A bare beginning -- on Locke

Human Understanding. Book III, Chapter ii. "Of the Signification of Words." Section 1. Page Numbers below are from Adams, Hazard. Ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. Revised. NYC: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

Locke underlies much if not most later thought in English, including the basis of the systemic assumptions of a mutually sensible reality, common sense and so forth that give us William James, Richard Rorty, truths that we hold to be self-evident, and an emphasis on so-called constative value in speech. But Locke recognizes the nuance and limits of his ideas better than many of his followers. Specifically, while he decides that people share some commonality of thought by having similar sensing equipment, and he casts his doubts of universality more on words than on thoughts themselves, he does not assume that matters of language can or should or had might as well be dispensed with while examining thought.

He does get into some pretty messes, like anyone, I suppose, who attempts to describe human understanding. The above dichotomy between words and ideas creates a hierarchy in which words describe thoughts, but thoughts do not (always) describe words. The thoughts and words, by virtue of being non-identical, are also discrete. Also, he ignores the shifts in the meaning of words based on syntax and system, so he can assume that people thinking to themselves can have perfect understanding of the words they use.

[A logical progression here would be to check in with Paul de Man's response to Locke in one of the essay collections]


"Words are sensible signs necessary for communication" (254).
Sect 2 "Words are the sensible signs of his ideas who uses them"

". . . when [man] represents to himself other men's ideas by some of his own, if he consent to give them the same names that other men do, it is stilll to his own ideas; to ideas that he has, and not to ideas that he has not.
Sect. 3. This is so nessarry in the use of language, that in this respect the knowling thd the ignorant, the leaned and the unlearned, use the words they speak (with an y meaning) all alike. They, in every man's mouth, stand for the ideas he has, and whic hhe would express by them. A child having taken notice of nothing in themetal he hears called gold, but the bright shining hellow color, he applies the word gold only to khis known idea of that colous, and nothing else; and therfore calls the same colour in a peackck's tail, gold. Another, that hath better observed, adds to shining yellow great weight; and hten the sound gold, when he uses it, stands for a complex idea of a shinging yellow, and a very weighty substance" (255).

He goes on at some length, reporting that men unreasonably take words to refer to other men's ideas and to referents.

There's more here.