Primary/secondary
quality distinction
The primary/secondary quality distinction is a conceptual distinction in epistemology and metaphysics, concerning the nature of reality.
It is most explicitly articulated by John
Locke in his Essay concerning Human Understanding,
but earlier thinkers such as Galileo and Descartes made similar distinctions.
Primary
qualities are
thought to be properties of objects that are independent of any observer, such
as solidity, extension, motion, number and figure. These characteristics convey facts. They exist in
the thing itself, can be determined with certainty, and do not rely on
subjective judgments. For example, if a ball is round, no one can reasonably
argue that it is a triangle.
Secondary
qualities are
thought to be properties that produce sensations in observers, such as color, taste, smell, and sound. They can be described as the effect things have on
certain people. Knowledge that comes from secondary qualities does not provide
objective facts about things.
Primary
qualities are measurable aspects of
physical reality. Secondary qualities are subjective.
George Berkeley was a famous critic of the
distinction. Berkeley maintained that the
ideas created by sensations are all that people can know for sure. As a
result, what is perceived as real
consists only of ideas in the mind. The crux of Berkeley's argument is
that once an object is stripped of all its secondary qualities, it becomes very
problematic to assign any acceptable meaning to the idea that there is some object. Not that one cannot
picture to themself (in their mind) that some object could exist apart from any
perceiver—One clearly can do this—but rather, that one cannot give any content to
this idea.
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Kant, in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself
as a Science, claimed that primary, as well as secondary,
qualities are subjective. They are both mere appearances that are located
in the brain of a knowing observer. In § 13, Remark II, he wrote: "Long
before Locke's time, but assuredly since him, it has been generally assumed and
granted without detriment to the actual existence of external things, that many
of their predicates may be said to belong not to the things in themselves, but
to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside our
representation. Heat, color, and taste, for instance, are of this kind. Now, if
I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining
qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place,
and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or
materiality, space, etc.)—no one in the least can adduce the reason of its
being inadmissible."
Kant argues that the understanding must provide the concepts, which are
rules for identifying what is common or universal in different
representations.(A 106) He says, “without sensibility no object would be given
to us; and without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts
without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.” (B 75) Locke’s mistake was believing that our
sensible apprehensions of objects are thinkable and reveal the properties of
the objects themselves. In the Analytic
of Concepts section
of the Critique, Kant argues that in
order to think about the input from sensibility, sensations must conform to the
conceptual structure that the mind has available to it. By applying concepts,
the understanding takes the particulars that are given in sensation and
identifies what is common and general about them. A concept of “shelter” for
instance, allows me to identify what is common in particular representations of
a house, a tent, and a cave.
The empiricist might object at this point by insisting that such
concepts do arise from experience, raising questions about Kant’s claim that
the mind brings an a priori conceptual structure to the world. Indeed, concepts
like “shelter” do arise partly from experience. But Kant raises a more
fundamental issue. An empirical derivation is not sufficient to explain all of
our concepts. As we have seen, Hume argued, and Kant accepts, that we cannot
empirically derive our concepts of causation, substance, self, identity, and so
forth. What Hume had failed to see, Kant argues, is that even the possibility
of making judgments about objects, to which Hume would assent, presupposes the
possession of these fundamental concepts. Hume had argued for a sort of
associationism to explain how we arrive at causal beliefs. My idea of a moving
cue ball, becomes associated with my idea of the eight ball that is struck and
falls into the pocket. Under the right circumstances, repeated impressions of
the second following the first produces a belief in me that the first causes the second.
The problem that Kant points out is that a Humean association of ideas
already presupposes that we can conceive of identical, persistent objects that
have regular, predictable, causal behavior. And being able to conceive of
objects in this rich sense presupposes that the mind makes several a priori
contributions. I must be able to separate the objects from each other in my
sensations, and from my sensations of myself. I must be able to attribute
properties to the objects. I must be able to conceive of an external world with
its own course of events that is separate from the stream of perceptions in my
consciousness. These components of experience cannot be found in experience
because they constitute it. The mind’s a priori conceptual contribution to
experience can be enumerated by a special set of concepts that make all other
empirical concepts and judgments possible. These concepts cannot be experienced
directly; they are only manifest as the form which particular judgments of
objects take. (http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantmeta/)