§53. Locke’s Experience
Locke orchestrates a dramatic invocation of experience in the Essay:
Whence comes [the mind] by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge: To this I answer, in one word, from experience.
In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our mind perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking.35He is not saying that all ideas come from experience, and it becomes clear as we read that many ideas, such as ideas of existence, unity, space, power, cause, and substance, arise through acts of considering, reflecting, and concluding, where the mind works over and reformats simple ideas. Locke's point is not to argue for some single process of experience from which all our ideas come, but instead that ideas arise after experience, and are not innately inscribed. “Since there appear not to be any Ideas in the Mind, before the senses have conveyed any in, I conceive that Ideas in the Understanding, are coeval with Sensation; which is such an impression or Motion, made in some part of the Body, as produces some Perception in the Understanding”36
Locke writes interchangeably of experience, perception, idea, and observation. Simple ideas are contents of consciousness that appear involuntarily and immediately and do not resolve into components. Yet the identification of simple ideas requires language, terms that belong to a speech community. Hence the question of error is not entirely one of individual recognition; in- tersubjective performance and reliable usage also have to be considered. Just because Locke never read Wittgenstein is no reason to think he could not appreciate this point.
Experience, therefore, cannot be the mere registering of an effect as sensation. It is conceptual, linguistically articulated, conscious to one individual but mediated by intersubjective terms, which severely qualify the passivity and privacy of simple ideas.37Simple ideas are also abstract. Immediate experience is not simple but multiplex, always many qualities together. The so-called simple idea is arrived at only by retrospective analysis, like an Epicurean atom. The singularity of simple ideas is not that they are passively registered but that they are indefinable, the equivalent in logic of atomic indivisibility. We cannot obtain knowledge of simple ideas through words or the analysis of concepts, for the meaning of their names is a simple, positive sensory content, though as particular qualities (e.g., ideas of colors or shapes) they have to be analyzed out of a complex array. But then, as Berkeley argued, these simple ideas are fictions. Since everything real is individual, including the psychological existence of ideas, no conscious, existing idea can have abstract or merely generic qualities.38
Locke might take these points as friendly corrections after three centuries of experience with his Essay. He was not a dogmatic thinker with a closed system, and we should remember what he wanted to accomplish in the theory of knowledge. There is no Empiricism, only profiles, versions, empiricisms. One empiricism is Berkeley’s phenomenalism, which equates experience with involuntary, incorrigible sensory data. As the logical empiricists develop the idea, what we call “things” are logical constructions from these phenomenal qualities. A different empiricism, closer to Locke, recognizes in experience signs of the unseen, legible to practiced judges, and confirmed or falsified by experimental trial. Perceptions are signs, as Hippocratics proposed—signs of their unseen causes—and perception methodically controlled supports probable, fallible, prudent, and at its best sagacious inference to an unseen reality. That is Locke’s quasi-Hippocratic, neo-Galenic empiricism in natural philosophy. Those causes can be judged, even if the conclusion is more like medical prognosis than Aristotelian scientia.
Locke is a turning point in ideas both popular and philosophical about science and natural philosophy. Did Locke believe science existed or could exist? It is not a simple question. What is science? Aristotle said it was syllogistic demonstration from necessary principles. In that sense, which Locke accepts as normative, he was implacably skeptical of a science of nature. But there was also the physician’s sapient judgment. In Locke’s time, no one would call that science, not even Locke. It was an art, a techne, prudent, practical knowledge. But it was also a promising new model for natural philosophy.