·

·

A Voluntary Imposition

de Man, Paul 1978. The Epistemology of Metaphor. Critical Inquiry 5(1): 13-30. [JSTOR]

Metaphors, tropes, and figural language in general have been a perennial problem and, at times, a recognized source of embarrassment for philosophical discourse and, by extension, for all discursive uses of language including historiography and literary analysis. It appears that philosophy either has to give up its own constitutive claim to rigor in order to come to terms with the figurality of its language or that it has to free itself from figuration altogether. (de Man 1978: 13)

Does philosophical discourse need figurality?

The mention of Locke in this context certainly does not come unexpected since Locke's attitude toward language, and especially toward the rhetorical dimensions of language, can be considered as exemplary or, at any rate, typical of an enlightened rhetorical self-discipline. At times it seems as if Locke would have liked nothing better than to be allowed to forget about language altogether, difficult as this may be in an essay having to do with understanding. Why would one have to concern oneself with language since the priority of experience over language is so obvious? (de Man 1978: 14)

I cannot agree. My reading shows that he dealt intermittently with the questions of language from the first chapter on: "We by degrees get Ideas and Names, and learn their appropriated Connexion one with another" (Locke 1741a: 25). This may seem veiled because he begins with "Names" instead of "Words".

Neither is there any question about what it is in language that thus renders it nebulous and obfuscating: it is, in a very general sense, the figurative power of language. This power includes the possibility of using language seductively and misleadingly in discourses of persuasion as well as in such intertextual tropes as allusion, in which a complex play of substitutions and repetitions takes place between texts. (de Man 1978: 15)

He is reading waay too much into the mist language casts "before our eyes". Locke mentioned rhetoric but in a negative sense. "Misleading" use of language is not good.

It is clear that rhetoric is something one can decorously indulge in as long as one knows where it belongs. Like a woman, which it resembles ("like the fair sex"), it is a fine thing as long as it is kept in its proper place. Out of place, among the serious affairs of men ("if we would speak of things as they are"), it is a disruptive scandal - like the appearance of a real woman in a gentlemen's club where it would only be [|] tolerated as a picture, preferably naked (like the image of Truth), framed and hung on the wall. (de Man 1978: 15-16)

How can a literary scholar be this illiterate? "Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against" (Locke 1741b: 106). First of all, rhetoric, oratory and eloquence are not the same? They may be related, but eloquence, specifically, has to do with the aspects of voice and expression. Secondly, "to be spoken against" and being "kept in its proper place" are very different things. Locke says that he doesn't want to say "much against it" (ibid, 106), meaning that he does not wish to offend those who deal with eloquence, much as one would not wish to offend women. Is confusing this for oppression a seductive thing?

But when, on the next page, Locke speaks of language as a "conduit" that may "corrupt the fountains of knowledge which are in things themselves" and, even worse, "break or stop the pipes whereby it is distributed to public use," then this language, not of poetic "pipes and timbrels" but of a plumber's handyman, raises, by its all too graphic concreteness, questions of propriety. (de Man 1978: 16)

Let me guess... Because pipes = penises? What is a timbrel? That is not a quote from Locke; the figure of the conduit, and "the Fountains of Knowledge" is (cf. Locke 1741b: 108). Paul de Man messes up this metaphor. It is not the ""conduit" that may "corrupt the fountains of knowledge"" but language is "the great Conduit whereby Men convey their Discoveries, Reasonings, and Knowledge from one to another" and "he that makes an ill use of it, though he does not corrupt the Fountains of Knowledg, which are in Things themselves; yet he does, as much as in him lies, break or stop the Pipes". Paul de Man has effectively committed one of the errors of language Locke points out, of using one abstract idea to affirm another (cf. Locke 1741b: 74) - he has made the "conduit" break the "pipes", which are the same thing. What's more, Locke says that ill use of language does not whereas de Man says may corrupt the fountains of knowledge. Was this man really a professor? How?

Such far-reaching assumptions are then made about the structure of the mind that one may wonder whether the metaphors illustrate a cognition or if the cognition is not perhaps shaped by the metaphors. And indeed, when Locke then develops his own theory of words and language, what he constructs turns out to be in fact a theory of tropes. Of course, he would be the last man in the world to realize and to acknowledge this. One has to read him, to some extent, against or regardless of his own explicit statement; one especially has to disregard to commonplaces about his philosophy that circulate as reliable currency in the intellectual histories of the Enlightenment. One has to pretend to read him ahistorically, the first and necessary condition if there is to be any expectation of ever arriving at a somewhat reliable history. That is to say, he has to be read not in terms of explicit statements (especially explicit statements about statements) but in terms of the rhetorical motions of his own text, which cannot be simply reduced to intentions or to identifiable facts. (de Man 1978: 16)

What nonsense is this? How do you find tropes between words, ideas, and things? It almost seems that by reading against or regardless of Locke's own explicit statements is a cop-out to read anything one wished into his rather straightforward text.

Unlike such later instances as Warburton, Vice, or, of course, Herder, Locke's theory of language is remarkably free of what is now referred to as "cratylic" delusions. The arbitrariness of the sign as signifies is clearly established by him, and his notion of language is frankly semantic rather than semiotic, a theory of signification as a substitution of words for "ideas" (in a specific and pragmatic sense of the term) and not of the linguistic sign as an autonomous structure. (de Man 1978: 16)

Thanks for not explaining ""cratylic" delusions". That's what good authors do - not explain their terms. The distinction between semantic and semiotic is arbitrary, Locke wrote long before it became a thing. There isn't much else to say about this because he, once again, does not explain the senses in which he is using these terms ("semiotic" is especially troubling in this regard because it appears that he's prone to Saussurean semiology rather than Peircean semiotics, which is more closely linked with Locke). Likewise with "pragmatic". Both words and ideas are signs according to Locke. Words do not substitute ideas, they stand for them.

"The names of simple ideas are not capable of any definitions [...]" (bk. 3. chap. 4, p. 26). Indeed not, since definition involves distinction and is therefore no longer simple. Simple ideas are, therefore, in Locke's system, simpleminded; they are not the objects of understanding. The implication is clear but comes as something of a shock, for what would be more important to understand than single ideas, the cornerstones of our experiences? (de Man 1978: 17)

Again, utter nonsense. Oh, definition involves distinction, and that is why we cannot define simple ideas? We cannot draw a distinction between red and blue? Simple ideas cannot be defined because they cannot be decomposed into simpler ideas. How they are not "the objects of understanding" is utterly beyond me. Understanding only capable of grasping complex ideas? What?

Locke's own "passage" is bound to continue this perpetual motion that never moves beyond tautology: motion is a passage and passage is a translation; translation, once again, means motion, piles motion upon motion. It is no mere play of words that "translate" is translated in German as "übersetzen" which itself translates the Greek "meta phorein" or metaphor. (de Man 1978: 17)

Wow. Again, making one abstract idea affirm another. Would anyone assent to this, that passage is translation, and translation is passage? This is exactly the loose, unsteady, wandering use of language Locke condemns. It is all well and good that de Man knows the etymology of metaphor, his subject matter, but he seems to be disregarding the distinction between passage qua motion of a body, and metaphor qua carrying over, which does involve motion, but not the motion of a (human) body but that of an object, carried by a body.

Locke's second example of a word for a simple idea is "light." He takes pains to explain that the word "light" does not refer to the perception of light and that to understand the causal process by which light is produced and perceived is not at all the same as to understand light. In fact, to understand light is to be able to make this very distinction between the actual cause and the idea (or experience) of a perception, between aperception and perception. (de Man 1978: 17)

Oh lord. Evidently Locke didn't understand light because he didn't use the French word! Apperception, which is so obscure a philosophical term that even the translator or editor of this paper got it wrong, could mean basically anything. Immanuel Kant, for example, gives it a very particular meaning: "The consciousness of self (apperception) is the simple representation of the "Ego;"" (Kant 1855: 41). By using obscure terminology without defining your terms is a real disservice to your reader. It's the sign of a loose thinker who doesn't want his meaning to be understood, only to be admired for being a clever boy for using big words.

But the word "idea" (eide), of course, itself means light, and to say that to understand light is to perceive the idea of light is to say that understanding is to see the light of light and is therefore itself light. (de Man 1978: 18)

Supreme rhetoric. That the light of light is itself light means, of course, nothing, and contributes nothing to the development of our knowledge. Moreover, "idea" does not mean light. It literally means "I see", and secondarily "notion, pattern". You can of course confuse seeing with light, and it would even be classical - i.e. you can beam "the fiery light from inside our eye toward the object of vision" (Reiche 1993: 163).

Etymons have a tendency to turn into the repetitive stutter of tautology. Just as the word "passage" translates but fails to define motion, "idea" translates but does not define light and, what is worse, "understand" translates but does not define understanding. (de Man 1978: 18)

Perfect nonsense. Just absolutely perfect. How to say nothing about saying nothing, this. The point, what little there is, doesn't even stand. Locke, for example, gives the etymology of substance and accident (cf. Locke 1741a: 135) and is very illuminating. De Man's point is all accident, without any substance.

Like the blind man who cannot understand the idea of light, the child who cannot tell the figural from the proper keeps recurring throughout eighteenth-century epistemology as barely disguised figures of our universal predicament. (de Man 1978: 18)

The what from what? The figural use of language and the proper use of language. Thanks for not bringing forth no examples. We'll just take you at your word that this is a recurrent theme in eighteenth-century epistemology because you've been soo correct thus far.

Properties, it seems, do not properly totalize, or, rather, they totalize in a haphazard and unreliable way. It is indeed not a question of ontology, of things as they are, but of authority, of things as they are decreed to be. And this authority cannot be vested in any authoritative body, for the free usage of ordinary language is carried, like the child, by wild figuration which will make a mockery of the most authoritarian academy. We have no way of defining, of policing, the boundaries that separate the name of one entity from the name of another; tropes are not just travellers, they tend to be smugglers and probably smugglers of stolen goods at that. What makes matters even worse is that there is no way of finding out whether they do so with criminal intent or not. (de Man 1978: 19)

Again, wrong. The question is still about things as they are, and more poignantly what we can know and cannot know: "Our Reasonings from these Ideas will carry us but a little way in the certain Discovery of the other Proporties in those Masses of Matter wherein all these are to be found. Because the other Properties of such Bodies depending not on these, but on that unknown real Essence, on which these also depend, we cannot by them discover the rest; we can go no farther than the simple Ideas of our nominal Essence will carry us, which is very little beyond themselves; and so afford us but very sparingly any certain, universal, and useful Truths." (Locke 1741b: 264). The question of authority does not meet the question of authority in Locke. Their conjunction is de Man's personal fancy. Also, I detest the conflation of "the free usage of ordinary language" and "the child" - a trope that calls to mind the savage mind (La Mentalité primitive) of "the uneducated classes" (PC 4.3) and black people. In the guise of resisting authority de Man is smuggling in colonial notions of ordinary language. Not cool.

Here Locke's example will be "man"; the question to be accounted for then becomes: What essence is the proper of man? The question in fact amounts to whether the proper, which is a linguistic notion, and the essence, which exists independently of linguistic mediation, can coincide. (de Man 1978: 19)

Yeah, I don't know why this paper focuses so much on essence and substance and the rest. From what I've seen, while reading Locke and organizing secondary literature, Locke's theory of language and his theory of substance are two very different things and don't overlap all that much. It looks like he's cramming heavier philosophical topics into this paper because they're properly confounding enough for his discourse, will confuse the reader sufficiently to give off the impression that he's really on to something when he's just talking out of his ass.

The problem is that of a necessary link between the two elements in a binary polarity, between "inside" and "outside," that is to say, by all accounts, that of metaphor as the figure of complementarity and correspondence. One now sees that this figure is not only ornamental and aesthetic but powerfully coercive since it generates, for example, the ethical pressure of such questions as "to kill or not to kill." (de Man 1978: 19)

The really surreal thing about this paper is that the quotations from Locke make a lot of sense, espically after just having finished reading him, but whatever the fuck de Man is going on about here is utterly incomprehensible and comes across as an attempt to cram in as many five dollar words as he possibly can without adding anything valuable to the discussion. For example, Locke does discuss whether a disfigured child is considered "human", even though it may come to have reason, or whether it should be killed because it doesn't look right. De Man's language almost indicates a point (binary polarity; aesthetic) but what the fuck it could be I have no clue, it looks like absolute fluff.

The passage is, of course, primarily a mock argument, a hyperbolical example to unsettle the unquestioned assumption of definitional thought. Yet it has its own logic which will have to run its course. For how could anyone "allow" something to be if it is not necessarily the case that it is? For it is not necessarily the case that the inner and the outer man are the same man, that is to say, are "man" at all. (de Man 1978: 20)

I mean really, who writes like this? It looks like de Man inserted "a mock argument", "a hyperbolical example", "to settle the unquestioned assumption" and "definitional thought" into a random sentence generator and let it roll until it looked grammatically legible enough to pass. What is "definitional thought"? How is Locke making a "mock argument" - isn't he making a real argument? How is the example "hyperbolical" if he tells of a real person who was born disfigured and became a preacher? What "unquestioned assumptions" is he unsettling, and what the hell are unquestioned assumptions anyhow in this context? This is a looooose thinker.

The problem there under discussion is what to do with the "Changeling"; the simpleminded child so called because it would be natural for anyone to assume that this child has been substituted by mistake for his real offspring. (de Man 1978: 20)

Define:changeling - "a child believed to have been secretly substituted by fairies for the parents' real child in infancy." To be honest, the use of "changeling" baffled me when reading Locke, and I still don't know what he meant by this word. But how can I believe that de Man's definition of it when nothing he has thus far written has been correct or made any sense? How can I be nourished, even a little bit, by someone who constantly produces word-salad?

If we then are invited by Locke, in conclusion, to "quit the common notion of species and essences," this would reduce us to the mindless stammer of simple ideas and make us into a philosophical "changeling," with the unpleasant consequences that have just been conjectured. (de Man 1978: 20)

Seriously, as soon as Locke's blockquote ends de Man drops in with some utter nonsense. Evidently he completely missed the point of quitting the common notion of species and essence (cf. e.g. Locke 1741b: 56), and instead of adding anything of relevance to the discussion made a pandering turn to the audience. We don't even know what a "changeling" by itself is, what the heck then is a "philosophical "changeling""?

