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CHAPTER TWO

JOHN LOCKE ON UNIVERSALS AND INDIVIDUALS

This chapter focuses on the thinking of John Locke, a Western thinker who is hardly as obscure as William of Ockham. It must be noted that many people are, however, familiar with Locke through his political theory whereas the thinking that is explored here is instead, epistemological as found in his Essay concerning Human Understanding. Again, the question is taken up as to how one come to know a universal. Does this imply a preceding acquaintance with individuals, in Locke's view? How is the paradigm-relationship between universal and individual found in the relationship proposed by Locke among words, ideas, and universals? Before these enquiries can take place, two matters need attention: first, given the narrow perception that Locke is exclusively a political and scientific philosopher, a brief biography might serve to illustrate the breadth of Locke's thinking and career; second, a discussion of the intellectual scene known as the Enlightenment in which one finds Locke is important to convey his pivotal and catalytic contributions in the epistemological area which is treated below.

I. A Brief Biography

John Locke was born on 29 August 1632 in a district of Somerset, near Bristol in England. His upbringing was tempered with what Locke scholar Peter H. Nidditch, calls a "determined Protestant faith. . . ." He nonetheless did not esteem that faith nor Catholicism for that matter. Locke attended the West-minster school from age fourteen. At Christ College, Oxford, he completed his B. A. in 1656 without much enthusiasm for the Aristotelian-geared philosophy. After his M. A. in 1658, Locke became a Senior Student or Fellow of Christ Col-lege through the sponsorship of the powerful politician, the Earl of Shaftes-bury until the latter's death in 1683.

Locke's interests reached into the physical sciences which would lead him to pursue a Doctor of Medicine, completing the program but never becoming a doctor by degree. Shaftesbury's financial support sustained Locke throughout the rest of his life enabling him to travel on the continent to France, developing a keen cosmopolitan mind. Throughout, civil turmoil in England was the back drop for Locke's life prompting some of his writings. His writing ranged in topics including science, medicine, philosophy, logic, and theology. His principal works include his Letter on Toleration, the Two Treatises of Government, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and the Essay Concerning Human Understand-ing He also wrote several works on Scripture and faith. Many of these, in fact, were assembled from smaller sketches and journal musings. One gets a sense that Locke's broad interests in life were reflected in his innovative thinking. Concluding, Jenkins tells us:

II. The Enlightenment as a context for John Locke's Empiricism

Following the Renaissance there arose the Enlightenment, yet another transformative cultural and intellectual movement in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By using human rationality as the primary faculty for acquiring all true knowledge, a significant change in understanding the world ensued. Seeking to find an element of unity in religion through rationality in response to the factious dissolution of religion, the Enlightenment proposed purified, rational religion or deism. This movement began in fact in England with Locke's and Hume's empiricism, the former of which is treated below, and soon developed with different emphases in France, Holland and Germany.

The tendency of the Enlightenment to ignore the importance of history was a criticism initiated by Voltaire and the encyclopedists marking the decline of this period. Moreover, a contemporary but contrary school led by Rousseau proposed that feeling was the primary human component, which apparently worked against the strength of the Enlightenment. The importance of the Enlightenment is that it is a period which clearly delineates the transition from scholastic schools of the middle ages into the modern period.

The Enlightenment essentially re-orients how humanity sees itself in the universe and expands exponentially the capacity for knowledge. The broad foundations for this evolution of philosophical focus are laid down in one of the Enlightenment's first schools, the empiricism to which John Locke's thought contributed much. English empiricism stresses that experience is the only source of all true knowledge. No longer is experience considered an initial component of the process of knowing. In fact, the notion of the mind being a tabula rasa or clean slate, so to speak, at birth denies the possibility of innate ideas and relegates all knowing to that which is gained through sensed, human experience--not that of angels or God.

As for method, priority is given to induction as the appropriate way to knowledge. Induction begins with the experienced instances--individuals--and concludes with a general or universal law. This universal law applies also to the unobserved instances which interestingly, are not corroborated by experience. This is, in effect, much of the foundation of the modern scientific method--a broad-reaching paradigm.

