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".

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Identity of the Knower and the Known: The 'I'

The question is often asked, "What is the 'I'?"

The "I" is the identity of the human consciousness, called the "knower", as it distinguishes itself from that which not part of its identity.  It comes down to something called the "ego-centric predicament":

"The epistemological predicament of a knowing mind which, confined to the circle of its own ideas, finds it difficult, if not impossible, to escape to a knowledge of an external world..." http://www.ditext.com/runes/e.html 

When it escapes to the knowledge of that external world, what is left is the identity of the knower, and the knower calls itself "I".

 This is concomitant to the "subject-object problem", [1] [2] which arises from the premise that the world consists of objects, things which are observed through perception and become the "known". Consciousness is defined by its awareness of these objects; a consciousness with no awareness of objects cannot be said to be consciousness at all since consciousness is consciousness "of something". The "subject" of knowledge is the individual knower considered as an act of awareness of an "object". 

Thus, the contents of consciousness come to be known to the consciousness as different from the objects themselves. The subject is not the apple nor any other thing of which it is conscious: that is the object. The subject is the knower.

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Intuition Vs. "Acquisition" of Knowledge

The question was recently posed: Does Metaphysical Naturalism accept the epistemological premises of Plato's intuition of knowledge, or those of Aristotle's acquisition of knowledge?

The fact is that man acquires his knowledge from the time of birth, filling his tabula rasa from sensory experiences. This is an Aristotilean concept. Plato, on the other hand, believed there were "permanent objects of knowledge [Forms or Ideas] directly apprehended by intuition (Gk. nohsiV [nóêsis]), the fundamental capacity of human reason to comprehend the true nature of reality." http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2h.htm

Plato held intuition to be the highest form of "knowing" because it demonstrated reason's ability to comprehend these Forms, which he defined as universals. The question then becomes, where does one acquire the concepts by which intuition is revealed?

They are acquired initially as simple sensory experiences, placed upon the tabula rasa where the faculty of reason then applies the hard-wired faculty of epistemological identification. Just as the faculty of sight and the other senses are hard wired and begin working immediately, so is the mind's faculty of epistemological operations.

Nothing is in the mind which was not first in the senses--"'Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.' All the materials, or content, of higher, intellectual cognition are derived from the activity of lower, sense cognition." http://www.ditext.com/runes/n.html

But intuition is not moot to the subject of epistemology. It merely does not work until there is sufficient material in the mind from which the subconscious can extract such "intuitions."

Plato believed intuitions to be direct, non-inferential awareness of abstractions or of concrete truths. Metaphysical Naturalism defines them as direct inferences, "that a subconscious entity of knowledge or of speculation integrates with conscious material to present to the consciousness both a comprehensive and immediate metaphysical analysis of the integration." Metaphysical Naturalist Glossary

In plain English, the subconscious is always on, always working, always analyzing. When a "light bulb comes on over your head" it is an intuition presented to your consciousness through its connection to the subconsious, which was working on the problem all the time.

If "something is on the end of your tongue" but you can't find the word that on the tip, it is because the word has not been culled from the subconscious. The conscious mind cannot be conscious at all times of all the things of which it was at one time previously conscious. We would be overwhelmed with images and words and music playing in our minds. What is not necessary to have in the "forward" consciousness is stored in the subconsciousness.

Aristotle is thus correct about the acquisition of knowledge. Plato is incorrect both about the nature of "intuition" and about the metaphysical nature of that which can be known.

But Aristotle thought knowledge of the essences and natural laws were objects of cognition which no intuition can reveal, but which science can prove to exist. When defined as in the Metaphysical Naturalist Glossary, intuition does not contradict the acquisition of knowledge through the senses, nor does it contradict abstract knowledge which necessarily is abstracted from sensory knowledge and only sensory knowledge; or from concepts, which are formulations made from previous abstractions.

Recommended reading about Knowledge ; Aristotle and Knowledge

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