An Essay Concerning Human Understanding¶
Locke, J. (1689). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Cited by¶
5 citations across 5 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Abstraction
- There is the underlying source — an entity, system, or situation richer in detail than the abstraction carries — and abstraction is meaningful only against this richer original.
This sourceTreats abstraction as the mental faculty by which the mind forms general ideas from particular sensations — grouping similar particulars and abstracting away their differences to retain the common residue.
SupportedVerified against the work's full text
Locke holds that only particulars exist and that general ideas are partial ideas made by leaving out detail of richer particulars, having no standing apart from them.
“GENERAL NATURES or NOTIONS are anything else but such abstract and partial ideas of more complex ones, taken at first from particular existences, will, I fear, be at a loss where to find them.”
- There is the underlying source — an entity, system, or situation richer in detail than the abstraction carries — and abstraction is meaningful only against this richer original.
- Essentialism
- Locke's Essay (1689) distinguishing real essence (underlying physical basis of the properties of a kind) from nominal essence (the abstract idea associated with the kind-term
This sourceThomas Basset, London. Book III draws the distinction between real essence (the unknown internal constitution on which a kind's discoverable qualities depend) and nominal essence (the abstract idea the sortal name stands for) — exactly the real/nominal-essence divide the marker cites. (NOTE: the existing annotation describing 'abstraction as a mental faculty' is from a different prime and does not match the real/nominal-essence claim here — annotation corrected.)
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Locke's Essay distinguishes essences "into nominal and real", the nominal being "the abstract idea to which the general name is annexed" and the real "that foundation from which all its properties flow". It adds that in substances the two are always quite different, so the two notions are separated rather than merely both named. That is the divide the sentence attributes to the work. The word physical is the article's gloss, and the worked example given is a mode, the triangle, where real and nominal essence coincide, rather than a substance's unknown internal constitution.
“I call it by a peculiar name, the NOMINAL ESSENCE, to distinguish it from the real constitution of substances, upon which depends this nominal essence, and all the properties of that sort”
- Locke's Essay (1689) distinguishing real essence (underlying physical basis of the properties of a kind) from nominal essence (the abstract idea associated with the kind-term
- Rights vs. Freedoms
This sourceFoundational philosophical treatment of abstraction as a mental faculty: the mind abstracts from particular sensations to form general ideas and concepts. Establishes abstraction as a fundamental cognitive operation, distinct from perception, and as the mechanism by which humans move from concrete experience to abstract knowledge.
- Separation of Powers
- Separation is structural (different institutions), procedural (different decision rules), and personnel-based (different people, different terms), an architecture whose conceptual roots Locke (1689) had earlier laid in the Second Treatise of Government by distinguishing legislative, executive, and federative powers and arguing that the legislative power could not safely be exercised by those who execute the laws.
This sourceFoundational philosophical treatment of abstraction as a mental faculty: the mind abstracts from particular sensations to form general ideas and concepts. Establishes abstraction as a fundamental cognitive operation, distinct from perception, and as the mechanism by which humans move from concrete experience to abstract knowledge.
- Separation is structural (different institutions), procedural (different decision rules), and personnel-based (different people, different terms), an architecture whose conceptual roots Locke (1689) had earlier laid in the Second Treatise of Government by distinguishing legislative, executive, and federative powers and arguing that the legislative power could not safely be exercised by those who execute the laws.
Mechanisms¶
- Burden Shift Detection
- Its strength is that it neutralizes the most common way ignorance is dressed as evidence: the argument from ignorance, in which "you can't prove it isn't so" is offered as if it were proof that it is.
This sourceRejects an attempt to make another person’s inability to disprove a proposition serve as affirmative proof of it.
- Its strength is that it neutralizes the most common way ignorance is dressed as evidence: the argument from ignorance, in which "you can't prove it isn't so" is offered as if it were proof that it is.
Verification¶
Does it exist? Not checked yet. This entry carries no identifier to resolve. It was extracted from the citation as written in the article, normalized, and deduplicated against the rest of the registry.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 2 of 5 citations: 1 supported, 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
See how references were verified.
Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.
- https://archive.org/details/anessayconcerni00lockgoog ×1
- https://archive.org/details/humanunderstandi00lockuoft ×1
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