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The John Locke’s Theory Of Perception
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On
the issue of appearance and reality, it is pertinent to say at this
juncture that, appearance is basically different from reality; hence one
can safely say that seeing something as it appears is not enough to
conclude that, one has the knowledge of that thing.
When a straight
stick or ruler is inside a bowl of water, it will appear to be bent,
thus, giving a wrong impression to the onlooker, but in reality, neither
the stick nor the ruler is bent, because after removing them from the
bowl of water, they look straight again. Should this situation be
accepted as the original state of the object? Is it as it appeared to us
outside the bowl of water? Or the way they appeared inside of it?
Furthermore,
we also experience illusion such as, mirage, where what we see is not
real. For instance, when driving on a highway on a sunny afternoon,
looking ahead, one will see a pool of water in a distance, and on
getting to the spot, the place turns out dry. People are often also
victims of hallucinations and they tend to see things which are not
actually there. This goes to show the unreliability of senses.
All
the instances given earlier are inconvertible facts of our experiences.
And they have only buttressed the fact that, experiencing or perceiving
things as they are, is not enough justification of the knowledge of that
thing. And this cannot be farfetched from the fact that, objects often
appear differently to different people or observers at the same time or
to some other observers at different times, thus, bringing about
incoherent conclusions from all the observers as earlier reiterated.
Though, this largely depends on state of affairs, light, physiological
position, or state of the observer.
All that had been said above, can
tempt one to conclude that, reality cannot be sensed or perceived, or
that, we can never know whether our experience is illusory or not, or
that sense experience is not a reliable source of knowledge.
Even, we
can state here that, issues of knowledge acquisition is in two folds,
we have knowledge through experience, and knowledge on the statement of
fact, as when one says, ‘all bachelors are unmarried’. But the
empiricists reject this on the grounds that, it is not verifiable.
Ludwig Wittgenstein opined that,
‘Such
statements, which cannot be verified and disproved, are meaningless,
only statements, which can be verified and proved, should be accepted
‘(Scruton, 1981: 137).
By and large, one can see that keen as Locke
was on the clarity of knowledge, he did not escape the fatal confounding
of sense-knowledge with intellectual knowledge, thereby, making the
confusion more confounded, so that one may take not only different, but
opposite doctrines, from the premises his theories present. If one
follows his work in one set of principles, and develop it to the end,
one will find himself in idealism, and if you choose to follow him in
another of his thought, you will find yourself in positivism, which it
takes reality around us as, the only thing that is, and denies value to
the intellect and reason.
Locke, in his conception and origin of
ideas, based it on the foundation and background of the empiricists;
those ideas are derived from sensation. He recognizes the extreme
importance of sensation, which could be seen in his second work. He
believed that knowledge originates from two sources; sensation and
reflection.
He also asserts that, knowledge is a process of
compounding, repeating, comparing, and uniting sensation. But he ran
into a problem, which was indeed great, because, he was unable to keep
up his thoroughly atomic theory of mind. It is a theory which makes all
relations external, they are, as he would say, super-induced upon facts.
This makes it impossible to account for any appearance of unity and
convention among ideas. He quietly, and without any consciousness of the
contradictions involved, introduces certain inherent relations into the
structure of the ideas, thereby, further discussing the objective
character of sensation in relation to the object which produces it.
Locke distinguished simple and complex ideas because he felt, to discuss
about ideas intelligently, it will be convenient to distinguish them,
as they are matter in the bodies that cause them (Popkin, 1969: 194).
Consequently,
one can see that Locke tends to lay down the marks of sensation as
passivity and simplicity as the real element in knowledge but Leibniz
denies or accepts in a sense different from that of Locke. According to
Russell, ‘Reality for Leibniz is not a supernatural yoking of things
naturally opposed, and also not a mere accident (Russell, 1971: 82).
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 3]
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