ABSTRACT
Our world is populated by many different kinds of things, such as water, gold, diamond, oaks, swans, horses, elephants, and men. Locke refers to such things as ‘particular sorts of Substances’. In his view, such individual things depend on the atoms that compose them for their existence, where these atoms are individual things in their own right. Although substrata are abstract in this more modern, functionalist sense, each substratum is nevertheless to be regarded as a particular. An individual substance has its own substratum as the support for the particular set of qualities it displays. There is no ‘common substratum’ shared by all the members of a given kind. Locke’s epistemic humility about substrata thus has a different basis than his epistemic humility with respect to real essences. While the latter is mainly due to our epistemic limitations concerning the intrinsic properties of real things, the former is due to the discrepancy between notional and actual entities.