As we [|] move from the mere contiguity between words and things in the case of simple ideas to the metaphorical correspondence of properties and essences in substances, the ethical tension has considerably increased. (de Man 1978: 20-21)

Oh fuck me. "Contiguity" is not a word Locke uses, and in Saussurean semiology it signifies the syntactic combination of word and word. The contiguity of word and thing would mean that word and thing are placed next to each other. Is that what he means? What the fuck does he mean?

Only this tension could account for the curious choice of examples selected by Locke when he moves on to the uses and possible abuses of language in mixed modes. His main examples are manslaughter, incest, parricide, and adultery - when any nonreferential entity such as mermaid or unicorn would have done just as well. (de Man 1978: 21)

Mermaids and centaurs (Locke doesn't mention unicorns) are not nonreferential. You can refer to mermaids and centurs - everyone will know what you mean. Per Charles Morris, you can signify non-existent beings, you cannot denotate them, you cannot literally point a finger at them because they do not exist. If de Man's concept of "reference" is only that, pointing at things, then he is correct; by any other formulation of reference, in fact most of them, he's making "bare Noise".

Once the reflection on the figurality of language is started, there is no telling where it may lead. Yet there is no way not to raise the question if there is to be any understanding. The use and the abuse of language cannot be separated from each other. (de Man 1978: 21)

Are you sure about that? Your abuse of language I can certainly separate from Locke's use of language.

"Abuse" of language is, of course, itself the name of a trope: catachresis. This is indeed how Locke describes mixed modes. They are capable of inventing the most fantastic entities by dint of the positional power inherent in language. They can dismember the texture of reality and reassemble it in the most capricious of ways, pairing man with woman or human being with beast in the most unnatural shapes. (de Man 1978: 21)

"But as for mixed Modes, especially the most material of them, moral Words, the Sounds are usually learned first, and then to know what complex Ideas they stand for, they are either beholden to the Explication of others" (Locke 1741b: 80). Yeah, as to mixed modes, we sure do invent "fantastic entities", like Wisdom, Glory, and Grace (Locke 1741b: 90). What fantastic beasts they are, and who knows how to catch them!

Something monstrous lurks in the most innocent or catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of the table or the face of the mountain, catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia, and one begins to perceive a world of potential ghosts and monsters. By elaborating his theory of language as a motion from simple ideas to mixed modes, Locke has deployed the entire fan-shape or (to remain within light imagery) the entire spectrum or rainbow of tropological totalization, the anamorphosis of tropes which has to run its full course whenever one engages, however reluctantly or tentatively, the question of language is figure. (de Man 1978: 21)

A hodgepodge of jargon.

In Locke, it began in the arbitrary, metonymic contiguity of word-sounds to their meanings, in which the word is a mere token in the service of the natural entity, and it concludes with the catachresis of mixed modes in which the word can be said to produce of and by itself the entity it signifies and that has no equivalence in nature. (de Man 1978: 21)

An undeveloped germ of a thought that, in the end, adds nothing to what Locke has already written about the connection between words and ideas. Moreover, with a tangling agentive: the word "by itself" produces nothing.

But the condemnation, by Locke's own argument, [|] now takes all language for its target, for at no point in the course of the demonstration can the empirical entity be sheltered from tropological defiguration. (de Man 1978: 21-22)

If only I knew what the fuck "tropological defiguration" is.

It is entirely legitimate to conclude that when Condillac uses the term "abstraction," it can be "translated" as metaphor or, if one agrees with the point that was made with reference to Locke about the self-totalizing transformation of all tropes, as trope. As soon as one is willing to be made aware of their epistemological implications, concepts are tropes and tropes concepts. (de Man 1978: 23)

If only Locke had put forward anything of the kind, or if de Man had explained it better. That "concepts are tropes and tropes concepts" once again making one abstract idea affirm another, the result being nowise an increase in knowledge but, on the contrary, an increase of confusion.

The story is like the plot of a Gothic novel in which someone compulsively manufactures a monster on which he then becomes totally dependent and does not have the power to kill. Condillac (who after all went down in the anecdotal history of philosophy as the inventor of a mechanical statue able to smell roses) bears a close resemblance to Ann Radcliffe or Mary Shelley. (de Man 1978: 23)

Thanks for all the citations. I'll be sure to check up "a Gothic novel". Heaping obscure literary references one upon another makes good academic writing?

From the recognition of language as trope, one is led to the telling of a tale, to the narrative sequence I have just described. (de Man 1978: 23)

Rationality is whiteness, language is trope, music is achitecture. Making one abstract idea affirm another sure is productive.

Why does the subject have to behave in such a potentially violent and authoritarian way? The answer is clear: this is the only way in which it can constitute its own existence, its own ground. (de Man 1978: 24)

Why indeed. In conclusion, this paper is hot garbage. It is shit. Paul de Man has done a real disservice to anyone wishing to get acquainted with Locke's theory of language by some proxy, that is, without reading through those 700+ pages themselves. I'm only 2/3 through I cannot continue, I am too weak and this is just too frustrating of a read. DNF.

Walmsley, Peter 1995. Prince Maurice's Rational Parrot: Civil Discourse in Locke's Essay. Eighteenth-Century Studies 28(4): 413-425. [JSTOR]

Since the publication of Paul de Man's influential essay "The Epistemology of Metaphor," it has become something of a critical commonplace to cast Locke as a naive language theorist, one whose desires for transparent meaning are inevitably frustrated by the very words he employs. De Man argues that Locke shows his ignorance of the deep "tropological structure of discourse" when he attacks the use of rhetoric and, in particular, metaphor in philosophical writing. (Walmsley 1995: 413)

Quite sad, considering how superficial Paul de Man's reading of Locke was. None of what de Man argued about Locke's theory of language made any sense in light of Locke's own text.

Reading Locke "to some extent, against or regardless of his own explicit statements," de Man points out the metaphors that lie concealed in the key terms of Locke's argument. This portrait of Locke as one too much the philosopher to appreciate the indeterminacy of language and to admit its powerful allusiveness has found wise acceptance among literary historians. (Walmsley 1995: 413)

The only metaphor he treated was the "conduit" and that was by no means concealed nor the key term of Locke's argument.

As Sitter makes clear, there is a tendency in the Essay to diminish the role of community in creating and sustaining language. For Locke, meaning is a private [|] act - the application of word to idea in the mind - and he consistently emphasizes the psychology over the sociology of language. (Walmsley 1995: 413-414)

"Nor do I deny, that those Words, and the like, are to have their Place in the common Use of Languages that have made them current." (Locke 1741a: 198); "Because Men being furnished already with Names for their Ideas, and common Use having appropriated known Names to certain Ideas, an affected Misapplication of them cannot but be very ridiculous." (Locke 1741b: 71)

Locke's concern about the interaction of philosophical discourse and the language of the street is clearly related to his immersion in the scientific thought of his generation, and to his desire in the Essay to prove himself a worthy "Under-Labourer" to the "Master-Builders" of the Royal Society (Epistle to the Reader). Many of Locke's scientific contemporaries, heeding Bacon's warnings about those prejudices we acquire from "the daily intercourse and conversation of life," had readily admitted the inadequacies of common language for natural philosophy. (Walmsley 1995: 414)

"But this remedy comes too late to do any good, when the mind is already, through the daily intercourse and conversation of life, occupied with unsound doctrines and beset on all sides by vain imaginations" (Bacon 1858: 40). Evidently daily intercourse and conversation of life are a conduit for unsound doctrines.

Locke proceeds to several instance, such as the interpretation of divine law, where knowledge is undermined by the great latitude of common usage. But it soon becomes clear that in distinguishing civil and philosophical discourse he is most concerned that names of substances from everyday speech are far too loose to be of use to the natural philosopher. The common speaker, concerned only with the more obvious and outward properties of any substance he handles, makes no effort either to extend or fix the list of sensible qualities he attributes to that substance (III.ix.15). As a result, in discourse about the material world "common Use [...] which reduces it self at last to the Ideas of particular Men, proves often but a very variable Standard" (III.xi.25). (Walmsley 1995: 415)

This view has some probability behind it. It would explain Locke's frequent concern with the ideas that are attributed as properties of the substance Gold. Does a common man know that it dissolves in Aq. Regia?

The imprecision of common words like liquor threaten to turn even the most limited scientific inquiries into pointless linguistic disputations. Indeed it was the physicians' confidence in their use of the word, before Locke's chastening exercise in definition, that tempted them to assert a knowledge beyond the evidence of their senses. (Walmsley 1995: 416)

Don't forget that they were also disputing over a scientific subject common at that time - what we call "nervous impulse" they called a liquid, "animal spirits".

There is, however, one even more extraordinary conversation cited in the Essay, the dialogue between Prince Maurice and the rational parrot, which Locke inserted int he chapter "Of Identity and Diversity" for the fourth edition of 1700. Recalcitrant as it is to philosophical analysis, this exchange repays attention since it provides grounds for a reconsideration of Locke's views on both the role of language in thought and the uses of civil discourse in philosophy. (Walmsley 1995: 417)

Hopefully not so recalcitrant to phatic analysis, whatever that could be.

In this instance Locke does not draw from his own experience but quotes at length from William Temple's Memoirs. The passage shows Temple attempting to engage the conversation of the aging and reticent Dutch colonial governor, Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen. Having heard from many mouths that Prince Maurice had carried on a meaningful dialogue with a parrot in Brazil, Temple asks him what there might be in the story: [...] (Walmsley 1995: 417)

From a phatic point of view it is very meaningful that this dialogue is designated "meaningful".

Not only is the subject of the conversation itself highly improbable, but it comes with reminders about the instability of oral tradition, the Prince confessing that his story has been distorted as it passed from mouth to mouth. Clearly what we are presented with here has itself suffered several removes from its first hearing. It is "the Hear-say of an Hear-say," a species of testimony about which serious doubts will be expressed later in the Essay (IV.xvi.10). (Walmsley 1995: 417)

That's a given. I'd look at it as an anecdote, a humorous story. The important thing, for me, is what it says about assumptions about language and reason.

Animal cognition, too, is a favorite theme. Locke offers us Temple's story as at least sufficient evidence "to countenance the supposition of a rational Parrot" (III.xxvii.8). Such evidence lies, of course, with the coherence of the conversation itself, with the parrot's apparent mastery of the complex conventions of communication. Like his friend, the anatomist Thomas Willis, Locke has rejected as reductive Cartesian accounts of animals as "bare Machins" (II.xi.11). Willis had proposed that if animals fall short of human reason, they nevertheless possess a "Brutal or Corporeal Soul" by which they are capable of memory, learning by experience and imitation, and even rudimentary ratiocination. Locke pursues these ideas in the Essay. It is absurd, he argues, to deny memory to birds that hearing a tune one day through practice attain a perfect rendition by the next (II.x.10). (Walmsley 1995: 418)

That's what makes the anecdote interesting. The parrot's speech is more rational than we would usually presume. As to animal souls, the question here is indeed deeper than merely of afterlife, i.e. if heaven will be infested with the souls of bugs, because the soul was considered the seat of rationality, e.g. "rational soul".

No virtuoso, he fails to ask the obvious speculative question - "Do you talk to other parrots?" The parrot, however, returns Maurice's skepticism with an indifference of its own, judging the governor to be merely "Some General or other." Like Montaigne's cannibals, it disquietingly reverses the imperial gaze, curious only to see so many white men in one place. And when Maurice laughs at the thought of one race of birds collaborating in the subjection of another, he seems to recognize his own ambiguous position among the South Americans. But the final and most elegant irony of the story is linguistic - the image of a parrot imitating a human imitating a chicken. (Walmsley 1995: 418)

This interpretation I didn't think of. Indeed, it's a sweet piece of irony. We are amused by the idea of a parrot herding chickens, but not of man doing the same to his own species.

The parrot, like Maurice, is hampered by problems of translation, problems that have interesting implications for Locke's theory of language. Parrots, it is widely assumed, do not use words privately - for recording ideas in the mind - but simply imitate the sounds they hear. In fact, in adding this dialogue to the fourth edition, Locke does not delete passages elsewhere in the Essay in which he proposes that animals lack the powers of abstraction necessary for meaningful signification (II.xi.10), and even states unreservedly that parrots are incapable of language (III.i.1). However perfect a parrot's imitation of the sounds of words, it never uses "them for signs of Ideas, which he has in his Mind" (IV.viii.7). But Temple's story draws attention to the fact that human acquire language, like parrots, by imitation, whether of chickens or of other humans. (Walmsley 1995: 418)

This is partly why Jakobson's phatic function includes both talking birds and the first vocalizations of infants - both illustrate the desire to communicate.

In their tellings, the Prince and Temple violate that most venerable of scholastic maxims - that man alone is the rational animal. Locke turns to common usage to prove that, on the contrary, we naturally use the term man to signify the form of the human body. Here civil conversation serves not as a hindrance to philosophy, but a corrective against its worst excesses. (Walmsley 1995: 419)

On this subject I prefer Peirce's view: "Man is nature's first essay towards the production of an intellectual animal. He is not that, but is a prophecy of it, perhaps." (W 1: 9) - we shouldn't flatter ourselves. We may not be the first, the sole, or even a rational species of creatures at all.

Many of Locke's scientific contemporaries expressed this distrust of such arcane Latinisms, and many, Boyle included, chose to publish the fruits of their research in English. As Brian Vickers has shown, Sprat's well-known celebration of the "primitive purity" and "native easiness" of Royal Society discourse reflected support amongst the fellowship for scientific communication in the vernacular, and at least some discomfort with the excessive Latinity of contemporary technical language. Throughout the Essay, Locke draws our attention to his own writing in "very plain English" (IV.viii.3), and frequent stops to search out more accessible equivalents for traditional metaphysical terms. (Walmsley 1995: 419)

It is a bit ironic that English was once in a position it now puts other languages in, having to contend and contest with English as the de facto lingua franca of science.

