Locke's Anti-Innatism

 From a philosophical point of view however the essential elements of Lockean empiricism were threefold: a) criticism of a-priori knowledge which he equated with innate knowledge b) to show that reason is dependent on experience rather than vica-versa c) and to accomplish this task through an account of concept-formation from a thorough investigation of human knowledge. If it can be shown that human understanding is completely dependent on sense-experience then no higher authority other than experience would exist to provide justification for one’s beliefs and the concept of a-priori reason would be an empty concept. Traditionally it is believed that Hume takes empiricism to its logical end. Recent scholarship does not share this view but tradition in this case seems to be right. The basic idea of Lockean empiricism is to show that a-priori reason lacks any application in the sphere of experience. We can notice this in Locke’s criticism of innate ideas, which questions the role that innate knowledge is supposed to play in human understanding. So the truth or falsity of rationalism would depend on their ability to clarify the relation between a-priori reason and empirical experience. Locke questions what theoretical role a-priori reason plays within the ambit of empirical psychology, if an empirical psychology does not invoke these rational principles and can also explain human ability to reason then innate knowledge would be redundant because of lack of application in the empirical sphere.

However Locke was mistaken in this respect because he mistook ‘innateness’ to be the primary issue between empiricism and rationalism and so the debate centred on concept-acquisition. An evolutionary psychologist may believe that evolution has drilled some knowledge within our brain prior to any encounter with the world but this form of innatism would still not count as a rationalism, it would rather could be an empiricism. So the Rationalist can reply to Locke in two ways, firstly that knowledge of certain truths cannot be acquired through sense-experience most notably in case of mathematics. And secondly, the sense-experience becomes an occasion to acquire knowledge of these truths, just like in Meno Socrates prompts a young slave to come up with geometrical theorem. Sense-Experience can become an occasion for recognition of truths we know implicitly. As Leibniz makes clear in his Discourse on Metaphysics section 26:

“In order properly to conceive what an idea is, we must prevent an equivocation. For some take the idea to be the form or difference of our thoughts, and thus we have an idea in the mind only insofar as we think it; every time we think of it again, we have other ideas of the same thing, though similar to the preceding ideas. But it seems that others take the idea as an immediate object of thought or as some permanent form that remains when we are not contemplating it. And, in fact, our soul always has in it the quality of representing to itself any nature or form whatsoever, when the occasion to think of it presents itself. And I believe that this quality of our soul, insofar as it expresses some nature, form, or essence, is properly the idea of the thing, which is in us and which is always in us, whether we think of it or not. For our soul expresses God, the universe, and all essences, as well as all existences. . . . And nothing can be taught to us whose idea we do not already have in our mind, an idea which is like the matter of which that thought is formed. . . . [Plato’s Meno] demonstrates that our soul knows all these things virtually and requires only attention (animadversion) to recognize truths, and that, consequently, it has, at very least, the ideas upon which these truths depend. One can even say that it already possesses these truths, if they are taken as relations of ideas.”

 

Hume unlike Locke was perfectly able to fathom the exact nature of the issue between rationalism and empiricism:

“’tis remarkable, that the present question concerning the precedency of our impressions or ideas, is the same with what has made so much noise in other times, when it has been disputed whether there be any innate ideas, or whether all ideas be derived from sensation and reflexion. We may observe, that in order to prove the ideas of extension and colour not to be innate, philosophers do nothing but shew, that they are conveyed by our senses. To prove the ideas of passion and desire not to be innate, they observe that we have a preceding experience of these emotions in ourselves. Now if we carefully examine these arguments, we shall find that they prove nothing but that ideas are preceded by other more lively perceptions, from which they are derived, and which they represent.” (THN 1/1/1)

 

The real issue as Hume fathomed between rationalism and empiricism concerns not the manner in which we acquire concepts but the content of those concepts – whether they are intellectual or sensible. Hume reconceived Locke’s psychological project as concerned with the origin of concepts, in order to show that all our concepts refer to something sensible. Hume’s project can be seen as the culmination of Locke’s efforts because Locke’s basic idea was to show that reason is not an independent source of knowledge at all and is fundamentally dependent on sense-experience. He however chose the wrong means to gain this end, which was corrected subsequently, partially in Berkeley and more fully in Hume.

