The empiricist philosopher John Locke worked out some of the details of an important distinction (originally formulated by Descartes) between primary and secondary qualities, and he was quite pleased with himself as this distinction allowed for the possibility of doing some serious science: you can't study secondary qualities objectively, since they are essentially subjective (and thus liable to change from person to person), but you can study primary qualities scientifically, since there is no difference in those cases between what you experience and what is.As you can learn in the following hilarious little presentation, little did Locke imagine that soon after, a) Bishop Berkeley would take this distinction to its logical conclusion and show that there is no real difference between primary and secondary qualities, and that b) the physical world would disappear as a result...
Esse est percipi... Dang!
Why are the primary qualities not all in the mind as well the secondary ones?
ReplyDeleteEverything is a concept. Size is comparative - something is bigger than something else. A measurement can only be done because we have the concept of "sameness", so we can compare one distance or weight with another.
And just because we can't prove that secondary qualities are objective (that I see the same "red" as you do) doesn't infer they are not. Our brains are all wired up roughly the same. Why would we have evolved so that one person's brain is stimulated differently, when it smells a scent or sees a colour, to another?