Locke on language in (civil) society

History of Political Thought

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 397-425

  Dawson, Hannah ^a  

^a QUEENS COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 25844433874     PISSN: 0143781X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (193)

1. Some notable examples are: Norman Kretzmann, 'The Main Thesis of Locke's Semantic Theory', The Philosophical Review, 77 (1968), pp. 175-96;
2. Hans Aarsleff, 'Leibniz on Locke on Language', in From Locke to Saussure (Minneapolis, 1982), pp. 42-83;
3. E.J. Ashworth, 'Locke on Language', Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 14 (1984), pp. 45-73;
4. Charles Landesman, 'Locke's Theory of Meaning', in John Locke: Critical Assessments, ed. Richard Ashcraft (London and New York, 1991), Vol. IV, pp. 218-34;
5. Michael Losonsky, 'Locke on Meaning and Signification', in Locke's Philosophy: Content and Context, ed. G.A.J. Rogers (Oxford, 1994), pp. 123-41;
6. Walter Ott, Locke's Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, 2003).
7. This includes: James Tully, 'Governing Conduct', in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 12-71;
8. Ian Harris, The Mind of John Locke: A Study of Political Theory in its Intellectual Setting (Cambridge, 1994);
9. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge, 2002), especially pp. 44-82.
10. See John Dunn, 'Measuring Locke's Shadow', in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (Yale, 2003), pp. 257-85, for a critique of the quest for a unified Locke.
11. There has been some work done on the relationship between language and society in Locke, notably: Rosalie L. Colie, 'The Social Language of John Locke: A Study in the History of Ideas', in John Locke: Critical Assessments, ed. Richard Ashcraft (4 vols., London, 1991), Vol. IV, pp. 259-80;
12. Peter Walmsley, 'Prince Maurice's Rational Parrot: Civil Discourse in Locke's Essay', Eighteenth Century Studies, 28 (4) (1995), pp. 413-25.
13. While Locke has many interesting things to say about names of simple sensations and of natural substances, and some of them very much at odds with what he says about names of non-natural things, for the most part these lie outside the social scope of this paper - except in two regards: first, they can provide an illuminating contrast to the non-natural names; second, some substance terms, particularly 'man', are involved in social discourse (on this difficult issue see note 95 below).
14. He admits as much in John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), p. 437 (III.v.16); Cf. III.v which is entitled 'Of the Names of mixed Modes and Relations', but talks only about mixed modes, revealing Locke's inclusion of relations in this category.
15. Given that for Locke, as for his contemporaries, words signify thoughts or ideas, 'ideas' and 'meanings' come to the same thing. For example, Locke, Essay, p. 422 (III.iv.6): 'the meaning of words, being only the ideas they are made to stand for by him that uses them'.
16. Cf. John Kersey, A New English Dictionary, ed. R.C. Alston (Menston, 1969 [1702]), wherein 'to mean' is explicated as 'to purpose, to understand, or to signify';
17. John Sergeant, The Method to Science (London, 1696), p. 3: 'The words Notion, Simple Apprehension, Conception, and Meaning, are all synonymous terms'.
18. Locke, Essay, p. 405 (II.ii.2).
19. Ibid., p. 405 (III.ii.1).
20. Ibid., p. 403 (III.i.5).
21. Ibid., p. 408 (III.ii.7).
22. Ibid., pp. 407-8 (III.ii.7).
23. Ibid., p. 488 (III.ix.21).
24. For a fuller analysis of Locke's concerns about the dominance of language and the context to which they were a response see Dawson, Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy, Chs. 6 and 9.
25. Locke, Essay, pp. 541-2 (IV.iii.6).
26. Ibid., p. 502 (III.x.21).
27. Ibid., p. 497 (III.x.14).
28. Ibid., p. 407 (III.ii.5).
29. Locke, Draft A in Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Other Philosophical Writings, ed. Peter H. Nidditch and G.A.J. Rogers (3 vols., Oxford, 1991), Vol. I, pp. 1-83, p. 13.
