display all the ideas for this combination of texts
12 ideas
| 12551 | We are satisfied that other men have minds, from their words and actions [Locke] |
| Full Idea: That there are minds and thinking beings in other men as well as himself, every man has a reason, from their words and actions, to be satisfied. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 4.03.27) | |
| A reaction: Locke is aware of the question of other minds, but is rather easily fobbed off with an answer. He hadn't thought enough about good robots, for all his imagination, and Descartes' mention of them. |
| 12483 | Unlike humans, animals cannot entertain general ideas [Locke] |
| Full Idea: The having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.11.10) | |
| A reaction: Animals were massively underestimated before the twentieth century. Animals must recognise types of things, as well as individual things. They must register that an individual animal is a dangerous or tasty species. Locke grants them 'some reason'. |
| 5002 | Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man's own mind [Locke] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man's own mind. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.01.19) | |
| A reaction: This sounds to me like one capacity of human consciousness, which is second-order awareness. I take animals to have first-order awareness (of the world), but not perception of their own awareness. Self-awareness is crucial to his concept of a 'person'. |
| 2603 | If we aren't aware that an idea is innate, the concept of innate is meaningless; if we do, all ideas seem innate [Locke] |
| Full Idea: To say a notion is imprinted on the mind, but the mind is ignorant of it, is to make this impression nothing. ….But if the capacity of knowing be the test of innateness, all the truths a man ever comes to know will be every one of them innate. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 1.02.05) | |
| A reaction: The problem is, I think, that Locke is relying wholly on introspection to decide on what is innate. If you turn to Chomsky's evidence, of children learning more language than they could possibly taught, there seems to be lots of evidence. |
| 2421 | There is nothing illogical about inverted qualia [Locke] |
| Full Idea: It would not carry any implication of falsehood to our simple ideas if by the different structure of our organs it were so ordered that the same object should produce in several men's minds different ideas at the same time (e.g. the colour of a violet). | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.32.15) | |
| A reaction: The vital point here is that it would be based on 'different structures'. I personally cannot see any objection to the possibility that someone's qualia might be inverted - by brain surgery. That is a problem for naïve realists, though. |
| 3522 | The same object might produce violet in one mind and marigold in another [Locke] |
| Full Idea: By the different structure of our organs the same object could produce in several men's minds different ideas, viz. if the idea that a violet produced in one man's mind by his eyes were the same that a marigold produced in another man's. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.32.15) | |
| A reaction: This is Locke's original proposal that inverted qualia might be possible, but note that he proposes a physical basis for the inversion, in 'different structures'. Without that, claiming qualia inversion is the same as claiming that zombies are possible. |
| 7721 | Locke's view that thoughts are made of ideas asserts the crucial role of imagination [Locke] |
| Full Idea: I construe Locke's thesis that our thoughts are 'composed of ideas' as the proposal that thinking (in its central form) crucially involves processes of imagination. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694]), quoted by E.J. Lowe - Locke on Human Understanding III | |
| A reaction: I like this, because I am struck with how incredibly wrong Descartes was about imagination, proposing that it was some trivial and peripheral aspect of the mind (Idea 1399). "Thinking just is imagination" is a plausible slogan. |
| 12476 | Every external object or internal idea suggests to us the idea of unity [Locke] |
| Full Idea: Existence and unity are two other ideas that are suggested to the understanding, by every object without, and every idea within. ..And whatever we can consider as one thing, whether a real being, or idea, suggests to the understanding the idea of unity. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.07.07) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me blatantly obvious that there is a close tie between this fact of metaphysics or psychology (or both) and the notion of a 'unit' in mathematics. Without this faculty of 'identifying' things, there would be no numbers or counting. |
| 12501 | The mind can make a unity out of anything, no matter how diverse [Locke] |
| Full Idea: There are no things so remote, nor so contrary, which the mind cannot, by its art of composition, bring into one idea, as is visible in that signified by the name 'Universe'. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.24.03) | |
| A reaction: This encourages ideas like unrestricted mereological composition, and the existence of the trout-turkey, but Locke is only saying that we can think of things that way. We can still strongly resist bizarre unities, and look only for natural ones, or none. |
| 9083 | The mind creates abstractions by generalising about appearances of objects, ignoring time or place [Locke] |
| Full Idea: The mind makes the particular ideas, received from particular objects, to become general,..by considering them as they are in the mind such appearances, separate from all other circumstances of real existence, as time or place. This is called ABSTRACTION. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.09.09) | |
| A reaction: What is distinctive here is that abstraction works on 'appearances' within the mind (which might be labelled 'sense-data'), rather than on the actual properties of the objects. Presumably abstraction can work on inferred unobservable properties? |
| 7040 | General words represent general ideas, which are abstractions from immediate circumstances [Locke] |
| Full Idea: Words become general by being made the signs of general Ideas; and Ideas become general by separating them from circumstances of Time and Place and other ideas; by this way of abstraction they are made capable of representing more individuals than one. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 3.03.06) | |
| A reaction: Fodor says this is they key move for empiricism. You can dispense with platonic forms and pure universals, and simple show general concepts as a way the mind has of dealing with particulars, which are built from experiences. |
| 12528 | If a man sees a friend die in a room, he associates the pain with the room [Locke] |
| Full Idea: A man saw his friend die in such a room, though these have in nature nothing to do one with another, yet when the idea of the place occurs to his mind it brings the pain with it. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.33.12) | |
| A reaction: Students of Hume think the notion of contiguity of ideas was original to Hume. Well it wasn't. |