ABSTRACT
Locke employed the word 'knowledge', like the expression 'to have an idea', with linked occurrent and dispositional senses. It is in the occurrent sense that knowledge is defined as the perception of a relation between ideas: 'actual Knowledge . . . is the present view the Mind has' of such a relation.57 An objection that the ordinary English word 'knowledge' and its synonyms in other languages have only a dispositional sense is itself without much force. 'Perceive' and 'see' (as in 'I saw that q followed from p?') are primarily occurrent verbs, and 'understand' can either be occurrent or dispositional. To deny that 'know' can intelligibly be given an occurrent sense like that of 'understand' which is appropriately linked to its normal dispositional sense is in effect to do no more than register disapproval of anything that smacks of intuitionism. It is, indeed, significant that disapproval of intuitionism has often found expression, in recent discussions, in the paradoxical claim that even in such a sentence as 'I understood the proof when I read it' the verb 'understand' is really dispositional, attributing a capacity.58 But just because that claim is paradoxical, it supplies little reason to reject Locke's conception of 'actual knowledge' out of hand.
