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Locke's account of personal identity has been highly influential because of its emphasis on a psychological criterion. The same consciousness is required for being the same person.

Given his representationalism how can Locke claim we have sensitive knowledge of the external world? We can see the skeptic as asking two different questions: how we can know the existence of external things, or more specifically how we can know inferentially of the existence of external things. Locke's account of sensitive knowledge, a form of non-inferential knowledge, answers the first question. All we can achieve by inference is highly probable judgment. Because Locke's theory of knowledge includes both first order psychological and second order normative conditions, sensitive knowledge can be non-inferential and less certain than intuitive and demonstrative knowledge.

In this paper, I am outlining a new, and perhaps controversial, account of Locke's epistemology. The common denominator in any act of assent in both the natural and religious epistemologies is the regulating role of reason. Key to the regulating role of reason is the requirement that any cognitive achievement, whether of knowledge, probability, or matter of faith, meets epistemic conditions at different stages or from different points of view. By employing the same justificatory structure throughout his epistemology, Locke offers a way in which reason can be seen to go as far as it can to justify itself (its reliability as well as its scope) from within its own natural limitations.