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Signification, Intention, Projection

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Locke is what present-day aestheticians, critics, and historians call an intentionalist. He believes that when we interpret speech and writing, we aim—in large part and perhaps even for the most part—to recover the intentions, or intended meanings, of the speaker or writer. Berkeley and Hume shared Locke’s commitment to intentionalism, but it is a theme that recent philosophical interpreters of all three writers have left largely unexplored. In this paper I discuss the bearing of intentionalism on more familiar themes in empiricist reflections on language, among them the signification of things (as opposed to ideas); the signifying role of whole propositions; and the possibility of reference to an “external” world.

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Notes

  1. Demea, in Part 3 of Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, says that “when I read a volume, I enter into the mind and intention of the author: I become him, in a manner, for the instant; and have an immediate feeling and conception of those ideas, which revolved in his imagination, while employed in that composition” (p. 33 in Dorothy Coleman’s edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Demea is not generally a spokesman for Humean views, but these remarks are treated by Hume as commonplaces that supply an uncontroversial background for a contrast between our aptitude for sharing the intentions of human authors and our inaptitude for sharing the intentions of the Author of Nature. Berkeley’s intentionalism is documented in detail below.

  2. A striking exception (though I feel sure there must be others) is Alessandra Tanesini’s brief entry on Locke in her Philosophy of Language A to Z (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007): “[Locke] proposed a view of language in which the meaning of a linguistic expression is the mental idea that the speaker intends to express when uttering the words” (p. 91). She goes on to say that “this suggestion has many problems: for example, it presupposes the notion of intention.” Tanesini is not, on the whole, a careful reader of Locke. For example, she criticizes Locke for failing to take account of words such as “and,” ignoring his treatment of particles (including his long discussion of the various shadings of “but”), and she concludes her entry by observing that Locke “did not seem to think about sentences as something other than a mere list of words,” ignoring Locke’s treatment of propositions and their truth-conditions. But in foregrounding Locke’s intentionalism she is, I think, entirely correct. Charles Landesman touches briefly on the role of intentions in Locke’s account of particles in “Locke’s Theory of Meaning,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 14 (1976), pp. 23–35, p. 34. In criticizing what he calls “the Lockean theory of communication,” which holds that a speaker communicates when the hearer grasps a “mental object” that the speaker's words express, Christopher Gauker actually contrasts what he sees as Locke’s own version of the theory, in which the objects expressed are ideas, with Donald Davidson’s, in which the objects expressed are intentions. See Gauker, “The Lockean Theory of Communication,” Nous 26 (1992), pp. 303–324, pp. 303–305.

  3. See Ott, Locke’s Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 7), and Kretzmann, “The Main Thesis of Locke’s Semantic Theory,” Philosophical Review 77 (1968), pp. 175–96. Intentions do play a role in Ott’s presentation of Locke’s views (see for example pp. 27–8), as well as in some of Hannah Dawson’s remarks in Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), for example on p. 6, but neither Ott nor Dawson treats intentionalism as a significant force in Locke’s thinking. I quote throughout from Peter H. Nidditch’s edition of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). References to this edition, by book, chapter, and section, are provided in the text.

  4. Page references to Locke’s side of the Stillingfleet correspondence are to The Works of John Locke, tenth edition (London: Thomas Tegg, 1823), volume 4.

