‘Ideas’ in Berkeley and Arnauld

Abstract

Over the years, John Yolton has done as much as any to change our understanding of Locke and, though the changes have been various and complex, one striking result is that commentators are now much less ready to assume that Locke is a ‘representationalist’.’ To be sure, J. L. Mackie is one commentator who has tried to reattach that label to him,2 but nothing hangs on a word. Even A. D. Woozley, who has vigorously opposed the traditional interpretation, concedes that ‘certainly he held some kind of representationalism’; but, as Woozley says, the question is ‘what kind?” We may not be in total agreement about the answer, but few would now be happy to state confidently (as R. I. Aaron did in his book) that, for Locke: ‘The mind does not see the real physical object. It sees an object which somehow exists in the mind, and yet it is not the mind itself, nor a modification of the mind.14 For Woozley, Locke’s ideas are not ‘things’ at all. For Yolton they are not ‘entities’. And Mackie too sees no reason to attribute a ‘crudely representative’ theory to Locke. In fact, he says, as ‘appearances’, ideas are ‘not a special kind of entity’. Instead, ‘to speak of appearances is just to speak generally of such matters as how-it-looks or how-itfeels’, where the ‘it’ is the object concerned. Not surprisingly, Yolton quotes this with at least qualified approval, though he prefers to think of Locke’s ideas as perceptions, or as perceptions with content. ‘It is easy’, he adds, ‘to slip into talking of the content as if it is an objecr; but Locke’s discussion of Malebranche, with some explicit passages from the Essay, gives us a clear warning against reading his account of ideas in that way.‘S I am going to assume that Yolton is broadly right about Locke.6 In part, our understanding of Locke’s position has changed because once the question is raised as to whether he really did hold the view traditionally attributed to him, it becomes very difficult to find passages in theEssay that make it clear that he did; while the few passages that may strike us at first as obvious candidates turn out, on reflection, to be susceptible to an alternative interpretation. But there is also the fact that, contra Reid, there seems to have been no general agreement at the time that ‘the immediate objects of perception are only certain shadows of the external objects’. Some writers did think this, or at least wrote as if they did, with Ephraim Chambers for example observing that when we look at the sun, ‘we do not see that Luminary itself, but its Image or Appearance convey’d to the Soul by the Organ of Sight; and this Image we call Zdea’.7 But others did not. In his PerceptualAcquaintance Yolton is concerned to