In Through the Looking Glass Lewis Carroll illustrates by way of Humpty Dumpty and Alice how misguided conventional beliefs about the nature of meaning and understanding are. In Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke not only illustrates but explores the consequences of these harmful beliefs. Locke's account has considerably greater depth, but at times their views converge.
Convergence
Alice's view of words and meaning is simple and straightforward. It's the common-sense view: words have meanings. Alice is perplexed by Humpty Dumpty's account of the meaning of ‘Glory’. ‘Glory’ for Humpty means ‘a nice knockdown argument’. Alice objects. That's not what ‘Glory’ means.
Locke and Humpty for different reasons agree to disagree with her common-sense view wholeheartedly. Unlike Alice, Locke claims that words on their own ‘have no Signification'. What he has in mind by on their own we shall explore directly with a thought experiment.
Humpty claims he is free to make his own meanings:
When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – Neither more nor less.
Locke's and Humpty's views converge. Locke acknowledges he shares Humpty's view. In support, he writes:
no one has the Power to make others have the same Ideas in their Minds that he has, when they use the same words that he does.
Because Humpty's freedom, Locke calls it his ‘inviolable Liberty’, matters to Locke he elaborates:
Therefore the great Augustus himself possessing the power that ruled the world, acknowledges he could not make a new Latin word, which is as much to say he could not arbitrarily appoint what Ideas any sound should be a Sign of in the Mouths and common Language of his subjects.
The consequences of the ‘inviolable Liberty’ each of us have to create our own meanings is precisely the point where their divergence of views on meaning begins to diverge.
Divergence
To understand the roots of their divergence we need to explore Locke's account of the birthplace of our meanings. Its cradle, he insists repeatedly, is Ideas in the mind:
the proper and immediate Signification of Words are Ideas in the Mind of the Speaker.
Or again, Locke is given to repeating himself:
The meaning of words … reduces itself at last to the Ideas of particular Men.
In other words, it's individual minds, Alice's mind, your mind, my mind, that in the last resort create meanings for ourselves. We need to acknowledge the consequences of this individual processing of words. In short, the essential privateness and subjectivity of meaning. Because we are semantically free, we can never, Locke wrote, ensure others have the same meanings as we do.
‘Struthious’
Before exploring the reasoning underpinning Locke's conclusion, a thought experiment may help us to see what Locke is driving at. Let's take a word I hope is meaningless to most of you – ‘struthious’. Let me tell you the ideas the word ‘struthious’ excites in my mind. I'll put the word in a sentence to make it appear more natural. I might well say of my friend Max that he is struthious. To a Lockean friend who asked, ‘What ideas do you have in mind when you say “struthious”?’, I'd reply, ‘Max is a bit of an ostrich.’ Depending whether she's familiar with the fabled story of the ostrich – they are popularly believed to bury their heads in the sand at the first sign of danger – my Lockean friend will then understand that Max is inclined to deliberately ignore upcoming problems staring him in the face. Or they would be staring him in the face if he hadn't buried his head in the sands of ignorance!
So, as a result of our exchange, my friend would have created for herself a meaning for ‘struthious’ – ‘ostrich-like’ in the alleged sense. What I don't know, what I can't know since, as Locke writes, ‘One Man's Body cannot pass into another Man's Mind’, is whether the meaning she has created for herself is the same as mine, or even the extent to which they are similar. In general, rough and ready experiments in empirical semantics can be disheartening. When we question others, we are likely to find considerable variations in the meanings of words we are accustomed to believe have a reasonably uniform meaning. It is highly likely we asked the wrong question. We asked: ‘What does that word mean?’ The question Locke would have us ask is: ‘What does that word mean to you?’
The thought experiment may serve to illustrate Locke's account of the origins of the meaning of a word. My friend achieved a meaning for ‘struthious’ by filtering my words ‘Max is a bit of an ostrich’ through a series of complex cognitive processes in her own head – processes about which now, as in the seventeenth century, we are largely ignorant. Despite the best efforts of neuropsychologists, the intimate brain–mind relationship still remains, in many respects, an enigma. My words triggered processes in her mind that enabled her to create for herself a meaning for ‘struthious’. The meaning is not the word, but what the word led her to create. In short, we make our own meanings. As Locke put it, meanings are:
Creatures of our own Making… . For the signification Words have, is nothing but a relation, that by the Mind of Man is added to them.