30. Although Locke and his contemporaries may not have been clear on this terminological distinction (and while his contemporaries did describe language as a 'contract'), I use the term 'compact' to distinguish it from a 'contract'. Whereas a 'contract' is a technical legal term, enforceable by positive law, a 'compact' is just a synonym for an agreement. In the case of language, it signifies an informal, tacit agreement enforceable only by reciprocal expectation (and natural law) that entails reciprocal obligation and benefits. I am very grateful to James Murphy for helping me to clarify contemporary use of 'contract', 'compact' and 'trust'.
31. See John Dunn, 'Trust in the Politics of John Locke', in Rethinking Modern Political Theory: Essays 1979-1983 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 34-54.
32. Cf. Dunn, 'Trust and Political Agency', in Interpreting Political Responsibility: Essays 1981-1989 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 26-44, p. 34 on betrayal being ineluctably the other side of the coin.
33. In Les voix du signe: nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480-1580) (Paris and Geneva, 1992),
34. Marie-Luce Demonet establishes that there was a broad consensus in the sixteenth century that the relationship between language and meaning was arbitrary. A sweeping look at seventeenth-century texts indicates that the consensus held. By contrast, many commentators have emphasized beliefs in a natural link between sign and signified, in particular with reference to Adamicism, Plato's Cratylus, Hermeticism and the Cabbala. Notable among these commentators are: Allison Coudert, 'Some Theories of a Natural Language from the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century', in Magi Naturalis und die Entstehung der modernen Natur Wissenschaften (Wiesbaden, 1978), pp. 56-114;
35. Allison Coudert, 'Forgotten Ways of Knowing: The Kabbalah, Language and Science in the Seventeenth Century', in Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Donald R. Kelley and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht, 1991), pp. 83-99;
36. The Language of Adam, ed. Allison Coudert (Wiesbaden, 1999);
37. David S. Katz, 'The Language of Adam in Seventeenth-Century England', in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (London, 1981), pp. 132-45;
38. James T. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modem Science and Medicine (Wisconsin, 1995). The important piece that argues for the strength of Adamicism in the seventeenth century and for Locke's correlative rejection of it is Aarsleff, 'Leibniz on Locke on Language'.
39. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Francis Bacon: The Oxford Authors, ed. B. Vickers (Oxford, 1996), pp. 120-299, p. 231.
40. Locke, Essay, p. 405 (III.ii.1).
41. Ibid., pp. 470-1 (III.vii.51);
42. Essay, p. 408 (III.ii.8).
43. Ibid., p. 408 (III.ii.8). In Part IV we shall see that, while personal and public use ought to converge, Locke was concerned that in fact people still individually determine what ideas words stand for, with the effect that common use often turns out to be little more than a collection of disparate individual uses. The very existence of the semantic compact is therefore called into question. For the moment, however, I am dealing with the law of propriety in the existent way that Locke frequently presents it - as a fixed and accessible standard that arbitrarily links certain words to certain ideas (of any kind, sensible as well as insensible, simple as well as complex) to which people are bound to conform.
44. Ibid., p. 467 (III.vi.45);
45. Essay, p. 479 (III.ix.8).
46. E.g. Quintilian, Institutio, Vol. I, p. 113;
47. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, p. 231;
48. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 28-9.
49. Locke owned all three of these texts. (The Library of John Locke, ed. John Harrison and Peter Laslett (2nd edn., Oxford, 1965), pp. 78, 155.)
50. Locke, Essay, p. 514 (III.xi.11).
51. Ibid., p. 506(III.x.31).
52. I am grateful to Janet Coleman for pointing out the many continuities between Augustine and Locke. On Augustine's view that conventional language is grounded in trust and on his more general characterization of humans as 'creatures of trust' see Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought From Ancient Greece to Early Christianity (Oxford, 2000), pp. 317-18.
53. Cf. Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 86, 98.
54. Locke, Essay, p. 501 (III.x.19)
55. explains that 'the word Gold (which by standing for a more or less perfect collection of simple ideas, serves to design that sort of body well enough in civil discourse)'. On the distinction between the 'civil' and 'philosophical' uses of words see ibid., p. 476 (III.ix.3);
56. Essay, p. 484 (III.ix.15).
57. Classical Roman rhetoric had five parts: invention, disposition (following the Ramist reforms, both of these were appropriated by logic), elocution (the figures and the tropes), memory (this increasingly became an art of its own, as well as suffering a demise with the advent of printing), pronunciation (this too became less of a concern in the context of printing, although spoken oratory, for example in the pulpit, remained hugely important). On the specialization of rhetoric see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 55-65.
