John Locke's Philosophy of Natural Science

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show the consistency of Locke's philosophy of natural science. Most of Locke scholars have wrongly assumed that his way of ideas contains an intrinsic difficulty about the reality of the external world. This paper makes it clear, however, that Locke deals with epistemological problems in terms of the distinction between facts and theory, not between the internal and the external. Locke does not admit that human beings can obtain a justified universal theory about the physical constitution of the world. But he happily affirms that they can be justified, by means of “simple ideas of sensation”, in believing in particular facts about the external world. Locke's conception of science is essentially Baconian and his way of ideas, a Cartesian inheritance, is shaped up within his Baconian scheme.