Locke emphasizes, at the very opening of Book III, the primacy of language's social and political functions as "the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society" (III.i.1), never losing sight of the facts that God gave man his understanding "not barely for Speculation, but also for the Conduct of his Life" (IV.xiv.1), and that philosophy, the child of wealth and leisure, is beyond the capabilities of the bulk of mankind. This practical and worldly awareness ultimately conspires to temper Locke's proposals for a distinct and precise philosophical language. There is in the Essay, as Rosalie Colie has shown, a sustained recognition that philosophy exists at the fringes of discourse, that the possibility of effecting a learned reform of usage is slight. (Walmsley 1995: 421)

"We have to realize that language originally, among primitive, non-civilized peoples was never used as a mere mirror of reflected thought. The manner in which I am using it now, in writing these words, the manner in which the author of a book, or a papyrus or a hewn inscription has to use it, is a very far-fetched and derivative function of language" (Malinowski 1923: 312).

Locke emphasizes, of his Two Treatises of Government, Locke describes our desire for company as divinely ordained: "God having made Man such a Creature, that, in his own Judgment, it was not good for him to be alone, put him under strong Obligations of Necessity, Convenience, and Inclination to drive him into Society, as well as fitted him with Understanding and Language to continue and enjoy it" Here Locke proposes that our faculties of both reason and speech are designed expressly by God to sustain our social beings and promote community. In this context, language is implicitly compared to the other institutions of civil life, most obviously civil government itself. (Walmsley 1995: 421)

I haven't yet made up my mind if I should read Locke's other writings, especially the treatises on government, but I might. This view of language and society seems classical but that's about as far as my knowledge about such views extends.

Ashworth, E. J. 1984. Locke on Language. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14(1): 45-73. DOI: 10.1080/00455091.1984.10716368

Locke's main semantic thesis is that words stand for, or signify, ideas. He says over and over again, though the phraseology he employs varies. In book III chapter 2 alone we find the following statements of the thesis: (1) '[...] Words [...] come to be made use of by Men, as the Signs of their Ideas' [III.2.1; 405: 10-11]; (2) 'The use then of Words, is to be sensible Marks of Ideas; and the Ideas they stand for, are the proper and immediate Signification' [III.2.1; 405: 15-17]; (3) 'Words in their primary and immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them' [III.2p2; 405: 21-22]; (4) 'That then which Words are the Marks of, are the Ideas of the Speaker' [III.2.2; 405: 27-28]; (5) '[...] [|] Words, as they are used by Men, can properly and immediately signify nothing but the Ideas, that are in the Mind of the Speaker' [III.2.4; 406: 29-31]. (Ashworth 1984: 45-46)

I caught three out of five. Not bad.

Locke offers no explanation of the terms he uses in these remarks, and I am going to take it that the phrases 'stand for,' 'being a mark of,' and 'being a sign of' are all roughly synonymous with the term 'signify.' The purpose of this paper is to explore what Locke intended to convey when he said that words signify ideas. I shall attempt to defend him against some, though not all, standard objections; and part of my defense with rest on the claim that Locke was using 'signify' in the same way that his scholastic predecessors used the Latin term 'significare'. (Ashworth 1984: 46)

This looks to be an illuminating reading. This significāre is the present active infinitive of sīgnificō, which means: 1. I show, express, signify, point out; 2. I portend, prognosticate; 3. I call, name; and 4. I mean, import.

Let us first consider his use of the term 'idea.' He wrote of it as follows: 'It being that Term, which, I think, serves best to stand for whatever is the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks, I have used it to express whatever is meant by Phantasm, Notion, Species, or whatever it is, which the Mind can be employ'd about in thinking' [I.1.8; 47:28-32]. If we remember that a phantasm is an image, that 'notion' is the word Locke uses for such mixed modes as 'courage,' 'drunkenness,' 'sacrilege' and 'murder' [II.22.2; 288: 24]; that 'species' includes both sensible species [|] or particular sensings, and intelligible species, or whatever is abstracted from particular sensings, we can get some idea of the extraordinary flexibility with which Locke used the term 'idea.' It ranges over immediate sensings, sensations, memories, images and concepts. As we shall see later, he often tends to emphasize the image aspect, but certainly not exclusively. When he says that courage is 'For a man to be undisturbed in Danger, sedately to consider what is fitted to be done, and to execute it steadily' [II.30.3; 374: 5-8], he surely does not suppose that his complex idea of courage is an image. (Ashworth 1984: 46-47)

Hence why he apologizes for the use of this word right at the start: "But, before I proceed on what I have thought on this Subject, I must here in the Entrance beg pardon of my Reader, for the frequent Use of the Word Idea, which he will find in the following Treatise" (Locke 1741a: 5).

Second, we should note his thesis that all complex ideas are made up out of simple ideas, which goes together with the thesis that simple ideas all come to us from experience, whether sensation or reflection. It is tempting to argue that Locke was committed to a radical reductionism, whereby any legitimate statement I make using such complex terms as 'justice' must be equivalent without loss of meaning to a series of statements, perhaps infinitely many, about sense data, immediate sensings, or whatever the preferred locution. It may indeed be that this is the logically correct conclusion to be drawn from some of the things which Locke says, but it is essential to remember that philosophers do not always pursue the logical consequences of their remarks to the bitter end, and that they might be horrified if they did. Many of Locke's examples of simple ideas, and all of his examples of analyzed complex ideas suggest that he took a considerably more relaxed view of his general thesis than have some of his readers. (Ashworth 1984: 47)

I have yet to form an rigid opinion on this. A lot of the stuff he wrote about simple and complex ideas went above my head. It would probably take a second reading and careful attention to systematize all of his statements about types of ideas into a coherent picture.

Thirdly there is his thesis that knowledge is 'nothing but the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas' [IV.1.2; 525: 5-7]. I am going to take it that he meant this quite literally, and that under no circumstances did he allow that the mind or perceiving agent could be directly related to any object other than an idea or the mind itself. He says so, more than once. For instance, he wrote that a man has 'no notion of any Thing without him, but by the Idea he has of it in his Mind' [II.32.25; 393: 14-15]; and that 'the Mind knows not Things immediately, but only by the intervention of the Ideas it has of them' [IV.4.3; 563: 27-28]. (Ashworth 1984: 48)

On Substance, he writes: "If Nature took care to provide us any Idea, we might well expect it should be such, as by our own Faculties we cannot procure to ourselves: But we see on the contrary, that since by those Ways, whereby other Ideas are brought into our Minds, this is not, we have no such clear Idea at all, and therefore signify nothing by the word Substance, but only an uncertain Supposition of we know not what" (Locke 1741a: 100). In other words, the mind does not embrace the object; it embraces ideas of the object.

The temptation for modern readers is to take Locke as a paradigm case of the private-language philosopher, one who holds that our mental life consists of a succession of occult entities called 'ideas' to which reference is made whenever we utter words meaningfully. (Ashworth 1984: 49)

Define:occult - "mystical, supernatural, or magical powers, practices, or phenomena."

He claimed that we have a mental language, made up of mental propositions [|] which contain ideas, not words [IV.5.3; 574: 14-21; IV.5.5; 575: 35-36; cf. II.32.19, 391: 35-36]. In his remarks on how to avoid error and confusion he exhorted the reader to focus on ideas rather than on owrds. He twice praised mathematicians for doing that successfully [IV.3.30, 561: 11-16; IV.4.9, 567: 21-30], and he said 'the examining and judging of Ideas by themselves, their Names being quite laid aside' is 'the best and surest way to clear and distinct Knowledg' [IV.61.1, 579: 6-8]. (Ashworth 1984: 49-50)

I take it that what he meant was something along the lines of mental imagery or representations, i.e. visual imagination.

I have now arrived at the heart of my argument, for not only was 'signify' a quasi-technical term for Locke; it was a genuinely technical term in the scholastic literature of the period, and indeed, in all medieval writings concerned with the theory of language. I wish to contend that Locke's use of the term 'signify' makes much more philosophical sense if one sees it against the scholastic background than if one approaches it from the point of view of twentieth century theories of meaning. It also makes a good deal more historical sense to suggest that Locke was influenced by his background, rather than being a complete innovator in every aspect of his thinking. (Ashworth 1984: 55)

Getting to the good stuff. I'm not even sure the last few pages on 20th century theories of meaning were even necessary.

In theory the main texts studied for logic and metaphysics (as for ethics, natural, and political philosophy) were those of Aristotle, but in practice secondary sources were used. The leading metaphysics texts included some by Catholics such as the Frenchman, Eustace of St. Paul, and some by Protestants, such as the German, Scheibler, and the Dutchman, Burgersdijck. They were all predominantly scholastic in nature, by which I mean that they were highly organized, were heavily influenced by the renewed Aristotelianism of the sixteenth century, and were equally heavily influenced by such medieval authors as Thomas Aquinas (who was undoubtedly more popular in the seventeenth century than in the thirteenth) and Duns Scotus. (Ashworth 1984: 56)

Christoph Scheibler and Franco Burgersdijk. Eustace of St. Paul I couldn't find.

Thurd, there is the theory of definition which had at least a negative influence on Locke. According to the scholastic texts, there were two kinds of definition: the definitio quid nominis or nominal definition, which explains the signification of a word; and the definitio quid rei which in Du Trieu's words is a 'definition which explains the nature of the thing [|] signified by a name.' He added that this type of definition was called 'essential' when it was given through those elements essential to the thing defined, such as animal and rational with respect to man. It applied only to substances. This is precisely the kind of definition which Locke spends so much time denying that we have a use for. (Ashworth 1984: 57-58)

Aww yeah, good stuff. A modern parallel in Charles Morris' distinction between signification and denotation.

The doctrine of mental language goes back to Aristotle's De Interpretatione 16a3 where he remarked that spoken words were signs of affections in the mind, but the real impetus for the development of a theory about mental language came from two sources, St. Augustine's De Trinitate 15, and Boethius in his second commentary on Aristotle's De Interpretatione. After Boethius, philosophers all seem to have taken it for granted that there were three types of language, spoken, written, and mental. Spoken and written languages had conventional meaning and were in fact, though not necessarily so, different for different groups of people. Mental language on the other hand was thought to be necesarily common to all men because it had natural meaning; no choice or convention was involved, and mental terms were significative by virtue of their very nature. Mental language was taken to be logically prior to conventional language, and spoken sentences were said to be meaningful only if they were subordinated to mental sentences. Most late medieval logicians also recognized an intermediate level of mental language which was conventionally meaningful. If a person 'speaks in his heart' by using the words of Latin or French without actually uttering them, then he is using mental language in an extended sense [cf. IV.5.4, 574: 23-26]. (Ashworth 1984: 58)

And it gets better. This is all new to me.

Intense and lengthy discussion of such issues seems to have ceased after the first three decades of the sixteenth century, when several people published entire books devoted to mental language; but even in seventeenth-century Oxford traces of the debate on mental language are to be found. For instance, in Robert Pinke's list of questions on logic, metaphysics and ethics published in 1680 for the use of Oxford students, one of the logical questions to be considered was 'Is a mental proposition a simple quality?' More important for our purposes is the Logica of Martin Smiglecius, a book which was published in Oxford in 1634, 1638, [|] and 1658 (the year Locke obtained his M.A.) and which was bought by two of Locke's students. A chapter of this work is devoted to the problem of the unity of mental propositions. Smiglecius reproduced the arguments of the fourteenth-century philosopher, Gregory of Rimini, and says that Gregory was right when he argues that a mental proposition was not a mere aggregate of terms. Rather it is a complex unity. It results from a simple act of affirmation or negation which gives to the concepts involves their roles within the proposition. (Ashworth 1984: 59-60)

Scholasticism turns out to be intensely interesting.

I should add that no one doubted that words are used to refer to public objects; the only question had to do with the description of the word-concept-thing relation. The very asking of this question strengthens my point that signification and meaning are not to be identified. If one takes the words 'Does a word signify concepts or things or perhaps both, but one less immediately than the other?' and replaces 'signify' by 'mean,' one makes nonsense of the question; whereas replacing 'signify' by my preferred synonym, 'makes known,' will preserve the sense. (Ashworth 1984: 62)

Märgid teevad asjad ja mõtted teatavaks.

One of several seventeenth-century accounts of this debate is found in the Logica of Martin Smiglecius. In good scholastic fashion, he presented the standard arguments for and against the main thesis before reaching his own conclusion. Of particular interest to me are his four arguments for the view that concepts are immediately signified by words. The first argument, which is an appeal to Aristotle's authority, can be ignored. He then argues that words were given to man in order to make known his mind which is hidden and invisible; that a speaker who conceives nothing signifies nothing, as is the case with parrots; and fourthly, that words can only signify things by means of the concept [ratio] whereby the things are conceived. Smiglecius himself did not accept these arguments. He pointed out that to say that concepts are an essential element in the signifying process does not by itself establish that they are what is signified; and he also argued that we can only use words to find out about a speaker's thoughts if we first know thet hings to which his words refer. (Ashworth 1984: 62)

Ashworth points out how both of these arguments appear in Locke. I recognize the second in this: "The terms of every proposition are presupposed to be comprehended; therefore no proposition can give us a new conception, and Wisdom is not learnt from books." (W 1: 5)

Du Trieu, 93-94; Sanderson, 81-82. Cf. Sanderson, 73: 'Conceptus sunt signa sive notae rerum, Voces Conceptuum, Literae vocum' ['Concepts are signs or marks of things, utterances of concepts, letters of utterances.] (Ashworth 1984: 63; footnote 36)

Good stuff.

I shall dispose of the names of mixed modes quite quickly, since the main problem here is not Locke's theory of language so much as the account he gives of mixed modes themselves. He claims that when we use such notions as 'justice' or 'triangle' we are dealing with 'Archetypes without Patterns' which have 'nothing to represent but themselves' [II.31.3, 377: 11-12]. A simple way of putting this would be to say that what counts as an instance of 'justice' or 'triangle' is up to us; we have invented the notions, and in so far as there is any onus of match it is on the world to conform to our definitions rather than the reverse. Our ideas cannot avoid conformity to reality here, since the only reality is as determined by us. (Ashworth 1984: 65)

This is epic. The discussion of Archetypes in Locke always confused me. This shows that his Archetypes are indeed conformable to Peirce's Types.