Furthermore, the relation is one, Humpty Dumpty would be pleased to note, any man may add at any time in his own way:
And indeed everyone will always have the liberty to speak as he pleases, and to apply what articulate Sounds to what Ideas he thinks fit, and change them as often as he pleases.
The implication we must draw is that there is no such animal as the real or true meaning of a word, pace Socrates. There are the meanings you have in mind, the meanings I have in mind, but no third entity out there we can call the meaning of the word. It follows that Humpty Dumpty is free to make the meaning of ‘glory’ or ‘impenetrability’ what he chooses. To some degree we too are all semantic individualists, making meanings out of our experience, our desires, and our expectations.
Until it's filtered through a Mind, a Word has no Meaning
‘Struthious’, initially meaningless to my friend, gained its meaning once with some help she had filtered it through her own mind. The role of words in Locke's account is to act as catalysts exciting meanings in minds. Catalysts are unaffected by the meanings they excite. ‘Wicked’ for me is still ‘wicked’, though for some young English speakers today it may excite ideas of approval.
Locke, a man of fundamentals, traces the roots of this innate semantic individualism to the particular process by which we each create meanings. His description of the process is explicit, but the language is not transparent to a modern reader. He writes:
Words, … come to be made use of by Men, as the Signs of their Ideas, not by any natural connexion, that there is between particular Sounds and certain Ideas … but by a voluntary Imposition, whereby such a Word is made arbitrarily the Mark of such an Idea.
In enunciating the arbitrary nature of the link between word and its meaning Locke is expressing an idea familiar to linguists – one Ferdinand de Saussure more than two centuries after Locke made his Principle 1: The Arbitrary Nature of the Sign.
The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary.
However, what is not so familiar is Locke's notion that words and meanings are the outcome of ‘a voluntary Imposition’. The chief difficulty lies in the different kinds of ideas the word ‘voluntary’ is likely to excite in the minds of seventeenth-century readers compared with readers today. The ideas occurring to a modern reader are likely to be touched off by phrases such as ‘being able to act of one's own free will’, ‘of deliberate, not constrained choice’. These meanings were available to Locke's readers, but in addition they could use ‘voluntary’ to excite ideas of activities that occurred spontaneously. In the 1630s we can find sentences such as:
we fed upon the homely and voluntary Diet provided by the place.
The appropriate sense is that without planting or farming, or any interference by man, the earth naturally provided edible food. Later a line of Alexander Pope's runs:
She fell to lust a voluntary prey.
Pope's sense is that the heroine was the victim of a spontaneous, naturally arising passion. In the eighteenth century the phrase ‘organ voluntary’ evoked a sense of a piece improvised according to the musician's creative skill, working impromptu like early jazz. Nowadays the phrase remains, a last relic, though it no longer carries the informing idea of spontaneous creativity.
Against this background Locke's use of ‘voluntary Imposition’ suggests he sees the individual's linking of words to ideas, not as a matter of free, conscious choice but rather as the result of a spontaneous process, instinctively happening.
The implications of each individual making their own meanings by ‘voluntarily and arbitrarily’ linking words to ideas in their minds appears to be offering philosophical support to Humpty Dumpty's semantic individualism. Locke can appear to be rejecting out of hand Alice's common-sense view that we are able to understand each other's words because they bear a uniform and public meaning. On the contrary, Locke is insistent that the meanings of words, at least their primary meanings, can only be the Ideas they stand for in each individual's mind:
Words, in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them, … Nor can any one apply them, as Marks, immediately to any thing else, but the Ideas, that he himself hath.
A corollary – fundamental to his account of meaning – is the point Locke immediately adds about the way the speaker as hearer must understand the words of others. When we try to understand what someone says to us, what we are actually doing, Locke argues, is applying their words to ideas in our mind:
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, ’tis still to his own Ideas; Ideas that he has, and not to Ideas that he has not.
Subjective Nature of Meaning
Locke could hardly hammer home more strikingly the ultimately private and subjective nature of our meanings for words. ‘if he consents to give them the same names, that other Men do’ is a reminder Locke has not forgotten each individual's ‘inviolable Liberty’. Locke repeatedly draws upon a telling image to capture his radical mind-dependent, person-dependent account of words and meanings. It's an image that crystallizes the ultimately subjective, Humpty Dumpty-like, nature of meaning.
