"Do Words Signify Ideas or Things?" The Scholastic Sources of Locke's Theory of Language

"Do Words Signify Ideas or Things?" The Scholastic Sources of Locke's Theory of Language E.J. ASHWORTH Articulate utterances signify the concepts of the mind, primarily, that is, and immediately; for they also signify things, but by means of concepts. --Franco Burgersdijck 1. INTRODUCTION MY AIM IN THIS PAPER is to shed some light on Locke's claim that words signify ideas. Although I shall start by considering two contemporary attempts to interpret Locke's theory of language, I shall devote most of my attention to a group of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century authors whose views are likely to have influenced Locke. My main claim will be that Locke's theory of language is easier to understand, if not to accept, when it is placed in what seems to be its proper c6ntext. When one is dealing with the great figures of early modern philosophy it is always a mistake to overlook their background. At Oxford, as at European universities, students were still reading scholastic texts in the mid-seventeenth century. That is, they were reading works written as university text books by Roman Catholic philosophers , predominantly Jesuit, who consciously placed themselves within the tradition of medieval philosophy and theology while at the same time making use of sixteenth-century developments in Aristotelian studies. Locke makes it very clear that he did not approve of the scholastic philosophy he was acquainted with, but it is primafacieimplausible to suppose that nothing of what he read had any effect upon his writings. As I shall try to make clear, my own view is that his theory of language was produced within a scholastic context, and relied heavily on the arguments which had been [299] 3OO HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY developed by scholastic philosophers. Locke was original and innovative, but not when he said that words signify ideas. Obviously the scholastic philosophers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were themselves writing within a tradition which cannot be overlooked if one wishes to understand their discussions. Equally obviously one cannot within the compass of a short paper on the background to Locke deal adequately with the background to Locke's background. However , a few brief remarks may be in order. The view that words signify ideas or concepts (two words which for the purposes of this paper may be used interchangeably) stems from Aristotle and in particular from Boethius's translation of Aristotle, De lnterpretatione I6 a 3 .1 He said that spoken words (ea quae sunt in voce) were signs (notae) of those passions which are in the mind; and every commentator agreed that passiones were to be taken as concepts rather than passions in the normal sense. By the late thirteenth century a debate was raging over the question whether words could properly be said to signify concepts rather than things.' Roger Bacon said that there was "not a moderate strife among famous men, ''3 and a little later Duns Scotus wrote of a "great altercation. TM Everyone who wrote a commentary on De Interpretatione had something to say on the issue; and it also turned up in other works, in Sentence commentaries and, for instance, in Buridan's Soph- /smata. Aristotle commentaries written in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were still largely focused on the arguments of earlier writers, especially Duns Scotus and Buridan, though occasional use was made of the commentary by St. Thomas Aquinas. 5 The later-sixteenth- and ' AristotelesLatinus 1I I-2. De Intetpretatione vel Periermenias Translatio Boethii Specimina Translationum , edidit Laurentius Minio-Paulello (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965), p. 5. For an interesting discussion of Aristotle's original text and what he may have meant by it, see Norman Kretzmann , "Aristotle on Spoken Sound Significant by Convention," in Ancient Logic and Its Modern Interpretations, John Corcoran, ed. (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1974), pp. 3-21. 9 There was also a debate among the ancient commentators on Aristotle, but its influence on the Middle Ages seems to have been only through references in Boethius's two commentaries on the De Interpretatione. 3 K. M. Fredborg, Lauge Nielsen, and Jan Pinborg, "An Unedited Part of Roger Bacon's 'Opus Maius': 'De Signis...