  5. For a somewhat different view of Locke and Hume, as thinkers “who...accorded the problems of interpretation intense and fruitful scrutiny” (p. ix), see Joel C. Weinsheimer, Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to Burke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Locke devoted two essays to the theory of interpretation: “An Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul’s Epistles, by consulting St. Paul himself” (the introduction to A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, in Works, volume 8, pp. 1–23), and a Latin essay on infallibility written in 1661–1662 and first published by John C. Biddle as “John Locke’s Essay on Infallibility: Introduction, Text, and Translation,” Journal of Church and State 19 (1977), pp. 301–327 (and included in English translation, under the title “Infallibility,” in John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 204–9). For comments on “An Essay for Understanding St. Paul,” see the following footnote. The early essay on infallibility is discussed at length by Weinsheimer in his interesting chapter “Locke on Human Understanding,” pp. 23–45. There Weinsheimer emphasizes what he sees as anti-hermeneutical themes in Locke’s thinking (see for example pp. 26, 33, 35–36, and 44). In Hume, by contrast, he finds what he calls “an entire panoply of implicitly hermeneutic tendencies” (p. 110 in his chapter “Hume and Others,” pp. 103–134). When he judges Locke an enemy of hermeneutics and Hume a promoter of it, Weinsheimer is operating with a conception of hermeneutics, derived from Hans-Georg Gadamer, that covers much more than the theory of linguistic interpretation, which is all I have in mind when I speak of hermeneutics in this paper. Weinsheimer’s view of Locke is contested by Michael P. Berman in “Locke the Hermenaut and the Mechanics of Understanding,” Humanitas 19 (2006), pp. 182–200.

  6. Locke himself devoted considerable effort to Biblical interpretation: see The Reasonableness of Christianity (in Works, volume 7) and A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (in volume 8). The Reasonableness of Christianity, an attempt to articulate the core of any genuine Christianity, is perhaps not explicitly intentionalist (see, though, p. 152 of volume 7, where Locke speaks of observing that “which is principally aimed at,” so as to discover a writer’s “true meaning and mind”), but its method admits very naturally of an intentionalist construal. The Paraphrase, as Hannah Dawson notes (Locke, Language, and Early-Modern Philosophy, p. 217), is decidedly intentionalist in orientation. In the introductory “Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul’s Epistle’s,” Locke straightforwardly identifies St. Paul’s having a “distinct meaning” in using particular words and phrases with “knowing himself what he intends by them” (Works, volume 8, p. 10). Our aim in interpreting an epistle, Locke says, should be “to understand the mind of him that writ it” (p. 14). Reading a letter through for the first time may give us some sense of its “drift and design,” but to achieve “a good general view of the apostle's main purpose in writing” it, and of the “steps and arguments” by which he “prosecuted [that] purpose,” the letter must be read again and again (pp. 14, 15). Locke is especially attuned to the ways in which our own philosophical prejudices can warp our interpretive results. “He that would understand St. Paul right,” he warns, “must understand his terms, in the sense he uses them, and not as they are appropriated, by each man’s particular philosophy, to conceptions that never entered the mind of the apostle. For example, he that shall bring the philosophy now taught and received, to the explaining of spirit, soul, and body, mentioned I Thess. v. 23, will, I fear, hardly reach St. Paul’s sense, or represent to himself the notions St. Paul then had in mind. That is what we should aim at, in reading him, or any other author; and until we, from his words, paint his very ideas and thoughts in our minds, we do not understand him” (p. 21).

  7. The same is true of early modern writing on language. The influential A New Grammar of the Latin Tongue..., to which is annexed, A Dissertation Upon Language, third edition (London: C. Hitch, 1749), by the pedagogue John Clarke (“John Clarke of Hull,” who is better known today, at least to historians of philosophy, as a writer on moral philosophy) is, for example, strongly intentionalist. Clarke comments often on the ways in which parts of speech and inflected forms make it possible for us to express fine-grained intentions. “Lego,” he writes, “signifies not only a particular Sort of Action, but withal an Intention of the Mind of him that uses it, to affirm that Action of himself. Lege signifies the same action, but intimates a different Intention to command, desire or allow the Action to be done by the Person to whom the Discourse is directed” (p. 124). If there were no case endings, he explains, “it would then have been a dubious Point, whether [a given adjective] was in the Intention of the Poet” to be applied to a given substantive. (p. 140) Because a speaker is “not designing to speak of a Distemper in general, but of a Distemper of a certain degree, the Adjective proper to signify that Intention, by qualifying and restraining the Signification of the Noun..., is rightly placed next it” (p. 144). Unlike the Latin verb lego, “the English verb [read] has no Mood at all, that is, no Variation or Change, to signify the various Dispositions or Intentions of the Mind, with respect to the Thing signified by it” (p. 150). Speakers of English must therefore signify those intentions in other ways.