Wayne Waxman (2005) has done seminal work in this area and he shows the following doctrines as commonly shared by Locke, Berkeley and Hume and introduces some terminology that may be useful in this regard:

Sensibilism: “the thesis that all our ideas—perceptions, in Hume’s terminology, representations in Kant’s—originate in (are coeval with) being perceived, and have no existence prior to or independently of their immediate presence to consciousness in perception. To understand this, however, we need from the outset to dispel one of the most widespread misconceptions about sensibilism: its limitation to a thesis about the senses as sources merely of sensations (visual, tactual, etc.).”

 

Intellectualism: “the thesis that the ideas constitutive of intellection generally (conception, judgment, and reasoning), and of objective understanding most particularly (thought and cognition of substances, causes, quantities, etc.), exist prior to and independently of their being perceived in sensation or reflexion, and so are composed of contents distinct from sensations and reflexions. Whether intellectualists traced these ideas to a source in the essence of our own intellects (innatism) or in that of God (illuminationism) is a matter of only secondary concern vis à vis their differences with sensibilists.”

 

“The key difference is that intellectualism implies that neither the senses nor any of the psychological operations directed upon their data have anything to contribute to the content of these ideas.”

 

Pschologism: “the sensibilist endeavor to trace concepts at the heart of age-old philosophical disputes to their origins as ideas in sensation or reflexion, with an eye to determining whether the operations of the mind given in internal sense perception make any essential contributions to their content. When the answer is yes, the psychologistic philosopher is in a position to set bounds to the employment of a concept that limit its scope to the purview of the experiencing mind in the very same subjectivist sense that pleasures and pains can only be supposed to exist when they are perceived to exist. As affirmative answers were supposed to include some or all of the concepts central to understanding in general and objective understanding in particular—conceptual universality, judgment, reason, individuality and identity, space and time, existence (and its modalities of possibility, actuality, and necessity), quantity (number and extensive magnitude), quality (reality and negation), substance, and cause and effect—psychologism was rightly regarded as the source of an entirely new variety of conceptual skepticism, and met with immense hostility as a result. Psychologism was also regarded as a source of idealism, indeed the first genuinely new variety since Plato.”

 

“Sensibilism, then, is the principle of unity, and psychologism the principle of continuity, connecting Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Sensibilism is the presupposition of psychologism, contrasts with intellectualism, and is related to empiricism as species to subspecies. To reject sensibilism is to hold that the contents objectively present in the idea we perceive and the contents subjectively perceived in sensation or reflexion in the presence of the idea are incommensurate. The psychology of its perception can then have no fundamental or essential importance to the idea itself. For regardless of whether it is conceived as an innate exemplar of the nature of an archetype existing externally to our minds or as that nature itself (present to us immediately by some special mode of insight, be it Malebranchian illumination or a Fregean-type apprehension of senses and references), intellectualism implies that it can owe none of its content to the psychological processes whereby it, or its mental exemplar, becomes present to the individual, isolated conscious subject in sensation or reflexion. Only the sensibilists’ denial of the objective independence accorded to concepts by intellectualism can open the way for psychological considerations to become indispensable to determining their meaning and delimiting their scope of application. This potential is realized if, and only if, a psychological inquiry into their origin as objects present immediately to consciousness should reveal that the understanding, in and through the processes whereby it brings them to consciousness, makes some indispensable contribution to their content.”

 

Let us look at Locke’s definition of an Idea:

“I must here in the Entrance beg pardon of my Reader, for the frequent use of the Word Idea, which he will find in the following Treatise. It being that Term, which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks . . . or whatsoever it is, which the Mind can be employ’d about in thinking. (ECHU I/i/§8)”

 

“Whatsoever the Mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of Perception, Thought, or Understanding, that I call Idea. (II/viii/§8)”

 

“because treating in [ECHU] of the understanding, which is nothing but the faculty of thinking, I could not well treat of that faculty of the mind, which consists in thinking, without considering the immediate objects of the mind in thinking, which I call ideas: and therefore in treating of the understanding, I guess it will not be thought strange, that the greatest part of my book has been taken up, in considering what these objects of the mind, in thinking, are; whence they come; what use the mind makes of them, in its several ways of thinking; and what are the outward marks whereby it signifies them to others, or records them for its own use. And this, in short, is my way by ideas.” (CWS 134)

