The fundamental question of Molyneux’s design of whether a new sense elicits a new idea or an idea from existing sense is global and ahistorical: transcending cultures and times. Yet, the changes from Mozi to Ibn Ṭufayl to Molyneux are historical—they demonstrate an evolution in methodology and intuition. This methodology begins with inquiries into the limits of knowledge—Mozi’s person born blind cannot identify colors—and evolves to knowledge kinds—Ibn Ṭufayl’s person newly sighted possesses a kind of knowledge of color. Finally, we see the issue of knowledge acquisition by distinct senses addressed in Molyneux’s person newly sighted who cannot know tactually familiar shapes by sight alone. Each inquiry provides a distinctive yet related approach to understanding what it means to be in possession of knowledge and how one came into its possession.
Considering Molyneux’s question in this broadened historical context should suggest to the reader an inclusive appreciation of the diverse means by which scholars have approached Molyneux’s own query, a diversity beyond what many contemporary discussions allow—discussions that attempt to find a “true” or “original” intent behind a query too general to answer in specificity, and too specific to be empirically tested (Degenaar 1996).
To make demands that narrow the creativity of experimental design undermines the intent of understanding the nature of knowledge acquisition by different senses. Just as Molyneux’s question may be viewed as an evolution of Mozi’s, so too might contemporary design informed by our current understanding of the processes involved in sight and touch, like the activity in the body (Ghazanfar et al. 2008) or movement around or in the shapes themselves (Schwenkler 2013), or the different kinds of blindness and subject-specific recoveries from sight (Glenney 2012, Ferretti 2017), put further demands on creative diversity. In sum, the fundamental inquiry of Molyneux’s question concerned something that we now know is not achievable using Molyneux’s original experimental paradigm. This invites us to foreground the variegated historical background of Molyneux’s question, and to raise the question as to what better anticipations, approaches, and answers have been considered. Knowing the history of Molyneux’s question is crucial to its future understanding.
Conjectures at new answers
The secondary literature on Molyneux’s question includes essays on answers from philosophers that never posed a direct answer, including Hume (Allison 2016) and Kant (Sassen 2004). Our first section continues this trend, but with an emphasis on marginalized voices in the history of early modern philosophy. This discussion from diverse philosophers adds to previous emphasis on inclusivity of answers to Molyneux’s question in other publications from people with blindness by Pierre Villey (1930) and Thérèse-Adèle Husson (1825) (see Glenney 2019 and Part II).
In Chapter 4, Chris Meyns discusses Anton Amo’s answer to Molyneux’s question. Amo’s conjectured answer emerges from two unique claims. The first is impassivity of the mind: “Amo thinks that the human mind cannot sense. It can only think” (Chapter 4); and, second, is a claim that the senses exist on a spectrum from clarity to obscurity: “one can give an ordinal ranking in terms of this relative clarity: vision ranking as clearest, followed by audition, olfaction, taste and lastly touch (Chapter 4).” Meyns adeptly weighs three different “yes” and “no” options, finally speculating that Amo would answer Molyneux’s question “no.” This provides a clarifying lens to Amo’s insights into the nature of mind and sensation, his views dancing between rationalist and empiricist epistemologies, as Meyns states:
The contribution of Amo’s answer to Molyneux’s question is all the more crucial as it helps unravel a historical oversimplification of dividing early modern thinkers neatly into empiricists and rationalists, a divide that can be thought to mirror answers to Molyneux’s question: “no” answers are empiricist, “yes” are rationalist. As we abandon these binary interpretive lenses, we open scholarship up to more diverse, and frankly, deeper and more enriching thinkers like Anton Amo.
