Logic and Philosophy of Science Group Talk (Jacob Beck, York)

The Logic and Philosophy of Science Group is pleased to welcome as guest speaker Jacob Beck, a professor and the York Research Chair in the Philosophy of Visual Perception in the Department of Philosophy at York University. He is also a member of York’s Cognitive Science Program, which he directed from 2018 to 2022, the Centre for Vision Research, and the Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) Program. Beck’s research makes progress on longstanding philosophical puzzles about the mind by reconceptualizing them in light of contemporary cognitive science. He has a special interest in pre-linguistic forms of mental representation, such as perception and the number sense.

Talk Title

Resurrecting a Primary-Secondary Quality Distinction

Talk Abstract

John Locke famously distinguished primary qualities, such as size and number, from secondary qualities, such as colour and odour. But his view was soon mocked by Berkeley and has been recurrently critiqued in the intervening centuries. Where does that leave us today? Are there grounds to accept a primary–secondary quality distinction in anything like Locke’s sense? I’ll argue that there are. Although the distinction I’ll develop is anachronistic—it is grounded in contemporary perception science and is not intended as a serious interpretation of Locke’s texts—it is extensionally close to Locke’s own and respects several core features of his account. These include Locke’s claim that primary qualities are objective or mind-independent in a way that secondary qualities are not; Locke’s notorious thesis that ideas of primary qualities resemble primary qualities in a way that ideas of secondary qualities do not; and Locke’s indifference to metaphysical distinctions that are elevated in contemporary discussions of secondary qualities. The account I’ll offer also has a further virtue: it’s likely to be true.

About the Logic and Philosophy of Science Group

One of six departmental Research Interest Groups, the Logic and Philosophy of Science Group hosts talks on logic, general philosophy of science, and philosophy of the particular sciences, as well as talks in allied areas such as formal epistemology, decision theory, and the metaphysics of science.