 

Locke uses the term ‘Idea’ as an all-inclusive term for both the object of thought and for the activity of thinking, where thinking includes perceiving, imagining, reasoning and even sensing. Locke seeks to study the faculty of understanding by consulting its immediate objects called Ideas and consider ‘whence they come from’ i.e. their origin, ‘what use mind makes of them, in its several ways of thinking’, i.e. concept formation and how the mind ‘signifies them to others’ or how they make communication through language possible.

 

1.1.1  Further Locke also says:

 

“To ask, at what time a Man has first any Ideas, is to ask, when he begins to perceive; having Ideas, and Perception being the same thing.” (2.1.9)

 

Here Locke defines an Idea in terms of presence to consciousness since the idea and its perception is regarded as the same thing. So the definition in a way comes to whatever consciousness perceives or whatever its object is, is called an Idea. From this Locke can infer that no:

“Truths can be imprinted on the Understanding without being perceived.” (1.2.5)

This is Locke’s key anti-innatism move. There are no truths that mind has access to and which it is not conscious of. This leads to the question what does Locke mean by ‘being perceived’ or ‘being conscious of’. The question becomes all the more pressing when we consider Leibniz’s objection to this definition of Idea. In his New Essays on Human Understanding (NE 118), Leibniz objects to this definition in the following way:

“it is impossible that we should always reflect explicitly on all our thoughts; for if we did, the mind would reflect on each reflection, ad infinitum, without ever being able to move on to a new thought. For example, in being aware of some present feeling, I should have always to think that I think about that feeling, and further to think that I think of thinking about it, and so on ad infinitum. It must be that I stop reflecting on all these reflections, and that eventually some thought is allowed to occur without being thought about; otherwise I would dwell for ever on the same thing.”

 

Waxman (2005) replies on behalf of Locke:

 

“Leibniz’s criticism that Locke’s position commits him to a reflective regress (NE 118) depends, it seems to me, on discounting Locke’s insistence that the one is just as deserving of being thought of as a sense as the other: a mere passive admission of sensations or reflexions into consciousness, with no need for any further mental activity in order for them to be given. There is thus no more need for the giving of reflexions itself to be given (and so on ad infinitum) than there is for the giving of sensations to be given simply in order for them to be perceived. Leibniz’s criticism seems to depend on the mistaken supposition that, for Locke, reflexive perceptual consciousness always involves an explicit act of focusing attention; however, as texts such as ECHU II/ix/§10 attest, Locke supposed that a great deal goes in our minds that is not attentively accessible to us.”

 

Waxman seems to think that Leibniz’s criticisms have to do with what Locke calls Ideas of Reflection, Ideas which “mind gets by reflecting on its own operation.” (2.1.4). He argues to effect that just like the object of sensation is given to the mind, similarly the objects of reflection are given to the mind and hence in order to be perceived a higher order perception is not required. But Leibniz’s criticism occurs in a context where he claims to be giving an argument against the view that mind cannot have an Idea that is not perceived. Waxman in the second half of the quoted passage considers that perhaps Leibniz implicitly attributes to Locke the view that to be conscious of something implies attending to it and so he takes consciousness to be attention and his objection seeks to counter this line of thought. This is closer to what Leibniz actually says.

On Waxman’s interpretation Locke does not take consciousness to be attention and so we can have conscious states without explicitly attending to them. But that is not the primary issue. In NE 109 Leibniz says that an Idea cannot be regarded as the form of thought for then it would begin and end with the thought but since the Idea is the object of thought it can exist before and after those thoughts. The key to Locke’s intended rebuttal which Leibniz too considers in NE 113, is to prove that it is the essence of thought that one be aware of it or that anything thinks without being aware of it. The conclusion that Locke is after is that there is a contradiction in taking one thinks and not be conscious of it (see ECHU 1.2.5 quoted above). This is how he seeks to argue against innatism. But if we go with Waxman’s interpretation ‘to be conscious of’ and ‘Idea’ are defined by Locke interchangeably and Leibniz is right to say in NE 118 that this begs the question. What Locke has done is to define Idea in terms of presence to consciousness, which is a nominal definition and then pitted this definition against the rationalist for whom it is not necessary to accept it. So Locke’s theory comes to this:

Definition: An Idea is what is regarded as the immediate object of thought.

