Locke on measurement

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2016.10.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Overview of Locke's treatment of some long-standing problems in metrology in both his Essay and other sources.

  • Explanation of broader context of experimental philosophy and natural history for Locke's discussion of problems of measurement.

  • Detailed analysis of manuscript materials relating Locke's interest in metrology to his famous Essay.

  • Careful reconstruction of the development of Locke's proposed universal standard of measure for length over two decades.

  • New light on the impact of Isaac Newton on Locke and his Essay.

Abstract

Like many virtuosi in his day, the English philosopher John Locke maintained an active interest in metrology. Yet for Locke, this was no mere hobby: questions concerning measurement were also implicated in his ongoing philosophical project to develop an account of human understanding. This paper follows Locke's treatment of four problems of measurement from the early Drafts A and B of the Essay concerning Human Understanding to the publication of this famous book and its aftermath. It traces Locke's attempt to develop a natural or universal standard for the measure of length, his attempts to grapple with the measurement of duration, as well as the problems of determining comparative measures for secondary qualities, and the problem of discriminating small differences in the conventional measures of his day. It is argued that the salient context for Locke's treatment of these problems is the new experimental philosophy and its method of experimental natural history.

Section snippets

Measurement, experimental philosophy and natural history

By the mid-seventeenth century experiment had come to play a central role in the practice of natural philosophy. So important was it that a new natural philosophical methodology emerged in England in the 1660s that came to be called experimental philosophy.8 It goes without saying that the primacy of observation and experiment in natural philosophy brought the problem of the standardization of measures to the fore. Quantities such as weight, length, time, and

Carolina and Drafts A and B of the Essay

Thus, by mid-1669 when Locke was appointed as secretary to the Lords Proprietors of the Carolina colonies, measurement was a familiar part of his day-to-day life. It is of singular interest, therefore, that in his capacity as secretary to the Lords Proprietors, Locke appears to have been involved in devising a set of weights, measures and a currency for Carolina. A manuscript draft endorsed ‘Carolina Measures and weights’ exists among the Shaftesbury Papers in the National Archives.18

Locke's travels in France

While Locke was brooding over the problems of measurement, Christiaan Huygens had set about sorting out the physics of pendulum motion and the design for the construction of a pendulum clock which, in turn, enabled greater accuracy in the determination of the length of a seconds pendulum.29 His results were published in his Horologium oscillatorium (Huygens, 1673). Here is how he puts it:

For the case in which each oscillation marks off one second, divide this

Locke and longitude

The variability of the seconds pendulum from one latitude to another was one thing, the utility of the pendulum as a timekeeper and, in particular of the pendulum clock, was quite another. One reason for a growing confidence in the pendulum as a measure of duration was the steady stream of important results issuing from the work of Picard. Picard had been set the task of revising the map of France and to do so he needed accurate measures of longitude. This was achieved using a method developed

Locke's Essay and the standard of length

It seems that it took at least another eight years before Locke again thought seriously about the gry. While he was in exile in the Netherlands in 1688 he reviewed a very technical work in natural philosophy in the Bibliothèque universelle et historique, perhaps at the behest of the editor of the journal, his friend Jean Le Clerc. The book was none other than Isaac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (hereafter Principia) which had been published in Latin in 1687. In his

After the first edition of the Essay

The Essay appeared in December 1689 and Locke met Newton very soon after the event: some time before mid-February 1690. They soon struck up a friendship and in 1691 Newton presented Locke with a corrected copy of his Principia. Ever on the lookout for constants and measures, Locke was struck by Newton's estimate of the speed of sound. In the first edition of the Principia Newton had set parameters for the speed of sound as somewhere between 920 and 1085 English feet per second. By 1689 he had

Conclusion

What are we to make of all of this? Locke knew personally many of the leading innovators in metrology of his day, Picard, Rømer, Huygens and even Cassini. He saw and responded to the problem of standardization of measures. He saw and reflected upon the problem of circularity of coordination. He even appears to have glimpsed the solution of epistemic iteration in his conception of the concurrence of probable reasons in relation to the accuracy of the seconds pendulum.

Yet Locke lived in a time of

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    An earlier version of this paper was given as a Rotman Lecture at the Rotman Institute for Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, Canada in May 2015. I should like to thank David Armitage, Jim Bennett, Patrick Connolly, Niccolò Guicciardini, William Harper, Benjamin Hill, Michael Hunter, Lindsay Judson, Anthony Turner and the two referees for the journal for comments and assistance. Research for this paper was supported by the Australian Research Council, grant number FT120100282 and IRH-ICUB, University of Bucharest.

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