to a system of otherworldly rewards and sanctions as revealed in Scripture. Moreover, he inferred mortalist ideas from the Bible, rejecting the resurrection of the same body and maintaining that the soul dies at physical death and will be resurrected by divine miracle. Accordingly, personal identity is neither in the soul, nor in the body, nor in a union of soul and body. To Locke, personal identity is in consciousness, which, extending “backwards to any past Action or Thought,” enables the self, both in this life and upon resurrection for the Last Judgment, to recognize that “it is the same self now it was then; and ‘tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done” (Essay II.xxvii.9).     

Peter Winch and Political Authority

This article explores a neglected aspect of Peter Winch's work: his writings on political authority. It seeks to show that this neglect is undeserved. Three themes are interweaved in the discussion. First, the major developments in Winch's thinking between his first published article on political authority (in a symposium with Richard Peters) and his later writings on the subject are identified and assessed. Criticism is focused mainly on his tendency to be insufficiently attentive to the distinction between being in authority and being an authority, and the implications this has for the distinctiveness of political authority. Secondly, particular attention is given to some of the key strands in Winch's analysis. These include his distinction between the nature and the grounds of political authority, how the role of consent is to be understood in the light of this distinction, how an adequate understanding political authority does not undermine our ideas of autonomy, and what it might mean to reject the whole idea of political authority. Finally, the article concludes by briefly defending the value of Winch's approach to political philosophy. Earlier it is shown that Winch's analysis does not foreclose on a range of political responses to authority, and this point is generalised to argue for a philosophical approach (like Winch’s) that aims at understanding, rather than at advancing any particular set of moral or political principles.     

Newman and Quasi-Fideism: A Reply to Duncan Pritchard

Abstract: In recent years, Duncan Pritchard has developed a position in religious epistemology called quasi-fideism that he claims traces back to John Henry Newman's treatment of the rationality of religious belief. In this paper, we give three reasons to think that Pritchard's reading of Newman as a quasi-fideist is mistaken. First, Newman's parity argument does not claim that religious and non-religious beliefs are on a par because both are groundless; instead, for Newman, they are on a par because both often stem from implicit rather than explicit reasoning. Second, pace Pritchard, Newman's distinction between simple and complex assent does not map onto the Wittgensteinian distinction between groundless hinge commitments and beliefs that flow from these hinges. For Newman, simple and complex assent differ in terms of the believer's level of awareness of their grounds. Third, and finally, Newman does not reject Locke's evidentialism in toto. Instead, he argues that certitude is not restricted to beliefs stemming from intuition and demonstration but often rightly includes probabilistically supported (or fallibly evidenced) beliefs.     

LOCKE AND THE OBJECTS OF PERCEPTION

Abstract: It is common to assume that if Locke is to be regarded as a consistant epistemologist he must be read as holding that either ideas are the objects of perception or that [physical] objects are. He must either be a direct realist or a representationalist. But perhaps, paradoxical as it at first sounds, there is no reason to suppose that he could not hold both to be true. We see physical objects and when we do so we have ideas. We see or hear birds and bells but we also have visual and auditory ideas of birds and bells. This suggestion is explored through examination of what Locke says about perception in his Elements of Natural Philosophy and the accounts offered both by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and by some of Locke's successors.