The central part of this chapter, however, focuses on how Locke proposes the actual dynamics of induction in human experience with particular regard to how we experience universals and individuals. With such a focus, the above, broad-stroke description of Locke's empiricism serves primarily to illustrate the way in which his thinking about human understanding relates to the great land-scape of his theory in general.

In attempting to find a coherent, unitary presentation of universals and individuals, one discovers that John Locke's thinking, due to its rather informal presentation, takes up this topic throughout the Essay from different, loosely-related angles creating controversial ambiguity and a liability to misinterpreta-tion by his critics. For the purposes of this chapter, however, the focus will primarily be on chapters two and three of Book III of the Essay, following Andrew B. Schoedinger in his anthology The Problem of Universals. As such, the topic is found in the midst of Locke's theory of language and meaning which illustrates, at the onset, the particular direction that Locke takes to address the experience of universals and individuals as well as the direction that is neces-sary to be taken in this treatment.

The Signification of Words

In the beginning of the second chapter of Book III of Locke's Essay, he begins by telling succinctly how language arose:

Thus Locke explains how words serve human communication "as the Signs of their [persons'] Ideas." It must be noted however that a word has no natural connection to an idea but is instead arbitrarily chosen by a person, i. e., "by a voluntary Imposition." That is to say, a word represents a person's own idea and also, that same word may represent or signify a different idea in another person's mind. Jenkins explains how this relates to the medium of language: "It is by means of language that the ideas of one mind are transferred to the mind of another." Locke gives an example of the idea of gold:

By looking at what else words relate to--their secondary references--one begins to see how this theory of communication is, in fact, a way to arrive at Lockean universals and individuals. As noted above, words signify the ideas held within one's mind which are ultimately and distinctly one's own while such ideas cannot be significantly at variance with those signified by the same words but of another's mind since this would hamper communication--in the worst case --as if they speak two languages. Yolton reviews the first of two senses of what Locke means by a secondary or "secret reference:"

Here, it is evident then that the element of convention or "common Accepta-tion" also affects a person's ideas.

There is a second sense in which words have secret reference. This regards the reality of things themselves which words signify. Locke explains: "[Persons] would not be thought to talk barely of their own Imaginations, but of Things as really they are. . . ." Yolton explains how this qualification is important for Locke as an empiricist:

Knowing the above, one has an understanding of how it is that words are related to things as well as to ideas. This is a basic framework which is useful then, to approach different types of words. With this, Locke then proceeds to the next chapter where he explores distinctions about the words we use and how this relates to one's understanding of universals and individuals.

General Terms and Universals

In chapter three of Book III of the Essay, John Locke's theory of language more specifically addresses the issues which are pertinent to the present study. This chapter's objective is, as Kraus explains, "to present his [Locke's] theory concerning how particular complex ideas. . . (as well as the names of these) become universals."

Locke begins by taking up the progress of his previous chapter and makes an inquiry regarding the relationship between things and words:

Here, one notes that Locke, from the start, observes that his theory discussed in the previous chapter might suggest a relationship shared among a word and an idea which are proper to one thing. Yet, this does not accommodate the reality of general words--those indistinct, universal terms such as 'person' which can refer to an infinite multitude of instances in reality.

Before moving on to address explicitly the issue of general terms, Locke suggests three reasons why there should not be, in fact, a name and idea for every particular thing which is rooted in language and knowledge. First, Locke asserts, "It is impossible, that every particular Thing should have a distinct peculiar Name." Quite simply, Locke is realistically pessimistic in regards to the capacity of the human intellect and its ability "to frame and retain distinct Ideas of all the particular Things we meet with. . . . " Moreover, Locke's second reason, waxing pragmatic, is that he believes it would be useless since, by encumbering communication, "it would not serve to the chief end of Language." Consider this example: If I communicate to another the names applied to ideas of particulars in my mind, this might not be literally significant or intelligible to the other who may be unacquainted with the particulars I have encountered. Thus far, Locke has given two reasons why one does not en-counter a language exclusively of particulars and that, as Locke says, this "has not been the Effect of Neglect, or Chance, but of Reason, and Necessity."

