John Locke is a historical figure. In 1689, he published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where across four books Locke outlines his beliefs that we are born as a blank slate, or tabula rasa, and knowledge is formed from sense-experiences. This idea can be traced back to Aristotle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa). The Essay is Locke’s response to skepticism and follows an epistemological view today I would classify as empiricism. Empiricism seems connected to inductive reasoning, the scientific method, and Aristotle, as opposed to Rationalism which follows deductive reasoning and Plato. Anyways, Locke’s goal was to understand the extent of human’s capacity to know, to avoid unsuccessfully casting “our Thoughts into the vast Ocean of Being.” Locke’s attempt to find “the boundary between the enlightened and the dark Parts of Things,” was to look at experience. Unfortunately, this is as revolutionary as his ideas get for me. He continues in the Essay to take about the primary and second qualities of things. Primary qualities being physical (volume, density, mass, etc.), while secondary qualities being subjective sensory experiences (texture, taste, color, etc.). But we cannot see shape without seeing color, so it seems the perception of either primary or secondary qualities is linked.

The definition of knowledge may help here. I have heard knowledge defined as justified true belief, although I have always thought of it as simply justified belief. The justification is the evidence you use to warrant your belief in something. For Locke, justification must be sensory experience. But the truth comes into play in this definition. What exactly is the truth? It seems Locke was attempting to tease that out with his primary and secondary qualities. For me, I always left the truth out of it. For someone in the social sciences, dealing with different knowledge systems, I encountered many statements which people hold as true, but I find subjective and false. I must have skipped establishing a truth value for physical or chemical things, something Locke spends a lot of time on. Perhaps this is a testament to the time and place Locke formulated his ideas, and the time and place I formed mine. Locke lived in a time when western science was still investigating the nature of matter. Perhaps his distinction of true and false into primary and secondary qualities was informed by his and his colleagues’ experiments into corpuscles. I guarantee my choice to leave out any notion of truth was informed by my work.

JLS