Lockean Operations

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Notes

¹See Stuart (1999, 2003, and Unpublished (a)).

²This reading is defended by Ayers (1986: 1991) and Jolley (1999).

³Yolton sometimes seems to favour this reading (e.g. Yolton, 1984). For a discussion of Yolton's vacillation about this, see Chappell (1994, 31–4).

⁴This reading is defended by Alexander (1985) and by Lennon (2001, 2004); it is ably criticized by Chappell (2004).

⁵The suggestion is explored, if not exactly endorsed, by Mackie (1976) and by Chappell (1994).

⁶Aaron (1971) and Woolhouse (1983) draw that conclusion. Bennett (2001: Vol. 2, p. 13) describes the thesis that Locke's ‘ideas’ are sometimes images and sometimes concepts as ‘mainly correct’, but also says that ‘we cannot get far with the Essay on the assumption that its ‘ideas’ are not all images’ (15).

⁷I explore the foundational questions about Locke's theory of ideas in my Forthcoming (b).

⁸Aaron also cites this passage as showing that sometimes in the Essay‘complex ideas, as well as simple, are held to be given’ (Aaron, 1971: 112).

⁹See, for example, II.xxiii.7 and III.vi.12–13.

¹¹Note Locke's puzzling reference to the images in the mirror as ‘Ideas’. He also speaks this way at II.i.15. In these two places, Locke is using ‘idea’ in a now obsolete sense meaning a figure, form, image or likeness of something. This is sense IIa for the noun ‘idea’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, which documents its use from 1531 to 1714.

¹⁰Why ‘for the most part’? Perhaps because Locke recognizes that our mental activities can help to determine which simple ideas we passively receive. By moving one's body in certain ways one may influence which simple ideas one has: the child who puts the pineapple to his mouth then passively acquires a simple idea that the less adventurous child does not have. See III.iv.11, where Locke suggests that one can only acquire ‘the true Idea of the Relish of that celebrated delicious Fruit’ by tasting a pineapple.

¹²This is not to deny that Locke occasionally speaks metaphorically of ideas entering the mind via the sense organs. See II.ii.1; II.ix.14; III.iv.10,16.

¹³For Locke's volitionism, see II.xxi.5–8, 15.

¹⁴Jolley makes this point (Jolley, 1999: 48).

¹⁵David Soles accepts Chappell's account of Lockean abstraction (Soles, 1999: 46). Jolley seems inclined to do so as well (Jolley, 1999: 50–1).

¹⁶Bennett points out this problem (Bennett, 2001: 2: 26).

¹⁷For a more in-depth argument against reading Locke as a subjectivist about colour, see Stuart, 2003.

¹⁸It is not the feature that you are thinking of: male hummingbirds – like most avian males – do not possess an ‘intromittent organ’.

¹⁹Perhaps it is because he says so little that commentators have come to such different conclusions about his conception of the status of relations. Gibson sees him as denying that relations have mind independent reality (Gibson, 1917: 193–5). Bennett sees him as holding that relations are reducible in a certain sense (Bennett, 1971: 253–4), and Langton sees him as holding that relations are real but irreducible in one of two senses (Langton, 2000).

²⁰If Locke thinks that the idea ‘sweeter’ is a complex idea that ‘terminates in’ the idea ‘sweetness’ without containing it as a part, then his views about the composition of ideas of relation are even more mysterious. The suggestion that he came to have second thoughts about ideas of relations having parts at all is one I take up below.

²¹For example, see II.viii.10; II.xxxi.12; IV.ii.11.

²²The suggestion is made by Gibson (1917: 65), Aaron (1971: 113), and Jolley (1999: 45).