What he says about substances here should be compared with what he says about modes. Presumably the ideas of at least some mathematical modes are images, given his claim that we can use 'Diagrams drawn on Paper' as 'Copies of the Ideas in the Mind' [IV.3.19, 550: 12-13], but of moral ideas he writes: 'We have no sensible marks that resemble them, whereby we can set them down; we have nothing but Words to express them by [...]' [IV.3.19, 550: 20-21]. It is a mistake to suppose that all Locke's ideas are images. (Ashworth 1984: 71)

The connection between diagrams and copies an interesting one from a Peircean point of view. In my paper (in press) I ventured that copies are spatial on very contingent evidence; this is affirmation.

Serjeantson, R. W. 2001. The Passions and Animal Language, 1540-1700. Journal of the History of Ideas 62(3): 425-444. [JSTOR]

"Do not think, kind and benevolent readers, that I am proposing a useless subject to you by choosing to discuss the language [loquela] of beasts. For this is nothing other than philosophy, which investigates the natures of animals." The Italian medical professor Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente began his 1603 treatise On the language of beasts with this captatio benevolentiae with good cause. For early modern natural philosophers almost universally insisted that only humans were capale of language and speech. In this they followed, sometimes explicitly, their ancient authorities. "Man," Aristotle had said in the Politics, "is the only animal that has the gift of speech." "Men," wrote Cicero in the De inventione, "most excel the beasts in this, that they can speak." They were sentiments echoed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. "There is no true language among beastes," said Sir Kenelm Digby. "Language" (loquela), concurred G. J. Vossius, "is unique to man." And according to John Ray in The Wisdom of God (1691), speech was "a quality so peculiar to Man, that no Beast could ever attain to it." (Serjeantson 2001: 425)

I can guess that this statement is going to be put to the test. What distinguishes speech from vocalizations?

Yet despite this pervasive assumption that humans spoke and animals did not, the question of animal language kept arising in early modern culture. Readers met speaking animals in beast fables and on Lucianic voyages. There was a popular belief in early modern England that "in the olde tymes" animals could speak. Theodore Zwinger, Claude Duret, and G. J. Vossius all recorded many accounts of human communication with birds, with the ancient claim that Apollonius of Tyana could understand birdsong being particularly notorious. (Serjeantson 2001: 426)

"Some one however of the Crotonian counsellors, after reviling the rest of the ambassadors, observed that he understood they had defamed Pythagoras, whom not even a brute would dare to blaspheme, though all animals should again utter the same voice as men, which fables report they did in the beginning of things." (Iamblichus 1818: 94-95)

In late Renaissance Europe speech was frequently conceived, in broadly Stoic terms, as consisting of two equally necessary components: the internal speech of reason (logos endiathetos), and the external speech of the voice (logos prophorikos). This common twofold understanding was even co-opted by Cartesians: writing in his Discours physique de la parole( 1668), Géraud de Cordemoy noted that, "In speech there are two things: the [|] knowledge of the formation of the voice, which can only come from the body; [...] and the signification or idea that is joined to it, which comes from the soul." (Serjeantson 2001: 427-428)

The stuff of "mental language" in the previous paper thus had Greek, as well as Latin, formulations.

Furthermore, voices were often distinguished into articulate and inarticulate. Articulate voices could be written down; inarticulate voices could not. Finally, following Aristotle, the basic criterion of articulacy was usually considered to be the ability to produce both consonants and vowels. (Serjeantson 2001: 428)

"Jointed" voice can be written down.

Some animals, however, were capable of articulating human words. Parrots and magpies were the commonly-cited exceptions to the general rule that animals were incapable of producing articulate voices. It was widely agreed, in fact, that the parrot's vocal organs were uniquely apt for producing human speech. The reason most early modern writers gave for this slavishly followed Pliny: the parrot has a broader tongue than other birds. Others went further, mentioning the parrot's short neck and upright stature. (Serjeantson 2001: 429)

Now I regret looking up images of parrot tongues. Their upright stature is probably the most important thing.

Conventionalism is the doctrine that words have no natural meaning, but rather signify by convention - by agreement - alone. (A comparison was sometimes made in [|] this respect between words and money.) The doctrine was derived from Aristotle's De interpretatione. In this work Aristotle proposed a fourfold structure of verbal signification. First came things; then came "conceptions" of things in the mind. Verbal utterances - "voices" - were signs of these mental conceptions; finally, there came written words, which were themselves signs of the spoken words. The most important element of this account was Aristotle's definition of spoken words as conventional signs of mental conceptions. (Serjeantson 2001: 429-430)
Conceptus sunt signa sive notae rerum, Voces Conceptuum, Literae vocum'" (Du Trieu; in Ashworth 1984: 63; footnote 36; above). This formulation leaves out things.

Furthermore, following Galen and Avicenna, animals were commonly ascribed an "estimative faculty" (vis aestimativa), an inner sense that prudently weighed up intentions and consequences - such as whether the sheep should flee the hungry wolf. But this did not qualify as reason. (Serjeantson 2001: 431)

May help explain the placement of will, volition, judgment, and understanding (as second in a triad) in various philosophical systems.

External speech, said Pierre Chanet, was inseparable from this internal discourse of reason: and if nature had given internal speech to animals, she would also have given them the organs by which to express it. Instead, animals learnt human language merely by imitation. If animals were capable of speaking human words, argued the Marburg Lutheran Christoph Scheibler in his treatise on the soul, it was only "by resemblance." Thus if for Aristotle imitation was the beginning of learning, then in the vast majority of early modern accounts of how animals learnt language, it was the end as well. (Serjeantson 2001: 431)

Christopher Scheibler, too, has already passed through (cf. Asworth 1984: 56; above). The point about imitation, too, has already passed through (cf. Walmsley 1995: 418; above).

Animals, said Anthony Deusingen, were incapable of abstraction: they could not discern the essences of things; they could not use conventional signs; they could not abstract universals from particulars; and they could not form maxims and rules. For the same reason they could not number, since in the Aristotelian tradition numbers could [|] only by formed by the rational soul. (Serjeantson 2001: 431-432)

Significant for my purposes only on the tangential reason that Peirce places the law of number in the third position of the triad, i.e. reason.

Speech enabled these abstract mental conceptions to be communicated by means of the conventional signs that represent them. But in order for true communication to occur, both parties had to possess the conceptions that lay behind the words. As the Jesuit Roderigo de Arriaga emphasized, this was not the case when conversing with parrots. Thus, too, an intention to communicate was also crucial to this understanding of speech; this might be expressed as the "will" behind an utterance. Pierre Chanet argued that when animals do express themselves by their voices (for even he could not deny that they did this), they nonetheless have no intention of doing so. (Serjeantson 2001: 432)

That both parties have to possess the conceptions behind the words very much the point of Locke with his second veiled reference (to the ideas inside other men's minds). That animals do not intend to communicate a very dubious statement.

Most authors raised the question of animal language to address linguistic and semantic questions about human speech; animals provided a convenient (and largely hypothetical) foil against which to define this attribute. Natural historians like Wotton, Gesner, Aldrovandi, and even Willughby might collect accounts of the vocal powers of animals, but no grammarian or logician concerned with understanding the nature of human language took them very seriously. (Serjeantson 2001: 433)

Likewise with Jakobson: "The endeavor to start and sustain communication is typical of talking birds; thus the phatic function of language is the only one they share with human beings." (1960d: 24) - that is the whole extent of it.

The French physician Ambroise Paré was not utterly eccentric in thinking that animals recognized each other by their voices, and even that "they seem to talk and lough among themselves." (Serjeantson 2001: 433)

Are they... laughing behind our backs?

What was it, though, that animals were communicating? What were they expressing by their voices, sounds, and gestures? The universal answer that early modern philosophers gave to this question was: their passions. Animals used their voices to express the passions or "affections" of their souls. (Serjeantson 2001: 434)

This would afford an unkind interpretation of Malinowski, who allowed to his "primitive savages" what early modern philosophers allowed to animals.

They stated that, like humans, animals used different voices to signify different passions. Giralamo Gardano illustrated this with the example of the chicken. (Chickens were a prize exhibit in several discussions of animal expression, no doubt reflecting the intimacy in which many early modern people lived with them.) When a mother hen calls her chicks, said Cardano, she clucks loudly; when she wants them to flee from a bird of prey, she raises and draws out her utterances; when caught, she cries out anxiously and repetitively, like hiccups; when laying eggs, she exults; when leading her chicks she uses a harsher, heavier and more sparing utterance than when she calls them to her; and when roosting she uses a low voice, different again from all the others. (Serjeantson 2001: 434)

When the parrot prince Maurice met "made the Chuck four or five times that People use to make to Chickens when they call them" (Locke 1741a: 285), it must have been this "harsher, heavier and more sparing utterance", this chuck. Notice, that this is also the exception - instead of a passion it expresses a command, as in the regulative function of a call of monkeys (cf. Carpenter 1969: 46).

Thus logicians, like the Dutch writer Gisbrecht van Isendoorn, explained that animal voices do not signify things, only passions. In this, he said, they are like a human laugh, which also signifies a passion rather than an object. Nor, explained the Jesuit Martin Smiglecius, do animal voices signify conceptions or ideas: whereas human utterances are capable of signifying both things and conceptions of things, animal voices do neither. (Serjeantson 2001: 435)

The 17th century scholastic scene wasn't all that large by the looks of it if names repeat so frequently in different papers.

Other writers, however, went so far as to arguet hat because natural signs were universal, this conferred advantages on animals that were denied to humans. One of the strongest statements of this position was made by the anti-Aristotelian Dalmatian philosopher Francesco Patrizi. "One species of cattle," he argued, "without ever changing their lowing, can understand each other throughout the world. Likewise all horses use their own whinnying, lions their roaring, pigs their grunting everywhere in the world. But men, after a small change of place, need to learn to speak a new language." (Serjeantson 2001: 435)

This reminds me of a comparison someone on the internets made between the U.S. and U.K. where you can fly thousands of kilometers across one and all the business outlets are the same, whereis in the other you drive 10 kilometers north, everyone speaks a different accent and the pastries have new names.

Several of these works took their lead from ancient treatises on animal intellignce: Plutarch's Moralia; Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism; and the neo-platonist Porphyry's vegetarian tract On Abstinence. These works areprimarily moral philosophical in nature and purpose, and it was this aspect of them that was picked up by writers like Michel de Montaigne, Montaigne's follower Pierre Charron, and the papal legate Girolamo Rorario in his work entitled That Brute Animals Use Reason Better than Men. (This treatise, written in 1544, lay unpublished for a hundred years until the French érudit Gabriel Naudé printed it in Paris in a philosophical climate much shaped by Charron's and Montaigne's writings.) (Serjeantson 2001: 436)

All of these are extant and accessible. That's the upside of ancient sources used in the early modern era.

The central argument in this tradition of discussing [|] animal language was that just because humans do not understand animals, it does not follow that animals do not converse with one another. Thus Rorario noted that, since animals abount in wit, flourish in memory, and are inflamed by a desire to learn - and especially to imitate our voices - "why do we not believe that they also have something by which they mutually understand each other?" (Serjeantson 2001: 436-437)

This is still a thing. The Boys, a TV show about superheros, had the parody of Aquaman praise the humour and wit of dolphines. A lobster cracks a funny joke just by staring at him.

Fabricius proves this from our perception of other languages: even though we might know that the Syrian, Hebrew, or Persian languages can be written down, they still seem to us to be illiterate and inarticulate. Historians tell us, he continues, that the Italians thought the Huns barked rather than spoke. (Serjeantson 2001: 439)

That's so good. This is indeed the case - if you do not understand the language you won't be able to discriminate words and letters because human speech is fluid (continuous) and may "swallow up" the pauses so clearly signified by spaces in a written text. As to barking, this is an impression my own brief acquaintances with Finns can attest to.

Following the classic Stoic division, Fabricius argues that animals' passions fall into four main kinds: pleasure (voluptas), desire (cupiditas), annoyance (molestia), and fear (metus). These have reference to present and future good, and present and future evil, respectively. (Serjeantson 2001: 440)

Voluptas also the Roman goddess of sensual pleasure, the daughter of Cupid (desire, desire for love; eager, greedy, passionate) and Eros. For a moment there I thought the first might have something to do with volition, as the second is clearly the cupidity in Aristotle (cf. Chase 1863: 469; ff). This paper was excellent.

Arikha, Noga 2005. Deafness, Ideas and the Language of Thought in the Late 1600s. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13(2): 233-262. DOI: 10.1080/09608780500069269

I assume from the outset that positive theories of cognition based on neurological or generally materialist accounts cannot de away with a puzzlement with regard to their relevance in answering the question of how it is that we are what we are - that is, individuals endowed witho consciousness, or with what in early modernity was referred to as the rational soul. The capacity to posit such a problem of consciousness is specific to humans, and to the human mind. Certainly, as the cognitive sciences today acknowledge and study, we are evolved creatures, on a continuum with the rest of the natural world. Tools such as, say, metarepresentational language - thanks to which we are able to devise questions about our nature and origins - belongs to humans alone. Language too is bound to be an evolved functions. But the philosophically and humanistically framed question remains of whether or not a concept of human exceptionality is necessary to the analysis of language. This article analyses a historical configuration of this question. (Arikha 2005: 233)

I'm not sure that that is all that is encompassed by "the rational soul". Are other animals not "individuals endowed with consciousness"? Metarepresentation I take to be the representation of representations, i.e. signs about signs.

This might be because the traditional subject-matter of modern philosophy was formed in the late seventeenth century out of the twin disciplines of metaphysics on the one hand, and of what would eventually be known as epistemology on the other. The first determined to a large extent the realm of physics; the second was initially (arguably until Locke) an aspect of psychology. However, the remit of philosophy today has overcome the foundational separation of metaphysics from natural philosophy, and of epistemology from psychology and the mind sciences. (Arikha 2005: 234)

Hopefully we will get to specific examples, beyond mere impressions.

