John Locke's Argument Against Innate Knowledge

“Whatever idea was never perceived by the mind was never in the mind” (Locke, 2007, pg3). What we see in the physical world, exists as it is physically there, and is exactly how it appears to us, and isn’t just in our own minds, therefore this equals the mental world which is created by one’s mind, and as John Locke states, if an idea wasn’t fundamentally perceived in one’s mind, then theoretically it wasn’t in the mind to begin with. John Locke separates the fundamentals of ideas, and how they are formed, by separating them into primary and secondary qualities. These qualities are formed through sense data, which is experiences that one has. Locke uses these theories to test his argument against innate knowledge.

By saying an object “is”

Primary qualities are observed in bodies. With primary qualities, there is consistency. The qualities that the body has are inseparable from the body itself. Locke uses an example of a grain of wheat to describe this notion, by saying that if you took a grain of wheat, split it directly in half, although it is now in two halves, each strain of wheat is still as solid as it was before, and each piece also has the same extension, figure, and mobility that it had as a whole grain. The process can even be repeated, by splitting each piece of grain again, and the same results will

When we think of an apple, the actual thought of an apple isn’t ‘apple shaped’, the apple that we are thinking of is ‘apple shaped’. An example of proving the theory of would be placing one hand into a container of hot water, and the other hand into a container of cold water, and then placing both hands into a temperature-controlled container of lukewarm water. Even though the lukewarm water was at a set temperature, each hand felt a different temperature to the other. This reiterates the fact that, depending on how you see, or go about an idea, it will receive a different outcome to the next person depending on how they did so. “What I have said concerning colours and smells may be understood also of tastes and sounds and other sensible qualities; which, whatever reality we by mistake attribute to them, are in truth nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us; depend on those primary qualities” (Locke, 2007, pg5). “Knowledge is the perception of the Agreement or Disagreement of two Ideas” (Locke, 2007, pg19). There cannot be knowledge without perception. The mind perceives ideas, it perceives ideas to know what an object is, and to know what it looks, feels, smells and tastes