ABSTRACT
Any modern reader of Locke who feels the intuitive force of his claim that the senses deliver immediate, uninferred knowledge in their own right is faced with the task of finding a justification for it quite different from the one to be found in the Essay. Locke's neat causal theory of representation, his notion of sensory ideas as blank effects and his conception of them as the constituent terms of a natural language of thought are hardly available to us today as materials for a structured account of perceptual knowledge capable of explaining the 'assurance we have from our senses themselves'. It is clear that a part of the task is to peel off a notion of independent authority from the notion of infallibility. What follows is an attempt to show how such a thing is
possible, employing a number of conclusions which have been arrived at above. It is controversial at every point, and some rival approaches will be considered briefly at a later stage.
