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Valberg's Secondary Qualities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Roderick Millar
Roderick Millar
Affiliation:
Cults Academy, Aberdeen
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Abstract

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Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 58 , Issue 223 , January 1983 , pp. 107 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1983

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References

1 E. Valberg,‘A Theory of Secondary Qualities’, Philosophy 55, No. 214 (October 1980), 437

2 I presume here that by‘secondary qualities’Valberg means things like colours. But if we are going to follow Locke's letter strictly we should say that secondary qualities inhere in objects just as much as primary ones but that they, i.e. the secondary qualities, are the causes of the ideas of colour, etc., which do not inhere in objects. In his Essay, Book 2, Chapter XXIII, ‘Of Our Complex Ideas of Substance’, Locke writes as follows, ‘sensible secondary qualities …are nothing but the powers those substances have to produce several ideas in us by our senses;which ideas are nothing in the things themselves, otherwise than as anything is in its cause’. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, A. D.Woozley (ed.) (London: Fontana/Collins, 1964), 189.