Holder belonged to a group of linguists at Oxford of whom another prominent member was George Dalgarno (1626-1687), author of the Ars signorum, a project for a universal language, and the Didascalocophus, a didactic treatise aimed at the deaf. (Arikha 2005: 237)

This was mentioned, without George Dalgarno's name attached, in one of the foregoing papers.

The preoccupation with the communicability of language, whether between individuals or between groups and nations, was thus intimately connected with a concern to find a way of reading the 'book of nature' and of communicating its contents in an intelligible way. There was intense disagreement - notably between Paracelsians, members of the Royal College of Physicians and scientific at the Royal Society - over how and whether this 'book' could be opened in the first place, and over what conditions were necessary for the communication of information to be possible. Webster complained in his Academiarum Examen that 'Many do superficially and by way of Analogy (as they term it), acknowledge the Macrocosm to be the great unsealed book of God, and every creature, glory and power'; but no one could 'read the legible characters that are onely written and impressed by the finger of the Almighty'. (Arikha 2005: 238)

The "communicability" of language nicely goes through the dyad, group, and societal levels (missing only the aspect of intrapersonal communication from Ruesch's matrix). How "legible" the characters of the Almighty are is still up to question.

It was through our senses, primarily vision, that we could acquire knowledge of the book of nature - just as language was the key to reading the book of Scripture and, for some, to unlock its secrets. But the relation of our senses to our ability to decipher signs must itself be an object of investigation. Our senses provided the information; yet that information had to be processed by the mind, which somehow bridged the different kinds of information which each sense delivered and unified the different kinds of information which each sense delivered and unified them into one concept, sign, or universal. The chief characteristic of the human mind was, then, its ability to process sense-data and use language, an intricate system of abstract signs inaccessible to animal minds. (Arikha 2005: 241)

The necessity of semiotics or the doctrine of signs for natural philosophy.

Holder accepted that 'Thousands of Signs may be invented and agreed upon, and learnt, and practised' - from bells and trumpet calls to facial expressions, pointing and knocking - which the dumb were good at using and which animals made use of too, 'to Call, Warne, Chide, Cherish, Threaten, &c., especially within their own kinds'. Nevertheless, the human voice and the alphabet were the 'chief' of all signs. Only man was endowed with speech,
as with an Instrument suitable to the Excellency of his Soul, for the most easie, speedy, certain, full communication of the Infinite variety of his Thoughts, by the ready Commerce between the Tongue and the Ear. And if some Animals, as Parrots, Magpies, &c. may seem to be capable of the same discriminations, yet we see, that their souls are too narrow to use so great an Engine.
That animals could not express themselves in the way that humans could was at first an Aristotelian assumption, and it held water despite the contrary assertions made in the sixteenth century by Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Charron (1541-1603). (Arikha 2005: 241)

William Holder must have been whom Serjeantson (2001: 429) meant regarding parrots and magpies. That words are the "'chief' of all signs" also echoed in Locke: "most usual whereof being Words" (Locke 1741b: 339). The "great [...]" Engine" reminds me of the comparison of the referential function of language with the elevator and the phatic with the doorbell.

Indeed, the first paragraph of the first part of the Logique by Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) and Pierre Nicole (1625-1695) established that: 'Since we cannot know anything outside ourselves without the mediation of the ideas within ourselves, thoughts we can have about our ideas might be the most important part of logic, because it is the foundation of everything else.' (Arikha 2005: 243)

A philosophical position that's becoming increasingly evident. Locke and Kant may be said to have systematized this view of perception.

Descartes had staked all on the belief that thought alone could counteract doubt about the veracity of sense-perception, which holding that the senses could only convey information about the way in which objects and their primary as well as secondary qualities were experienced, not about their nature. Locke, on the other hand, believed that objects first affected our senses, causing 'perception in the Mind' and 'thereby produce in the Understanding a simple Idea'. (Arikha 2005: 247)

This looks like a subtle difference but amounts to Locke forming a separate faculty of Understanding, Kant in turn out of Reason.

Girls, said Fénelon, could turn idle if given too much licence in the youth; and with time on their hands they might become the bathetic victims of their own inappropriate curiosity, like the 'précieuses'. Here is how he thought one should attend to the need to teach children - and girls in particular, naturally inclined as they were, he wrote, to focus on their bodies - that 'our soul is more precious than our body', indeed that the two were 'distinct': [...] (Arikha 2005: 250)

A redpilled frenchman.

We shall shortly see how, in Cordemoy's dualist scheme, using language was, in a rather convoluted way, akin to perceiving. As would be the case for Locke, it involved the conceptualization of data; and the relation between word and thing was equivalent to that between idea and thing: to speak, he said, was 'donner des signes de sa pensée'. For both Cordemay and Locke, language was unquestionably a coherent system because, quite simply, it supposed and was built upon a constant correspondence between referent, sign and meaning. (Arikha 2005: 254)

"Referent, sign and meaning" - two out of there are not Locke's terms. Doesn't his "private language" ordeal and all that he says about the use of words contradict "a constant correspondence"?

The parrot analogy made an appearance, as it did in Holder and in Locke, to help make the point that while non-rational creatures such as parrots could emit intelligible, seemingly intelligent sounds - just as mechanical contrivances were capable of doing - they were themselves unable to generate unconditioned linguistic constructs. Words, as Descartes himself had pointed out, were related to passions only in humans. The words of parrots were devoid of content. The sounds they made certainly did not signal the existence of a thinking mind and could just as well be [|] echoes resounding off rocks. It was the mind, not the disposition of organs, that determined the capacity to speak. Neither parrots nor the other beings observed by the sceptic spoke meaningfully, whereas the creator of this thought-experiment clearly did. In other words, one could not take for granted the correspondence between external appearance and internal nature. (Arikha 2005: 255-256)

The parrot's speech is, in other words, like "the mechanical utterances of automata" (Gardiner 1932: 46).

Peaden, Catherine Hobbs 1992. Understanding Differently: Re-Reading Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22(1): 74-90. [JSTOR]

Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding can serve to exemplify these tensions because it articulates values that served as seeds for modern feminism(s) while paradoxically participating in the construction of a discursive system that has been used to oppress women. (Peaden 1992: 74)

Everything is bad and good.

While Locke's texts contain much that has been important to feminism - for example, ideas of non-essentialism, tolerance, an inchoate social constructivism, and less severe child-rearing practices - they formed part of a shift in discursive practice that figuratively and literally subordinated women over the next two centuries. This paper examines, specifically, how Lockean language theory has served as a key component of a rational-empirical way of seeing the world that assumes control of both women and the world. (Peaden 1992: 74)

How can a way of seeing the world assume control of people?

Feminist Susan Bordo, in her examination of Descartes, has described the transition from the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the scientific age as a "drama of parturition," a cultural birth out of an organic female universe and into the masculine modern world of science. (Peaden 1992: 74)

What was that organic female universe? Feodalism? The Romish orthodoxy?

Bordo's narrative interprets the shift to a new discursive pattern of science as a "rebirthing," a "re-imaging" of knowledge and the world as masculine. The masculine is a world of detachment, clarity, and objectivity opposed to the feminine world of connection between knower and known, mabiguity, and empathy. (Peaden 1992: 76)

In these positive terms the feminist paints women as dependent, muddle-minded, and emotionally overloaded. What is the benefit of these absolute bifurcations? Are there no detached, clear, and objective women?

Echoing Bordo's sympathy for a more "feminized" world-view, Reiss characterizes medieval discursive activities as a search for resemblances between this world and the divine, an accumulation of patterns, an effort to listen to and comprehend what the world has to say. (Peaden 1992: 76)

The medieval worldview, according to which that which is not in the bible does not exist.

Nevertheless, most ideas in the final analysis point back to things. This leads Locke to direct the full force of his language theory to constructing a logic, one designed to determine with the greatest certainty the "things" of a reality external to the knower, ultimately to master it. In his attempts to control language, he sets up anew the old quarrel of rhetoric and philosophy, but with a difference: Rhetoric is explicitly personified as a seductive woman banished from the masculine arena of pure logic. (Peaden 1992: 77)

Simple ideas point back to things; mixed modes and complex ideas don't. I see that this author has attended the Paul de Man school of misreading Locke. How Locke's figurative statement about rhetoric has been misunderstood could ironically make for a good case a figurative language.

As is familiar knowledge, the Essay takes as its approach the "Historical, plain method" of Boyle and Newton and its scope ranges from Locke's first book denying innate ideas, through an argument in Book II that all knowledge derives from experience, to a discussion in Book IV of knowledge as mental operations performed upon ideas. Throughout these books, but particularly in Book III "Of Words," we find Locke's thoughts on language.
The very placement of Locke's linguistic theories is a clear signal that language is secondary to other considerations in the work. (Peaden 1992: 77)

So, on the one hand he discusses language throughout the book when the need arises, yet he dedicates a whole book to it only in third order, hence it must not have been very important to him. Ambiguity.

For although Locke admits that language may construct thought, language remains a "reflection of its ideational base" (Land 32). This ideational base rests on the theory that [|] words are signs for ideas, not for things, and thus all humans can ever know are their own ideas of things, not the "real essences" of the things themselves. (Peaden 1992: 77-78)

Sounds about as cogent as Stephen Hicks' take on Kant being the first postmodernist.

Locke's ideational theory of language concerns itself primarily with words and their meanings to individuals rather than signs participating in a shared system. As such it is more precisely semantic rather than semiotic. (Peaden 1992: 78)

Yeap, de Man is in the bibliography. Just like de Man, Peaden ignores the "common use" aspect and the second veiled reference (to ideas in other men's minds). This "semantic rather than semiotic" could just as well be a direct quote from de Man, leaving "semantic" and "semiotic" likewise undefined.

Since words are secondary to ideas in Locke's philosophy of language, sunig words, as he warns "like a parrot," without these mysterious internal ideas, results in an abuse of words and a breakdown in the system of [|] conveyance of ideas from private individual to private individual. This theory contradicts his opening proclamation of the sociality of language. An example of semantic idealism, it focuses exclusively on the speaker without regard to the dialogic nature of speech events and the fact that hearers may make sense of an utterance whether or not the speaker has her ideas "clearly and distinctly" in mind. Language doesn't condition thought here, but ideas in the speaker's head alone determine meaning. (Peaden 1992: 78-79)

"He that hath new Notions, will, perhaps, venture sometimes on the coining new Terms to express them: But Men think it a Boldness, and 'tis uncertain, whether common Use will ever made them pass for current." (Locke 1741b: 71) - that's how little is necessary to refute this nonsense.

Vivian Salmon traces the seventeenth-century use of the idea of simple notions to a French logic text by Pierre du Moulin, who wrote that there are as many simple notions as there are things in the world. These simple natures combine to produce all the other materials of the world. This use, from primitive atomic theories held since the Greeks, flourished in the natural and moral philosophy as well as in rhetoric, where topics were likened to the "simple natures" or alphabet of rhetoric, as in Vico, for example. Bacon used the simple natures or alphabet metaphor again in a scientific context, as did Gassendi, Descartes, and Boyle. This tendency to atomize and separate pervades Locke's work, influencing his view of the subject as first a single unit like an atom only secondarily joined in a social contract. (Peaden 1992: 78; footnote 4)

Actually interesting. The logic text by Pierre du Moulin not mentioned on Wikipedia. Salmon, vivian 1972. The Works of Francis Lodwick: A Study of His Writnigs in the Context of the Seventeenth Century. London: Longman.

In Book III, in discussing the imperfection of words, Locke divides language into philosophical and civil uses (along the same lines as the traditional divisions of philosophy and rhetoric), with civil use allowed "a good deal less exactness" (476; III.9.3). (Peaden 1992: 79)

Extremely dubious. Does rhetoric serve "the upholding common Conversation and Commerce about the ordinary Affairs and Conveniences of Civil Life" (Locke 1741b: 76)?

Yet almost immediately he dismisses civil language and holds up philosophy as the model for all discourse. Clear communication with maximum certainty becomes the goal of knowledge, and rhetoric has no part to play in discovering or constructing knowledge. (Peaden 1992: 79)

So when he writes that "the Market and Exchange must be left to their own ways of Talking, and Gossipings not to be robbed of their antient Privilege" (Locke 1741b: 107) he's lying?

He goes on to differentiate between degrees of knowledge, the greatest being intuitive knowledge (immediate, certain cognition of the relations of ideas) and, second, demonstrative knowledge, or (intervening chains of proof resting on intuitive knowledge). A third degree of knowledge, sensitive knowledge, represents unprovable belief or faith in the real existence of other beings and an external world (530-538; IV.2). (Peaden 1992: 79)

"As to the fourth sort of our Knowledge, viz. of the real actual Existence of Things, we have an intuitive Knowledge of our own Existence; a demonstrative Knowledge of the Existence of a God; of the Existence of any thing else, we have no other but a sensitive Knowledge, which extends not beyond the Objects present to our Senses." (Locke 1741b: 177) - In other words, intuitive knowledge is apperceptive (knowledge that I exist), demonstrative knowledge is knowledge that God exists (that I exist is sufficient proof, for Locke, that God exists), and everything else - knowledge of the world - is sensitive knowledge because it proceeds from Sensation (perception).

Locke is so impressed with the value of this mathematical thought process he even wishes to extend its certainty to civic language, previously the realm of probability, arguing "That Morality is capable of demonstration, as well as Mathematicks" (643; IV.12.8). Again, a more certain philosophical discourse becomes the model for all discourse, completely displacing the contingencies of civil discourse, or rhetoric. (Peaden 1992: 79)

What is civic language? Locke is talking about "moral Words" that represent complex ideas and don't have the same signification for everyone, nor a constant signification for anyone individually. Peaden seems to thing that searching for certainty is moral language, to attempt to define words like "justice", "glory", etc. erases all other types of discourse, somehow.

Nonetheless, despite Locke's continued attempts to deny rhetoric a central place in his Essay, he thinks so well and so thoroughly that he often defeats his own ends. Inconsistent as are we all, he continues to dream of a common language that could serve as a transparent window of simple ideas opening onto things. Meanwhile, his own text repeatedly denies the possibility, and rhetoric, the repressed, keeps returning. (Peaden 1992: 80)

Peaden must be reading Locke against him, in the manner of de Man, that is, imposing one's own nonsense over a text without recourse to what the text is saying. Locke mentioned rhetoric once, and all of a sudden it's the central thing in his essay about innate ideas, experience, language, and knowledge.

