Phi final pap
Chocotita
LockePrimarySecondaryQualities28Canon29.pptx
John Locke’s Epistemology
John Locke (1632-1704) was an English philosopher best known today for his philosophy of human rights and defense of representative government (which played a formative role on American political philosophy), but he was also an influential epistemologist and early psychologist.
Primary and Secondary Qualities
The primary qualities of an object are its shape, size, solidity (hardness or softness), texture, location and movement/rest.
The common attributes of primary qualities are:
Play a role in mechanistic explanations.
Can’t be perceived differently by different subjects.
Secondary qualities are “such qualities, which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e. by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colours, sounds, tastes, [scents] etc.” Secondary qualities are not what things taste or smell like, or what color they are, they are the object’s powers to cause those sensations in us.
The common attributes of primary qualities are:
Secondary qualities don’t play a role in mechanistic explanations.
Can be perceived differently by different subjects.
Objectively “in” the apple:
Size
Shape
Texture
Location
Movement
All its secondary qualities which cause subjective sensations.
Merely subjectively “in” our perception of the apple:
Sensation of Color
Sensation of Scent
Sensation of Flavor
Sensation of Sound
Two color concepts
Philosophers therefore differentiate between two concepts of color. The first is “phenomenal color” (from the Greek word φαινόμενον, meaning “to show”), which is an experience of color in our mind. The second concept of color is “physical color,” which is what Locke means by a color secondary property. An object’s physical color is an object’s power to cause phenomenal color experiences in people who look at it. Scientifically speaking, it is the object’s surface light-wave reflectance.
Which of these color concepts is the “right” color concept?
Wrong question! There is no “right” color concept. Prior to doing philosophy we had a messy conception of color that lead us into confusion. After reading Locke, we have a better idea of what reality is actually like and we need to revise our conceptual scheme to match it. Turns out we should have two concepts where we used to have just one.
Mechanistic Explanation
Mechanistic explanations explain why/how something happens by reference to the size, shape, and force of some object(s) pulling or pushing other objects (as opposed to what kind of thing something is, what something’s purpose is, or what something’s origin is).
Mechanistic Explanation
“How does the key unlock the door?”
Teleological (Ancient Greek) explanation: It is the key’s purpose to unlock the door.
Mechanical explanation: the key’s teeth have the size and shape so that, when the key is inserted into the lock, the teeth exert an upward force on the lock’s tumblers that aligns their break lines.
The “Inefficacious” Argument against Colors and Flavors.
The only qualities that objects really have are those that factor into the fundamental scientific explanations of how the world works.
Colors and flavors do not factor into the fundamental scientific explanations of how the world works.
Therefore, objects do not really have colors or flavors.
The “Inefficacious” Argument against Colors and Flavors.
Defenders of premise 1 argue that science is the best source of knowledge we have about what reality is actually like: it is objective, methodical, and penetrates reality at a deeper than our individual minds alone are capable of. Therefore, we should accept the picture of reality we are given by science, and that’s it. Anything we might add to the picture science gives us wouldn’t have “scientific credentials” and thus doesn’t deserve our recognition.
Since a physics textbook never uses something’s color or flavor to explain anything, these properties are not “scientific” (real, objective) properties.
The car on the right gets hot in the sun faster than the car on the left. Is this a problem for Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities?
Variation depending on conditions/subject
The Variation argument
If two people could perceive the same object as being different colors, then that object isn’t objectively any color.
Two people could perceive the same object as being different colors.
Therefore, that object isn’t objectively any color.
There’s nothing special about the particular object we’re talking about, what’s true of it is true of objects in general.
Therefore, objects do not objectively have color.
The Variation argument
In actuality, people (and animals) do perceive colors and smells differently. Some color-blind people perceive greens as pink, for example. Dogs can find smells where humans detect nothing.
It is a contradiction for something to be both pink all-over and green-all over, or for something to be scented and not scented, if we understand these qualities to be objective qualities that the object really has in the same sense it has a shape. So these must be properties the object doesn’t objectively have, but that they only appear to have when we experience them.
The Variation argument
Why accept premise 1? Often ignored is the fact that premise 1 requires that there isn’t any fact of the matter over who “gets it right” when two people perceive an object’s color differently.
But why not? Doesn’t it feel right to say that a color-blind person is perceiving a green apply wrongly when they perceive it as pink? Their different rods and cones fail to pick up the apple’s real color, which our better functioning rods and cones correctly perceive.
Likewise, why not say the bloodhound picks up the scent the trail really has, which we simply can’t smell because our noses suck too much? Aren’t we wrong to say the trail doesn’t smell? Otherwise, what is the dog picking up?
The inverted spectrum
What principled reason could we give for saying who got it right? How could we even know who got it right? In light of these difficulties, it’s reasonable to say that there just is no “right.”
What secondary qualities are not, revisited.
Colors, flavors, scents, and sounds (and maybe textures?) as we experience them are not secondary qualities. They are the ideas (i.e. phenomenal sensations) caused in us by secondary qualities. According to Locke, objects do not really have colors, flavors, scents, or sounds in the way we experience them, but they do have all their secondary qualities even if no conscious being is around to perceive them.
