Locke on Knowledge, Politics and Religion

New Interpretations from Japan

Kiyoshi Shimokawa, Peter R. Anstey, Kiyoshi Shimokawa, Peter R. Anstey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350189201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Locke scholarship has been flourishing in Japan for several decades, but its output is largely unknown to the West. This collection makes available in English for the first time the fruits of recent Japanese research, opening up the possibility of advancing Locke studies on an international scale. Covering three important areas of Locke's philosophical thought – knowledge and experimental method, law and politics, and religion and toleration – this volume criticizes established interpretations and replaces them with novel alternatives, breaking away from standard narratives and providing fresh ways of looking at Locke's relationship with philosophers such as Boyle, Berkeley and Hume. The specific topics that have been selected are ones that continue to have important contemporary moral and political implications, from constitutionalism and toleration to marriage and the death penalty. Applying Locke's views to 21st-century questions, this collection presents provocative readings of the defining aspects of Locke's philosophical thought, stimulating current debates and heralding a new era of collaborative work for Locke scholars around the world.

Part 1

Knowledge and experimental method

1

Locke and non-propositional knowledge¹

Peter R. Anstey

In An Essay concerning Human Understanding (hereafter Essay) Locke claims:

1. (1) Knowledge . . . consists in the perception of the agreement or disagreement of Ideas. (Essay IV. vii. 2)²
   He also speaks of
2. (2) our Knowledge, which all consists in Propositions. (Essay II. xxxiii. 19)

These two claims do not sit well together. How can the perception of a relation between ideas be some proposition? Needless to say, a wide range of interpretations have been proposed by scholars in order to explain how both of these claims can be true for Locke. The favoured strategy in the secondary literature is to interpret the first claim so that it conforms to the second.³ Thus, it is argued that, for Locke, the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas just is the forming of a true proposition. As David Owen puts it, for Locke ‘[i]n knowledge, there is no distinction between perceiving the agreement or disagreement of ideas, forming the proposition, and knowing it to be true’ (Owen 1999: 47).⁴ This strategy is favoured because, to many scholars, the view that Locke believed that knowledge is fundamentally propositional seems very secure: if he believed anything about knowledge, it is claimed, he believed that all knowledge is propositional.

Yet this strategy is not without its problems. This is because it ties Locke’s definition of knowledge to his theory of true propositions, and the theory of true propositions concerns not only the agreement and disagreement of ideas, as required by Locke’s definition, but also the agreement and disagreement of the things signified by those ideas. As Locke puts it, propositions are the joining and separating of signs and the word ‘truth’ signifies ‘nothing but the joining or separating of Signs, as the Things signified by them, do agree or disagree one with another’ (Essay IV. v. 2). In response to this Ruth Mattern, a proponent of this orthodox, propositional interpretation, suggests that Locke had two senses of the terms ‘agreement’ and ‘disagreement’; a stricter one referring only to ideas and a looser one for ideas and those things represented by the ideas in question.⁵ Samuel Rickless, another proponent, responds in a diametrically opposed way, claiming that since ‘agreement’ and ‘disagreement’ are restricted to relations between ideas, Locke denies that we can have knowledge of contingent truths. On Rickless’s view, all knowledge, for Locke, is of necessary truths (or falsehoods).⁶

Neither of these strategies is very satisfying. There is no clear evidence of a loose sense of ‘agreement’ in Locke’s writings, and a theory of knowledge that precludes knowledge of contingent facts seems to undercut the prominent role of experience in Locke’s overall project, doing away with what Locke calls sensitive knowledge altogether.

In this chapter I propose a different strategy: instead of forcing claim 1 to conform to claim 2, I shall argue that claims 1 and 2 are about different types of knowledge and that claim 1 should not be interpreted so as to conform to claim 2. In fact, I go further and argue that claim 1 is concerned with a form of non-propositional knowledge. Thus, I deny that, for Locke, all knowledge is propositional. I argue that what Locke means when he makes claims such as claim 1 is that the objects of knowledge in its most fundamental sense are ideas, and on the few occasions that he makes claim 2, he means that all the objects of knowledge, in the sense of ‘all the things that we know’, are propositions.

There is a more precise way of setting out what is at stake here. The orthodox view of Locke on knowledge, the view that I oppose, can be stated as a bi-conditional:

3. One perceives the agreement or disagreement of ideas A and B if and only if one perceives the truth of a proposition containing ideas A and B.

