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The early Modern conception of a thing is of a set of particles. For them the particles were solid, like small billiard balls, but in a variety of shapes.
[Today the idea of particles sort of remains, but they are not 'solid' any longer. And we turn to scientists do we not to explain as best they can to us lay-people what they are instead. And they can't. (I mean lay-people are not equipped to understand the concepts required. We have to become physicists if we are to get any kind of serious grasp.)]
So one the transformations is the move from a thing as 'materia prima with form' to a thing as a set of particles which are thought of as parcels of matter.
But there is a related transformation.
The Scholastics spoke of individual 'things' like a horse or a tree as 'substances' and thought of these as terribly important. These 'substances' had 'qualities'. But the main thing was that the world was populated by 'substances', so that if you wanted to understand anything it was a substance or substances you had to grasp.
The Moderns (eg Locke) wanted to say: No: the important
items are not substances at all but qualities. Insofar as we are to understand
anything it is qualities we must concentrate on.
Their point was that we acquire all that we know of a thing via our senses, and these senses of ours register a thing's 'properties'. They tell us that it is for example green, and sweet-smelling, and firm to the touch, and makes a gentle thus when you let it fall to the ground, etc.
Our senses are all we have to go on if we are to understand anything about things that are not us, and all they give us are the thing's properties.
Now, is it fair to complain: and they don't give us the thing itself ! - ?
If the senses are all that we have to go on, and they only give us knowledge of properties, maybe we have no warrant to think that there is anything more to a thing than a set of properties! - ?
You may experience the temptation to think that properties can't exist on their own: they have to 'belong' to something. You can't just have 'green': for there to be green there must be something that is green.
What then is this 'something'? I handle an apple and my eyes tell me it is green, my hands tell me that it is smooth and firm, my ears tell me it makes a soft thud when it hits the ground, my nose tells me it smells sweet. If we say there must be something that is having these properties, what can we say about that something? We can't seem to say anything about it except that it has the properties we get through our senses. It has to be some kind of totally unknown - ?
John Locke thought this was getting silly. There's no point at all in positing the existence of 'something you know not what'!
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"Substrate" Courtesy s7.eu.ixquick.com |
So one confusion Locke wishes to identify and clear away is the notion that it is helpful to think of properties as needing a kind of 'substrate' to 'support' them.
You might think, with Descartes, that properties are 'dependent' and that unless there was something for properties to 'depend on' - something to 'support' properties - there couldn't be any properties.
Locke thinks if you say Yes to this you are positing something about which we are totally ignorant, and leaves it to be understood that we may as well not bother. It doesn't advance understanding much to say 'there must be something supporting properties' if we can't say anything at all about the 'support' we are positing.
A person who tries to operate with the concept of substance doesn't really have any firm idea of it at all, he says - 'only a supposition of he knows not what support of such qualities which are capable of producing simple ideas in us...' Locke, Essay, Book II Chapter XXIII Section 1.
In trying to bring out the emptiness of the claim that properties need a 'substrate' to 'support' them Locke says... [MORE]
I think what Locke is saying is that some people operate with a notion (which they call 'substance') of a kind of substrate in which properties inhere. But they can't say anything more about this supposed 'substrate'. So it's too vague a notion to be really meaningful or useful.
What do you think? Is a thing a collection of properties? If not, what is it?
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| More about John Locke |
Let's stay with Locke, because he goes on to articulate what he thinks our conception of a thing must be.
Locke's picture is: you get a set of ideas of sense when you look at the tree and it is your mind that forms out of them the idea of the tree. The idea of the tree for Locke is a complex idea, made up of several simple component ideas.
How exactly do our minds construct the idea of a tree from the set of ideas of qualities we get when we 'look at a tree'?
Locke assumes that when we have sense experience relating to, say, a tree we get a set of simple ideas of sense.
His next point is: this set of simple ideas of sense seems to be an item. That is, the different ideas that make up the set on one occasion often seem to go together on other occasions. That is, Locke suggests that when we look at this tree now, and again in an hour say and then again tomorrow we find that a certain set of simple ideas of sense seem to go together, to keep company.
Locke says when we notice this the thought occurs to us that something must be responsible for it - for the way in which this set of ideas always seems to occur as a batch. And he suggests that what we think is that they go together because they all flow from one and the same 'something'.
Heavy, heavy quotation marks round "thing" here to indicate that we are trying to say something very peculiar! But let me complete the thought before returning to the difficulty these quotation marks point to.
Locke's point seems to be: the idea of a particular substance is the idea of "whatever it is" which gives rise to the set of simple ideas of sense which we are noticing stick together or co-occur.
"... we come to have the ideas of particular sorts of substances, by collecting such combinations of simple ideas as are, by experience and observation of men's senses, taken notice of to exist together; and are therefore supposed to flow from the particular internal constitution, or unknown essence of that substance." Essay, Bk II Chapter XXIII, Section 3.
When we think that there is a "something" which somehow "brings it about" that a set of qualities keeps recurring as a package, are we making a mistake? Are we moving illegitimately from co-occurence to a 'something' tying the package together? Maybe the set of qualities is all there is to a 'thing' and our inferring to the existence of something 'holding the package together' is invalid?
[Locke himself isn't crystal clear what his answer is to this question. I will outline just one possible interpretation.]
Here is what he says:
Locke's Essay, Bk II, Ch. XXIII, Section 1.
I interpret Locke to be saying that his answer to the question we put above is No: the movement of thought from co-ocurrence to a "something" responsible for the co-occurrence is illegitimate. That is, our experience of sets of qualities always going together is the source of a kind of illusion. We experience a packet of ideas always going together and assume that this means they must "inhere" in "something" - but mistakenly.
Putting this now as Locke's answer to the question of where we get our idea of a "particular substance" from, Locke is explaining how we can mistakenly think we have a conception of "particular substance". He would be saying that it is an illusion generated by the constant co-occurrence of a set of ideas.
Reprise
So: what for Locke is the idea of a thing? He puts it in his idiom of how you acquire ideas. How then for Locke do I acquire my idea of a thing?
When I look at an object, through my senses I get a set of ideas, each corresponding to one of the object's qualities. E.g. the idea of brown, the idea of rectangularity, the idea of hardness. Such sets of qualities appear to recur repeatedly. I infer from this fact that the set of qualities "inhere" in "something".
Our idea of a 'something' which we think of a set of qualities as 'inhering in' is our idea of a 'particular substance'. It is really a confusion on our part.
I think the key point is that he is rubbishing the Scholastic concept of 'substance' (which Descartes has not demolished) and putting in place the Modern concept of a thing.
For Locke and most of the early 'scientists' (called virtuosi at the time), our senses give you access to a thing's properties, whereas for the scholastics the senses had allowed you to share on a temporary basis the form of the substance received. For the Scholastics through perception you encountered directly whatever populated the universe. For the new framework, those 'things', insofar as there were any, were mysterious and shadowy, unplummable, and what perception was thought of as giving access to were qualities. If we wanted to make scientific progress we should concentrate on qualities and the relations between them (eg weights, or smells and shapes).
What would psychology today say about this? Would it broadly agree with Locke? Is he broadly right that you get information of different modalities which your brain subsequently works up to form a complex data-structure which uses the concept of a thing?
Thanks to whoever did the Locke animation - sorry I've lost a note of wjere it comes from, but it's too sweet to leave out.
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