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Locke as a Fallibilist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Douglas Odegard
Douglas Odegard
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Extract

Could John Locke defend his view that the knowledge we acquire in intuition and demonstration is infallible, and should he try to defend it? Peter Schouls thinks the project is unviable, and I think Schouls is right. But I also think Locke should not even bother trying. I shall elaborate on the argument that he could not defend the view, indicate why I think he should abandon infallibility, given his other views, and then investigate what he might usefully say about knowledge and certainty if he were persuaded to abandon it.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , Summer 1996 , pp. 473 - 484
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1996

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References

Notes

1 Schouls, Peter A., Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

2 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Nidditch, Peter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975), Book 4, Chapter 16, Section 3. References in parentheses are to this essay of Locke's.Google Scholar

3 Lakatos, Imre, Proofs and Refutations, edited by Worrall, John and Zahar, Elie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Popper, Karl, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 80.Google Scholar

5 Quine, W. V. O., “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in his From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953).Google Scholar

6 Lehrer, Keith, Theory of Knowledge (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), p. 177.Google Scholar

7 Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 135.Google Scholar

8 Schouls raised this question in a symposium on his Reasoned Freedom, held at the Canadian Philosophical Association annual meeting, Calgary, Alberta, 1994.Google Scholar