  8. The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, translated by Andrew Tooke, edited by Ian Hunter and David Saunders (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), Book I, Chapter xvii, first paragraph, pp. 159–160.

  9. The context is a comparison between the doctrines of revealed religion (which suffer from “the common and natural obscurities and difficulties incident to Words”) and the truths of natural religion. Locke suggests that the latter are somehow exempt from the defects inherent in the rest of what we say and hear; they are “plain,” “very Intelligible to all Mankind,” and “seldom controverted” (III ix 23). The doctrine of innate ideas rejected in Book I of the Essay is one way of explaining how natural truths could be so universally received; a crucial task of the Essay (which Book I itself cannot complete) is to provide another and better explanation.

  10. “Intention,” pp. 135–146 in Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 135. For more detail on Prynne see Patterson’s Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England, With a New Introduction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 113–115.

  11. See Locke’s letter to Newton of 5 October 1693 in H. R. Fox-Bourne, The Life of John Locke, two volumes (London: H. S. King, 1876), volume 2, p. 227. Rousseau followed a different and more reckless policy. He reports it was his “own very imprudent maxim” never to suppress anything “out of fear that connections might be made, provided my conscience is my witness that I was not aware of them while writing”—provided, that is perhaps to say, that it could not have been intended (Confessions, Book 10, p. 501 in Angela Scholar’s translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)).

  12. The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, edited by F. B. Kaye, two volumes (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), volume 2, pp. 289–290. This is a reprint of the edition first published by Oxford University Press in 1924.

  13. A speaker may, of course, utter a word without intending to communicate, and we may infer from the sound that she has the idea the word stands for in mind. But this would be a degenerate case of linguistic signification, more akin to a cry than to a speech act.

  14. See for example Ott, Locke's Philosophy of Language, p. 27, citing Essay III iii 13 and III vi 1.

  15. He does go on to say that “their signification must [therefore] agree with the Truth of Things, as well as with Men’ Ideas,” which could be taken to imply that the name signifies nothing but an idea which, when it agrees with the truth of things, establishes the name as a representation (but not a sign) of things.

  16. I cannot pause here to give an account of the metaphysics of Lockean sorts, but I believe they are best understood neither as sets (in our sense) nor as ideas (in Locke’s sense), even though they depend for their existence on ideas—nominal essences—that we compose. When I talk with someone about “a Sort of Birds” (III vi 34), for example, it seems to be Locke’s considered view that I am talking not about my ideas, but about something in the extra-mental world. But the nature of that thing is, in the Essay, left unclear. For a strongly realist passage about sorts, see Essay III vi 1 or the opening lines of III xi 25; for a contrary passage identifying sorts or species (and not merely their nominal essences) with ideas, see IV iv 17.

  17. It is true that Locke “never so much as uses the phrases ‘mediate’ or ‘secondary’ signification” (p. 26), but they are, arguably, counter-concepts implicated in his use of “immediate” and “primary.” Ott also notes that in claiming that words “properly and immediately signify” nothing but ideas, Locke implies that they must signify things improperly (p. 27), but the relevant contrast could be between what words signify in their own capacity and what they signify only with outside assistance. Finally, Ott observes that “in the course of Book III,” Locke states the linguistic thesis without restricting it to primary or immediate signification, for example at III x 15, where he writes that words are “the Signs of our Ideas only” (p. 26).

  18. There is a use of “proper and immediate” along these lines in Chapter 9 of the Third Letter for Toleration. The “proper and immediate effect” of punishment, Locke says there, is pain or inconvenience. But, he adds, the “natural effect” of that pain or inconvenience—and, I would be inclined to say, the distal or mediate effect of the punishment—is obedience (in The Works of John Locke, volume 6, p. 392).

  19. See her “Locke on Language,” pp. 175–198 in Vere Chappell (ed.), Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and my review of Ott’s book in Philosophical Books 48 (2007), pp. 76–78. Dawson says, diplomatically, that “‘signify’ is a rich term that is roughly equivalent to ‘indicate’ or ‘make known'," and refers readers to both Ott and Ashworth (Locke, Language, and Early-Modern Philosophy, p. 14). There is another use of “signify” that may escape Ott’s analysis at III viii 1, where Locke speaks of signifying that something is the case. I discuss this passage below.

