John Locke and the Ethics of Belief

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RamistThomist

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Locke’s goal is simple: to offer a rational, objective, public account of reason that will heal the warring factions of society. His method, at least in the broad strokes, is fairly straightforward: believe in accordance with the evidence the things of “maximal concernment.” In other words, not only should you believe things on the basis of evidence, the strength in which you believe something should be proportional to the evidence.

It is to Nicholas Wolterstorff’s credit that he shows us a different picture of Locke: sure, the empiricist is in the background, but Locke’s account of knowledge in Book IV of his Essay is far more nuanced than a mere empiricism. And so we begin:

Knowledge is perception (Book IV). What does it mean to see/become aware that a proposition is true? The classic answer: One is aware that one and another proposition are true and that certain relationships that follow are true.

Whenever we say we “just know” something to be true, we usually attach to it the ocular metaphor that we “see” it to be true. Thus, for Locke, we perceive facts. Perception for Locke is immediate awareness (Wolterstorff 43). That which comes short of certainty is not knowledge (Letter to Stillingfleet, Works III: 145). Does this mean we can’t know anything, given such limited criteria? Not necessarily, for perception and certainty comes in degrees.

Knowledge = act or state of mind (45). It is not the same as belief. For Locke believing is a mental state; assenting is a mental act. Problem: We all believe things that aren’t present to the mind.

Knowledge = not only awareness of some fact, but the relationship between facts (59)

Will Locke’s proposal work? No. It could not survive the hammer blows of Hume (or Reid). Let’s take the claim that “Reason should be our guide.” Locke’s view of empiricism and “the association of ideas” demands induction, and as Hume pointed out, that demands a formal fallacy.

But that’s not the biggest problem with Locke. The problem is quite simple: How are we to tell when the evidence is satisfactory (167)? Not all evidence is simply a collection of apples and oranges on the ground and we count which side has the most. Here is a sample of Locke’s argument (pp. 169ff):

P1: I note a correlation between a certain noise and a car going by
P2: The noise I am presently hearing is of that sort
C: Hence it is highly probably a car is going by.

The main problem is that the correlations aren’t necessarily representative of reality. We need another premise:

P1*. I note a correlation between a certain noise and a car going by
P2*. My sample of the correlation of events was and is representative of all tokens of that sort.
P3*. The noise I am presently hearing is of that sort.

But as Hume points out, P2* is not a necessary truth. It is not intuitive. Indeed, Hume doubts any real connections between past and present.

But Locke is still important. His form of classical foundationalism remained more or less in play until the late 20th century. Indeed, one can tease out connections between Locke’s epistemology and his ethics. Further, one wonders about such ethics, the Anglo tradition in philosophy, and the current (if waning) dominance of neo-liberalism in politics.

The book is a hard read. Locke isn’t necessarily an easy read and Wolterstorff’s analyses are very technical. However, it shows us a different angle on Locke besides that of the textbook empiricist.
 
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