“A little knowledge is still knowledge”: some remarks about Locke’s scepticism concerning scientific knowledge

The charge of scepticism was already brought against Locke by one of his contemporaries: Bishop Stillingfleet criticized the limited range and certainty guaranteed to knowledge by the “new way of ideas” formulated in Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. In his response to the bishop, Locke disclaimed scepticism as incompatible with a sincere love for truth and he denied validity to any inference of the non existence of substances from the uncertainty and obscurity of our knowledge of them. The same disclaimer can be extended to another kind of scepticism with which Locke has been charged more recently, relating to corpuscularianism: although it seemed inconceivable in many important aspects, corpuscularianism in Locke’s opinion was the theory which went closest to truth because its explanatory limits could not afford sufficient reasons to prefer alternative, more inconceivable hypotheses.