Make Entry -- Become an Editor -- Most Popular: (10, 25, 50, 75, 100)

   Help

The Molyneux Problem

The Molyneux problem was first borne of a letter that in 1688 an Irish scientist and politician named William Molyneux sent to the philosopher John Locke. In the letter he posed the following problem for Locke to ponder: If a man is born blind and is taught to identify and name a cube and a sphere by using his sense of touch, would that man be able to identify and name the cube and the sphere by means of vision alone should he ever regain his sight? The problem is meant to raise questions about the nature of visual perception, how much is raw sensation versus learned conceptualization. It also raises questions about the relation between different sense modalities, especially those that share common properties (i.e. spatial extension).

Locke did not respond to the letter when he first received it. It was many years later, through the course of a correspondence that was struck between the two men, that Molyneux reminded Locke of the scenario and asked him to include it in one of his future publications. Locke found the problem to be worthwhile and reformatted it in a way he believed would prove thought provoking to the other thinkers of the day. The problem debuted in his work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and garnered the attention of such notable intellectuals as Gottfried Leibniz, George Berkeley, Denis Diderot and Voltaire.

Web Resources On The Molyneux Problem

SEP: Molyneux Problem
Molyneux's Letter

Book Resources On The Molyneux Problem

Molyneux's Problem: Three Centuries of Discussion on the Perception of Forms by M. Degenaar
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke

Site Maps: Most Recent | Clusters | Browse
New: Graduate Student Job Opportunity