The importance of language for Locke is so significant that he has dedicated a whole part of his book on its nature, use and importance. According to him, language is the basic instrument of all human social interactions. For the employment of language, we have the first the physical organs, like the tongue and the mouth, that help us articulate a variety of sounds. We also have the ability of using these sounds that are produced by the respective organs to as sings of internal conception through which we communicate all our thoughts. Finally, we also employ words as general terms that can be applied to many particular things. Language is designed to serve all the practical needs of human life.
The problem that comes up after this discussion is how do we achieve our communicative goals. Locke suggests that all our words are representations of ideas. Locke also said that the absence of any universal language reveals that the connection between the word and the idea that it represents is not natural but rather conventional.
There is yet another problem here, and that is that since ideas differ from person to person and the association of words to ideas is purely voluntary, it follows from all this that the proper representation of a particular word depends on the particular idea in the mind of the speaker to which the hearer has no access.
3 comments:
there are definately problems with language. we think a lot faster than we speak, and when we come upon an involved theory and want to convey it to another person, we don't know how much the other person knows about our theory to begin with and we don't know how their thought process works either. we can never really know how another person feels, and it seems language shows how alone we are in our thoughts
Right but at the same time i think that language is a real blessing...
think about it, what would humanity be without any form of language? We would not know anything beyond what happened a few days, or maybe a few generations ago.
Granted that there is verbal history, and this is what probably used to happen for most of human history, but that verbal history can very easily turn into folklore. Future generations have no way of telling what was the original incident and what was made up. Written language is a blessing.
But lemme go back to language in general. If it were the case that no language existed, then we would have no method of communication.
The ancient egpytians used to believe that once you acquire the name of something, you have obtained a part of it. I think this might be true metaphsyically speaking. We might not have grasped the thing in its physical existence, but our ability to express it as language is something that helps us capture the concept of that thing. This could even be some thing like infinity. We can't understand it, but the very fact that we use a word to state a concept shows that we somehow, however abstractly, understand what infinity is.
this has great philosophical and theological implications. what are they?
Philsophically speaking, the very concept of a human beings ability to comprehend the fact that there exists such an ability that it can help our cognative faculties to understand the world around us is astonishing.
From a more religious perspective, we say words like God, heaven, hell, prophets. Does that mean that we have somehow understood what it means to be god, or that what heaven and hell are, or for that matter that a few people have claimed that they are Gods representitives on this earth?
Interesting, isn't it...
LANGUAGE IS A BEAUTIFUL, A MYSTIFYINGLY BEAUTIFUL THING!
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