58. Locke, Essay, p. 508 (III.x.34). Strictly speaking, only tropes (e.g. metaphors) involve a change in word meaning. Figures are 'shapes' of speech (e.g. antithesis). However, 'figurative' increasingly became not only an umbrella term but also a term to denote the tropes, to the extent that 'tropical' has now fallen out of use almost completely and been replaced by 'figurative'.
59. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, ed. R.C. Alston (Menston, 1971), sig. Biv.
60. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), p. 128.
61. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 52.
62. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech (Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 341.
63. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (London, 1959), p. 112.
64. Locke, Essay, p. 508 (III.x.34).
65. Ibid., p. 508 (III.x.34).
66. Ibid., p. 492 (III.x.5).
67. Locke is specifically talking about the names of complex ideas, which, as we shall see in Part IV, are, being voluntarily composed, liable to inadvertent semantic alteration, so that the very idea of common use fades as a possibility. Here, however, Locke is making a different point. While the pliability of complex ideas doubtless plays its part, Locke is concerned about a situation where the speaker wilfully makes a word stand sometimes for the complex idea that common use dictates and sometimes for ideas that ought to be represented by different words. The abuse recalls the fallacies or sophisms of logic, whereby a false point is proved by putting an ambiguous word as the middle term, making it stand for one thing in the first proposition and another in the second, such as 'dog' which is both an animal and a star. That Locke has this kind of thing in mind is confirmed when he complains that 'in arguings, and learned contests, the same sort of proceeding passes commonly for wit and learning' (Locke, Essay, p. 493 (III.x.5)).
68. Ibid., pp. 492-3 (III.x.5).
69. Puttenham, Art of English Poesie, p. 163, calls the trope: 'plaine abuse'.
70. Ibid., p. 493 (III.x.5).
71. Art of English Poesie, p. 163, Ibid.
72. Ibid., p. 439 (III.x.6).
73. Ibid., p. 494 (III.x.7).
74. Ibid., p. 495 (III.x.10).
75. Ibid., p. 496 (III.x.12).
76. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1988), p. 412.
77. Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennett (Oxford, 1703), IV, p. 278.
78. See IV, pp. 280-1 on linguistic obligation.
79. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 348.
80. Locke, Essay, p. 389 (II.xxxii.15).
81. Ibid., p. 69 (I.iii.6).
82. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis, 1983), p. 25.
83. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1983), p. 25, Ibid.
84. Locke, Two Treatises, p. 281.
85. Locke, Essay, p. 292 (II.xxii.9).
86. Ibid., p. 552 (IV.iii.20).
87. Essay, 552, Ibid.
88. However, my interpretation of Locke's analysis of linguistic self-delusion that nevertheless does not exculpate the believer does not square easily with what Locke says about personal identity and responsibility: a person is only responsible on the day of judgment for that of which he is conscious (Essay, pp. 343-4 (II.xxvii.22)).
89. Locke, Two Treatises, p. 150.
90. Ibid., p. 142.
91. Ibid., pp. 325, 332, 337, 406, 350.
92. Ibid., p. 381.
93. Ibid., p. 367.
94. Two Treatises, 367, Ibid.
95. Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford, 1954), p. 212.
96. Locke, Two Treatises, p. 211.
97. Ibid., pp. 321, 322.
98. Ibid., p. 293.
99. Cf. Locke on Money, ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly (Oxford, 1991), p. 374.
100. Ibid., p. 301.
101. Plato, The Republic, ed. G.R.F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge, 2000), p. 32 (351c-d).
102. Locke could also have in mind Augustine's characterization of criminal gangs as 'bound by a compact' (Concerning The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson, intro. John O'Meara (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 139).
103. Locke, Essay, p. 66 (I.iii.2).
104. Locke, A Letter, p. 51.
105. Ibid., p. 49.
106. Locke, The Correspondence, ed. E.S. de Beer (8 vols., Oxford, 1976-1989), Vol. I, p. 123.
107. Locke on Money, p. 450.
108. Ibid., p. 451.
109. Ibid., p. 522.
110. Aristotle, On Interpretation, trans. Harold P. Cooke (Cambridge, MA, 1938), p. 115.
111. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, p. 230.
112. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 25.
113. John Stockwood, Certaine grammar questions for the exercise of young Schollers in the Learning of the Accidence (London, 1590), sig. B2r.
114. Locke, Essay, p. 405 (III.ii.1).
115. Ibid., p. 406 (III.ii.3).
116. Essay, 406, Ibid.
117. Essay, 406, Ibid.
118. See Coleman, A History of Political Thought, pp. 316-17 on Augustine's experiential and semantic individualism.
119. E.g. ibid., p. 429 (III.v.3);
120. A History of Political Thought, p. 479 (III.ix.7).
121. Ibid., p. 468 (III.vi.46).
122. Locke is, nonetheless, worried about the divergence of the meanings of substance terms in the context of 'philosophical enquiries and debates' (ibid., p. 484 (III.ix.15);
123. A History of Political Thought, p. 453 (III.vi.26)).
124. Ibid., p. 391 (II.xxxii.18).
125. Ibid., p. 165 (II.xii.5).
126. Ibid., p. 319(II.xxv.1).
127. Ibid., p. 429 (III.v.3).
128. It ought to be noted that mixed modes are not arbitrary in the sense that, in the interest of convenience, it is in the nature of man to make mixed modes (ibid., p. 290 (II.xxii.5)).
129. It is in what men decide they consist that is perfectly arbitrary. It should also be noted that mixed modes are, for the most part, species of 'abstract' or universal ideas, and that it is again in the God-given nature of man to make these kind of general ideas (for the purposes of expedience, knowledge and communication (ibid., pp. 409-10 (III.iii.2-4)).
130. However, when Locke deals with abstraction, he often implies that men abstract identically (which is precisely why abstract ideas, being universal, enable men to communicate). So, for example, he explains how a child notices a resemblance between his ideas of particular persons and abstracts from them a universal idea of 'man' (ibid., pp. 409-11 (III.iii.3-8)).
131. But when Locke deals with ideational complexity, he often insists that men make complex ideas differently from each other, and one of his favourite illustrations of this phenomena is the very same idea of 'man' (e.g. ibid., pp. 453-5 (III.vi.26-27)). While the relationship between complexity and abstraction is difficult to pin down, and is perhaps another permutation of the tension that this final part of the article is concerned to reveal, it does not detract from Locke's anti-scholastic, nominalist polemic about the voluntary nature of complex ideas, and his associated claims about their divergence. In this article I do not deal with the distinction between abstract and particular ideas because all the words I am concerned with are general. Particular names, such as Charles II, are unproblematic and not in danger of duplicity or proliferation.
132. While Locke struggles throughout his life with the demonstrability of natural law, he lays the groundwork. Briefly, we have intuitive knowledge of our own existence, from which we achieve demonstrative knowledge of God and his will - by which we are bound, according to the right a maker has in his work or labour. The fundamental dictate of the law of nature, that mankind is to be preserved, can be deduced from God's giving us life and the means to preserve it (Locke, Essay, p. 549 (IV.iii.18);
133. Locke, Two Treatises, p. 271).
134. Locke declares that morality can be a demonstrable science because the ideas involved are mixed modes and so 'not of nature's, but man's making'; being therefore 'perfectly known', they can be the objects of demonstration (Locke, Essay, p. 516 (III.xi.16)).
135. However, the ideas that begin moral ratiocination are precisely those of substances: me (man) and God. For an interesting exploration of this problem see Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 44-82.
136. Locke, Essay, p. 408 (III.ii.8).
137. Ibid., pp. 387-8 (II.xxxii.12).
138. For an investigation of Locke and his commentators on the subject of private language see Dawson, 'Locke on Private Language', British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 11 (4) (2003), pp. 609-38.
139. Locke, Essay, p. 477 (III.ix.5).
140. Ibid., p. 479 (III.ix.8).
141. Essay, 479, Ibid.
142. Ibid., p. 408 (III.ii.8).
143. Ibid., p. 479 (III.ix.8).
144. Ibid., p. 229 (II.xx.1);
145. Essay, p. 229 (II.xx.3).
146. Ibid., p. 229 (II.xx.2);
147. cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 110-11.