According to the interpretation offered in this chapter, it is true that if one perceives the truth of a proposition then one perceives the agreement or disagreement of its constituent ideas. This is because one perceives the truth of a proposition as a result of perceiving the agreement or disagreement of its constituent ideas.⁷ However, I deny that Locke was committed to the second conditional, namely, that if one perceives the agreement or disagreement of ideas, then one perceives the truth of a proposition. The difference between these two conditionals is subtle but important. Many of Locke’s discussions about perceiving the agreement or disagreement of ideas appear in the context of a discussion of how we come to know the truth of propositions; that is, they pertain to the first conditional. In my view, these need clearly to be demarcated from those discussions of the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas that have to do with the definition of knowledge and the exposition of Locke’s three degrees of knowledge: intuitive, demonstrative and sensitive.

To put this another way, some of what Locke says concerning knowledge and propositions has to do with how we know the truth or falsity of propositions that we encounter by some means or other. But Locke also has things to say about acquiring knowledge directly with reference to ideas only and not to propositions. In the former case, if we encounter a proposition, through conversation, say, we know that it is true or false by perceiving the agreement or disagreement between its constituent ideas. By contrast, if in the absence of any proposition we perceive that two ideas agree or disagree, we are then able to form a proposition concerning that agreement or disagreement. It is important to the argument of this chapter that these two different contexts for the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas are not conflated.

The chapter proceeds as follows. It sets out an interpretation of Locke as holding a four-step theory of the acquisition of knowledge, culminating in knowledge of verbal propositions. The steps can be labelled as perceiving, affirming, assenting and verbalizing. Of course, Locke does not present his theory as comprising these four steps: this parsing of the theory is my own. However, I contend that the four-step interpretation is a very effective way of coming to grips with the content of his theory.

The most salient feature of these steps is that the first involves a form of non-propositional knowledge. Along the way I discuss the passages in which Locke claims that all our knowledge is of propositions, and I point out a number of weaknesses in some of the leading alternative interpretations of Locke on knowledge. However, this chapter does not provide a thorough and systematic critique of all the interpretations in the large secondary literature that conflict with my own. Instead, it is intended that the interpretation offered here should stand in its own right as a positive alternative to those who interpret Locke as holding that all knowledge is fundamentally propositional.

It should be said at the outset that Locke’s views about ideas and about knowledge contain gaps and do not answer all of the questions that we like to ask of them.⁸ Nevertheless, in my view, there are enough materials to construct a coherent theory, and that is what I propose to do here. The chapter concentrates on intuitive and demonstrative knowledge and has little to say about sensitive knowledge. This is not because this third form of knowledge does not fit the interpretation offered here, but because it is, in my view, more complicated, and offering an interpretation of the nature of sensitive knowledge would be a distraction from the chapter’s main aim.⁹ The main aim is to set out the four-step interpretation of Locke on knowledge with special reference to the fact that Locke is committed to a form of foundational, non-propositional knowledge. Each of the following four sections deals with one of the steps in Locke’s view of knowledge. For ease of exposition all terms denoting ideas are in italics and all mentions of propositions are between angle brackets ‘< >’.

1 Step One: Perceiving the agreement or disagreement of two ideas

The first step in acquiring intuitive or demonstrative knowledge involves the perception of the relation of agreement or disagreement between two ideas.¹⁰ Further, according to Locke, to acquire demonstrative knowledge is to perceive that two ideas agree or disagree with the assistance of a third, intermediate idea.¹¹ Locke calls intermediate ideas proofs,¹² but this can be confusing for modern interpreters, and I will restrict myself to calling them intermediate ideas. Locke also claims that more than one intermediate idea might be needed, but I will largely ignore this complication here.

Step One is the step that I claim is pre-propositional. It is simply perceiving the agreement. I suggest that we avoid expressing this as seeing that they agree, that is, seeing that the idea of a agrees with the idea of F. Here we need to rid ourselves of contemporary notions of propositions such as that nature has a propositional structure.¹³ We also need to avoid being deceived by the manner in which I am expressing these thoughts. As Locke himself points out,¹⁴ we can only discuss these matters using verbal propositions, but the point is that when...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Locke and Japan
• Part I Knowledge and experimental method
• Part II Law and politics
• Part III Religion and toleration
• Index
• Copyright