Modified: 2025-01-08 12:59 PM
- His father fought on Parliament's side during the Civil Wars
- Scholastic education at the University of Oxford but fell in with early scientists
- Worked for Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper)
- Learned about government
- Authored the constitutions of the Carolinas
- Obtained medical degree
- Visited French Protestants
- Exiled in Holland
- Locke inspired writers of Declaration of Independence
- Essay on Human Understanding
- Include human understanding as a science
- Against Descartes' innate knowledge
- Ryle (1967, p. 3) emphasizes Locke’s influence when he wrote:
"If we could fly back in a time-rocket to England in 1700, we could already breathe its air, and we could already converse with our new acquaintances without feeling lost. In the England of, say, 1600, we should gasp like fishes out of water."
- Tabula Rasa
- Empirical metaphor
- Graphic: notice how experience fills the slate of the mind

- Simple and Complex Ideas
- Simple ideas come from sensation
- Association turns those simple ideas into complex ones
- Spoiler Alert: it was not until Pavlov came up with classical conditioning that a mechanism for association was found (see chapter 9)
- Qualities of Objects
- Primary Qualities
- mass
- location,
- movement
- texture
- solidity
- In other words, these properties belong to the object (and can be measured objectively)
- Secondary
- These properties come from the perceiver
- What color is a tennis ball? Do diet drinks have an aftertaste?
- Tennis balls are perceived as green, yellow, or a color in between green and yellow
- Some people detect an aftertaste in some diet drinks, others do not.
- Spoiler Alert: Berkeley (see below) will eliminate primary qualities in his philosophy.
- Locke on knowledge
- Intuitive: existence, and even Locke admitted that some knowledge pre-existed learning
- Demonstrative: must be learned
- Example: the theorems of mathematics
- Once learned, however, they were unchangeable
- Sensitive: ideas, the largest category
- He had a probabilistic vies of empirical knowledge
- Example: there is a 60% chance of rain tomorrow
- He explored language too:
- Words were ideas
- Ideas could be:
- particular (e.g., this web page)
- abstract (e.g., beauty)
- Locke's Social Contract
- People may transfer some rights to government but reserve others to themselves
- Early step forward towards psychology
- He believed: He had swept away the "rubbish" of Scholasticism
- He prepared the grounds for an empirically based psychology
Back to Learning Theory Main Page