But what does it mean to think something or to have an object of thought?

ECHU 2.1.9: Having an Idea and its perception are the same thing. Hence there cannot be an Idea that pre-exists in understanding.

To use Leibniz’s terminology, Leibniz fails to realize that perhaps Locke is collapsing the distinction between the form of thought and the object of thought. In NE 119 Leibniz distinguishes Idea and thought and admits that some sensation always corresponds to a thought but pure and distinct Ideas are always independent of the senses. In reply to a metaphor Locke uses against innatism that it is impossible to feel hunger and yet not be aware of it; Leibniz distinguishes between thoughts and the awareness of thought. If Locke also distinguishes between pre-attentive and attentive consciousness as Waxman has it, then his argument using the example of hunger does no harm to innatism. The question all along is why Locke feels justified in pointing out the existence of thought without explicit awareness to be a contradiction. Leibniz takes him in that very sense as already pointed out but he thinks that Locke draws a distinction between a thought and a second-order thought that allows us to be conscious of that thought or in his terminology between representation and apperception. In NE 212 Leibniz says:

“The senses provide us with materials for reflections; we should not even think about thought if we did not think about something else i.e. the particular facts which the senses provide.”

So his argument from infinite regress comes down to this that if there is a rule that mind follows to the effect that it necessarily is aware of every single thought, which for Leibniz is possible only if there is a thought about the first thought, then in this case the second thought will remain unconscious contradicting the rule and so in order to be aware of this second thought it would have to think it and the further application of the rule would imply that the mind occupies itself with only one thought and never moves onto the next. But if Locke thinks that self-consciousness is basic and is implied in every single thought then the mind does not need to explicitly think every particular thought and which theory is surely different from Leibniz’s theory of self-consciousness which demands we should be aware of something before self-consciousness is possible. But to attribute such an interpretation to Locke is to treat him like Berkeley which inclination he certainly did not have, as Waxman also admits. In favour of such an interpretation is another passage from ECHU 4.1.4:

“Tis the first Act of the Mind, when it has any Sentiments or Ideas at all, to perceive its Ideas, and so far as it perceives them, to know each what it is, and thereby also to perceive their difference, and that one is not another. This is so absolutely necessary, that without it there could be no Knowledge, no Reasoning, no Imagination, no distinct Thoughts 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 disagree, i.e. the one not to be the other: And this it does without any pains, labour, or deduction; but at first view, by its natural power of Perception and Distinction.”

 

Clearly the infallible access to the content of a thought that Locke claims thought to possess is possible only if there is nothing more to the content of a thought than what is present to consciousness as such or in Waxman’s terminology the appearance = reality principle applies to the ‘object of understanding’. Leibniz found this so improbable that he considers such a possible interpretation of Locke in NE 109 and then brushes it aside as originating due to inadvertence in use of terms.

 

Waxman considers this interpretation and attributes it to Locke but also seeks to distinguish his view from Berkeley. First Waxman considers an intimate relation between reflexive consideration of an Idea and the Idea itself to be a necessary relationship since for Locke it is a principle of individuation. So every new reflexive consideration of an Idea becomes then a new Idea and thereby if I perceive something, then picture it and after some time recollect it, all these three would be different Ideas; common sense notwithstanding. In support of this interpretation Waxman cites 2.14.3-6 and 13-14 where Locke discusses concept acquisition of temporal change acquired though an internal perception of change of conscious states:

“I would have any one try, whether he can keep one unvaried single Idea in his Mind, without any other, for any considerable time together. . . . he will, I suppose, find it difficult to keep all other Ideas out of his Mind: But that some, either of another kind, or various Consideration of that Idea will constantly succeed one another in his thoughts, let him be as wary as he can.”