Knot and Bundle image
Locke visualizes the word as a knot binding strands of ideas together. Each of us individually assembles our own strands and knots them with a word. Though our knots may have the same names we can never know precisely what strands of Ideas others have knotted with their words. Because we are constantly adapting and modifying our own meaning to accommodate the meanings we suspect others have in mind, we may not even know precisely what Ideas our own knots tie:
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.
Humpty Dumpty might well feel justified in believing he had found a philosopher who shared his view of meaning.
He could not be more wrong.
While Locke is at considerable pains to emphasize the way human beings as semantic individualists create meanings by themselves for themselves, he also recognizes from the outset that we are social animals, not just by choice, but innately. Man is born, he writes:
not only with an inclination but also under a necessity to have Fellowship with those of his kind.
The kind of fellowship he has in mind is not only one of running with the herd, but also a fellowship of minds – a fellowship alien to Humpty Dumpty. However, to achieve a fellowship of that order language is crucial:
Man, though he have a 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.
Locke's Paradox
By insisting on the ultimate subjectivity of meaning Locke can appear to have painted himself into a corner. Man, a social animal, needs a language to make contact with those of his kind. The meanings of words for any individual, however, are mediated by their own particular ‘Ideas’ in their own minds. Locke at times writes, ‘peculiar Ideas’. ‘Peculiar’ in the seventeenth century excited ideas of ‘belonging solely to a person’, ‘being a private, personal possession’. Modern ‘particular’ lacks the force ‘peculiar’ lends to Locke's individualist account of meaning.
Locke's corner has the character of a paradox. We annex public words to private experience in order to share that private experience – so that ‘others might receive Profit and Delight’. Yet the very words we use to make that private experience public carry with them the seeds of uncertainty and misunderstanding. Our language has to be interpreted by other individuals who have no alternative but to apply our words to Ideas in their own minds. We can therefore never know for certain whether the words we are using are doing what we want them to do – serve, as Locke would say, as ‘the great Instrument and common Tye of Society’. The paradox is universal since we all have to construct meanings for ourselves in the same way, subjectively.
Locke writes:
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.
What Locke refers to here as ‘all alike’ is not of course the meanings of the words but the process. It is the process by which each individual tacitly constructs meanings for themselves that is common to all. The result of that process is that the meanings of words are: ‘relation, that by the Mind of Man is added to them’.
At the heart of Locke's enquiry into language, meaning and understanding is a truth about the human condition not easily acknowledged. Locke presupposes we are, each one of us, ultimately locked in our own heads. The primary meanings of any individual's words are:
limited to his Ideas, and they can be signs of nothing else.
For Locke, however, this is not a conclusion but a necessary starting-point. How are human beings – innately sociable creatures yet semantic individualists – able to let others know what is hidden in their minds, when for each the public words being used mark a private sorting of experience? How, in short, do we overcome the paradox involved in having to use public words to communicate private Ideas?
Locke can go some way in agreeing with Alice that words do have what he sometimes calls ‘a common Acceptation’, at other times ‘a common use’. Alice would surely have been pleased with Locke's observation:
Common use regulates the meaning of words pretty well.
Less pleased with the hedge, he adds, in the end meanings are private:
But common use, being a very uncertain rule, reduces itself at last to the Ideas of particular Men.
Though the name Glory … be the same in every Man's mouth, through a whole Country, yet the complex collective Idea, which everyone thinks on, or intends by that name, is apparently very different in Men using the same Language.
Alice and Humpty Dumpty are eloquent witnesses to the difference.
Locke's Bold Conjecture: Secret Reference
Locke's own account of how far language can serve both for expressing our own thoughts and for the communicating of our thoughts to others, even though the words we use ‘stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them’, rests on a bold and original conjecture. It is a conjecture that not only transcends the isolation of a semantic individualist like Humpty Dumpty and the apparent common sense of Alice's realism, but also resolves the paradox of language use.
Secret Reference
By way of this conjecture Locke is able to explain how we are able, up to a point at least, to reconcile our innate desire for fellowship with others – our immanent sociability – with our equally innate semantic individualism. It also enables him to shed a bright light on the limits and limitations of language, helping us to understand not just how the publicness of words can co-exist with the ultimate privateness of meanings, but also why indeterminacy of meaning is an innate feature of language use.
