The New Doctrine of Prejudice
The doctrine of prejudice has many variants since its default version is inconsistent: its application to itself refutes it. This is no serious impediment, since it is easy to eliminate inconsistency. It is also easy to reword it—as any theory—so as to do
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The New Doctrine of Prejudice
The doctrine of prejudice has many variants since its default version is inconsistent: its application to itself refutes it. This is no serious impediment, since it is easy to eliminate inconsistency. It is also easy to reword it—as any theory—so as to dodge its inconsistency and the counterexamples to it, and there are many ways to do so. Since the doctrine was—it still is—taken for granted by most of its adherents, they varied its wording casually. It is interesting to see how it altered through the ages and what its current popular variants are. And of course, the right place to start with is the philosophy of Locke, whose influence throughout the Age of Reason was tremendous. There is an immense scholarly literature on his work and its influence— most of it irrelevant to the present study. My discussion of his work is brief, as it concerns only the doctrine of prejudice. Locke’s epigone Dr. Isaac Watts takes a much larger share of this chapter since he expressed the spirit of the age better and since he was tremendously influential. This chapter ends with an attempt to assess the doctrine in its current variant: it is part-and-parcel of current inductivism, scarcely ever given explicit expression, much less public discussion, yet it provides inductivism its air of cogency.
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John Locke
Locke was the official epistemologist of the Fraternity. This makes him the most influential philosopher of modern times. He was chosen to this task as he was an admirer and a friend of Newton (and 10 years his senior). He served as the empiricist epistemologist. None of his statements is as famous as that nothing is in the intellect that has not previously been in the senses, although the statement is Aristotle’s. All this explains his fame without ascribing to him any specific contribution. Did he make any? This question was not raised. He did make one, and it is important and explains better his high status in the tradition of the Enlightenment movement. He solved a serious problem that troubled all the participants in the Royal Society 249 J. Agassi, The Very Idea of Modern Science: Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 298, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5351-8_16, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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The New Doctrine of Prejudice
and other participants in the scientific revolution. The fraternity had endorsed ideas of both Bacon and Copernicus. Bacon had disapproved of Copernicus as he had ignored the evidence of his senses. This disapproval had to be answered. Locke offered an answer, and it remained the default answer for centuries. It was his application of Bacon’s theory of the prejudices of the senses to the claim that we see the sun move: we see the sun in different angles in the sky and (wrongly) conclude that it moves. This was a tremendous tour de force. All discussion of observation prior to, say, 1600, rested on a theory known as naïve realism: what we see is (more-or-less) what is out there. This is scarcely cr
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