In book four Locke outlines three plans for treating the problem of skepticism, about whether or not the world really exists outside of our mind. This idea comes from Locke's theory of knowledge. In other words if we only have the access to the ideas in our minds and which come from our minds, how do we know know thier is actually a real world outside of our minds. He uses three strategies to over come the skeptic viewpoint.
The first strategy he uses is a weak stategy to simply say can you really doubt that thier is an actual world out there. The second strategy is to simply put it, who really cares if thier is an actual world out there as long as we understand enough to get around in the world we are in. The third strategy he uses seven experiences to explain that thier is an actual world. 1. There is a realness to percieveing objects that we don't get from memories or imagination. 2. We cannot get ideas without using the sense organs. 3. We are able to only recieve ideas in certain situations so it cannot be the organs working by themselves. 4. We gain ideas passively. 5. Ideas are sometimes accompanied with pleasure and pain, though our dreams do not. 6. Senses ofter bear witness to other peoples reports. 7. Two people can share the same experience.
I agree with his third strategy againt skepticism, i think he does a good job using the senses to describe why thier has to be a real world beyond our mind. Though i think he does a very poor job with the first two strategies. In the first one it is basically a childish argument, thats just stupid so why believe it. The second one is more uplifting but does not really do anything against the skeptic viewpoint. Its just saying who cares if thier is no real world just know this world enough to get by.
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I think that the sixth and seventh reasons for the third strategy might not be as true as it would seem. Because each person is only privy to their own mind and conscious experience, it is quite difficult to say that there is such a thing as having common experiences. Such a claim is not open to verification, that is, it cannot be proven. In order to be proven we would have to use words to describe our experiences, but although our words may seem to be the same, we cannot say with certainty that we mean the same things by them. I could point at an object and say "that is red" while another person points at the same object and says "that is red". We may be having two different experiences of the color, though. What I call "red" might be what he experiences as what I would call "green" and vis versa. Of course we would still use the same words to describe our experiences, but they would actually refer to two different experiences. This could be said of other experiences as well. When we learn to speak and use language, we learn by repetition and ostension (pointing), but we may, the whole time, be experiencing something very different than what is experienced by other people who also learn to use the same words when referring to objects.
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