Locke's conjecture, putting it simply, is this: language works as well as it does because we all unwittingly collude in a tacit, communal conspiracy. At the heart of this conspiracy is a covert act of the imagination we all perform whereby we tacitly assume that what we individually do in creating meanings for ourselves by forging links between public words and private Ideas, others do with broadly the same result. Locke calls this tacit leap of faith we each make about the language activity of others ‘a Secret Reference’. In introducing his conjecture Locke makes it perfectly clear that ‘Secret Reference’ acts as a counter-point to the subjective, personal nature of meanings he has insisted on from the outset of Book III:
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.
Of the two ‘secret references’ we make only the first is crucial to resolving the clash between Humpty Dumpty and Alice on links between words and meanings.
The First Secret Reference
In order to successfully collude in the covert, communal conspiracy underpinning the use of language, the first thing both women and men do, Locke conjectures, is to tacitly presume that the words standing for Ideas in their own minds also mark Ideas in the minds of others. This tacit presumption is Locke's first secret reference. Men, Locke writes:
suppose their Words to be Marks of Ideas in the Minds also of other Men, with whom they communicate.
Not only do they suppose words mark Ideas in others’ minds, men also act as if they mark much the same Ideas as their own words do. This tacit act of the imagination – ‘acting as if’ – Locke argues, is essential to any hope of communicating. Without the first secret reference – the tacit presumption of uniform meanings – men, he writes, would 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.
Secret reference, however, is semantically a double-edged, if essential, hypothesis. While it launches the possibility of communicating, it also allows a highly misleading belief to take hold – the belief in the existence of mind-independent, person-independent meanings for words. In short it permits the reification of meaning – meanings are believed to be entities existing out there in the world. The tacit nature of the first secret reference effectively disguises the way meanings are ultimately the result of processes in the mind. Ordinarily we are not conscious of the way that in using language, either as speakers or hearers, whatever we say or understand must pass through the filters of our individual minds. Yet exchanging Locke's view of the mind-dependent, person-dependent nature of meaning for a belief that meanings are mind-independent and person-independent only encourages the false conviction that meanings really are uniform across speakers. In Locke's truth, meanings are private, subjective, uncertain and indeterminate. Yet by ‘acting as if’ the same words held the same meanings, we can readily slide into believing they actually do. As Locke points out:
Men think it enough that they use the Word, as they imagine, in the common Acceptation of that Language; in which case 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.
Supposing there is a generally agreed public meaning – ‘a common Acceptation’ that is ‘precisely the same’ for all speakers and hearers – can be a wellspring of misunderstanding. It led, for example, to Alice finding Humpty Dumpty's use of language bewildering. Implicitly she expected the meanings of words like ‘glory’ and ‘impenetrability’ to be regular and well-defined. Instead she discovered in Humpty Dumpty's use that the meanings of such words was irregular and indeterminate. From Locke's perspective understandably so, given the mind-dependent, person-dependent nature of meanings. From the kind of expectations Alice and most of us entertain, commonly proceed, Locke writes:
Noise and wrangling, without Improvement or Information; whilst Men take Words to be constant and regular marks of agreed Notions, which in truth are no more but the voluntary and unsteady signs of their Ideas.
A further serious drawback to tacitly supposing the first secret reference to be not an essential working hypothesis but a simple truth is that as a consequence men:
stand not usually to examine whether the Ideas they, and those they discourse with, have in their Minds, to be the same.
In interposing ‘not usually’ Locke's characteristic irony is showing. In truth he knew men rarely examine whether the Ideas they each have in mind for the words they use are the same. Under the silent influence of the first ‘secret reference’ – believing meanings are uniform across speakers – they simply do not consider any such examination to be necessary. It is to Alice's credit that she did try to discover whether the Ideas the word ‘glory’ excited in her mind matched Humpty Dumpty's.
Semantic Empathy
The expression ‘Secret Reference’ is haunting but not modern. Today I construe the first ‘Secret Reference’ as an instance of semantic empathy. Conscious of our own meanings we imagine – tacitly imagine, this is not usually a deliberate, conscious act – that others have the same, or at least similar, meanings for words in their minds as we do. Empathetically what we do is project – project tacitly – onto the minds of others the meanings we have in mind. Looked at this way, Locke's first secret reference is an act of the empathetic instinct – an instinct Locke puts at the heart of language use.
Locke's Principle of Charity
Let me end with Locke's Principle of Charity:
It would become us to be charitable one to another in our Interpretations or Misunderstandings … in cases involving Religion, Law, and Morality.
I would extend the Principle to nearly all our dealings involving language!