Like Amo, Damaris Masham never mentions Molyneux’s question, though Locke took her into his confidence, living with her family for years after his return to England in 1691. Amo and Masham, both philosophers in their own right, are often overlooked, perhaps because of their disenfranchised status (non-white, non-male, non-able-bodied), and their consideration here provides a beginning of rectification at this loss. What’s more, Masham worked out her own unique philosophical view—a kind of Lockean Platonism—adopting a complex epistemology that combined elements of both empiricism and nativism, anticipating our current “mixed” understanding of idea acquisition today. How to intermix these contrasting theories of acquisition? Vaughn, in Chapter 6, provides an example from our acquisition of the idea of God. Quoting Masham, who writes, “Men must be consider’d purely as in the state of Nature, viz. as having no extrinsick Law to direct them (1705),” it appears that for Masham our minds are a kind of blank slate, but with inborn abilities to reason about the ideas that our senses fill our mind with. “With just our immediate knowledge of the senses and reflection coupled with our ability to reason, we can come to have a knowledge of God.” (Chapter 6) How so? The love of God requires that we first experience the pleasure of loving others around us. “[I]f we lov’d not the Creatures, it is not conceivable how we should love God (Masham 1696, 62).” So, might our knowledge of shapes be similar? Perhaps! Like Leibniz’s own answer, it appears that for Masham any answer to Molyneux’s question will require that the newly sighted reason out which shape is which from their experience-based ideas of shape—ideas that likely are common across the senses in the way that our ideas of God and man are common across these diverse identities.
To the contributions from those that did not give a direct answer to Molyneux’s question but could have, our volume adds discussions of answers that pre-date the publication of Molyneux’s question. We begin by discussing the answer by Epicurus and his follower Lucretius (Chapter 1), turning to Spinoza (Chapter 3), and finally Cavendish (Chapter 5).
What if Molyneux’s question did not ask about the blind? For instance, could not the same set of considerations be made if we asked the question of a person reared in darkness? Perhaps so, with even better experimental and even ethical outcomes (see Part II). Hence, Epicurus’s own version of tactile vs. visual experience while in darkness, which predated Molyneux’s by two millennia, may offer clearer considerations:
As the author of Chapter 1, Giulia Scalas, speculates, Epicurus’ “no” answer mirrors that of Locke, based on the claim that while touch and sight must share the same object, each sense requires perceptual learning to acquire the kind of memories that enable recognition of objects.
A “no” answer is also conjectured for Spinoza’s response to Molyneux’s question, by Daniel Schneider in Chapter 3. As Schneider writes:
Why? Even though each shape elicits the same idea of extension, different senses produce different ways of representing the same object. As Spinoza writes:
Spinoza’s answer provides an optimistic insight into “no” answers that are skeptical of the ability of the newly sighted to identify shapes by noting that something new and different is granted by distinct senses. In other words, each sense provides a new way the “body can be disposed” to understand the world. If so, then each sense provides a new way to understand the world around us, opening new doors of understanding, a hopeful narrative once used by Plato in his story of the slave boy whom Socrates led to see shape in the light of geometrical reasoning, an analogy that Schneider puts to good use throughout his chapter.
Marcus Adams’ discussion of Margaret Cavendish’s answer in Chapter 5 is similarly revealing. For, as Adams writes, “Like many philosophers in the Early Modern period, Cavendish is interested in the experiences and reports of blind perceivers, and she treats them as a test case for her own philosophy” (Chapter 5). In particular, Cavendish considers whether “an animal can have an insight, if it were born blinde” (1655, 118).” This is an anticipation of recent experiments on newborn chicks (Versace et al. 2019) and bees (Solvi et al. 2020). For anyone familiar with Cavendish’s complex theory of perception and cognition, you will not be surprised to find a rather complex account in answer, conjectured about humans. Adams suggests that for Cavendish, a subject would scaffold from 2D representations to “sculpt” 3D figures, a kind of mind-based Photoshop application. The result is a “yes” answer: “The rational matter would immediately discover the match between the representations from the two senses by using what Cavendish calls “remembrance,” which is human perceivers’ ability to work with a “copy of a copy, from the original print” (Chapter 5).
Aside from these new answers to Molyneux’s question from the history of philosophy, several papers are dedicated to the historical milieu that informed the design and publication of Molyneux’s question. In Chapter 2, Lenn Goodman considers the indirect influence of Ibn Ṭufayl on the design of Molyneux’s question, as discussed in the General introduction, and also speculates on Ibn Ṭufayl’s influence on Locke’s writing of his Essay. Goodman traces the empiricist influence on reli...