Now, the third reason will be considered as well as Locke's already-mentioned thoughts on individuals or particulars. Due to his empirical leanings, a method of induction where particulars are the stepping stones towards know-ing general terms, he posits the following third reason. If there were to be a word for every particular thing, such a situation would not advance the cause of knowledge which, Locke says, "though founded in particular Things, enlarges it self by general Views; to which, Things reduced into sorts under general Names, are properly subservient."

Recall that Locke begins this chapter with a judgment about individuals that has led to all of the immediately preceding justification, as it were, of general terms: "All Things, that exist, being Particulars, . . . ." Locke believes that all that exists in reality is particular or individual; to him, existence itself is the principium individuationis. Here and throughout his thought, Locke, demonstrating his empiricism, is characteristically unlike a realist who tries to understand a dynamic of existence in which universals are the locus and individuals must somehow be derived from them.

As relayed above, Locke's theory begins with ideas about particular things. This theory reflects the process of learning that takes place from infancy to adulthood in which one is first familiar with particular people, for example, and one has ideas of each. Then, through discerning particular people as things with similar characteristics, one may as Locke explains, "frame an Idea, which [one] find[s] those many Particulars do partake in; and to that [one] give[s], with others, the name [Person]. . . ." This presentation demonstrates an experience of developing universal or general ideas and words but it is apparent that it is altogether roughly hewn and a somewhat more precise explanation of Locke's theory of universal ideas is needed.

One must again ask Locke's question: "For since all things that exist are only particulars, how come we by general Terms, or where find we those general Natures they are supposed to stand for?" He answers this rather concisely:

Kraus draws on the above theory and the example of universals in human intel-lectual development as he explains:

By this, Kraus tries to delineate further how universal ideas are related to individual ideas in Lockean theory. That is to say that, by partial representa-tions, Kraus means the ultimately similar characteristics shared by particulars or "what is common to them all" remaining after the distinguishing or differen-tiating characteristics have been excised, so to speak, through the process of abstraction. Such a partial representation is essentially the abstracted, universal idea or a sort, to use Locke's term.

Although the existence of individuals is presumed to be incontrovertible as far as Locke is concerned, the method of abstracting universals treated above does not exactly show the ontological status of universals. Beginning with Locke's words, one learns his important distinction:

In other words, insofar as a universal is a word or an idea which itself is individual or particular, it exists in the same manner as other words and ideas, and in the same manner as all individual things for that matter. Beyond that, its quality of universality which arises through signification, does not contribute to its existence. Moreover, universality is not found in the existence of a particular member of a sort or universal. It is evident that Locke's words carefully exclude the possibility of the real existence of universals.

Michael Ayers carries the issue of the existence of Lockean universals further in relation to an Aristotelian perspective:

Ayers makes it clear that, in the range of ancient to modern philosophy, there is what one might call a transposition of mind in understanding where a universal is found or its ontological status. For Locke, a universal does not inhere in a thing's essence but instead is the result of human abstractive activity.

IV. Conclusions about Locke's Theory of Universal Ideas

Trying to describe the order of development, Locke placed primacy in the ideas found in the human mind--"ideas, then names." The need for communi-cation leads to the expression of these ideas by shared, public, or conventional words, but ultimately, each person still has private ideas which are proper to that person. Ideas are signified by words which serve the end of language--communication. Some words are general. That is, they represent general ideas which themselves are of many things in reality. General ideas consider similar things indistinctly by their shared characteristics. Such general ideas are, for Locke, universal ideas. Further, although universal ideas exist in the same way that any particular thing does, it is universal in its signification and, as such, its universality does not contribute to the idea's existence.

The approach taken by Locke is refreshing and thorough. His presentation of universals and individuals relies heavily on the relationship between a thing and the name and idea that a person has for it. Locke makes some substantial steps forward in trying to equalize the subjective and the objective in the field of epistemology; the primacy of one's own ideas is, at once, inviolable but also, friendly to language created through convention.

Nonetheless, Locke's contribution to epistemology, to me, acts as a bridge that joins together or reconciles science and philosophy inasmuch as that could have happened in his era. That is, he successfully reoriented our understanding of how we know the observed world in a manner that is in harmony with the school of empiricism, then still in its infancy.

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