John Locke’s Essay presents an in depth, systematic philosophy of mind and thought. The Essay wrestles with elementary questions on how we predict and understand, and it even touches on how we tend to express ourselves through language, logic, and spiritual practices. Within the introduction, entitled “The Letter to the Reader”, John Locke describes how he became involved in his current mode of philosophical thinking. He relates an account about a conversation with friends that made him understand that men typically suffer in their pursuit of information because they fail to work out the limits of their understanding.
Book One lays out the three goals of his philosophical project: to find where our ideas come from, to determine what it means to own these ideas and what a thought basically is, and to look at problems with religion and opinion to work out how we should proceed logically
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For Locke, information is what the mind is in a position to understand through reasoning out the connection, or lack of affiliation, between any 2 or additional of our ideas, because information solely has to do with relations between ideas, that are within the mind, the information we are capable of isn't really information of the globe itself. John Locke identifies four types of agreement and disagreement that reason can understand to produce knowledge: (1) identity and diversity, (2) relation, (3) coexistence, and (4) realization that existence belongs to the ideas themselves and isn't within the mind. John Locke distinguishes between 3 grades or degrees of knowledge: intuition, once we immediately understand an agreement or disagreement the instant the ideas are understood; demonstration, which needs some style of proof; and sensitive information, that is concerning the existence of an external world, roughly resembling the globe as we tend to understand