John Locke
Experience · Knowledge · Mind
John Locke was born in Somerset in 1632 and studied at Christ Church, Oxford. Philosopher, physician and political thinker, he became one of the foundational figures of British empiricism and one of the most influential thinkers of the Enlightenment.
His work challenged the idea that knowledge was simply inherited or innate. Instead, Locke placed experience at the beginning of human understanding.
The Idea
We are not born knowing. We learn through experience.
Locke rejected the existence of innate ideas, arguing that the mind acquires the materials of knowledge through sensation and reflection.
Experience provides what the mind has to work upon.
Understanding develops as those experiences are remembered, compared, combined and examined.
What we know, therefore, has a history.
Locke and Owain Morgan
Locke gives Owain an important way of thinking about character:
To understand what a person believes now, ask how he came to believe it.
Owain is interested not only in immediate motive but in formation.
Education matters. Childhood matters. Family matters. So do occupation, social position, success, failure and the countless experiences through which assumptions about the world gradually become established.
A man may describe something as obvious or natural without ever having considered why it appears so to him.
Owain wants to know where that certainty came from.
Perhaps it was taught explicitly. Perhaps it was learned through imitation. Perhaps repeated experience made one conclusion seem inevitable. Perhaps an isolated event left an impression powerful enough to influence everything that followed.
Locke therefore encourages Owain to think historically about the individual.
Character does not simply appear.
Neither do prejudice, loyalty, fear or expectation. They develop through encounters with the world and through the meanings subsequently attached to those encounters.
This is particularly important when Owain encounters behaviour that seems incomprehensible from the outside. Before judging the belief behind it, he tries to reconstruct the experience that made the belief plausible to the person holding it.
That does not mean every belief is equally reasonable.
It means beliefs have origins.
Locke therefore leaves Owain with a question that reaches beyond the immediate action:
What happened in this person’s life that made this way of seeing the world seem natural?
The Unresolved Question
Experience may shape understanding, but experience does not guarantee truth.
Two people can encounter similar circumstances and learn entirely different lessons from them. A mistaken belief may be reinforced by experience just as readily as an accurate one.
Nor does explaining how a belief was acquired establish whether it is justified.
The origin of a belief and the truth of a belief are different questions.
Owain must therefore reconstruct the experiences that formed a person’s understanding without assuming that those experiences made the resulting understanding correct.
Further Reading
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) — Locke’s major examination of the origins, development and limits of human knowledge.
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) — particularly relevant to the formation of character through education, habit and experience.
Two Treatises of Government (1689) — Locke’s influential account of political authority, natural rights and government by consent.
The Essence
Locke gives Owain a deceptively simple principle: belief has a biography.
What a person thinks, fears, expects and regards as self-evident has been formed through a lifetime of experience.
To understand conduct, Owain therefore looks not only at the person standing before him, but at the experiences that helped make that person possible.