Locke's purified philosophical language is first undermined by his category of relation, in which words such as "mother" only mean what they do by virtue of their relations with other words such as "father" and "daughter". This introduces a semiotic system as co-producer of meaning rather than the individual speaker's idea or intention of meaning alone. (Peaden 1992: 80)

How does treating of words that imply relations between simple ideas undermine his philosophical language? What is "a semiotic system" in this context? "Meaning", once again, not Locke's term.

Mixed modes are abstract terms which form our ideas of such concepts as beauty, gratitude, or theft. Locke says these are nothing but bundles of simple ideas tied together by words used as a "Knot" (417-419; III.3.17-19). He tries to keep these mixed modes "pure" in his atomistic scheme by presupposing the existence of separate simple ideas first experienced in the world and subsequently tied together by a Name:
For the connection between the loose parts of those complex Ideas, being made by the Mind, this union, which has no praticular foundation in Nature, would cease again, were there not something that did, as it were, hold it together, and keep the parts from scattering. Though therefore it be the Mind that makes the Collection, 'tis the Name which is, as it were the Knot, that ties them fast together. (434; III.5.10)
Locke is hesitant to ascribe too much power to this "knot." And no wonder, for this category of mixed modes actually introduces language as central to the knowledge process. As Bennington points out "it is clear that the length of time the bundle of ideas could be held together by the mind without the securing knot of language is unthinkably small" (114). Locke himself notes that when words have already been invented, it is more usual that people learn them without having the requisite sensations and reflections, for they learn them from other people. In making this point, he opens up the possibility of their having been originally framed socially, without any prior sensations and reflections. In effect, the name has become not something simply added on to a bundle of ideas, but something necessary to the making of that idea, a process of social construction. Thus the mixed modes disrupt Locke's atomized, individual knowing subject, the origin of empirical knowledge, introducing to his language theory the social and the centrifugal. (Peaden 1992: 80)

Peaden sure showed her straw-man-Locke what's what! This "atomized, individual knowing subject" is not in Locke's text, and as I've shown above with regard to "common use" and the second veiled reference, he never closed the possibility that words are framed socially; in fact he often chastizes people who use words because they've heard them from others, without themselves knowing what ideas they signify. As to the Knot thing, that I like, but this Bennington quote clearly generalizes what Locke says about mixed modes to apply on language in total. Simple ideas don't need to be held together like that, because they stand for things that we can point to. What is "red" - the color of that ladybug, there. What is "glory" - uhh...

In the Essay, the construction of a devalorized feminine is manifested primarily by Locke's effort to control language, specifically, to exclude a devalorized (and feminized) Rhetoric from Philosophy as well as to exclude the figural from literal philosophical language. As we have seen, this effort to exclude the social from human understanding, another way of purifying Rhetoric from Philosophy, is an exclusion which ultimately fails. (Peaden 1992: 81)

Again, the quote was "Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against" (Locke 1741b: 106). Evidently, the fair sex will not suffer even not to be spoken against, for the mere mention of the fair sex will be taken as being spoken against, and suddenly you are responsible for two centuries of oppression. Excluding "the social" from human understanding is complete nonsense. The "Business" of words is "conveying its Knowledge to others" (Locke 1741b: 339).

Influenced by Descartes, Locke intensifies the Baconian negativity toward rhetoric. He does so primarily by positing a "bad" feminine rhetoric in opposition to a "good" masculine scientific discourse. Since classical times, rhetoric has been figured as feminine, but the figure was more often held up for adulation - as is the allegorical warrior figure or Rhetorica in Martianus Capella's work - than discredited. (Peaden 1992: 81)

Define:rhetoric - "language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect, but which is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content". If you say this is feminine...

Despite his playfulness, attention to his abuses in concert with his feminine gendering of rhetoric shows not only the masculine gendering of philosophy, but also the boundaries he attempts to set for philosophy. These boundaries, attempting to exclude rhetoric and figurality, aim to create a closed, masculine space for philosophy apart from the deceitful feminine rhetoric. (Peaden 1992: 82)

Keep in mind that the totality this "gendering of rhetoric" consists of a passing remark saying that "Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against". Conflating the rhetoric/philosophy distinction with feminine/masculine is something you have to really read into it, against Locke's text.

Secondly, this textual moment links rhetoric, pleasure, and desire, emphasizing the human desire for rhetoric because "Men take pleasure in being Deceived." (Peaden 1992: 83)

Peaden might be reading "Men" as "men", not "humans".

And finally, although an ironic passage, it highlights Locke's quest for control and mastery, logically associating language with women. It does this by it extending the metaphor "Language is a woman" syllogistically from the axiom "Women must be controlled" to its final logical conclusion "Language must be controlled." This move has been well described by Julia Penelope, [|] who explores in the history of grammar and language study the linked efforts to control both women and language.
It would perhaps be easier to take this passage less seriously if it did not form part of a textual enchainment of terms and images devaluing women or subsuming woman in man. Images of women in the text are relatively rare, but when they appear they are almost always negative and ultimately women disappear. (Peaden 1992: 83-84)

Ah, when Locke is talking about language, he's actually talking about women. Logically. In my notes I found only one token of "women": "the Souls of excellent Men and Women ascended into Heaven" (Locke 1741b: 162) - HOW DARE HE!

Feminist rhetoricians would do well to increase their interrogations of - their "non-innocent" conversations with - such traditional "canonical" texts as Locke's Essay, reading them alongside the many still unknown texts by women in our history who have previously interrogated or conversing with them. Such a practice can be central to the production of a new "understanding." (Peaden 1992: 89)

Yeah, not a single word in here about Catharine Cockburn.

Pritchard, Timothy 2013. Locke and the Primary Signification of Words: An Approach to Word Meaning. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21(3): 486-506. DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2013.771611

Locke's claim that the primary signification of (most) words is an idea, or complex of ideas, has received different interpretations. Most theorists argue that by primary signification Locke has in mind '(linguistic) meaning' (Alston, Philosophy of Language; Kretzmann, 'The Main Thesis of Locke's Semantic Theory'; Losonsky, 'Locke on Meaning and Signification'; 'Language, Meaning, and Mind'; Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding). Some though have denied this. Ashworth ('Do Words Signify Ideas or Things?'; 'Locke on Language') argues that signification relates, not to meaning, but to 'making something known'. Ott (Locke's Philosophy of Language, 24) argues that the sign/signification relation is a matter of a sign being an 'indicator' of (evidence for) what is signified. Against these latter theorists, I argue that something like linguistic meaning is almost certainly correct. (Pritchard 2013: 486)

Very minute question, this.

Second, the account appears to make Locke guilty of at least some degree of semantic idealism, in which a word is taken to refer not only to things in the world but also to the ideas that a word signifies. Hence, when we say 'The sun is the cause of the day' we are, in part, talking about our idea of the sun and our idea of a day. (Pritchard 2013: 487)

I think all of these accounts unduly reduce Locke's "signs" to "words". Both words and ideas are signs, accordinc to Locke (cf. Locke 1741b: 195).

Locke states that the proper/primary/immediate signification of a word is the idea (or ideas) that the word stands for (III.ii.1, 2-4, 7; III.iv.1-2). Locke often omits the qualifiers and makes the same point in terms simply of the signification of a word. (Pritchard 2013: 487)

"Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them" (Locke 1741b: 4). "The use then of Words, is to be sensible Marks of Ideas; and the Ideas they stand for, are their proper and immediate Signification" (Locke 1741b: 4).

Locke emphasizes that if a word does not stand for any idea that word is merely an empty sound. Words that belong to no idea 'would be perfectly insignificant Sounds' (III.i.4), 'bare Sounds, and nothing else' (III.x.26). The idea of word stands for is what is needed to make the difference between merely 'articulate Sounds', which even parrots can make, and a word of a language (III.i.1-2). This corresponds to the intuition that it is when we have learnt the meaning of a word that the word becomes more for us than just a sound. (Pritchard 2013: 487)

And we should take it for granted that parrots have no ideas.

Ott illustrates from Hobbes what he means by an indicator. Hobbes states that things are 'signs' when they are regularly observed either to follow something or to go before something. A thick cloud is a sign of rain to follow; rain is a sign of at hick cloud that went before. As well as these natural relations, signs can be set up arbitrarily. Hobbes writes:
[A] bush hung up, signifies that wine is to be sold there; a stone set in the ground signifies the bound of a field; and words so and so connected, signify the cogitations and motions of our mind. (Hobbes, 'De Corpore', I.ii.2. 1839, 14f.)
From this perspective, what is signified is that which is indicated, that for which evidence is given (Ott, Locke's Philosophy of Language, 24). (Pritchard 2013: 489)

This sounds a bit like Peirce's initial definition of the sign, i.e. "Veracity consists in a constant connection between the sign and the thing; for if the sign sometimes goes without the thing, then it may speak falsely, and if the thing goes without the sign, it may be belied in negative cases" (W 1: 80).

I doubt Ott's position can be maintained. His notion of an indicator seems to presuppose reliability (made explicit, Locke's Philosophy of Language, 31f.): for x to indicate y, x must reliably correlate with y. But the reliable indication of such-and-such, in the context of a consideration of conventional signs, is most naturally taken as relating to how the conventional signs are used. If a community reliably uses a bush as a sign of a wine shop (and does not use it as a sign for other shops), a bush outside a shop will be an indicator of, in the sense of reliable evidence for, a wine shop. Signs can be unreliably used. (Pritchard 2013: 490)

Perhaps "words" aren't the ideal type of signs? Convention, in this sense, is already thirdness, while signs belong to secondness. The trouble stems from mixing linguistic (words) and non-linguistic signs (bushes, clouds).

Ashworth suggests we should read Locke in the context of this debate. Some argued that what we primarily pick up on, when we hear words, are statements about how the world is, and that it is only via those statements that we come to learn (if we do) of what the speaker is thinking. Others, such as the logician Burgersdijck, held that utterances primarily signify concepts, not things, and Ashworth ('Do Words Signify Ideas or Things?', 325) claims that Locke 'obviously followed' this second approach. (Pritchard 2013: 491)

Ashworth's interpretation is validated by the order of references Locke himself gives, i.e. ideas in our own minds, ideas in the minds of others, and only thirdly things in the world.

Locke describes the remembered ideas (which capture particular features from our perceptual experience) as providing us with 'patterns' that can be used for sorting things into types. Locke speaks of things as being found to 'agree' with (or as 'conforming' to) these patterns (II.xi.9; III.iii.6, 8, 13, 15, 18; III.vi.1, 7, 30, 36, 39). That is to say, having memorized a shape (or colour or texture, or whatever), on perceiving an object we can decide whether or not the object has that shape or colour or texture. When an object agrees with an idea the object can be named by the word (if there is one) that is annexed to the remembered idea (II.xi.9; III.iii.12-13, 15; III.vi.1; IV.vi.4). The picture suggested by this is that the memory of an idea or complex of ideas, which provides us with a kind of pattern, is a memory that is ultimately based on some repeatable configuration that arises in our experience. (Pritchard 2013: 493)

This discussion, I believe, would be more profitably conducted with regard to complex ideas, i.e. philosophical terms, the meaning of which is so often nebulous or even, as Locke pointed out, misapplied.

The main sense in which Locke uses 'refer' falls under the broad paraphrase given by the OED as: to relate one thing to another. Several different nuances of meaning (not always easily separable) fall under this general paraphrase. One of these nuances is 'to trace (back), assign, attribute, impute (something) to a person or thing as the ultimate cause or source' (OED). This seems particularly applicable to Locke's discussion of mixed modes, where he writes that apart from 'Men's voluntary Combination' we 'have nothing else to refer these our Ideas of mixed Modes to as a Standard' (II.xxxiii.12; see also II.xxxi.1, 3; III.v.6; III.v.12; III.v.14; III.xi.17; IV.iv.5). Miked modes are combinations of ideas that the mind has arbitrarily put together 'without reference to any Archetypes' (III.xi.15), 'without Patterns, or reference to any real Existence' (III.v.3). In these passages, Locke is describing the lack of relatedness that mixed modes have to any archetype; that which we 'refer' our ideas of mixed modes to - that which we trace them back to - consists of our own voluntary combinations of ideas, these being the source of the complex idea. By contrast, 'Our complex Ideas of Substnaces, [are] [...] referred to Patterns in Things themselves' (II.xxxii.18; cf. III.ix.20; IV.iv.11). That is to say, our ideas of substances are put together on the basis of how we experience things to be (and so are subject to modification as we learn more about things, III.vi.29-30). (Pritchard 2013: 497)

A valuable distinction between mixed modes and complex ideas. Thus far simple ideas, mixed modes, and complex ideas more-or-less correspond to firstness, secondness and thirdness.

This possibility is strengthened by looking, second, at a notable asymmetry in Locke's use of terminology for the word-idea and word-thing relations. It is true that Locke can use 'signify' and 'stand for' for the word-thing relation, but simply listing these texts obscures the huge disparity in the frequency of his use of these terms for the word-thing relation in comparison with the word-idea relation. His use is overwhelmingly weighted to the word-idea relation. In Book III, there are over 350 uses of [|] these terms (or cognates) for the word-idea relation, but merely a handful of texts for the word-thing relation (and sometimes these are uncertain). Locke's interest in 'signification' relates almost entirely to what it is that mkes words significant (rather than being empty sounds) and his answer to this starts with the relation between a word and an idea. (Pritchard 2013: 501-502)

The cool thing about such an old and influential text is that people have taken the care to count such instances.

There are about sixty occurrences of 'denominate' in the Essay - e.g. taking other people's property is denominated stealing (II.xxviii.16), the parcel of matter on my finger is denominated gold (II.xxxi.7) - and in almost every case it is only the item that a word refers to (in the standard sense) that receives denominations. A word such as 'gold' is used to denominate not its primary signification but the thing that agrees with the primary signification (cf. II.xi.9; II.xxxi.3). As far as I can tell there are only three places where 'denominate'/'denomination' is used for the word-idea relation. (Pritchard 2013: 502)

Define:denominate - "to give a name to: designate". Locke's use of the word "Name" appears quite loaded.

