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... ce and connection are relations that hold of real objects, as opposed to abstract ideas. I have combined the categories of the intuitive and demonstrative here, since Locke has little to say about them. Few relations of co-existence are known through the examination of ideas alone. Of greater importance are relations discovered to hold in sense objects.
Most of them are subjects of opinion, and only those which are actually present in perception are known sensitively. Thus I may know that my yellow watch is gold. Knowledge of existence is somewhat artificially divided among the various degrees. I know myself through the direct inspection of ideas.
There is a demonstration of God' existence, and there is sensitive knowledge of objects actually present to my senses. Thus I do not know that the classroom in which the lectures are given exists at the very moment I am typing these notes in my office. So in truth, we know very little sensitively, since what we perceive at any time is very limited. Locke painted himself into a corner in his description of knowledge as concerned only with ideas. Paradigm examples of knowledge, on this view, are that white is not black, and that the sum of the squares of the sides of a right triangle is the square of the hypotenuse. But both are independent of any facts except those concerning ideas themselves.
Locke, rightly, asks why on his account of knowledge anything which comes into anyone' head does not count as knowledge. He notes that we intend for some of our ideas to refer beyond themselves to an external reality, and that the title of knowledge must be reserved for those ideas which correspond to it. But this raises the problem of the criterion for distinguishing which ideas conform to reality and which do not. Rather than giving a general criterion of knowledge, Locke proceeds on a case-by-case basis.
The second case he considers is the least interesting. We have seen already that mathematical knowledge is supposed to be based on intuition and demonstration concerning abstract ideas. Locke adds that they are representative of themselves, and the question of external reality touches them only indirectly. If there are things that correspond to our abstract ideas, then demonstrations about them apply to those things. The same goes for other kinds of abstract ideas, including moral ideas. The first case of correspondence is that of simple ideas to their originals.
Locke assumed that these ideas are not made up by ourselves (we can only operate on given simple ideas), they correspond to what causes them. Note, however, that Locke has not yet shown that we have knowledge of the existence of other things. It still remains open whether the source of these ideas is an external reality, and the nature of the correspondence has not been established. The third case is the least ambitious. This concerns complex ideas of substances. To what extent does my idea of a raspberry correspond to the thing?
Locke provisionally answers that the correspondence is rough. Finally we turn to the question of our knowledge of the existence of things. That we know our own existence intuitively is based on appeal to the argument of Augustine and Descartes, that doubting one' own existence presupposes the existence of a doubter, and hence is futile. This knowledge is intuitive, it seems, because one can hold this thought in its entirety at a single time. The proof of the existence of God is problematic. As a good empiricist, Locke gave a proof a posteriori, or from experience.
The starting point is the already-demonstrated existence of himself. From this narrow basis he moves outward using a version of the principle of sufficient reason (itself never justified), that nothing cannot produce anything. To avoid a regress of producers, he claims that we must acknowledge that from eternity there has been something. (It is not clear why he could not appeal instead to a first cause which was not produced, rather than produced by nothing). Next he claimed that this something is most powerful. This conclusion is quite dubious on the grounds that the only thing he need account for is the existence of himself.
But even if he did invoke this being as the cause of the existence of the world, the being need only be as powerful as it takes to produce the world as its effect. Finally, this eternal, most powerful, being is said to be most knowing. Locke has noted that he himself is an existing thinking thing, and now claims that thinking cannot arise spontaneously from matter. Only a thinking thing could give rise to a thinking thing.
Further, the being is most knowing. But the same problem as before arises here: the being need only be powerful enough to produce the level of thinking found in the world. In general, proofs a posteriori have the problem that the infinite properties of a God seem to surpass what is required to explain the world around us. Having given a flawed argument for the existence of God, Locke moved to give a shaky account of our knowledge of the existence of other things. This knowledge is sensitive, and is very limited in its scope. One can know of the existence only of those things with which one is in sensory contact.
Locke' theory of sensitive knowledge is very much like some contemporary theories of knowledge. It has two components, one "external" and the other "internal. " The external component in knowledge is that a causal relation between the knower and the object is a necessary condition for knowledge. "It is therefore the actual receiving of ideas from without that gives us notice of the existence of other things, and makes us know, that something doth exist at that time without us, which causes that idea in us; though perhaps we neither know nor consider how it does it" (IV, XI, 2). Although this external connection is necessary for knowledge, however, it is not sufficient. The second ingredient is what is Ernest Sosa calls an "epistemic perspective, " or an assessment of the way our faculties operate to produce the ideas in us. The eyes are said to give "testimony" in which we have confidence. "If we persuade ourselves that our faculties act and inform us right concerning the existence of those objects that affect them, it cannot pass for an ill-grounded confidence" (IV, XI, 3).
