Abstract

It’s been more than three hundred years since William Molyneux posed his now-famous question to John Locke. While it’s clear Locke agrees with Molyneux that someone born blind and made to see would be unable to recognize at first sight the objects he knew previously only by touch (cross-modal recognition), why Locke thinks this is never made explicit in his Essay or elsewhere. I argue here that this lack of clear textual support motivates the need for a new approach to explaining Locke’s answer to Molyneux’s question. The new approach I offer here is to consider what successful Lockean cross-modal recognition might look like given his “Architecture of Ideas,” the work of his Essay to account for mental content, from simple sensory ideas to knowledge. This allows us to identify which ideas and mental faculties he would likely consider essential for success at Molyneux’s task, and which, if lacking, explain the newly sighted man’s failure. Furthermore, this approach yields some surprising results: there is more than one reason the newly sighted person would fail. And adjusting the question to involve a cross-modal comparison of two-dimensional shapes does not require Locke to change his answer to ‘yes’.