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Locke on Real Knowledge /

Abstract

One of Locke's primary goals for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding is to provide a theory of knowledge that explains how we can have knowledge of the actual world. But because Locke holds a representationalist theory of perception, on his view we can directly perceive only the ideas of external objects (and not the objects themselves), which inevitably raises doubts about whether there actually exist any external objects corresponding to our ideas. To make matters worse, he defines knowledge as the perception of a relation between ideas. Many object that such an account of knowledge cannot give us knowledge of the actual world. But this criticism ignores a special category of knowledge that Locke calls "real knowledge", which is his own account of how we have knowledge of the actual world. In this dissertation I use Locke's account of real knowledge as a way to understand how we have knowledge of the actual world. I argue that there are two requirements for real knowledge: the first requirement is the perception of a relation between ideas, and the second requirement is a necessary connection between these ideas and reality. It is because of this second requirement for real knowledge that, on Locke's view, we can have knowledge of the actual world. For when we perceive a relation between the relevant ideas, because those ideas are necessarily connected to reality, it necessarily follows that those ideas correspond to the way the world actually is. In this way my interpretation is able to explain how, according to Locke, the perception of a relation between ideas can give us knowledge of the existence of external objects, knowledge of the qualities of particular material objects, and knowledge of an objective moral standard. Thus Locke's account of real knowledge gives us the insight we need to understand how Locke thinks we can have knowledge of the actual world

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