AN ESSAY ON JOHN LOCKE’S THEORY OF

KNOWLEDGE
Ezinwanne M. Onwuka
Email: [email protected]

Abstract
In any philosophical discourse, the word “knowledge” occupies a very
important place. Before trying to know about things, philosophy finds it
indispensable to undertake a consideration of the nature and possibility of
knowledge. Questions like what is knowledge? How do we get knowledge?
What are the sources of knowledge? have been the preoccupation of many
renowned philosophers and this has led them to discuss knowledge in various
ways from different perspectives. Rationalism and empiricism are the two
philosophical schools of thought that have given diametrically opposite answers
to the question(s) regarding the source of knowledge. The aim of this paper is to
explain empiricism as a theory of knowledge with emphasis on John Locke’s
theory of knowledge, as the foremost proponent of empiricism.
Keywords: Knowledge, Ideas, Experience, Mind.

Introduction
Empiricism is perhaps as old as philosophy itself but it did not come to flourish
in philosophy before the seventeenth century of the Christian era except only for
a brief while at the time of the sophists of the early Greek period (Brightman,
1954). At the beginning of the modern age, a number of eminent philosophers
increasingly applied the empiricist method in philosophical investigations.
Through the works of thinkers like Locke (1632-1704), Berkeley (1685-1753)
and Hume (1711-1779) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
empiricism came to establish itself as a definite and vigorous creed in
philosophy. As a branch of epistemology, empiricism disregards the concept of
innate ideas and focuses entirely on experience and evidence as it relates to
sensory perception. It rivals rationalism according to which reason is the
ultimate source of knowledge. The philosophy of empiricism was first put forth

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by John Locke’s in his book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
According to Bertrand Russell (1945), this is his most important book and upon
which his fame most securely rests. Therein, Locke argued that the only way by
which man acquires knowledge is through experience. This paper is a holistic
approach to John Locke’s empiricism.

What is Empiricism?
Empiricism, in philosophy, is the view that all concepts originate in experience,
that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or
that all rationally accepted beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable
only through experience. This definition accords with the derivation of the word
empiricism from the Greek word empeiria which means experience. It is a
philosophical theory which argues that human knowledge is derived entirely
from sensory experience. Accordingly, it rejects any (or much) use of a priori
reasoning in the gathering and analysis of knowledge.

According to the empiricists, experience provides the marks of criteria of

knowledge and these criteria may be subsequently used to determine the extent
of our knowledge. They emphasize that, sense experience is the only guide in
our understanding of the world; that is, it is the only method and criterion of
knowledge and truth. Thus, any opinion or judgment which cannot be
established on the evidence of experience, is to be treated as uncertain, false or
even as superstitious. In philosophical theories and everyday attitudes, the
experiences referred to by empiricists are principally those arising from the
stimulation of the sense organs, that is, from visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory
and gustatory sensation. Lending credence to this, Hospers (1967) averred that
they ultimately reduce all concepts, all knowledge and all scientific
generalizations to sensations and perceptions. What all empiricists have in
common is their rejection of innate ideas and their insistence that all knowledge
derives from sense perception and is circumscribed by sense perception. They

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all maintain that at birth the human mind is a blank slate – tabular rasa.
(Omoregbe, 1998).

From the foregoing, it can be said that, as a theory of knowledge, empiricism

upholds the view that experience is the only source of knowledge, or that the
senses alone can provide us with reliable knowledge about the world (Hossain,
2014). The common-sense view is that, the senses do provide us with
knowledge of some sort and most people adopt this kind of empirical view.

John Locke’s Theory of Knowledge

John Locke was born in 1632 at Wrington, Somerset, and died seventy-two
years later in 1704. He was one of the most famous philosophers and political
theorists of the seventeenth century. He is often regarded as the founder of the
school of thought known as British Empiricism, and he made foundational
contributions to modern theories of limited, liberal government.