 

So if for instance I am continuously staring at an empty chair, the successive flow of consciousness will not have a single object – the chair but there will be a succession of conscious states each having different objects or Ideas but all taken to be the same in unreflective common sense and contra Leibniz in NE 109, the Idea will not exist before the thought or even after it but would be co-terminus with it.

 

Does Locke however take this option; that the thinking of a thought and a thought are identical? Would this not however vitiate any distinction between Ideas of Sensation and Ideas of Reflection? If the Ideas of both are given then how does the mind discriminate between sensation and reflection? What is the discriminating feature of sensation that allows us to differentiate between ideas of sensation from ideas of reflection?

But worse still how to prevent the collapse of Locke’s views into Berkeley’s? Waxman prevents this collapse by stating that on Locke’s view the content of consciousness and its perception are ‘correlated’ and the possibility remains that the content ‘might exist unperceived’. Waxman distinguishes the ontological question of existence of the content of consciousness from the psychological question of what appears to consciousness. He further argues that Locke decided the ontological question on empirical grounds (i.e. physiological considerations) in favour of appearance-reality principle unlike Berkeley who decided the question on grounds of conceptual content of existence. This is not very comforting for one thing it contradicts 4.1.4 quoted above where Locke attributes to us infallible access to Ideas and another his critical anti-innatist project which depends on primacy of the psychological question of how we know reality over the metaphysical question about what reality is, is compromised if empirical or physiological considerations are brought in to settle psychological matters; why not then accept the priority of metaphysical questions too! And finally however Locke may have arrived at his theory of appearance = reality for Ideas, he arrived at the same position as Berkeley’s yet we never find him denying the existence of an external world or collapsing the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Waxman does not believe that Locke’s position comes down to Berkeley’s but there is no mid-way between taking the content of thought to be identical with thought and different from thought. We can however consider an alternative interpretation put forward by Martha Bolton and Michael Ayers (1991). The latter says:

“Lockean simple ideas . . . must be taken to correspond to their objects in regular and orderly ways, even if we are ignorant of the nature of those objects and of how they act on us. A simple idea is therefore, as Epicurus and Gassendi had held, a natural sign of its cause. As such it is a ‘sign’ in another sense too, since it is naturally fitted to represent or ‘signify’ in thought that feature of real things, whatever it may be, which is in general responsible for our receiving ideas or sensations of that type. So the simple idea of white received in sensation and capable of being recalled in imagination stands in the natural language of thought for whatever in the object underlies or constitutes its general power regularly to cause just that sensation in us, the power Locke called the ‘quality’ of the object. The epistemic sign is also the semantic sign of this quality. . . . The signs that naturally indicate qualities or powers naturally stand for them in thought. This neat conjunction of epistemology and theory of representation, encapsulated in the ambivalence of the terms ‘sign’ and ‘signify’ in Locke’s usage, lies at the heart of his general philosophy.”

 

Waxman calls such views internalist in considering the relation between content of consciousness and consciousness. Martha Bolton in her article “The Real Molyneux Question and the Basis of Locke’s Answer” says:

 

“….it is a mistake to think [Locke] takes simple ideas as such to be totally lacking in what we might call conceptual connections. . . . That simple ideas are indicators of the distinctive qualities of things is something we naturally understand, not something we discover entirely from repeated idea-patterns. . . .The visual idea of a cube is a light-colour pattern plus the understanding that it is caused by a cube.”

 

Such an interpretation would allow Locke to distinguish between sensation and reflection from a psychological point of view since the sensation would be distinguished by its intentionality being produced within us from outside it carries that information on its sleeve. This also explains why Locke would infer the existence of an external world on grounds of sensation being caused by something external and also why some Ideas can be said to resemble objects in an external world. But there are also considerations against it, as Waxman points out, to conceive an Idea on the Bolton-Ayers view is to (i) conceive a substance external to the mind as its cause and (ii) to recognize that they are internal to the mind and in need of a cause. In such a view an Idea is a ‘cognitive ground’ to affirm the existence of something outside myself. But to have a Simple Idea is not ipso facto to have knowledge based on that Idea or in other words to have a sensation is one thing and to have sensitive knowledge is another. Sensitive knowledge in Locke’s view can only be acquired on the basis of perception and comparison of agreement and disagreement between Ideas. That comparison comes at a stage post the acquisition of Simple Ideas. This objection does not seem to me to be decisive because Ayers / Bolton do not have to admit that sensitive knowledge arises on the occasion of acquisition of a Simple Idea and further operations of the mind are needed to unpack what is implicit in the content of an Idea. The important point is if sensation is seen as intentional then there is a possibility of sensitive knowledge in Locke’s philosophy which otherwise would collapse into idealism.

