Locke: Perception and Knowledge

"Knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas. In this alone it consists. [Essay IV i 2] "
http://www.philosophypages.com/locke/g04…

For some philosophers, "idea" is that which is in the mind as a condition of sensation, or "the given".
"Given, The: Whatever is immediately present to the mind before it has been elaborated by inference, interpretation or construction."
http://www.ditext.com/runes/g.html

In other words, for those philosophers, if you sense that your hand is touching something, there is the "idea" that something exists which your hand is touching. But whether or not you call that an "idea", I know of no philosopher who doesn't also call it "the given".

Locke meant more than this. Locke meant by "perception" something that is defined in the mind beyond the mere point of the given; it had to be elaborated by inference, interpretation or construction, (induction; deduction; conceptualization).

This is easy to acknowledge when you read his words again: perception is the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas. The mind's acknowledgment of "the given" will neither agree nor disagree with either previous nor future events of what is "given" to us to perceive. But a perception is the acknowledgment of the given; acknowledgment requires a correspondence between "ideas"; ideas must be that which is "elaborated by inference, interpretation or construction", because without those, ideas would remain only as perceptions about which we know nothing except that they exist.

Ayn Rand, a Lockean herself, put it this way:
"A “perception” is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli [the given], but of entities, of things....A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. When we speak of “direct perception” or “direct awareness,” we mean the perceptual level. Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident. The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, conceptual discovery."
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/percep…

Locke, therefore, meant that perceptions were separate from sensations, and as far as "knowledge" of them was concerned, we have that only when we perceive that one idea is connected to another, at which time we also see that it either agrees or disagrees with the others. If it disagrees, it or one or more of the others is "repugnant", or contrary.

Perception is not the simple acknowledgment that we have had a sensation of "the given". An infant is "given" many things at birth, and his mind is in terrible turmoil attempting to determine the nature of his new world. He must determine that "mother is good"; "food is good"; "dirty diapers are bad", etc. But even then, until he gains a language by which to identify these things, they are still nothing more than "the given". He doesn't have the conception of a dirty diaper; he only knows that something happened to him and he doesn't feel good after that, and until he is taken care of.

So for Locke, "perception" is acknowledgment--of one idea or concept either agreeing with or disagreeing with other ideas, whether conceptual or not. An infant without a language can still determine that one thing is contrary to another (such as his mother makes him happy, then she makes him sad or angry, and he must eventually learn how one person can do both.)

So the key to "perception" in the language of Locke is to understand that it means the acknowledgment of at least a pair of "ideas" which will be either in agreement with each other, or "repugnant" to each other. 

It is only from the perception of like/unlike ideas that we can come to have "knowledge", because what is not "knowledge" is literally "unacknowledged" and must be greater than "the given".

Ardi Pithecus ™,
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On Earth There Is Nothing Great But Mind

I just read something I've heard before, written by William Hamilton: 

On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind.

On earth there is nothing greater than man when man is at his greatest, and that is when he chooses to use his mind. But it is a choice. Our description as "the rational animal" doesn't mean we are infallibly rational. It means we have the capacity to reason unlimitedly. After all, by the rules of logic we know which deductions are fallacies, because they break the rules. But TV commercials use such fallacies to sell their wares and often they are upfront, blatant, about it, sometimes to prove a point, sometimes to make us laugh.

Shysters know the rules of logic and break every one they can get away with, so long as you believe them and don't know they have broken a rule of logic.

But even knowing all the rules we can sometimes make the mistake of missing one of them, or we become unwilling to do what is rational because it would hurt too bad. I think that most mothers who kill their children in post-partum depression know they are doing wrong; but the alternative of doing the rational thing, of giving up their kids, would hurt them unbearably so that they could not live with it.

Well, of course they could live with it if they were given immediate help, put on suicide watch, and coached back into the world of sanity. But moments of insanity are often only moments of refusing to live according to reason because it would cause insanity.

And yet, without mind, there is nothing greater in man than in any animal on earth. The mind helps others in their time of need, during earthquakes and typhoons and hurricanes; through the death of loved ones; with soup kitchens, food banks, and food stamps; and even going to war to save others from tyrants.


There is nothing on Earth that is worth having without mind, because to have known "mind" is to know all that is great in Man.

The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism ^sm,
Journal of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism ©,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger ©,
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra © and
The Metaphysical Naturalist ©,
are the educational arms of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC,
and are:
©2008-2010 by Curtis Edward Clark and, Naturalist Academy Publishing, ^sm

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com