Tertiary qualities
Tertiary qualities are the powers an object has to cause changes in the qualities of other objects.
A knife’s ability to cut something into a different shape.
A fire’s ability to cook meat.
A dye’s ability to change the color of some cloth.
(But what about a pain reliever's medicinal properties?)
A common confusion
All of an object’s qualities are qualities they have in virtue of their physical body, and objects really have all their qualities. Objects have all their secondary qualities even when there are no conscious entities around to perceive them.
Also, its not the case that objects have phenomenal colors if there are intelligent beings around but are devoid of phenomenal colors when they aren’t around. Objects don’t have phenomenal color at all.
Are Primary Qualities Actually Secondary Qualities?
Our perception of something’s size and shape depend on our distance from it and the angle from which we are perceiving it, so in this sense they exhibit the same condition/subject variation as secondary qualities. Even our perception of whether or not something is in motion depends on how it is related to us (think about looking outside when your train starts to move).
Are Primary Qualities Actually Secondary Qualities?
Despite what the last slide said, primary qualities are still distinct from secondary qualities because primary qualities (but not secondary qualities) play a role in mechanistic explanation, and this doesn’t have anything to do with our perspective.
Even if a rectangular block looks square to me because of my perspective, it won’t fit through a square hole horizontally.
Sims and Mechanistic Explanations
If we’re conscious sims living in a computer simulated world, then none of the mechanistic reasons we take to explain why balls roll down, why knives cut, or why keys unlock locks are true. Everything that’s really happening is simply a matter of some computer’s processor moving around bits of energy on a motherboard.
For example, if we are in a simulation, you can’t walk though a door without opening it not because the door’s matter blocks your body’s matter from moving through it, but simply because the simulation’s code prevents the movement. If the code allowed it, we could move through doors without opening them.
Idealism
George Berkeley (pronounced “Bark-Lee”) was the Bishop of Cloyne, County Cork, Ireland (although he lived in Rhode Island from 1728-1732. Also, Berkeley, California is named after him).
Berkeley’s Idealism
“By sight I have the ideas of light and colours with their several degrees and variations. By touch I perceive, for example, hard and soft, heat and cold, motion and resistance, and of all these more and less either as to quantity or degree. Smelling furnishes me with odours; the palate with tastes, and hearing conveys sounds to the mind in all their variety of tone and composition. And as several of these are observed to accompany each other, they come to be marked by one name, and so to be reputed as one thing. Thus, for example, a certain colour, taste, smell, figure and consistence having been observed to go together, are accounted one distinct thing, signified by the name apple. Other collections of ideas constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and the like sensible things; which, as they are pleasing or disagreeable, excite the passions of love, hatred, joy, grief, and so forth.”
Berkeley’s Idealism
Berkeley does not deny the existence of ordinary objects like apples, cell phones, submarines, internal combustion engines, or poodles.
What Berkeley asserts is that these things are not
physical objects, they are collections of ideas.
We learn of poodles through characteristic sensations
including the sight, smell, taste, and touch of the
poodle. The poodle is the bundle of these sensations
together.
Berkeley’s master argument
General Sherman, the largest tree in the world, in Sequoia national park.
“Esse est percipi” - “To be is to be perceived”
If something is impossible to imagine, then it is impossible for it to be real.
It is impossible to imagine a tree existing without being thought-about, since in trying to imagine such a tree there is always at least one person thinking about that tree – you!
Therefore, since it is impossible to imagine a tree existing without it being thought about, it is impossible for a tree to actually exist without it being thought about.
The tree is just one example that could be replaced with any other object, therefore, nothing can exist independent of thought.
Berkeley is making two mistakes.
He is treating “being thought-about” as if it is an intrinsic property of the tree, when it is an extrinsic property of the tree.
He is conflating what we think about with the process of thinking.
An intrinsic property of something is a property it has only in virtue of what it is, what it is made of, or what it does.
It is an intrinsic property of my apple that it is fibrous.
It is an intrinsic property of an electron that it is negatively charged.
It is an intrinsic property of a tree’s leaves that they absorb sunlight.
An extrinsic property of something is a property it has because of how something else is related to it (you could change all the extrinsic properties of an object without changing its intrinsic properties).
It is an extrinsic property of the Beatles that they are my favorite band.
It is an extrinsic property of my class that it is a requirement for the philosophy major at MDC.
It is an extrinsic property of a tree that it is being thought about.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Properties
What we think is not how we think.
In order to imagine a world, do you need to imagine yourself existing in it? No, of course not. I can imagine a fantasy world with elves and dwarfs and wizard without needing to imagine that I am part of that world (as much as I wish).
This demonstrates that while my own thought process is required to imagine something (duh), this doesn’t mean it is part of what I imagine. If my own thought process did need to be part of what I imagine, then I would necessarily have to exist in that world by virtue of my thought being included in that world.
Can you imagine a tree without thinking about it? No, of course not. But can you imagine a tree existing even in a world where you don’t exist (and therefore which can’t be being thought about by you)? Yes.
