What each one of us is getting at when we use language are the ideas in our minds.  Martinich suggests, in his brief introductory notes to the section, that Locke had nothing else to appeal to, given his view that the only things we know directly are the ideas in our minds.  (Compare what he says in a paragraph Martinich omits, "we having, as has been proved, no ideas at all, but what originally come either from sensible objects without, or what we feel within ourselves, from the inward workings of our own spirits, of which we are conscious to ourselves within" III, I, 5.)  But I hope you think the view is sufficiently plausible in its own right.   

4.      Locke next says that signs would be of no use unless "those signs can be so made use of as to comprehend several particular things" and so language requires general terms, which stand for general ideas while other signs, proper names, stand for particular ideas.  He also notes that some words are used "not to signify any idea, but the want or absence of some ideas, simple or complex, or all ideas together", such as 'nothing', or 'barrenness'.  

5.      Locke notes that the link between sound and meaning/idea is not "natural" (if it were, he says there would only be one language) but created by "voluntary imposition".  

6.      Locke's common sense, or the incoherence of the view he was espousing, is soon made visible in the remark "words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them, how imperfectly soever or carelessly those ideas are collected from the things which they are supposed to represent."  So on the one hand, you can only make a sign stand for something you know, which is something in your own mind, and so one person's use of a word such as 'gold' applies only to a bright colour, another to colour plus a weighty substance, another those plus fusibility, and so on.  But on the other, Locke has to admit that when we use words our "thoughts give them a secret reference to two other things":

1. ideas in the minds of others (I assume you mean what I mean by 'gold'; I don't examine whether that is so [how could I?], but take it for granted since we are using the same language);
2. real things in the world (most of the time we don't want to talk about our imagination or the contents of our minds, "but of things as they really are").

           Having all but seen the absurdity of his official view, Locke then insists that to yield to these "secret" inclinations is "a perverting the use of words, and brings unavoidable obscurity and confusion into their signification, whenever we make them stand for anything but those ideas we have in our own minds."  

7.      Locke shares a frequent empiricist belief that many people misuse language (he has a considerable amount later on imperfections and abuse of language and their remedies - III, IX-XI): "because words are many of them learned before the ideas are known for which they stand: therefore some, not only children but men, speak several words no otherwise than parrots do, only because they have learned them, and have been accustomed to those sounds."  But you can see here a hole in the official doctrine.  Words are meant to stand for ideas, but Locke admits that we learn many words before having had the relevant ideas [and, of course, how is he to know what the relevant ideas are?].   Another hole appears in the paragraph immediately following: I can only use a word to signify my idea, but I cannot, nor can even the "great Augustus", invent a new word - each of us is constrained to apply words to the same ideas as others do, if we are to speak properly, and our words must "excite the same ideas in the hearer" if we are to speak intelligibly.  

8.      We need general names because we couldn't have a proper name for all the things we meet, and even if we could, it wouldn't help us communicate - you would need to have the same set of names in your language, and so to have met exactly the same set of particular things.  And even if this were possible, it wouldn't serve for "the improvement of knowledge".  That is a matter of generalising, sorting things into kinds.  But since, for Locke, everything that is is particular, how do we arrive at general words?  His answer leads into one of the great debates among the British Empiricists, having been attacked by Bishop Berkeley.  We shall not follow that path, but briefly note Locke's answer:

Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas: and ideas become general, by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence. By this way of abstraction they are made capable of representing more individuals than one; each of which having in it a conformity to that abstract idea, is (as we call it) of that sort.... It is plain ... that general and universal belong not to the real existence of things; but are the inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern only signs, whether words or ideas.

Elementary objections to Locke 

9.      Starting with these last remarks, one problem for Locke is the somewhat hidden generality in the existence of words.  We now employ the type/token contrast to make the point.  Locke says that nothing real is general and universal; we invent generality by using words or ideas to signify many things, in virtue often of similarities among them.  Leaving aside the complex of questions about similarity, one problem for Locke is that when he thinks of words (or ideas) he seems to be thinking, not of a use of 'gold' or 'rabbit' on January 21st 2004 at Cave Hill and then a use of a different token of 'gold' etc. on January 24th or your meeting with a token on a later date, but rather, as we usually do, of the same word, the same type word, 'gold' on any number occasions of use.  But such a type is inherently general.  One might still want to pursue some sort of nominalist reduction of other generalities to type words, but it won't rid the universe of all generality.  But this is to cavil at his metaphysics rather than his philosophy of language.

10.  I have already indicated some of the difficulties with Locke's position.  Summarising objections from various sources, we may note:

• If the purpose of language is, as Locke claims, to make my private, invisible ideas known to you, then, on his own premises (that all you can ever know are your ideas), the task is impossible. [Martinich, p. 502.]
• On those same premises, I can never know whether I have communicated successfully - I can know the idea I intend, but I cannot discover if it exists in your mind as a result of my using a bit of language. [Martinich, p. 502.]
• What exactly is a Lockean idea? They are not in general images - if you imagine a dog it is a spaniel or a German Shepherd, not just a generic dog. If you say they are concepts, what are concepts? Images/concepts are not true or false, so how do they connect with the meaning of complete sentences? [Lycan, pp. 78-9.]  This question could lead us off into vast debates about Locke's terminology and doctrines.  I note that a sympathetic commentator on Locke has said "the ambiguity of the term 'idea' and the looseness with which Locke uses it are here something of an advantage.  The thesis that would really be indefensible is that the meaning of every word or phrase is some mental image with which it is associated, but Locke does not as a rule write as if he believed this.... Locke's stress on ideas ... amounts to little more than a quite appropriate requirement that we should be able to sketch some intelligible account of the thought processes that underlie our use of words of various sorts" [Mackie, Problems from Locke, p. 108].
• What is your idea/image/... of 'of'? [Lycan, p. 79.] Actually, Locke has a chapter (III, VII) complaining that philosophers have not paid enough attention to what he called "particles"; but his sketchy remarks about 'but' do not look like a promising non-circular answer to Lycan's question: more like "the mental feelings/thoughts you get when you use the word 'but'".
• The meaning of words is public, intersubjective, social; individual speakers may not know those meanings, but what they do not know is still the meaning of the word; Lockean ideas are not like that. [Lycan, p. 79.]
• There are meaningful sentences that have never been and never will be used (of course I can't actually produce one for you), so those sentences at least do not express ideas or some other mental state. [Lycan, pp. 79-80.] Locke would, I think, have appealed to the same sort of constructive mechanisms he invoked to explain how we come by ideas/words for unicorns, etc.
• The preceding criticisms have been taken from our texts.  I will sketch a couple of others from an important work by Jonathan Bennett (Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes [Oxford University Press, 1971]) that take us somewhat deeper and closer to our next topic.  Bennett's first criticism is of a circularity in Locke's story: "for a speaker to mean something by his words, he must not merely have ideas in his mind but must use his words to 'stand as marks for' his ideas"  (p. 3) - but standing for something is too close to meaning something for it to help us understand the latter.
• Bennett's second criticism is directed to the notion that the difference between uttering S and uttering S and meaning something by it is a matter of the second being two things, an uttering and something else.  If it were so, Bennett says, this extra thing would have to be an inner activity since you could have two behaviourally identical creatures (an Englishman and a Frenchman practising English articulation, for instance) that both uttered "Scram!" while only one of them meant anything by it.  Bennett's point is that meaning cannot involve any such inner activity since we have yet to discover any such thing, and yet we do know that people mean things by using language (and Locke claims to know that humans generally do, while parrots do not, mean things when they utter sentences).  If uttering with meaning were dependent on some as yet undiscovered event, we couldn't know any of this.  (This is a generalisation of Martinich's objections that invoked very dubious details of Locke's account; Bennett is arguing against a wider range of possible theories.)  Bennett's claim leads us into Wittgensteinian areas since if uttering and meaning is not a matter of two things, what is it?  Bennett's answer here (he later expanded enormously upon this answer in Linguistic Behaviour) is that it is a matter of present dispositions and the various kinds of behaviour one evinces at other times that give evidence for having those dispositions.  If I say "scram!" and you don't move, I may pick up a blunt instrument to beat you with.  Our genial Frenchman, or a parrot, would be unperturbed.

      I think that the simple and fundamental mistake is something Locke recognised: language is a way of  dealing with the real world, hardly ever with the contents of our minds.  If I tell you that Zeus doesn't exist I am not referring to some idea I might have - that idea (whatever precisely it might be) does exist.  I am trying to say something about how things are.  It is difficult to come up with a non-semantic analogy, but consider a radar screen.  A blip tells someone that there is an aircraft approaching.  It is a blip on the screen, but if it were only that, the radar would be malfunctioning; its whole point is that it indicates an object a good way away from the screen.  So I suspect what people who follow Locke are doing is confusing the fact that language and meaning require something in us (analogous to the blip) with the fact that what is meant is most certainly not that 'thing', but how the world is.     

Wittgensteinian Objections:  A quick glimpse of The Private Language Argument

13.  As if Wittgenstein's own argument, or train of thought, were not enough, one of his most illustrious commentators, Saul Kripke (in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language), has created an almost equally large literature addressing a sceptical position that Kripke claims to find in Wittgenstein's text.  People often attribute this set of issues to "Kripkenstein" since it is not clear that either thinker actually espoused the position.  There is an enormous website by John Humphrey (http://krypton.mnsu.edu/~witt/index.html#contentsAnchor) devoted to the Kripke/Wittgenstein issue.  Amongst much else, he has some critical comments on the remarks Martinich makes in his introduction to the relevant readings in his collection.   

14.  Our ordinary words connect with objects and situations in a world that we share access to.  If I say "there's a cat sitting on the mat" you can pick out the volume of space-time I am concerned with and agree or dispute that it contains a cat, a mat, or the one sitting on the other.  You may be correcting my factual beliefs (it looks like a cat but is really a hitherto unknown species of hamster) or my grasp of the language ("we" wouldn't call that a mat, it's rather a rug) - assuming these can be neatly distinguished.  These abilities to check whether what is said is true or appropriate or a correct way of using the language do not seem mysterious; and we rely on them all the time.  The problem created by supposed private entities is that it is not obvious whether any of this ordinary machinery could be present.  And without it, how can we have a language?  Cf. Wittgenstein: "in the present case I have no criterion of correctness.  One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right.  And that only means that here we can't talk about '"right'"  (Philosophical Investigations §258, quoted by Craig).   If I tell you I intend to use 'slomy' to mean the particular type of sensation I got interacting with a particular dish of coo-coo, and then I later remark that some semolina pudding is pretty slomy too, have you got any way of dealing with me as you had when we were talking about cats on mats?  It looks like you just have to take my word for it, and you won't have much idea what, if anything, 'slomy' means.   Words like my 'slomy' do get into the language, but only, so the PLA argument goes, when there are publicly available criteria, e.g. kinds of stuff we can distinguish, such as slush and slime.  If I told you that one particular bit of coo-coo was slomy but most aren't; that this bowl of semolina was too, but again most aren't, we would have difficulty making sense of my claims, wouldn't we?

15.  Where the normal ways of checking for correctness do not exist, you might say there simply is nothing to check, or somewhat less extremely, there is no way we can talk about such things.  Or you could try to show that meaningfulness is still possible, despite the absence of the usual mechanisms (cf. Craig for development of this sort of approach).  One bizarre direction some people have gone is to wonder whether a language used by one person (to talk about public objects, not just supposedly private ones) is a possibility.  Martinich has some discussion of this (pp. 503-506); it is trenchantly criticised by Humphrey on his website.  You might see how the problem arises if you consider Krikpe's approach to these issues.  Kripke asks the sort of question Bennett discussed: what makes it the case that a person means something by 'S'?  Given finite behaviour, there are any number of rules that would generate it.  We like to think that our addition-behaviour has been guided by the well-known rules for addition, but everything we have done could be generated by an infinite number of other rules.  So how do we know that we are using the standard rules, or in what fact does our using the standard rules consist?  Kripke claims that there is no acceptable answer in terms of facts about each individual; so the answer - if there is one at all - will invoke social facts, facts about what a number of people do (and so no one individual could speak a language).    

Lycan on propositions

16. You can read these few pages yourselves. 

Ed Brandon

24 January 2004, revised 24 January 2008