In his most important work, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke

set out to offer an analysis of the human mind and its acquisition of knowledge.
The main project of the Essay is an examination of the human understanding
and an analysis of knowledge. He offered an empiricist theory according to
which we acquire ideas through our experience of the world. Knowledge, then,
consists of a special kind of relationship between different ideas.

Locke opened Book IV of his Essay with the quote: “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. Where this perception is,
there is knowledge, and where it is not, there, though we may fancy, guess, or
believe, yet we always come short of knowledge” (4.2.2, 525). What does
Locke mean by the “connexion and agreement” and the “disagreement and
repugnancy” of our ideas? An example might help. Bring to mind your idea of
the colour white and your idea of the colour black. Locke thinks that upon doing

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this you will immediately perceive that they are different, that is, they
“disagree”. It is when you perceive this disagreement that you know the fact
that white is not black. There are three dimensions along which there might be
this sort of agreement or disagreement between ideas. First, we can perceive
when two ideas are identical or non-identical. For example, knowing that
sweetness is not bitterness consists in perceiving that the idea of sweetness is
not identical to the idea of bitterness. Second, we can perceive relations that
obtain between ideas. For example, knowing that seven (7) is greater than three
(3) consists in perceiving that there is a size relation of bigger and smaller
between the two ideas. Third, we can perceive when our idea of a certain feature
accompanies our idea of a certain thing. For instance, if I know that ice is cold
this is because I perceive that my idea of cold always accompanies my idea of
ice. From this, it follows that Locke thinks that all of our knowledge consists in
agreements or disagreements of one of these types.

John Locke’s Critique of Innate Ideas

It is obvious that if Locke is going to say that all ideas come from experience,
he must reject the theory of innateness (Stumpf and Fieser, 2015). The first of
the Essay’s four books is devoted to a critique of nativism, the doctrine that
some ideas are innate in the human mind, rather than received in experience. He
attacks previous schools of philosophy, such as those of Plato and Descartes,
which maintain that there are certain ideas (units of mental content) which were
neither acquired through experience nor constructed by the mind out of ideas
received in experience. The usual justification for this belief in innate principles
is that there are in the understanding certain innate principles stamped upon the
mind of man, which the soul receives in its very first beginning, and brings into
the world with it. In other words, certain principles exist to which all human
beings universally assent.

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Locke contends that, on the contrary, no principle is actually accepted by every
human being. His contention is that the fact that not all humans have these ideas
is enough evidence that they were not implanted in the human minds at birth,
and that they are therefore acquired rather than innate. Furthermore, if universal
agreement did exist about something, this agreement might have come about in
a way other than through innate knowledge. Another argument of his directed
against innate ideas is that human beings cannot have ideas in their minds of
which they are not aware, so that people cannot be said to possess even the most
basic principles until they are taught them or think them through for themselves.
Still another argument is that because human beings differ greatly in their moral
ideas, moral knowledge must not be innate.

Locke attacks both the view that we have any innate principles (for example, the
whole is greater than the part, do unto others as you would have done unto you,
etc.) as well as the view that there are any innate singular ideas (for example,
God, identity, substance, and so forth). The main thrust of Locke’s argument
lies in pointing out that none of the mental content alleged to be innate is
universally shared by all humans.

As Locke saw the matter, the doctrine of innate ideas was superfluous because it
contained nothing that he could not explain in terms of his empirical account of
the origin of ideas (Stumpf and Fieser, 2015).

John Locke on Ideas

According to Locke, ideas are the fundamental units of our mental content and
so they play an integral role in his explanation of the human mind and his
account of our knowledge. Ideas, according to Locke, are the immediate objects
of human knowledge (Omoregbe, 1998). This means that we have no direct
knowledge of things themselves but only of our ideas about them.