148. Locke, Essay, p. 698 (IV.xix.1);
149. cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 31.
150. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the 'Two Treatises of Government'(Cambridge, 1969), p. 191, argues powerfully that 'the intention of the entire epistemological venture' was to 'restrain the encroaching flood of partiality' by providing a 'morals of thinking'.
151. Locke, Two Treatises, p. 275.
152. Ibid., p. 276.
153. Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. John Yolton (Bristol, 1993), p. 13.
154. Ibid., p. 8.
155. Cf. The King James Bible, 1 Corinthians, ch. 13.
156. Locke, Essay, p. 340 (II.xxvii.16): 'whatever has the consciousness of present and past actions, is the same person to whom they belong'.
157. Ibid., p. 151 (II.x.4).
158. Ibid., pp. 151-2(II.x.5).
159. Ibid., p. 478 (III.ix.6).
160. Cf. Montaigne, Essays, p. 1210.
161. Locke owned both the 1669 French edition of the Essais and Florio's 1603 translation (Harrison and Laslett, Library, p. 191).
162. Locke, Essay, p. 480 (III.ix.9).
163. Ibid., p. 478 (III.ix.6).
164. Ibid., p. 402 (III.i.1).
165. Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 318-19.
166. Locke, Essay, p. 489 (III.ix.22).
167. Locke, Two Treatises, p. 331.
168. Ibid., p. 353.
169. Locke often elides the difference between the two compacts (e.g. ibid., pp. 347, 353). However, it is important for Locke that the generation of the government is a two-stage process, whereby there is one, powerful body of the people that is prior to the government and to which the government is answerable. Here Locke is implicitly attacking the Hobbesian one-stage compact whereby there is no body of the people independent of the sovereign.
170. Ibid., p. 309.
171. Ibid., p. 349.
172. Locke's stress on express consent, particularly at the original compact, has perplexed some commentators. However, as John Dunn has suggested, the proposal becomes more credible if one considers the 'occasions in any man's life in which he uses verbal formulae which imply a recognition of his membership in the national society to which he belongs' (Dunn, Political Thought, p. 141).
173. Even if one admits of the necessarily behavioural and hypothetical nature of much of the rights-transfer, the process remains reliant on linguistically constituted moral concepts and therefore dangerously threatened by semantic promiscuity. For further thoughts on this issue see Dunn, 'Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke', Historical Journal, X (2) (1967), pp. 153-82;
174. John A. Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society (Princeton, 1993);
175. Michael W. Brough, 'Lockean Express Consent: An Argument Against Irrevocability', Locke Studies, 3 (2003), pp. 113-31.
176. See John Dunn, 'Measuring Locke's Shadow', in Locke, Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Shapiro, pp. 257-85, pp. 277-8 on the centrality of judgment at the precarious and creative centre of Locke's vision of the human political predicament.
177. Locke, Essay, pp. 432-3 (III.v.8).
178. Essay, pp. 349-50 (II.xxviii.2).
179. Ibid., p. 349 (II.xxviii.2).
180. Ibid., p. 434 (III.v.10).
181. Essay, 434, Ibid.
182. Essay, 434, ibid.
183. Ibid., pp. 432-3 (III.v.8).
184. Locke contradicts himself on this point in the (1686-8?) manuscript entitled Of Ethick in General, in Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 297-304.
185. Locke, Essay, p. 357 (II.xxviii.12).
186. This is an important point to make against the various claims for Locke's individualism (notably C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962);
187. Laura Brace, The Idea of Property in Seventeenth-Century England: Tithes and the Individual (Manchester, 1998)).
188. Locke, Essay, p. 357 (II.xxviii.12).
189. Ibid., p. 497 (III.x.13).
190. Ibid., p. 480 (III.ix.9).
191. Ibid., p. 497 (III.x.13).
192. Tully, 'Governing Conduct' is the piece that illuminates Locke's 'mercantilist', reformist agenda.
193. Cf. E.J. Hundert, "The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke Between Ideology and History', Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXV (1) (1972), pp. 3-22.