Locke's primary qualities

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 201-228

  Wilson, Robert A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA   (Canada)

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EID: 60949731022     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2002.0041     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. First published in 1690, the Essay went through three further editions during Locke's lifetime: 1694, 1695, and 1700. Unless otherwise noted, throughout the paper I refer to the fourth edition of the Essay. I have relied largely on the standard edition of the Essay, edited by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), and have turned to the original editions where necessary.
2. Cf. this composite list to those in John Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 25;
3. Peter Alexander, Ideas, Qualities, and Corpuscles: Locke and Boyle on the External World (hereafter IQC) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 134;
4. and Edwin McCann, "Locke's Philosophy of Body," in V. C. Chappell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Locke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 60. The "minimal judgment" in my composite list concerns motion and its variants, and it would be longer were one to distinguish between motion, motion of parts, and motion of (observable) bodies; see also section 6 below on motion.
5. Inattention to Locke's various putative lists of primary qualities in II.viii is particularly pervasive in the literature that discusses Locke's view of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Recent examples include Samuel C. Rickless, "Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78 (1997) : 297-319;
6. and Lisa Downing, "The Status of Mechanism in Locke's Essay," Philosophical Review 107 (1998): 381-414.
7. For example, see Maurice Mandelbaum, Philosophy, Science, and Sense Perception (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964);
8. E. M. Curley, "Locke, Boyle, and the Distinction Between Primary and Secondary Qualities," Philosophical Review 81 (1972): 438-64;
9. F. J. O'Toole, "Qualities and Powers in the Corpuscular Philosophy of Robert Boyle," Journal of the History of Philosophy, 12 (1974): 295-315;
10. Alexander, IQC, passim, and "Boyle and Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities," Ratio 16 (1974): 51-67 (reprinted in I. Tipton, ed., Locke on Human Understanding [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977]);
11. A. D. Smith, "Of Primary and Secondary Qualities," Philosophical Review 99 (1990): 221-54;
12. and Lisa Downing, "Are Corpuscles Unobservable in Principle for Locke?", Journal of the History of Philosophy, 30 (1992): 33-52.
13. "Locke's Philosophy of Body," 61.
14. Cf. also Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 90.
15. As referees for the Journal have pointed out, aspects of this interpretation are prefigured in two earlier papers: Arnold Davidson and Norbert Hornstein, "The Primary/Secondary Quality Distinction: Berkeley, Locke, and the Foundations of Corpuscularian Science," Dialogue 23 (1984): 281-303;
16. M. Mandelbaum, Philosophy, Science, and Sense Perception, ch. 2. Mandelbaum notes (61-2) that his use of "transdiction," introduced in his discussion of Newton and Boyle, is itself borrowed from a commentary that D. C. Williams gave at Harvard in 1958. Although Mandelbaum argues that a similar transdictive inference is at work in Boyle, he is more circumspect in attributing such an inference to Locke, which is somewhat surprising in light of Mandelbaum's overall view of Locke and the corpuscularian tradition. See esp. 87-8 of Mandelbaum's discussion.
17. Also quoted in Mandelbaum, Philosophy, Science, and Sense Perception, 81-2.
18. Cf. Davidson and Hornstein, "The Primary/Secondary Quality Distinction: Berkeley, Locke, and the Foundations of Corpuscularian Science," 288-9, where they also cite Newton's Rule III and Mandelbaum's discussion of it. I suspect that Mandelbaum's highly stimulating discussion of Boyle is at least a partial common cause of our discussions.
19. Cf. Davidson and Hornstein, "The Primary/Secondary Quality Distinction Berkeley, Locke, and the Foundations of Corpuscularian Science," 298-9.
20. Cf. Atherton, '"Ideas in the Mind, Qualities in Bodies': Some Distinctive Features of Locke's Account of Primary and Secondary Qualities," 114, who also takes this to undermine Alexander's version of what I am calling the conceptual point interpretation.
21. D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), ch. 12.
22. J. L. Mackie, Problems from Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 25.
23. Cf. also A. D. Smith, "Of Primary and Secondary Qualities," 249-53
24. and Margaret D. Wilson, "History of Philosophy in Philosophy Today; and the Case of the Sensible Qualities," Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 191-243, esp. 232-3 and 235-6.
25. For Boyle on texture, see for example The Origin of Forms and Qualities According to the Corpuscular Philosophy, reprinted in M. A. Stewart, Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), esp. 24-53,
26. Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, ch. 4;
27. and Mackie, Problems from Locke, esp. 24-6.
28. Cf. also C. J. F. Williams, "Are Primary Qualities Qualities?", Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1969): 310-23.
29. Here Locke begins with talk of the idea of solidity, but by halfway through the passage he has made a shift to talk of the property of solidity, since he talks of "it" as being the cause of sensations in us. This is an instance of Locke's notorious idea-quality shift, which I am generally ignoring in this paper. For a recent, startling treatment of the shift, see Jonathan Bennett, "Ideas and Qualities in Locke's Essay," History of Philosophy Quarterly 13 (1996): 73-88.
30. Cf. also Atherton, '"Ideas in the Mind, Qualities in Bodies': Some Distinctive Features of Locke's Account of Primary and Secondary Qualities," 114-5, who takes this passage as further support for her claim that Locke is chiefly interested in our ideas of primary qualities, not primary qualities themselves.
31. Descartes's notion of extension is clearly more mathematical than is Locke's, as exemplified by Descartes's endorsement of the infinite divisibility of extension and thus matter, and his scepticism about atoms because they were claimed to be indivisible. See also Daniel Garber, Descartes 'Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 120-7, for discussion.
32. See Stephen Yablo, "Mental Causation," Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 245-80, esp. 252.
33. Although, as Davidson and Hornstein note ("The Primary/Secondary Quality Distinction: Berkeley, Locke, and the Foundations of Corpuscularian Science," 282), Locke viewed solidity as a qualitative, non-mathematizable quality, one way of quantifying it, and thus of distinguishing the extent to which a given body fills space, is through the notion of density. This is not to claim that Locke had such a notion, any more than his commitment to a "massy" corpuscularianism implied that he had the notion of mass; in both cases, though, I think Locke has made some interesting conceptual progress toward each of these later articulated notions.
34. For more on microscopy and the rise of atomism more generally, see C. Meinel, "Early Seventeenth-Century Atomism: Theory, Epistemology, and the Insufficiency of Experiment," Isis 79 (1988): 68-103, esp. 81ff.;
35. and Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
36. For example, see Sydney Shoemaker, "Identity, Properties, and Causality," and "Causality and Properties," both reprinted in his Identity, Cause, and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).