ABSTRACT
Locke's approach to knowledge and belief might appear to differ from present-day approaches in such fundamental respects that it might seem lost labour to engage in any detailed comparisons. One might suppose that the task of the philosophical critic is to denounce Locke's intuitionist, infallibilist and foundationist blunders, praise him a little, perhaps, for his recognition of the importance of probability and his general opposition to dogmatism, and pass on. Yet it could be that we have most to gain precisely from the effort to do justice to what at first appear his least tenable principles. Philosophical error is often implicated with insight, and overreaction to error can hide important truths from us, sometimes for generations. Typically, our reading of past theory becomes mere parody. The present section will comprise a general explanation of how such a thing might have happened in the theory of knowledge, and the argument will be developed in the succeeding sections on perceptual and universal knowledge.
