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Locke on Qualities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

John Campbell
John Campbell*
Affiliation:
Wolfson College, Oxford
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Extract

Locke's division between primary and secondary qualities in chapter viii of Book II of the Essay is a hardy philosophical perennial which has weathered centuries of misrepresentation. Gradually, however, a new dawn in Locke scholarship is breaking, in the light of which it transpires that the importance and interest of the dichotomy belongs not to classical philosophy of perception but to philosophy of science. The excellence of current Locke exegesis, however, should not blind us to the fact that recent readings are in urgent need of supplementation: and one aim of this paper is to show how this might be achieved.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , December 1980 , pp. 567 - 585
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1980

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References

1 John Locke An Essay concerning Human Understanding. All references are to the Clarendon edition edited by P. H. Nidditch.

2 Bennett, J. Locke Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Oxford U. P., 1971) Ch. IV; cp., e.g., pp. 103-4.Google Scholar

3 Alexander, P. “Boyle and Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities”, reprinted in Tipton, I. C. (ed.) Locke on Human Understanding (Oxford U. P., 1977); cp., e.g., p. 65.Google Scholar

4 J. L. Mackie, Problems from Locke (Oxford U. P., 1976) p. 12.

5 Ibid.

6 II. iv. 1.

7 I defer consideration of the question of how “insensible parts” may be said to possess qualities. (But cp. IV, xvi, 12 here.)

8 The same point, incidentally, is made at IV. ii. 11.

9 II. viii. 11–15.

10 Bennett, J. Locke, Berkeley, Hume, p. 105.Google Scholar

11 Alexander, P.. “Boyle and Locke”, p. 68.Google Scholar

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 J. L. Mackie, Problems, pp. 20-21.

16 II. viii. 22.

17 Macintosh, J J. “Primary and Secondary Qualities” in Studia Leibnitiana, 8 (1976), p. 102.Google Scholar

18 Ibid.

19 A subsidiary attack on the “common notion” of qualities is developed in II. viii. 10: if all powers to produce simple ideas in us are accounted qualities, so too should all powers simpliciter. Yet the “common notion” does not make this move; retaining an unscientific emphasis on the importance of man in the universe.

Locke nevertheless seems to have been unhappy with the dichotomy between accounting only primary qualities as qualities and retaining the “common notion” which seems to allow the powers to produce pleasure and pain the status of “quality”. So in Ill. iv. 16 he tries again, defining “quality” as “power to produce a simple idea which comes into the mind by only one sense”: excluding the powers to produce pleasure and pain, but also, as Locke notes, all the primary qualities from qualityhood. So this revision is swiftly abandoned; in Ill. vi. 29 “shape” is referred to as a quality and in Ill. vi. 30-2 simple ideas and qualities are identified outright. Seeking the intentions behind these latter formulations, it seems only fair to suppose that we are by Book IV back with the original definition of II. viii. 8.

20 P. Alexander, “Boyle and Locke”, p. 72.

21 “Boyle and Locke” passim; Problems, Ch. 1.

22 P. Alexander, ‘Boyle and Locke”, p. 70.

23 Mackie, Problems, pp. 14–15.

24 Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, p. 104.

25 Ibid., pp. 96-100.

26 Hume, D. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge (Oxford U. P., 1951).Google Scholar

27 Here is Bennett on II. viii. 15:

Since ideas cannot resemble either bodies or qualities of bodies, this must be either discarded or transformed. The only plausible transformation is into something like the following: in causally explaining ideas of primary qualities, one uses the same words in describing the causes as in describing the effects (shape-ideas etc. are caused by shapes etc.); whereas in causally explaining ideas of secondary qualities one must describe the causes in one vocabulary and the effects in another (colour-ideas etc. are caused by shapes etc.) If this is not what Locke's ‘resemblance’ formulations of the primary/secondary contrast mean, then I can find no meaning in them. (Locke, Berkeley, Hume, p. 106).

I have little to add to this. The need to resort to the method of interpretation-bytransformation is in my view strong prima-facie evidence of misreading of Locke.

28 J. Mackie, Problems, pp. 49-50.

29 P. Alexander, ‘Boyle ' Locke”, p. 75.

30 I am indebted to J. J. Macintosh for criticism of earlier drafts.