One thing he said in this connection caught the eye of Berkeley, that we cannot doubt the existence of the things we see and feel. But what, Berkeley asked, do we see and feel other than the ideas themselves? Locke says that he "has reason to rely" on the testimony of the senses. He argues that has the assurance of God. It appears from IV, XI, 3, that he thinks that since God has given him these faculties, and they are correlated with the production of pleasure and pain ("one great concernment of my present state"), he can be confident in the testimony of the senses. This is reminiscent of Descartes' claim that God would be a deceiver had he been created with faculties whose manifest testimony is erroneous.
Locke then gives four concurrent reasons to be confident in the testimony of the senses (or equivalently, to support his "epistemic perspective. ") The first is that we cannot invent specific kinds of ideas, say the taste of a pineapple, so that they require "exterior causes. " Locke can cite only empirical evidence for this conclusion, i. e. , that "nobody" gets the taste of a pineapple until they actually bite into one. It is not clear that this establishes the impossibility of so doing, however. But even if the empirical evidence Locke cites is sufficient for his purposes, note the weakness of the conclusion. Locke cannot say what the exterior cause is. As Berkeley noted, the exterior cause might be God.
The second reason is also vulnerable to the same objections. Locke claims that the production of some ideas seems to be forced on me. I have no control over them (the come "willy-nilly" into the mind), and so they are the product of an exterior cause. As with the first case, Locke cites empirical evidence which may or may not be sufficient for his conclusion. And he again is vulnerable to Berkeley's criticism that the specific exterior cause is not established by the argument. The fourth reason (which is more continuous with the first two than is the third), is that the senses bear testimony to one another.
This is a sound principle for evaluating testimony when there is some other evidence, but it does not work well in the present case. If a number of witnesses giving testimony are systematically lying or systematically deluded, then the coherence of their testimony is of no value. The only conclusion Locke could draw is that whatever the exterior cause of sensitive ideas may be, it is likely to be the same for all the sense modalities. Coherence may well be a criterion separating the dreamed or imagined from some other ideas to be called "real, " but the nature of the real is unknown, at least on the basis of these three arguments. The third reason is an apparent difference between ideas, in that the pleasure or pain associated with some is dramatically more intense than what is associated with ideas of imagination, dreams, etc. This argument is not very strong, since hallucinations can bring on great pain, as with Delayed Stress Syndrome.
Locke went on to delimit the extent of our knowledge to objects actually affecting the senses, as is implied by his externals condition discussed above. (I did not mention in lecture that this condition allows knowledge on the basis of memory of actually sensed objects, since the ideas were caused originally in the appropriate way. ) On the other hand, we cannot know that other minds exist, though it is highly probable that they do. The required external causation falls short. We are not affected by the minds of others, but only by physical phenomena: what we see, hear, feel bodies to do. This introduces the topic of the use of reason in matters that fall short of knowledge. Locke's general principle is that we ought to assent to a proposition when the preponderance of evidence is on its side, i. e. , when it is highly probable.
On the other hand, it is not always the case that we ought to withhold assent when there is not a preponderance of evidence. This loophole exists because there are some matters which are "above reason, " in the sense that there is no way to adduce empirical evidence for or against. These cases allow for consent on the basis of faith. On the other hand, there are cases in which there is an absolute preponderance of evidence against a proposition, when it is "contrary to reason. " I may not give my assent to what conflicts with what I know to be true.
What is wrong with assenting to a proposition (e. g. , that there is more than one God) that is contrary to reason? It is an abuse of the faculty of reason which God gave us. Thus, Locke held that the true God would never give us faculties which we are supposed to subvert in order to know God. If we may revert to Descartes once again, God would be a deceiver if such a condition holds. Locke' religious convictions were rationalistic.
That is, he thought that religious belief has a rational basis. We have already seen that he tried to demonstrate from rational principles the existence of God. He also held that revealed religion can be considered testimony which has its own evidential weight. There are two sorts of revelation possible: direct implantation of ideas in our minds by God, and public signs such as the content of scripture. In both cases, whether we should place confidence in these sources depends on whether they have good credentials, i. e. , whether we have good reason to think that they are actually the word of God.
Here Locke began his attack on enthusiasm, which would set up revelation without reason. Locke states that this is impossible, so that anyone professing to do this must be stating his own fancies. The mark of the enthusiast is the justification of the belief by the mere degree to which it is believed. Locke diagnosed the syndrome as the product of an overheated brain.
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