Dawson, Hannah 2005. Locke on Language in (Civil) Society. History of Political Thought 26(3): 397-425. [JSTOR]

In Book III of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke lays out a rich philosophy of language. While philosophers have poured over this particular book, evaluating the truth and integrity of its arguments and examining their place in Locke's theory of knowledge, historians of his political thought have largely ignored it. (Dawson 2005: 397)

So rich, in fact, that it appears to be very difficult to pin down.

This is strange, given that language is the means of human interaction; more particularly, in some important and irreducible ways, language is the essential mechanism by which political society, as Locke understands it, is both created and sustained. (Dawson 2005: 398)

Expressed on the very first page of Book III: God created Man "also with Language, which was to be the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society" (Locke 1741b: 1).

I should begin by emphasizing that the kind of words I examine in this article concern culture, not nature. To put it more technically, I consider the names of what Locke calls 'mixed modes' and 'relations' (although he tends to subsume relations under the category of mixed modes, and I shall do so here). These are entities that, if they exist in nature at all, do not do so in any permanent way, such as 'truth', 'heresy', 'right', 'love' and 'vice'. They are made up by men and have no fixed referents in the external world. The names of mixed modes therefore form the vocabulary of the social sphere and, unfortunately, they are peculiarly affected by the three features of language that I discuss. (Dawson 2005: 398)

Culture/nature distinction perhaps not perfectly suitable with Locke's philosophy. That the names of mixed modes concern "the vocabulary of the social sphere" is on point.

In the first place, Locke fears that words effectively dominate ideas - or meanings. While he accepts without question the long-established view that thought is theoretically prior to language, he argues that in practice language has a sovereign place over ideas in cognition as well as in communication. This linguistic regime especially affects mixed modes because they have no objective standard to keep them real, as we might say. Their names, being the only firmly public things about them, have carte blanche. Unable to see beyond description, we are locked in a vicious circle of words. (Dawson 2005: 399)

This applies on mixed modes and complex ideas only, no-one can easily invent new simple ideas, nor is the use of the words of mixed modes a carte blanche when they are determined by common use.

The third aspect of Locke's linguistic theory that has strong political resonance seems to destabilize the civil edifice at an even deeper level. I shall call this aspect semantic instability: the view that the meanings of words are unstable, that different people mean different things by the same words. This view calls into question the very existence of the compact that affixes certain words to certain ideas. It suggests that there is not even an agreement to be broken, thereby unpicking yet further the social fabric. (Dawson 2005: 399)

Locke discusses this, writing something along the lines that someone who uses words unsteadily, meaning one thing at one time and something else at another, will be treated as courteously as the businessman who places arbitrary prices on his produce. That is, there will be social consequences to people who veer towards "unsteadiness".

Unlike names of sensations and substances, such as 'blue' and 'tree', which can be somewhat verified and checked by the objective world, purely conceptual talk has nothing to tie it down. Mixed modes, those ideas that mediate society, are peculiarly dependent on words for their communication, and therefore have a peculiar form of generative power. (Dawson 2005: 401)

Not "nothing" per se. The way we use "true", "love", "liberty", "obligation", etc. is checked by how other people use these words. While our meanings can diverge, they are seldom completely opposed. And if they are, this becomes an interesting thing to be brought out in itself, as with "conservative" implies complete lack of government in the U.S. and totalitarian control by the state in Russia. See, for example, how often the use of "left" and "right" political leanins are lamented for their varied meanings, or how much stock is put into "democratic socialim" vs" social democracy".

'From our cradles', writes Locke, 'we come to learn certain articulate sounds very perfectly, and have them readily on our tongues, and always at hand in our memories', so that 'not only children, but men' turn out 'no otherwise than parrots do'. It is due to the pre-eminence of words in thought as well as in conversation that Locke feels impelled to add Book III to the Essay. (Dawson 2005: 401)

People do enjoy the parrot trope.

Rather than enforcing toleration, creative words in fact usher in persecution and enthusiasm. The theoretical chains on speech are broken by the unfettered power of words to say anything they like. Words give the lie to their ideational limits. They enable and encourage speakers to outstretch their knowledge. (Dawson 2005: 402)

I'm pretty sure that this reading of Locke's theory of language is not justified.

Language is in two senses a compact. The first is what I shall call the semantic compact. This is the agreement and the obligation between men to make certain sounds stand for certain ideas, or meanings. With the exception of an albeit enthusiastic minority of thinkers, the great majority of early modern philosophers subscribed to this conventionalist thesis. In the Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon, for example, explains that [|] words are connected to cogitations 'ad placitum, having force only by contract'. Locke agrees. Words are made signs of ideas 'not by any natural connexion, that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas [...] but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an 'idea'. While language began through acts of individual linguistic legislation, people like Adam affixing words to ideas as they pleased, these word-idea connections were cemented by the 'tacit consent' of the community, in a process almost as unimaginable as it had been imperceptible. Once established, 'common use' deprives people of their original 'liberty' to make (now familiar) sounds stand for whatever ideas they please. They are bound in a loose form of reciprocal obligation to use words as' the rule of propriety' dictates. While the semantic compact does not have the force of a legal contract, Locke evokes its normative power when, drawing on a venerable metaphorical tradition, he compares words to money in an effort to explain how speakers are obliged to obey the law of propriety. (Dawson 2005: 403-404)

Then why write, a few pages earlier, about "the unfettered power of words to say anything they like" as if this was really the case.

With regard to mixed modes, however, the semantic compact is extremely fragile. It is easily broken because all that exists, in a permanent, public sense, are the words. While the natural world sets a limit on credulity, there is no such pressure on cultural discourse. Largely a matter of ideational-linguistic construction, mixed modes have no third party to regulate them. Categorical statements can be made about 'right' and 'wrong', 'murder' and 'self-defence', for example, without check. Without an objective block to the audience's gullibility, speakers can easily get away with 'improper' speech. (Dawson 2005: 405)

It is interesting that whereas Locke's mixed modes are ideally "moral words", Dawson replaces this with "cultural discourse", whatever that is.

The most extreme instance of the disruption of the semantic compact is the art of rhetoric, which by the end of the seventeenth century had arguably been [|] whittled down to the techniques of elocutio - the figures and the tropes. This is certainly how Locke sees it, summing up the art as 'figurative speeches'. The orator professionally breaks the semantic compacts. He takes a word, removes it from its 'proper' meaning and applies it to another. (Dawson 2005: 405-406)

This is very well put. The first (de Man) and sixth (Peaden) papers in this post, advancing rhetoric, have done exactly that - taken Locke's figural analogy between Eloquence and the fair sex, and written complete nonsense on the basis of their intentional misunderstanding.

As Thomas Hobbes puts it baldly in Leviathan (1651), metaphors, queens among tropes, 'openly professe deceipt'. This brazen severance of the semantic compact had long incited attack. Michel de Montaigne accuses rhetoricians of 'bastardizing and corrupting things in their very essence'. Thomas Sprat calls rhetoric 'this beautiful deceit'. Locke rounds on the ornaments of eloquence, renaming them 'the arts of fallacy', which must be shunned if 'we would speak of things as they are'. (Dawson 2005: 406)

Ah, but now - per Peaden - you are advocating for violence against women!

Locke's wrath is presumably aimed here, at least in part, at the two connected groups he hated most in the 1680s: Filmerian absolutists and Anglican clergy, and their unholy alliance which instituted a terrifying blend of tyranny and persecution. These courtly and clerical hermeneuts spin out of their seminal texts - 'the laws of God and man' - so-called 'truths' that enslave the people, such as that kings and priests have unfettered power by divine right. They use the name of the 'law' to legitimate the confiscation of dissenters' property, thereby obliterating the entire rationale of the law - which is to protect people's property. The breach of the semantic compact itself therefore has deeply uncivil consequences. (Dawson 2005: 408)

This is the kind of historical context I'm most in search of. Somehow I've already visited before the Wikipedia page for Robert Filmer.

There is a second compact on which language relies. I shall call this the moral compact. It is the protocol that we speak ingenuously. It informally binds us to tell the truth. One of Locke's strongest influences, Samuel Pufendorf, explicitly articulates the morally contractual nature of language, the speaker's obligation to speak their mind and the hearer's right to know it, and the imperspicuous nature of language that both necessitates and potentially destabilizes this communicative predicament. He elaborates on the 'pact between us', whereby 'although signs do not inform us of the minds of others by an infallible, but only by a probable certainty, men being naturally capable of dissimulation and disguise; yet that which any person hath express'd by these signs shall be presumed to be his serious purpose'. While Locke does not spell out the reciprocal obligation that members of a speech community are under to tell the truth, the faith-based nature of this element of communication is clear. Given that words are naturally opaque, we can only trust that speakers mean what they say. (Dawson 2005: 408)

And it gets better. Samuel von Pufendorf. His Of the Law of Nature and Nations is available in the Internet Archive, and the PDF is only 1024 pages, the text in two columns and 6 point fornt size.

Referring perhaps to the treason trials that Charles rigged to convict Whig activists, or to the expropriation of estates, Locke explains how governments conceal their injustice with a verbal masquerade. Peeling it off, he insists that violence and injury 'is still violence and injury, however colour'd with the name, pretences, or forms of law'. (Dawson 2005: 409)

Some things never change. We see this today in the U.S., where peaceful protest are reported as "violent riots" because riot police turns up with violence.

The absolute necessity that Locke attributes to trustworthiness comes out sharply in his blunt refusal to tolerate atheists. His reason for this piece of intolerance is as follows: 'promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of humane society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, tho but even in thought, dissolves all'. Without our relationship with God to ground both our knowledge of and our obligation to the natural law, and without the heady inducements of hope and fear of heaven and hell, Locke cannot see how we could be brought to honour our word - a disposition which, in itself, is 'necessary to the preservation of civil society'. (Dawson 2005: 412)

There is an argument to be made about the honesty of atheists - they, unlike the religious, do not have to pretend to themselves that they have absolute unwaivering faith in something essentially dubious. Not having to habitually lie to themselves, they are less prone to lie to others. The life of a religious person on the other hand is one of perpetual self-deceit.

This belief that language expresses the contents of the mind was embedded in the trivium, the three arts of language which still formed the bedrock of gentle education in seventeenth-century England. In his Certaine grammar questions for the exercise of young Schollers (1590), John Stockwood explains that 'speech [...] is a pronouncing of words together, wherein every man and woman speaking to each other, use to utter their myndes'. Locke simply repeats the claim. 'The use then of words', he declares, 'is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for, are their proper and immediate signification'. (Dawson 2005: 414)

It is too bad that books like this aren't (yet) available in the Internet Archive.

However, while philosophers and pedagogues had tended to generalize 'the mind', Locke probed the point that if language reflects the mind, it must reflect the mind of someone. He and his contemporaries must be committed to a belief in semantic individualism, whereby the meaning of words is determined by their particular users. When Locke feeds this truism through his particular account of the mind, it has some disturbing ramifications for communication. For various reasons that I shall elaborate, the minds of Lockean individuals differ from each other. Therefore, the same words will ineluctably signify different ideas for different speakers. Just as one person's mental landscape differs from another's so, by definition, will the meanings of their words. (Dawson 2005: 414)

For this very reason Locke's theory of language is ideally suited to discuss the throwth of signs, in which one of the most important points is that a new word is created by someone (a particular individual) and then gains currency. Not only do individuals create words but sometimes they give them a renewed dominant meaning.

Our moral partiality is compounded by Locke's account of how our personal histories inscribe themselves on the blank slates of our minds. In Of the Conduct of the Understanding he sketches various narrowing viewpoints engendered by our environments. The 'day labourer' and the 'country gentleman' are both victims of their circumstances, whether these be 'poor conversation' or 'claret'. (Dawson 2005: 419)

It looks like there might be something for me in the Conduct of Understanding. It's a rather short read as well.

When things could not look much worse for the univocity of words, Locke takes a final step into the mire. Meanings do not only differ from person to person, but in the same person from moment to moment. This depiction of semantic fluidity within the same person coincides with Locke's deconstruction of personal identity. One's identity consists only in the memory and consciousness of one's continuing self. Given the fluctuating and forgetful character of the mind, one's self is a patchy entity, and one's speech will suffer accordingly. Locke depicts the great throng of ideas that rushes at us as fading and disappearing, 'leaving no more footsteps or remaining characters of themselves, than shadows do flying over fields of corn; and the mind is as void of them, as if they never had been there'. (Dawson 2005: 419)

Also why Locke Essay is the place to start an investigation into Peirce's views of the self. As in the many instances (in Collected Papers) where he uses the words "future self", taking it for granted that the self has this unavoidable fluidity.

The first is the natural, God-given sociability of man. Unconcerned to communicate with each other, people seem indisposed to be the sociable creatures that God intended. Language is the evidence as well as the means of God's plan for our peaceful and productive union. He gave men the capacity to speak so that they could help one another. (Dawson 2005: 420)

Unlike other primates we humans are sociable.

The final foundation of Locke's civil society that looks set to be ruined by semantic instability is the most deep-seated of the three. It is, in effect, what we might call 'culture'. It is nothing other than that great raft of mixed modes, those ideas that do not refer to things in the world, but are made up by men, such as 'goodness', 'love', 'king' and 'concubine'. Mixed modes constitute the entire representational system that makes sense of our lives. We are already familiar with Locke's individualistic account of the creation of mixed modes. However, he directly contradicts this with a separate, holistic account. He declares, apparently unaware of the inconsistency, that mixed modes are made by and for the community. Unfortunately, this collectivist story, that gives a robust representation of culture, is completely dependent on the semantic consensus that its author simultaneously ravages. Semantic instability snuffs out the symbolic vista that originates our existence. (Dawson 2005: 422)

This narrow linguistic conception of culture must be put to the test, and I hope that subsequent readings about Locke will clarify the whole "mixed modes" ordeal. It certainly seems to be one of the most interesting parts of his theory, what with nearly every paper about him mentioning it.

