ABSTRACT
These and similar tensions reveal themselves in particular in Locke's account of error. A major problem for any approach like his is that it makes 'judgement' a cognitive faculty, a way of being informed about the world, and yet at the same time makes every belief, however wild and unreasonable, by its very nature as a belief an exercise of judgement. The problem lies partly in the close comparison with knowledge. Judgement is one of the 'understanding Faculties', which has been 'given to man to supply the want of clear and certain knowledge in Cases where that cannot be had'.89 As knowledge is correspondent to 'evidence', so belief is correspondent to probability. Belief, that is to say, is naturally (almost, it seems, by definition) founded on the sort of extrinsic 'arguments or proofs' which are the grounds of probability.90 As John Passmore says, in perhaps the only sustained discussion of Locke's theory in this respect, it seems that 'Locke defines belief . . . as a purely intellectual operation, in a way which emphasizes at once its likeness, and its inferiority to knowledge.'91 Yet it is the same faculty of judgement which is responsible for error and mistake. Its weakness does not lie simply in the weakness of probability as opposed to certainty, or in the fact that what is probable may be false. Unlike the knowledgedelivering faculties of intuition and sense, or the knowledge-preserving faculty of memory, judgement can be perverse, wrong-headed and irrational. If it is a cognitive faculty, then, as Locke had to recognize, it is one which can be abused, or at least can be misguided by nonrational influences. Passmore argues that there is a fundamental incoherence in Locke's thought about belief centred on his ambivalent attitude towards the question whether belief is voluntary and so in itself a proper object of praise or blame. Eventually, Passmore believes, Locke in effect abandoned his original 'intellectualist' conception of belief as the exercise of a cognitive faculty, swinging round to a view of it as, like action itself, always motivated by passions of one kind or another, whether disreputable or reputable.
