Experiential Objects and Things Themselves

In Locke’s Essay we find two different viewpoints being deployed: direct-realistic and representational-realistic. They are closely connected with each other and together form a holistic whole. Every meta-scientific view possesses one of its common, indispensable origins in our ordinary, direct-realistic (or in Edmund Husserl’s terminology, ‘natural’) attitude; and Locke’s meta-scientific view in the Essay is no exception. However, since he usually expresses his direct-realistic view in a language of ‘ideas’ that stems from the Cartesian representational-realistic viewpoint adopted in the Essay, his arguments there have often seemed confused to many readers. I have pointed out this problem on other occasions, but have not yet treated it thematically. In this paper I take up the problem once more and attempt a fuller clarification of Locke’s naturalistic, holistic logic.