Abstract
Locke's 'Constructive Skepticism'- A Reappraisal M. JAMIE FERREIRA IN HIS TreatiseHume challenges the philosophical division of all reasoning into "knowledge and probability," proposing as a corrective the intermediate category of "proof. ''~ He recapitulates this point in a footnote to his first Enquiry, where he specifically points to Locke as an exponent of a division of "all arguments into demonstrative and probable," proposing once again the corrective category of "proof."* The suggestion is that Locke failed to recognize that category--namely, those arguments from experience which are "free from doubt" or "leave no room for doubt"3mand so is led to unacceptable conclusions. Hume clearly saw this reading of Locke's dichotomy as a reading for which he need not argue, and thus saw himself as introducing a corrective rather than merely reinforcing or emphasizing a category commonly assumed in philosophical circles. Such a reading of Locke, however, becomes problematic in light of welldocumented analyses of a tradition of "constructive skepticism" (developed in the works of Chillingworth, Tillotson, Wilkins, and others) in the fifty years preceding Locke's Essay, in which the category of "moral certainty"-constituted by the absence of 'reasonable' ground for doubt--provided a bridge between "knowledge" and "probability." For it has been claimed that Locke's view in the Essayshould be seen as "the culmination" of the fifty-year developmentmin particular, that the Essayprovided a "generalized" version and "application" of the "major themes" of those predecessors, and offered a doctrine which was in fact "in its fundamental features identical with those A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, x978), ~24. * Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, a975), 56n. s Cf. my "Hume's Naturalism--'Proof' and Practice" (forthcoming, Philosophical Quarterly) for a study of the possible difference between the two formulations of the definition of proof. [211] 212 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of his predecessors [although] there are terminological differences. TM And that claim has been reiterated in the more recent suggestion that "it is plain that Locke belongs to this tradition of constructive skepticism. ''5 If these claims are correct, then Hume was simply wrong to think that Locke failed to do justice to the category he was proposing as a corrective, for Locke was the culmination of a tradition which was centrally concerned to provide just such a bridge category--namely, "moral certainty," a kind of 'proof' in which there was no "room for doubt." Moreover, other later critics of Locke would also have been guilty of failing to give Locke sufficient credit on this, and consequently on related matters. For example, the "appeal to common sense" and "the deep interest in the psychological aspects of knowledge" are themes which it has been suggested were "undoubtedly inspired in large part by Locke's Essay. ''6 But these were some of the very things which Locke was criticized as failing to do justice to by certain figures coming after him. At the very least the claim that Locke's doctrine was fundamentally "identical " to that of the preceding tradition, appealing like them to "the certainty of ordinary life and the doctrine of levels of certainty ''7 needs qualification. I want to suggest, moreover, that there are elements in Locke's thought which support an understanding of him as departing in a significant way from the earlier tradition, rather than as culminating it through maintaining a doctrine "identical" in its "fundamental features." I suggest that putatively "terminological " differences signal substantive differences between the two doctrines, for Locke's restrictions on the word "certainty" fit with and reinforce a more substantive restriction in his doctrine which serves to distinguish it in an important way from the earlier one. Highlighting this will make more plausible how Locke could have been interpreted, by those after him witnessing (whether knowingly or not) to the earlier tradition, as alien to its overriding concerns. The grounds for that interpretation are worth exploring, both for the light they can shed on Locke's own thought, and for a better understanding of Locke's place in the historical progression of British thought. 1...
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