Overview

Book Three of Locke’s Famous Essay deals with Language. I’ll only outline much of this book very generally, because most of the book is about how words stand for ideas. This means that he goes through simple, complex, relational, etc. ideas again. To me, it just isn’t worth the effort to go through this all again point by point.

Nevertheless, since I didn’t outline every argument in detail, and because this is as far as I am going to take it with him, I’ve included a brief “overview” with a few key points from my notes on the secondary literature about his theory of ideas and his theory of language.

Outline

Chapter I: Words or Language in General

  1. God designed humans as sociable - needing other people, and equipped with language, which “was to be the great instrument and common tie of society.”
  2. Besides the ability to articulate sounds, humans needed to be able to use these sounds as signs of ideas in order to convey these ideas between minds.
  3. Since language would be cumbersome otherwise, it needs to include terms that are general - aka. apply to multiple particular things. Names (nouns) are general if they apply to general ideas, and particular when they stand for particulars.
  4. Additionally, we have privative words (nothing, ignorance, barrenness) that relate to positive ideas by signifying their absence.
  5. We also have words referring to items far removed from anything of which we have sense-experience. The meanings of many of these words (e.g. imagine, apprehend, adhere, conceive) are borrowed from ideas of sense-perception.
  6. Knowledge, which has to do with propositions, has a greater connection with words than perhaps is suspected. In order to investigate this, we have to determine what exactly names are applied to (exactly, what /kinds/ of things - since most nouns are general).

Chapter II: The Signification of Words

  1. Since we had to have a way to get ideas out of our heads, we arbitrarily (note: not random or unmotivated) picked sounds to mark the ideas.
  2. Words are used to signify ideas in the mind of the speaker (say, his or her representations of stuff in the world), as opposed to directly to stuff out in the world. He thinks our ideas are the medium of access to that worldly stuff and that since this is the case, words can only stand in for them (as opposed to the worldly stuff itself, to which they might still refer, but only indirectly).
  3. Each of us uses a word to express the idea that we have associated with it; but obviously we cannot use it to signify a complex idea that we don’t have.
  4. Despite the fact that words can only signify ideas in the mind of the speaker, “men in their thoughts” suppose that their words also mark two other things:
    1. Ideas in the mind of the hearer - that is, they presuppose that other literate speakers of the language in question use it in the same “ordinary meaning” way.
    2. Things as they really are - that is, they conflate their mindly ideas of worldly stuff with the worldly stuff itself.
  5. Because words because “immediately signify one’s own ideas” the sound of the signifying word can come to evoke the idea it signifies just as strongly as if the relevant kind of object were presented to the senses.
  6. Because we often learn words before we have a developed idea of the things they signify, it is easy to direct our thought to the words themselves, rather than the things. And so it happens, Locke cautions, that some people “utter various words just as parrots do.”
  7. Each word has its meaning by a purely “arbitrary imposition” - it is ultimately for each individual to decide what idea she will associate with a given word. There are of course good practical reasons for wanting one’s own word-idea pairings to be the same as those of others’ in one’s own society, but this practical concern leaves standing the fact of personal responsibility for the meanings of one’s speech.

Several Remaining Chapter Summaries

  1. Chapter iii: Most words are general for practical reasons. If we had names for each particular thing, communication and learning would be slow and difficult. So we generate words for abstract ideas to talk about things in “bundles.”
  2. Chapter iv: Names of simple ideas refer (to the ideas). Names of substances refer (to complexes of simple ideas, not to things), but names of mixed modes need not refer (see below). Names of simple ideas are “undefinable,” where names of complex ideas are “definable.”
    1. Note on modes: By contrast with substances, modes are dependent existences - they can be thought of as the ordering of substances. Since these modal ideas are not only made by us but serve as standards that things in the world either fit or do not fit and thus belong or do not belong to that sort, ideas of modes are clear and distinct, adequate and complete. Thus in modes, we get the real and nominal essences combined. (Cf. Uzgalis, John Locke in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  3. Chapter v: Names for abstract ideas (mixed modes) and for relations (those ideas generated without direct reference to the outer world) and are answerable only to internal human interests and needs (which are often normative, evidence for why some words cannot be directly translated from language to language).
  4. Chapter vi: Common names for substances stand for “sorts of things” - they are names for complex ideas, and the different common substances are marked out by nominal essences (since we cannot know the real essences of worldly stuff).
    1. Even though the “essences” which we talk about are “made by the mind” and not “by nature”, we are somewhat bound by nature in the case of substances more than in the case of mixed modes. If people fail to conform their ideas to the things they speak of, we’re back at Babel.
  5. Chapter vii: In addition to words that signify simple and complex ideas, which function as general or particular terms, Locke knows he needs to account for what he calls “particles,” which are words that signify the logical operations of the mind (syncategorematic terms: the copula, conjunctions, etc.).
  6. The remaining chapters discuss the distinction between abstract and concrete terms [viii]; how words may be misused, and how individuals may misuse words [ix and x]; and how such misuse may be overcome [xi].

Overview of Locke

  1. Viz. Locke’s empiricism: “There is a big difference between maintaining that sense experience is the source of all our knowledge and maintaining that sense experience is the ultimate basis for the justification of our knowledge: Locke is not an empiricist in the latter sense.” (Hauptli, here)
  2. Locke is a pretty serious representationalist, to the point where he thinks that the object of all cognitive activity of the understanding (thinking, perceiving, but not willing, etc.) has as its object an idea/representation.
    1. This has been roundly criticized for both being pointlessly inelegant and for introducing an apparent “veil” whereby it becomes unclear that we can have accurate knowledge of worldly things. Even many Locke apologists tend to grant this charge, and spend time arguing that Locke didn’t actually believe this.
    2. The validity of this criticism relies on the tacit ontological status of Lockean ideas, which seem to cash out to something intentional objects (or cognitive contents). The contrast between an intentional (say) apple, and some real apple is that “an intentional apple need not have any intentional [e.g.] shape whatsoever, even though its associated material apple - its material counterpart, as we might call it - must have some shape or other.” (Chappell, Vere; Locke’s theory of ideas in the Cambridge Companion to Locke)
  3. There are two kinds of general ideas in Locke’s theory of ideas - determinate quality-ideas shared between particulars (whiteness) and indeterminate species-ideas that particulars instantiate (women).
    1. Contrast this to the fact that particular ideas are tokens and abstract ideas are types. This means the former cannot be shared, where the latter can.
    2. This addresses some confusion with regard to the fact that you can have particular general ideas. (Aka. you can have a particular “whiteness” idea token of the general “whiteness” type.)
  4. This dovetails with Locke’s first controversial claim about language: that the immediate signification of a speaker’s words is always only his own ideas. This claim is basically that when I say “apple,” that stands in for an intentional apple, regardless of whether that intentional apple represents a real apple or not.
    1. To review, Locke’s strategy about language is in the first place to undercut confusion arising from a falsely essentialist view of language, especially classificatory language (see below). Where it gets complex is that he also believes that a true view reveals inherent liabilities in the ideal of perfect communication through language. Although, of course, he is pragmatic enough to know that we have no other medium for communication.
  5. In his second (but related) controversial claim about language, Locke attacks the Aristotelian assumption that the classification of natural objects into kinds or species reflects the natural or objective existence of a determinate number of fixed or unchanging “substantial Forms.”
    1. Locke’s doctrine is thus that while our systems of classification must always be based on what we actually know about objects, no matter how much we know we will never find anything that removes the burden of choice from us in constituting these classifications. (Paul Guyer, Locke’s philosophy of language, in the Cambridge Companion to Locke)
  6. These two claims clearly suggest a cautionary view of language.