Lockean man tends to be a thin-skinned egoist. He is fiercely self-interested, but his self-interest has as one of its overriding goals the approbation of others. His gaze fixated on the evaluation of his community and his mind filled with its cultural discourse, his very self cannot be understood outside that community. His private mental landscape is cultivated by his society through language. Given that public censure 'is a burden too heavy for humane sufferance', individuals are desperate to know and loudly to voice the community's normative framework that is embodied in mixed modes. The values of the group, that its members so fervently follow, are only manifest in the public, palpable language that passes between them, and it is therefore on these words which everyone hangs. (Dawson 2005: 423)

Only now do I realize that Locke also anticipated the looking glass self. On another note, I recently thought about Campanella's "The City of the Sun" and how "Solarians pity death convicts, and talk to them until they accept or even desire the capital sentence" (Iovan 2011: 72). Humans do appear to be that susceptible to the influence of their peers, yet why couldn't this very same mechanism be used for criminal rehabilitation? If you can talk someone into desiring the capital sentence, couldn't you just as easily talk them into improving their behaviour?

Aarsleff, Hans 1964. Leibniz on Locke on Language. American Philosophical Quarterly 1(3): 165-188. [JSTOR]

Thus their disagreement can be defined within the history of the lively seventeenth-century debate about words and things, language and mind, and ultimately language and knowledge. Or, put differently: If the object of man's study is Nature, as to the Royal Society it certainly was, does language somehow find its place within Nature or does it exist only for man's convenience and entirely apart from Nature? If the former is the case, then one may expect that words can be made to yield some - and perhaps much - knowledge of reality; if the latter, none; and in either case, language may perhaps reveal something about the mind. (Aarsleff 1964: 165)

Why does it have to be one or the other? Can't language be an amalgamation of nature and human invention? And by amalgamation, I do mean that human invention is coated over what is otherwise natural.

The Essay was literally epoch-making, and such works never fail to efface their own past; in fact, one can almost say that the Essay has no other history than that which was its own future, as if Locke merely wrote to give Berkeley and Hume something to write about. Unlike Locke, Leibniz often named his sources and gave citations, which may help to identify the Essay, elusive background; and Leibniz' vast correspondence offes a further wealth of information. (Aarsleff 1964: 166)

Indeed, Locke's lack of citations gives off the false impression that it is all original. On the other hand, these kinds of authors are prime subjects for historical examination, giving way to studies like this which aim to restore the missing pieces to the larger picture.

It is familiar knowledge that the Essay, having been at least nearly 20 years in the making, made its first appearance in the world very early in 1690 and that Book III bears the title "Of Words." It is not so often remembered that both Book II and Book IV also have a good deal to say about words, especially the former. this is merely one example of teh repetitiveness of the Essay, which Locke was aware of, but said he was "too lazie, or too busy" to remedy. (Aarsleff 1964: 167)

This I've had to point out in several places in this post. Language, and issues related to language, are treated in passing remarks throughout the Essay.

It is well to remember that the epigraph from Cicero's De Natura Deorum, which Locke originally placed on the title page of the Essay, occurs in a context that argues about the names of the gods and whether their existence has anything to do with their having names. (Aarsleff 1964: 168)

A topic familiar from Cassirer.

Behind these words lies the conviction that a language that is unmixed and original - that has, in other words, retained in its own stream the greatest number of root-words ever since Babel and the Confusion - is somehow in closer accord with the Cosmos and Nature, with Creation and the Creator, with truth and reality. Consequently it is also better able than other languages to record the truths of natural philosophy, for it is itself "natural." German was as original as Hebrew and not inferior to Latin and Greek. (Aarsleff 1964: 169)

Upon this standard it is no wonder that Estonian philosophy is in such a poor state - it is neither unmixed nor original.

Having suggested a German translation of Monboddo's great work Of the Origin and Progress of Language, Herder wrote a Preface to the first volume, which came out at Riga in 1784. He rightly saw that the work was much more assured of success in Germany than in England and gave the revealing reason: "Locke geht uns night weiter an, als sofern er der Wahrheit diente, und wir sind lange schon durch Leibnitz gewöhnt, auch schache Seiten seiner Philosophie zu finden." (Aarsleff 1964: 171)

Only 6 volumes! See the first one. Herder writes that Locke does not concern us any longer because Leibnitz has pointed out the errors of his philosophy.

To provide the fullest and fairest statement of Locke's doctrines, Leibniz wrote his Nouveaux Essais as a dialogue between a "lover of Truth" Philalethe and the "lover of God" Theophile; the latter is Leibniz while the former speaks for Locke and corresponds to Pierre Coste. The procedure is simple. Philalethe presents Locke's views by direct quotation, paraphrase, summary, or a mixture of all three at such length as the matter may justify, often with omission of illustrations and examples; then Theophile answers. Sections may be telescoped into a single paragraph or entirely omitted; chapters may be severely shortened but none are completely left out. Departure from Locke's order occurs occasionally and shows that Leibniz took some care with the composition. For instance, most references to words and language in Book II are omitted and some of them transferred to Book III. A noteworthy example occurs in II, xi, 10-11, where Locke observes that animals "have not the faculty of abstracting, or making general Ideas, since they have no use of Words, or any other general Signs." Leibniz transposes most of this discussion to the opening pages of Book III, where it is in fact more appropriate. (Aarsleff 1964: 173)

Regardless of the daunting length, I must make an effort to read the Nouveaux Essais.

Both Boyle and Locke had the conviction that knowledge accumulates by a process that steadily may bring us closer to truth, but the Truth is never achieved; the process never ends. (Aarsleff 1964: 174)

We will never reach the final object.

It is not a metaphysical treatise, not a "recherche de la vérité." It does not pretend to offer a complete system of knowledge and truth, but to present a discussion of the ways in which knowledge may be obtained and secured. Its nature is essentially practical, and for that reason it pays much attention to the ways in which we may wrongly come to believe we have certain knowledge when in fact we do not. It is to this problem that Book III "Of Words" is chiefly devoted. It offers many instances of Leibniz' failure to understand Locke's limited scope and intent. (Aarsleff 1964: 175)

Leibnitz evidently was dissatisfied with Locke's Essay because it wasn't a final statement about truth. Locke, in his own words, was only "a lover of truth".

But then, how was Leibniz to know what Locke and his half dozen friends would have taken for granted, the "historical, plain method" of the natural philosophers in the Royal Society? The word "understanding" in the title is to be taken in its active sense as meaning something like "ways of getting to know something" - "mind" is no synonym for it. The Essay is about process, not about the still center and the possible. The aim of the Essay was much more limited than Leibniz saw; in I, i, 6 Locke had pointed out that "our Business here is not to know all Things, but those which concern our Conduct," i.e., conduct in regard to nature as the Royal Society would have understood it. (Aarsleff 1964: 176)

I expect this to be in some contrast to the use of "understanding" in, say, Malebranche.

He also agrees that words have two functions: For the recording of our own thoughts as in memory and for the communication of our thoughts to others. This Leibniz had likewise said before, though in his answer he points to other kinds of useful signs, such as those of algebra, clearly intending to remind Locke of the combinatorial characteristics. They further agree on a practical matter, namely that language must work with "ease and dispatch" or "ease and quickness." But the agreement does not last beyond the first chapter. (Aarsleff 1964: 183)

At least they agreed in something.

Language, then, is conventional, not natural; words bear no intrinsic relationship to things, but to ideas only - as we are often reminded by Locke's knot-and-bundle metaphor. The meaning of the word has nothing to do with its sound. Locke takes great care to be consistent in this matter and often restates his principle in passage that strike directly at the natural language doctrine. (Aarsleff 1964: 183)

This metaphor is one of the more interesting parts in the Essay for me. Not only because it also appears in Lotman (e.g. "bundles of possibilities") but because my own naive thinking about the phono-semantic knots (per Jakobson) followed along these lines (I called them arupaelad, or "strings of the mind", to signify the bond between the signifier and signified).

Hacking, Ian 1988. Locke, Leibniz, Language and Hans Aarsleff. Synthese 75(2): 136-153. [JSTOR]

Some of the groundwork for Aarsleff's assault can be found in his early Locke/Leibniz paper. He himself says that "in retrospect I can now trace the theme that holds my essays together to an observation that occurs in Locke's Essay" [A. 24] - none other than the "double conformity" already mentioned. I argue that in some important ways Aarsleff got Leibniz wrong, and that this foreshadows his subsequent contretemps with Berlin, where he seriously misjudged the cogency of his oponent. (Hacking 1988: 136)

Define:contretemps - "a minor dispute or disagreement." "an unexpected and unfortunate occurrence." "This image of the word as a knot that ties a bundle together is one that Locke uses often and with great emphasis; it calls attention both to the arbitrariness of the idea and to the active role performed by the word in preserving the idea as well as in fostering the opinion that it is not arbitrary, on the mistaken assumption that there is some sort of real - and hence not arbitrary - connection between word and object. The relevant passages are: II, xxxii, 6-8 (with the important concluding statement [|] about the "double conformity" between thing-idea and idea-name); [...]" (Aarsleff 1964: 175-176; footnote 37).

The disagreement about nominal and real essences seems, to most readers of today, to be the nub of Leibniz's critique of Locke's in 'Of [|] Words'. It is inevitably connected with recent discussions of natural kinds. Some philosophers note an affinity between Leibniz and Hilary Putnam's proposals about the meaning of "meaning". In his connection, J. L. Mackie wrote of "Locke's anticipation of Kripke", which as Nicholas Jolley has observed, in a curious way to label a suggestion that Locke rejects but which, with modifications, can be read in or into Leibniz. (Hacking 1988: 136-137)

It looks like I'm in it for the long haul.

Here are three topics that Aarsleff holds to be at issue: Adamicism, the double conformity "problem" [A. 24] or "principle" [A. 246], and the knot-and-bundle image. We are on new terrain with a vengeance! Perhaps philosophers will be able to guess what a knot-and-bundle image is. Few, I suspect, will recall "double conformity", because the phrase occurs only once in the Essay. Aarsleff's readers will find it 13 times in A. "Adamicism" may be a word invented by Aarsleff. The words, "Adam", "Adamic" and "Adamicism" occur on at least 35 different pages of A, often several times to a page. The effect is pervasive, starting at page 9 and terminating at page 346. (Hacking 1988: 140)

Indeed, I missed it, too, because the previous paper only mentioned it once in a footnote. The substance of it, on the other hand, was discussed at length by Pritchard.

Adamicism has two parts. (1) There was one first language, inaugurated by Adam, doubtless when all his ribs were intact, and from which all human languages are descended, just as all humans are descended from Adam. (2) This first language was the true language, with the following properties. Adam had true ideas of things. Each of his ideas truly matched the thing of which it was an idea. The name of each thing was associated with a true idea in the mind of the first speaker, and, before the fall, in the mind of his consort. For Adam, there was a perfect "double conformity" of names to thing and idea. The name names the thing; it signifies (as Locke would put it) the idea, and the idea is a true idea of the thing. Here I use the word "thing" generically, denoting objects, qualities, sorts, substances, relations, etc. (Hacking 1988: 140)

Aarsleff's paper did bring out lengthy quotes from Locke's contemporaries who appeared to hold such views. That German is ideally suited for the purposes of philosophy, and a language like Estonian not, is a consequence of such a view. "[Aarsleff] argues that Book III of the Essay is firstly an assault upon [Adamicism" (ibid, 140). Makes sense.

Ideas of mixed modes, it will be recalled, are formed from different simple ideas (as opposed, e.g., to the number "three", composed of three unities, simple ideas of the same kind). In Locke's view, men are able to combine any ideas they want in order to form a new idea, which will be an idea of a mixed mode. A mixed mode is a bundle of ideas. We affix a name to a bundle. This name serves as a knot, that keeps the bundle together - hence Aarsleff's talk of a knot-and-bundle image. (Hacking 1988: 141)

Out of the plurality of simple ideas (unities) comes a new unity, which is a totality (a mixed mode).

The alleged science/history split should be made in a different way. It is a difference in what is understood by "idea". For Locke ideas are psychological entities that exist exactly when they are in the mind of a person. Leibniz's ideas are intellectual entities, in the mind for sure, but extant while not being thought about. Leibniz was one step down the road to that notion now familiar to analytic philosophers, namely Frege's Begriffen or concepts. Frege made a well known distinction between sense, reference and associated idea. Locke's ideas are Frege's associated ideas. Leibniz's ideas are not the "senses" of Frege's logic, because they do exist only as possessed by living individuals (or God). But they are dispositional: an idea exists when someone is disposed to have it. They are also typically conceptual, in the realm of the intellect, rather than visual, in the domain of the imagination. (Hacking 1988: 147)

Evidently such seemingly superfluous questions as does a book no-one read contain information? have grand philosophical consequences. In Locke I met something like it only once: "Put a Piece of Gold any where by itself, separate from the Reach and Influence of all other Bodies, it will immediately lose all its Colours and Weight, and perhaps Malleableness too" (Locke 1741b: 206).

In Section 1 I described one well-known contrast between Locke and Leibniz: the disagreement over natural kinds. I conclude this section with the other, less noticed difference between Locke and Leibniz. Locke has a resolutely anti-historical conception of language. Leibniz is participating in the birth of historical linguistics. Aarsleff nods in this direction using the vogue words of two decades age. Locke is synchronic, Leibniz diachronic [A. 58]. Those neologisms of the linguistic technocrats serve merely to conceal the fundamental difference between Locke and Leibniz on language. Leibniz knew that language is an historical and cultural phenomenon. That is why his book was so well received in Köningsberg after 1765 [cf. A. 49]. In twentieth-century anglophone philosophy Leibniz is revered for his logic, his ars combinatoria and his projects for artificial languages. Hence we tend to ignore some other ways in which other facets of his writings were welcomed. (Hacking 1988: 149)

I'm not a great fan of the synchronic/diachronic opposition but "neologisms of the linguistic technocrats" seems a bit too much. They've been around, after all, since the late 19th century (cf. Jakobson 1960c), and appropriated by de Saussure from Eastern-European philologists, I take it.

| Labels: , , ,

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)