 

In ECHU 2.2.2 Locke defines Simple Ideas as those Ideas which cannot be derived from any reflexive operation performed on those Ideas, which must instead be passively perceived. Mind is a tabula rasa only as far as the content of thinking is concerned but the operations that mind performs on these Ideas are innate to the mind. Further in 2.12.1 Locke says:

 

“As simple Ideas, are observed to exist in several Combinations united together; so the Mind has a power to consider several of them united together, as one Idea; and that not only as they are united in external Objects, but as it self has join’d them. Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call Complex . . . which though complicated of various simple Ideas, or complex Ideas made up of simple ones, yet are, when the Mind pleases, considered each by itself, as one entire thing, and signified by one name.”

 

The Ideas of Substance and Mode are regarded by Locke as complex Ideas:

 

“…the Ideas we have of Substances, and the ways we come by them; I say our specific Ideas of Substances are nothing else but a Collection of a certain number of simple Ideas, considered as united in one thing.” (2.23.14)

 

The Idea of Mode is formed through building in the concept the supposition that they cannot subsist by themselves and Ideas of Relation are formed by “bringing two Ideas, whether simple or complex, together; and setting them by one another, so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one” (2.22.1).

 

Waxman seems right when he says that Simple Ideas are considered simple in virtue of their origin in the mind and not in terms of divisibility of the content of the Idea, he cites 2.25.9 where Locke considers Idea of extension to be a Simple Idea even though the content of the Idea could be divided further. This seems to support his interpretation because if the content of an Idea is seen relative to its origin then in the activity of combining and dividing Ideas, what are being combined and divided are psychological components of the mind that it cannot create from within but which it gets from outside. But then the Idea of extension bears some similarity to an external object and hence this Idea is regarded by Locke as objectively valid.

 

This interpretive problem arises due to an ambiguity in Locke himself. He sometimes uses the term Idea to signify a psychological entity within the mind, a natural occurent thought or a sensation while at other times he uses it in the sense of a sign or cognitive ground for an external object. There are passages in support of both positions. From a philosophical point of view there is a single project that Waxman attributes to Locke. This project is:

 

“If we trace the progress of our Minds, and with attention observe how it repeats, adds together, and unites its simple Ideas received from Sensation or Reflection, it will lead us farther than at first, perhaps, we should have imagined. And, I believe, we shall find, if we warily observe the Originals of our Notions, that even the most abstruse Ideas, how remote soever they may seem from Sense, or from any operation of our own Minds, are yet only such, as the Understanding frames to itself, by repeating and joining together Ideas, that it had either from Objects of Sense, or from its own operations about them: So that those even large and abstract Ideas are derived from Sensation, or Reflection, being no other than what the Mind, by the ordinary use of its own Faculties, employed about Ideas, received from Objects of Sense, or from the Operations it observes in itself about them, may, and does attain unto.”

 

