John Locke 1690: Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III , Chapter II
1. Words are sensible
signs, necessary for communication of ideas. Man, though he have great
variety of thoughts, and such from which others as well as himself might
receive profit and delight; yet they are all within his own breast, invisible
and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made to appear. The comfort
and advantage of society not being to be had without communication of thoughts,
it was necessary that man should find out some external sensible signs, whereof
those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known
to others. For this purpose nothing was so fit, either for plenty or quickness,
as those articulate sounds, which with so much ease and variety he found
himself able to make. Thus we may conceive how words, which were by nature so
well adapted to that purpose, came to be made use of by men as the signs of
their ideas; not by any natural connexion that there is between particular
articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language
amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made
arbitrarily the mark of such an idea. The use, then, of words, is to be
sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for are their proper and
immediate signification.
2. Words, in their
immediate signification, are the sensible signs of his ideas who uses them.
The use men have of these marks being either to record their own thoughts, for
the assistance of their own memory or, as it were, to bring out their ideas,
and lay them before the view of others: 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. When a man speaks to another, it
is that he may be understood: and the end of speech is, that those sounds, as
marks, may make known his ideas to the hearer. That then which words are the
marks of are the ideas of the speaker: nor can any one apply them as marks,
immediately, to anything else but the ideas that he himself hath: for this
would be to make them signs of his own conceptions, and yet apply them to other
ideas; which would be to make them signs and not signs of his ideas at the same
time, and so in effect to have no signification at all. Words being voluntary
signs, they cannot be voluntary signs imposed by him on things he knows not.
That would be to make them signs of nothing, sounds without signification. A
man cannot make his words the signs either of qualities in things, or of
conceptions in the mind of another, whereof he has none in his own. Till he has
some ideas of his own, he cannot suppose them to correspond with the
conceptions of another man; nor can he use any signs for them of another man;
nor can he use any signs for them: for thus they would be the signs of he knows
not what, which is in truth to be the signs of nothing. But when he represents
to himself other men's ideas by some of his own, if he consent to give them the
same names that other men do, it is still to his own ideas; to ideas that he
has, and not to ideas that he has not.
3. Examples of this.
This is so necessary in the use of language, that in this respect the knowing
and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned, use the words they speak (with
any meaning) all alike. They, in every man's mouth, stand for the ideas he has,
and which he would express by them. A child having taken notice of nothing in
the metal he hears called gold, but the bright shining yellow colour, he
applies the word gold only to his own idea of that colour, and nothing else;
and therefore calls the same colour in a peacock's tail gold. Another that hath
better observed, adds to shining yellow great weight: and then the sound gold,
when he uses it, stands for a complex idea of a shining yellow and a very
weighty substance. Another adds to those qualities fusibility: and then the
word gold signifies to him a body, bright, yellow, fusible, and very heavy.
Another adds malleability. Each of these uses equally the word gold, when they
have occasion to express the idea which they have applied it to: but it is
evident that each can apply it only to his own idea; nor can he make it stand
as a sign of such a complex idea as he has not.
4. Words are often
secretly referred first to the ideas supposed to be in other men's minds.
But though words, as they are used by men, can properly and immediately signify
nothing but the ideas that are in the mind of the speaker; yet they in their
thoughts give them a secret reference to two other things.
First, They suppose
their words to be marks of the ideas in the minds also of other men, with whom
they communicate: for else they should talk in vain, and could not be
understood, if the sounds they applied to one idea were such as by the hearer
were applied to another, which is to speak two languages. But in this men stand
not usually to examine, whether the idea they, and those they discourse with
have in their minds be the same: but think it enough that they use the word, as
they imagine, in the common acceptation of that language; in which they suppose
that the idea they make it a sign of is precisely the same to which the
understanding men of that country apply that name.
5. To the reality of
things. Secondly, Because men would not bethought to talk barely of their
own imagination, but of things as really they are; therefore they often suppose
the words to stand also for the reality of things. But this relating more
particularly to substances and their names, as perhaps the former does to
simple ideas and modes, we shall speak of these two different ways of applying
words more at large, when we come to treat of the names of mixed modes and
substances in particular: though give me leave here to say, that it is a
perverting the use of words, and brings unavoidable obscurity and confusion
into whenever we make them stand for anything but those ideas we have in our
own minds.
6. Words by use readily
excite ideas of their objects. Concerning words, also, it is further to be
considered:
First, that they
being immediately the signs of men's ideas, and by that means the instruments
whereby men communicate their conceptions, and express to one another those
thoughts and imaginations they have within their own their own breasts; there
comes, by constant use, to be such a connexion between certain sounds and the
ideas they stand for, that the names heard, almost as readily excite certain
ideas as if the objects themselves, which are apt to produce them, did actually
affect the senses. Which is manifestly so in all obvious sensible qualities,
and in all substances that frequently and familiarly occur to us.
7. Words are often used
without signification, and why. Secondly, That though the proper and
immediate signification of words are ideas in the mind of the speaker, yet,
because by familiar use from our cradles, we come to learn certain articulate
sounds very perfectly, and have them readily on our tongues, and always at hand
in our memories, but yet are not always careful to examine or settle their
significations perfectly; it often happens that men, even when they would apply
themselves to an attentive consideration, do set their thoughts more on words
than things. Nay, 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 so far as words are of use
and signification, so far is there a constant connexion between the sound and
the idea, and a designation that the one stands for the other; without which
application of them, they are nothing but so much insignificant noise.
8. Their signification
perfectly arbitrary, not the consequence of a natural connexion. Words, by
long and familiar use, as has been said, come to excite in men certain ideas so
constantly and readily, that they are apt to suppose a natural connexion
between them. But that they signify only men's peculiar ideas, and that by a
perfect arbitrary imposition, is evident, in that they often fail to excite in
others (even that use the same language) the same ideas we take them to be
signs of: and every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for
what ideas he pleases, that no one hath the power to make others have the same
ideas in their minds that he has, when they use the same words that he does.
And therefore the great Augustus himself, in the possession of that power which
ruled the world, acknowledged he could not make a new Latin word: which was as
much as to say, that he could not arbitrarily appoint what idea any sound
should be a sign of, in the mouths and common language of his subjects. It is
true, common use, by a tacit consent, appropriates certain sounds to certain
ideas in all languages, which so far limits the signification of that sound,
that unless a man applies it to the same idea, he does not speak properly: and
let me add, that unless a man's words excite the same ideas in the hearer which
he makes them stand for in speaking, he does not speak intelligibly. But
whatever be the consequence of any man's using of words differently, either
from their general meaning, or the particular sense of the person to whom he
addresses them; this is certain, their signification, in his use of them, is
limited to his ideas, and they can be signs of nothing else.