Substance, Reality, and Primary Qualities

Abstract

TWO bad mistakes have been taken over from Berkeley by most philosophers who have read and assessed him with the casualness usually accorded to the great, dead philosophers. Each mistake is in the nature of a conflation or running together of two philosophical doctrines which ought to be kept apart, and thus a conflation also of the problems which the doctrines offer to solve. The doctrines in question are all expounded in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. They are : ( i ) a certain account of what it is for a property to be instantiated by something; (2) a certain account of the distinction between appearance and reality, or between how it is with me and how it is with the world; and (3) a thesis about primary and secondary qualities. Locke certainly accepted (2) and (3). His scathing attacks on (1) have usually been taken as a defence of it here Locke has suffered the usual fate of the ironist. In the first part of my paper I shall discuss the conflation by Berkeley, and by most English philosophers since his time, of (1) with (2). This conflation is, specifically, an identification: Berkeley and others have actually failed to see that (1) and (2) are distinct. The conflation of (2) with (3) which I shall treat in the second part of the paper has not usually taken the extreme form of an identifying of the two doctrines with one another. Occasionally, (3) is described as a version of (2), but a more common mistake is the milder one of treating (3) as being integrally connected with (2) in a way in which it is not. In respect to both parts of the paper, I have been greatly helped by criticism from Peter Bell and Ian Hacking. My interest in these conflations is philosophical rather than exegetical. If distinct false theories such as (1) and (2) are identified with one an other, it will be harder to see why they are false and where the truth lies. Furthermore, I shall argue that there is something true and important which Locke, in his doctrine (3), was struggling to say about primary and secondary qualities. Yet his gestures in the right direction have not been followed up as they deserved; and it seems that A post-Lockean philosophers' neglect of the primary/ secondary distinction has been due to their thinking that what Locke says about the distinction is an integral part, or one formulation, of a single monolithic doctrine of which (i) and (2) are also essential ingredients. This has tarred the primary/ secondary distinction with the same brush as some things which have rightly been rejected, and so something important has been overlooked. Through all the Berkeleian commentaries which identify (1) with (2), and wrongly connect (2) with (3), there is inevitably an appreciable haze of vagueness and failure of grasp. This does es pecial harm by nourishing the assumption that the study of philosophers like Locke and Berkeley is only a marginally useful activity which may be adequately conducted with the mind in neutral. In fact, it can be one of the most rewarding and demanding of philosophical exercises.