Slide 1
Locke traced the materials of thought to experience
John Locke argued against innate ideas and traced the materials of thought to experience. His account includes awareness of the mind's own activities.
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In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, sensation and reflection are two sources of ideas. Reflection means noticing operations such as willing and doubting, not receiving information through a mysterious additional sense.
Slide 2
The mind combines and compares those materials
Locke's mind is not merely a passive storehouse. It combines, compares and abstracts from the ideas experience supplies.
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Imagine noticing several triangular drawings and considering their shared shape apart from their colours. This illustrates abstraction without claiming that a general triangle must exist as a separate object somewhere.
Slide 3
Shape and colour illustrate different kinds of quality
Locke distinguished primary qualities, such as shape, from secondary qualities, such as colour. The distinction concerns how our ideas relate to objects.
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On his account, secondary qualities are powers in objects to produce sensations in us. Calling colour secondary does not mean that coloured experiences never happen or that objects make no contribution to them.
Slide 4
Understanding also has limits and probabilities
Locke examined what human understanding can establish and where it must rely on probability. A theory of knowledge also maps uncertainty.
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A detailed report about a distant event may deserve confidence without giving the same kind of access as an immediate demonstration. The degree of assent should respond to the available support rather than exceed it.
Slide 5
Experience supplies material that the mind actively organizes
Locke's empiricism gives experience a foundational role while leaving room for mental work. Receiving materials and organizing them are different stages.
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Return to the drawings: exposure supplies examples, while comparison isolates a feature they share. This helps explain why calling a view empirical does not require treating every complex idea as a direct sensory copy.
Sources
- John Locke
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- John Locke
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy