Liberalism in Lockean Linguistics

In the Essay concerning human understanding (1690) John Locke (1632–1704) suggests that man misunderstands the relationship between ideas, words, and things, assuming that there exists a ‘double conformity’. This assumption is at the core of our misunderstanding of our epistemological status, the misunderstanding from which Locke must free his readers if they are to grasp the foundations of human knowledge. To this extent Locke is a communicational sceptic. He believes that the linguistic communication of ideas is ‘imperfect’. Left to our natural powers to form ideas and signify them by words, we will too often fail to convey our thoughts to our hearers. The remedy to this ‘imperfection’ is for us to constrain the exercise of our linguistic powers. There is thus an interesting parallel between the structure of Locke’s discussion of language in the Essay and his discussion of political power in the Second Treatise on Government (1689). In the latter Locke then traces the roots of political norms to the individual’s sacrifice of a share of their own natural freedoms and powers to political authority, so that social anarchy can be avoided. In the same way the normative prescriptions offered in the Essay, by restricting the individual’s basic linguistic freedom, are designed to avoid the communicational anarchy that would result if all individuals exercised their linguistic freedom to express themselves as they choose. Locke thus takes communication to occur, not as a result of chance or of a pre-existing conformity between words and ideas, but rather as a result of the linguistic agent’s voluntary constraint of his/her semiotic freedom.