display all the ideas for this combination of texts
14 ideas
| 12478 | A 'quality' is a power to produce an idea in our minds [Locke] |
| Full Idea: The power to produce any idea in our mind I call 'quality' of the subject wherein that power is. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.08.08) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as much the most accurate way to think of properties, but then I accept Locke's distinction between primary and secondary properties. Red is a property of brains, not of tomatoes. Tomatoes have power to cause this property. |
| 12481 | Hands can report conflicting temperatures, but not conflicting shapes [Locke] |
| Full Idea: The same water may produce the idea of cold by one hand and of heat by the other; ...but figure never produces the idea of a square by one hand which has produced the idea of a globe by the other. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.08.21) | |
| A reaction: I find this to be a thoroughly convincing argument in favour of the primary/secondary distinction, despite the later objects of Berkeley, Hume and Kant. One might add colour blind people reporting differently from the rest of us. |
| 12546 | We can't know how primary and secondary qualities connect together [Locke] |
| Full Idea: There is no discoverable connection between any secondary quality, and those primary qualities that it depends on. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 4.03.12) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be an accurate account of the problem, and it pinpoints what may be the single most recalcitrant mystery facing human understanding - why do red things look RED? |
| 15989 | Colours, smells and tastes are ideas; the secondary qualities have no colour, smell or taste [Locke, by Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: If I am right, colours, tastes, odours and sounds are not, for Locke secondary qualities but ideas; secondary qualities are colourless, tasteless, odourless and soundless textures of bodies. | |
| From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694]) by Peter Alexander - Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles 8 | |
| A reaction: This the concise summary of Alexander's reading of Locke, and I find him wholly convincing. |
| 15971 | Secondary qualities are powers of complex primary qualities to produce sensations in us [Locke] |
| Full Idea: Such qualities, which are nothing in objects but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities i.e. by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their sensible parts, as colours, sounds, tastes etc. These I call secondary qualities. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.08.10) | |
| A reaction: Alexander emphasises that secondary qualities are in objects. It is the ideas (here 'sensations') which are in us. This quotation shows that secondary qualities are not identical with 'textures' (which are complex primary qualities), but are 'powers'. |
| 6725 | Locke believes matter is an inert, senseless substance, with extension, figure and motion [Locke, by Berkeley] |
| Full Idea: Some thinkers (e.g. Locke) understand by matter an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure and motion do actually subsist. | |
| From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694]) by George Berkeley - The Principles of Human Knowledge §9 | |
| A reaction: Berkeley, of course, goes on to reject this. Personally I agree with Locke, because I am a realist, and I think the seventeenth century distinction between primary and secondary qualities is a key contribution to human understanding. |
| 15982 | Qualities are named as primary if they are needed for scientific explanation [Locke, by Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: In Locke, the needs of scientific explanation are what determine which qualities are to be taken as primary. | |
| From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694]) by Peter Alexander - Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles 6 | |
| A reaction: Not a sharp distinction, but interesting. It must concern 'objective' explanations to cut out the secondary qualities. |
| 12479 | Primary qualities produce simple ideas, such as solidity, extension, motion and number [Locke] |
| Full Idea: The original or 'primary' qualities of body produce simple ideas in us, viz. solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.08.09) | |
| A reaction: The tricky word here is 'simple', which clearly won't be enough on its own to distinguish primary from secondary qualities. Notice that there is a germ of an empirical theory of arithmetic in the word 'number'. |
| 12480 | Ideas of primary qualities resemble their objects, but those of secondary qualities don't [Locke] |
| Full Idea: The ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, and their pattern do really exist in the bodies themselves; but the ideas produced in us by secondary qualities have no resemblance to them at all. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.08.15) | |
| A reaction: I think this is exactly right. More that one sense can reinforce a primary quality, because there is a 'pattern' to be detected in various ways. That things look square is explained by their squareness; things looking red is just very weird. |
| 7049 | In Locke, the primary qualities are also powers [Locke, by Heil] |
| Full Idea: Readers of Locke have been wrong to imagine that primary qualities are not themselves powers. | |
| From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.08.15) by John Heil - From an Ontological Point of View 17.2 | |
| A reaction: This is part of the move to connect Locke with modern essentialism about natural laws. If a disposition is a power, then clearly being hard or square will affect the dispositions, and hence be a power. Secondary qualities result from powers. |
| 15973 | In my view Locke's 'textures' are groups of corpuscles which are powers (rather than 'having' powers) [Locke, by Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: I take the unorthodox view that Locke uses the word 'texture' for the pattern of corpuscles in a group and regards the power of a body to affect our senses or another body as identical with this textures, so that powers are intrinsic properties of bodies. | |
| From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694]) by Peter Alexander - Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles 5.2 | |
| A reaction: The disagreement is whether the textures 'have' the powers (the orthodox view), or whether they 'are' the powers (Alexander's view). To counter Idea 15971, Alexander quotes Idea 15974. He says 'a secondary quality is a texture' (121). |
| 7050 | I suspect that Locke did not actually believe colours are 'in the mind' [Locke, by Heil] |
| Full Idea: I make no claim to being a Locke scholar, but I suspect that the position often associated with Locke - that colours are 'in the mind' - flies in the face of Locke's considered view. | |
| From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.08.15) by John Heil - From an Ontological Point of View 17.3 | |
| A reaction: A glance at Locke gives the impression that he thought secondary qualities were really 'ideas', which would presumably be in the mind. Heil is hoping that Locke will agree with his own view. Further study will be required... |
| 15979 | Secondary qualities are simply the bare powers of an object [Locke] |
| Full Idea: Secondary qualities, as has been shown, are nothing but bare powers. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.23.08) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure here whether 'bare' means 'simple' or 'unconcealed' - probably the latter. This supports Alexander's claim that the secondary qualities are identical to the 'textures' of the object. They certainly aren't in the mind. |
| 12482 | Molyneux's Question: could a blind man distinguish cube from sphere, if he regained his sight? [Locke] |
| Full Idea: Mr Molyneux's Question: a blind man, taught by touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal and same bigness. Suppose the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the man made to see - could he distinguish them? | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.09.08) | |
| A reaction: Both Molyneux and Locke agree that the answer is 'no', because he won't yet have learned to associate the new experiences with the old shapes. [Gareth Evans wrote on this question] |