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How are ideas formed in our mind? Locke explains that when we perceive
things, they impress themselves on our minds and leave their images (their
copies) there. These images are the representatives of things in our minds, and
these are our ideas of things (Omoregbe, 1998). Hence, ideas are mental
objects. The implication is that when you perceive an external world object like
an apple there is something in your mind which represents that apple. So when
you think of an apple what you are really doing is thinking about the idea of that
apple. On a different plane, ideas are mental actions. The thought here is that
when you perceive an apple you are really perceiving the apple in a direct,
unmediated way. Ideas are the mental act of making perceptual contact with the
external world object. The implication of this, therefore, is that since the mind
has access only to the ideas and not to the world of objects, we have certainty
about the ideas alone. He distinguished between simple and complex ideas.

Simple ideas constitute the chief source of the raw materials out of which our
knowledge is made. These ideas are received passively by the mind through the
senses. When we look at an object, ideas come into our minds in a single file.
This is so even when an object has several qualities blended together. For
example, a white lily has the qualities of whiteness and sweetness without any
separation. Our minds receive the ideas of white and sweet separately because
each idea enters through a different sense, namely, the sense of sight and the
sense of smell. Sometimes different qualities enter by the same sense, as when
both the hardness and coldness of ice come through the sense of touch. In this
case, our minds sort out the difference between them because there are in fact
two different qualities involved. Knowledge according to Locke, agrees with the
realities of things, as the simple ideas we get represent things outside. In this
sense, the simple ideas are the product of things operating on our minds. In
other words, things outside us arise in us sensations that generate simple ideas.
We are passive in their reception. This is a very fundamental assumption of

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Locke’s empiricism. Locke thus assumes that there are things out there in the
world and our simple ideas are copies of what is there in the world.

Complex ideas, on the other hand, are not received passively but rather are put
together by our minds as a compound of simple ideas. Unlike simple ideas,
complex ideas are not copies and they do not refer to anything original out
there. The human mind makes them. Here the emphasis is on the activity of our
minds, which takes three forms: The mind (1) joins ideas, (2) brings ideas
together but holds them separate, (3) and abstracts. Thus, my mind joins the
simple ideas of whiteness, hardness, and sweetness to form the complex idea of
a lump of sugar. My mind also brings ideas together but holds them separate for
the purpose of thinking of relationships, as when I say that the grass is greener
than the tree. Finally, my mind can separate ideas “from all other ideas that
accompany them in their real existence” as when I separate the idea of man
from John and Peter.

John Locke on the Degrees of Knowledge

After detailing the types of relations between ideas which constitute knowledge,
Locke continues on to discuss the three “degrees” of knowledge in 4.2. These
degrees seem to consist in different ways of knowing something. The first
degree Locke calls intuitive knowledge. This is the highest degree of knowledge
and the most certain of the three as Locke says, “Such kind of truths, the mind
perceives at the first sight of the Ideas together, by bare Intuition, without the
intervention of any other Idea; and this kind of knowledge is the clearest, and
most certain, that humane frailty is capable of.” (4.2.1, 531). An agent possesses
intuitive knowledge when he directly perceives the connection between two
ideas. It is acquired by direct intuition, without any intermediary. An example
of this kind of knowledge is mathematical knowledge.

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Next is demonstrative knowledge. This is scientific knowledge, and it is
acquired by experiment and demonstration. For example, most of us are unable
to tell that the three interior angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles
simply by looking at them. But most of us, with the assistance of a mathematics
teacher, can be made to see that they are equal by means of a geometric proof or
demonstration. This is the model for demonstrative knowledge.

The third and lowest degree of knowledge is sensitive knowledge. It is the

knowledge of particular things as they exist, and it is acquired through sense
perception. Sensitive knowledge has to do with the relationship between our
ideas and the objects in the external world that produce them. Locke claims that
we can be certain that when we perceive something, an orange, for example,
there is an object in the external world which is responsible for these sensations.
Part of Locke’s claim is that there is a serious qualitative difference between
biting into an orange and remembering biting into an orange. In other words,
there is something in the phenomenological experience of the former which
assures us of a corresponding object in the external world.

