Molyneux's Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception

by M.J. Morgan

If a man born blind were to gain his sight in later life would he be able to identify the objects he saw around him? Would he recognise a cube and a globe on the basis of his earlier tactile experiences alone? This was William Molyneux's famous question to John Locke and it was much discussed by English and French empiricists in the eighteenth century as part of the controversy over innatism and abstract ideas. Dr Morgan examines the whole history of this Locke's own (negative) answer to the question, the contributions of Berkeley, Condillac, Diderot and Voltaire and the factual accounts of early cataract operations and modern laboratory studies. He shows how this debate is involved in the development and eventual separation of philosophy and experimental psychology after the eighteenth century and considers why the original question is effectively still unanswered. This is one problem-area with its intricate cluster of connected conceptual and technical difficulties which suggests the need for some reunion or at least collaboration between the two subjects.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Michael J. Moore, Department of Experimental Psychology University of Cambridge

Reviews

[Campbell Rider]

Molyneux's question asks whether a person born blind, whose vision was restored, would recognise by sight objects they had only ever touched. This book gives a clear and succinct summary of responses to this problem in Locke, Berkeley, Condillac, Voltaire and Diderot. The book serves to highlight the centrality of concerns about the relationship between the senses and the innateness of cognitive faculties in the development of modern psychology. Morgan has offered generous extracts from primary texts that are often hard to source, including an almost complete translation of Diderot's Letter on the Blind.