This psychological project to trace the origins of our Ideas which is clearly found in Hume, is not so clear in Locke. The reason is Locke seems to be running two distinct projects against intellectualism. In the beginning of ECHU he believes he demolishes innatism through bringing out a contradiction that there can be something within understanding yet one not be conscious of it, on the basis of which Waxman attributes psychologism to Locke i.e. the view that the content of thought can be reduced to thought. If Locke does subscribe to this reduction then sensation cannot be regarded as representational contra Ayers and Bolton. However from the second chapter he begins another project to show that understanding is not a distinct source of knowledge since all the concepts we regard it to be the source of are not possible without materials mind acquires through its senses and using which the mind builds complex and abstract Ideas to furnish man with those intellectual concepts. While Waxman regards that as one single project, Locke seems to regard it as two and the reason is simple, he believes that mind gets materials to think from outside and is not the source of the content from within and so the dependence of a concept of the sense is not psychologistic because the possibility of knowledge depends on senses representing an outside world. Berkeley on the other hand sees the source of the content of thoughts to be the mind and later to be God or the actus prius himself which to Locke is unacceptable. Yet in the first project Locke uses the term ‘Ideas’ as if it were a sensation, enough to mislead an able interpreter like Waxman and then in the second half he traces the origin of Ideas to the materials that senses furnish us from outside and finally he argues that some of these Ideas are objectively valid and hence can allow us to make inferences about an external world and are as a matter of fact a proof that the external world exists. However his psychological project is vitiated by a serious difficulty – what is the content of a complex Idea for example the Idea of a substance? Is this Idea something distinct from a collection of Simple Ideas or does it signify something external to the mind? What positive definite content can we ascribe to this Idea? Locke cannot regard it as an Idea distinct from the collection of Simple Ideas for that would bring intellectualism back into play nor can he regard it as signifying an external object because Locke argues that a substance must be an unknown substratum knowable to us only through its effects within us but not in itself.

More worrying is the charge of circularity raised by Thomas Hill Green (1894). To take for instance Locke’s account of the origin of the concepts of Cause-Effect, he bases it on observation of circumstances that led to the existence of an object through volition or the exercise of the will. Green argues that this account presupposes the notion of a substance or an external thing since a succession of sensations cannot lead to the formation of a concept of an external thing. Here we must recall Waxman’s criticism of Ayer’s and Bolton’s interpretation and Locke’s assertion of immediate perception of sensations being caused within us from an external reality (in 2.2.2). Sensations are passive and ideas of reflection, volition in particular which are active, are required as building blocks for the concept of cause but from reflective knowledge of actions we cannot get the notion of an outside world. The question Green raises is from where do we get the notion of an outside object? If we follow Waxman and say that Ideas are like sensation in that appearance=reality principle applies to it, then merely through sensations which are seen as internal entities we cannot get the notion of an external object. And if it is said that we arrive at such a notion through mind’s operation of combining Ideas and abstracting from them, then we must inquire about the content of such an Idea – does it pre-exist in the mind or does it come from outside? In a mind that only consists of sensation and mind’s operations on them, no content can be found from inside, not without violating the condition that the content of thought must come from outside via the senses. And so Ayers / Bolton seem right that some form of reference to an outside world is built into the Lockean Ideas. Where else can we get it from? But then the charge of circularity comes along because as Green points out the notion of an external object is nothing but the notion of a cause producing an effect within us and it is the formation of this concept that Locke has set out to explain and yet he assumes its presence in the mind already through the route of the senses:

“But the reference of a sensation to a sensible thing means its reference to a cause. In other words the invented relation of cause and effect must be grounded in the primary experience in order that it may be got from it. (Works, 1.57)”

 

Or as Wilfrid Sellars (1967), says referring to Kant’s remarks on Locke in Transcendental Deduction and poking some fun about Locke’s concept-empiricism:

 

“That is why, the introduction to the Transcendental Deduction, he can speak of Locke as an eminent physiologist of the understanding. What he says is that good old John Locke thought we could get the categories (you know Locke came before Hume and Hume's devastating attack) from empirical objects by abstraction; he had an abstractionist theory of the categories. That is what Hume jumped on. Remember Locke said, we observe one object bang another and therefore "collect” the idea of power. Heh. Well, that was one of the passages which shows that Locke was in tune with the common sense of his time but when it came to philosophical dialectic, he just wasn't up to it and Hume realized that.”

 

We were supposed to derive these concepts from sense-experience and yet sense-experience already presupposes these notions. It is important to see that the issue is about the dependence of the concept to sense-experience. If the appearance=reality interpretation is applied to Locke and the concept is seen as essentially constituted by sensation like pleasure and pain are constituted by consciousness then the possibility of an external reference is vitiated. But if sensations are seen as representational then psychologistic project that Hume and to a lesser extent Berkeley engage in is not possible due to circularity issues. But if there is only a contingent relation between concepts and experience then the origin of concepts cannot be ascribed to experience alone which seems to be what is needed to refute Rationalism. Hence I believe Locke was an inconsistent sensibilist and totally unaware of psychologism.