The three degrees of knowledge can be summarized thus: Intuitive knowledge

gives us certainty that we exist, demonstrative knowledge shows that God
exists, and sensitive knowledge assures us that other selves and things exist but
only as they are when we experience them (Stumpf and Fieser, 2015).

John Locke on Substance and Qualities

Furthermore, Locke argues that when we perceive things what we actually
perceive in them are qualities (e.g. colour, height, size, hardness) which impress
themselves in our minds, leaving their copies or images there. But we know that
these qualities cannot exist on their own. They inhere in something, a
substratum, which supports them and from which they are coming out. This
substratum from which they are coming out, which supports and in which they

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inhere is what Locke calls substance. We can never know it directly because we
can have no direct cognitive contact with it. We can only know the qualities that
come out of it and which impress themselves on our minds. It is only by
inference that we know of its existence since we know that these qualities
cannot exist on their own. They must be existing in something and this is
substance. The implication of this doctrine of Locke is that we can never know
things as they are in themselves. We can only know our ideas of them.

To describe in even more detail how we get our ideas, Locke turned his
attention to the problem of how ideas are related to the objects that produce
them. Do our ideas reproduce exactly the objects we sense? If, for example, we
consider a balloon, what is the relation between the ideas that the balloon
engenders in our minds and the actual nature of the balloon? We have ideas
such as round, hard, white, and cold. To account for these ideas, Locke says that
objects have qualities, and quality, for him, is the power (in an object) to
produce any idea in our mind. (Stumpf and Fieser, 2015). The balloon, then, has
qualities that have the power to produce ideas in our minds. Locke went further
to make an important distinction between two different kinds of qualities in
order to answer the question of how ideas are related to objects. He terms these
qualities primary and secondary.

Primary qualities are inseparable from a body and they remain in it even when it
undergoes changes. For example, qualities of solidity, extension, figure and
mobility, motion or rest, and number. Locke considers them as the original or
primary qualities of the body, which produce simple ideas in us. They resemble
what is in the object and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves.
For example, the balloon looks round and is round; it appears to be moving and
is moving. Thus, our ideas, caused by primary qualities, resemble exactly those
qualities that belong inseparably to the object. In this sense, they are real

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qualities, as they really exist in the bodies, whether anyone perceives them or
not.

On the other hand, secondary qualities are not in the objects themselves. They
produce ideas in our minds that have no exact counterpart in the object. We
have the idea of red when we see the balloon. But there is no redness in the
balloon. What is in the balloon is the quality, the power to create in us the ideas
of red. Secondary qualities have no resemblance of them in the body in which
they are perceived. For example, in the case of a white rose, our idea of it does
not resemble the rose considered in itself. What corresponds in the rose to our
idea of white is its power of producing in us the idea of white through the action
of imperceptible particles on our eyes.

Primary qualities, then, refer to solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and
number – or qualities that belong to the object. Secondary qualities, such as
colours, sounds, tastes, and odours, do not belong to or constitute bodies except
as powers to produce these ideas in us. The importance of Locke’s distinction
between primary and secondary qualities is that through it he sought to
distinguish between appearance and reality. (Stumpf and Fieser, 2015)

Conclusion
John Locke made significant contributions to the history of Modern Philosophy
in both epistemology and political theory. He was influenced in many ways by
Descartes, but in opposing Descartes’ Rationalist epistemology he established
the starting point of Empiricism. Locke set out “to enquire into the origin,
certainty, and extent of human knowledge.” He assumed that if he could
describe what knowledge consists of and how it is obtained, he could determine
the limits of knowledge and decide what constitutes intellectual certainty. His
conclusion was that knowledge is restricted to ideas – not the innate ideas of the
rationalists but ideas that are generated by objects we experience. Without

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exception, according to Locke, all our ideas come to us through some kind of
experience. This means that each person’s mind is in the beginning like a blank
sheet of paper upon which experience alone can subsequently write on.

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