ABSTRACT
In John Locke’s magnum opus, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he formulates the most famous and influential version of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. An unrefined and misleading first pass at Locke’s metaphysical distinction might be this: primary qualities are really in bodies, and secondary qualities are not, being merely appearances in our minds. This chapter explores three different accounts of how the three distinctions namely, metaphysical distinction, epistemological distinction and scientific distinction are supposed to be related. The first interpretation is the naive interpretation. This interpretation asserts that Locke held that the epistemological distinction tells us that the scientific and metaphysical distinctions coincide. The second interpretation is the naturalist interpretation. This interpretation undeniably has its attractions. Since naturalism is attractive to many contemporary philosophers, this seems a charitable interpretation of Locke. The third interpretation – corpuscularianism as uniquely good exemplar of the metaphysical distinction.