  20. There may be another shift of perspective from speaker to hearer in Ott’s account of Locke’s defense of his linguistic thesis. Ott sees Locke’s argument as resting on two premises, one about the nature of signification and one about the world. “Locke,” he explains, “thinks that he can rule out proposals that things other than ideas (and mental acts) are signified [by our words] simply by consulting the definition of signification, and then seeing if these candidates can be linked with words in such a way as to meet that definition” (p. 32). According to Locke's definition as Ott understands it, signification is indication. To say that x signifies y is to say that x is an indication of y: that its appearance or presence is something from which the appearance or presence of y can be reliably inferred. “There is," Ott writes, “no logical impossibility about a world in which whenever anyone utters the words ‘stone,’ a stone appears” (p. 32). But that magical world “is not our world” (p. 32). Words in our world do not reliably indicate the presence of things. But they are reliable indicators of ideas in the minds of speakers. Hence words signify ideas and nothing but ideas. What Ott offers here is an argument against my supposing that your words signify things. But Locke’s target seems to be my supposing that my own words do so. His concern, in other words, lies with something I do in my privacy (III x 19). I’m not convinced that the problem with that is the encouragement I offer others to think that my words, like incantations, might summon things into being.

  21. For other passages exhibiting Locke's concern with securing reference to absent bodies see III vi 13, 25, and 46.

  22. That simple ideas or qualities might support a distinction between real and nominal essence is a suggestion made to me in conversation by Allison Kuklok, who has been pursuing it in her own work on Locke.

  23. Consider II xxxi 2, where Locke says that things are “denominated by us...as if” simple ideas “were real Beings in them.” Fire is said to be light and hot, “as if Light and Heat, were really something in the Fire, more than a power to excite these Ideas in us.” Here it sounds as if the names of simple ideas do sometimes reach beyond the ideas they signify, just as the names of substances do. But then Locke goes on to say that words such as light and heat “truly signify nothing, but those Powers, which are in Things, to excite certain Sensations or Ideas in us.” What does he mean by truly signifying? Perhaps, in the same sense, the names of substances do not truly signify anything more than combinations of simple ideas (together with the idea of substance or substratum). But does that mean that some people can’t use them to signify (or to attempt to signify) something more? If I can signify more when it comes to man or gold, why can’t I do so when it comes to light, hot, white, or blue?

  24. Is it altogether clear whether, at III viii 1, Locke is treating a man is white as a form of words, or (instead) as a juxtaposition of ideas? I believe he's treating it as a form of words, or that he's treating it simultaneously as a mental proposition (whose constituent terms are ideas) and as a verbal proposition (whose constituent terms are words). Other passages are more definite. In the marginal heading of Essay I ii 22, “Implicitly known before proposing, signifies that the Mind is capable of understanding them, or else signifies nothing," Locke certainly seems to be ascribing the power of signifying-that to a form of words. Similar passages include §28 in the Examination of Malebranche (in volume 8 of the Works), where Locke says, of the sentence “All beings are present to our minds," that “presence [either] signifies that we see them, or else it signifies nothing at all"; §51 of the same work, where he says that when Malebranche writes that “he is certain that the ideas of things are unchangeable," either these words mean that ideas are true unchangeable representations of things, or else “they can only signify, that the idea I have once had will be unchangeably the same as long as it recurs the same in my memory; but when another different from that comes into my mind, it will not be that"; and p. 66 in the Stillingfleet correspondence (volume 4 of the Works), where Locke writes that “these words, ‘allowing the argument to be good,’ in the received way of speaking, are usually taken to signify, that he that speaks them does not judge the argument to be good; but that for discourse-sake he at present admits it."

  25. Locke’s chapter on particles is another indication of a concern with whole propositions, since he takes them to play a signifying role only in propositions or discourses (see III vii 1–3).

  26. For an early modern treatment of signification that takes account of some of the complexities I go on to consider here, see Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, edited by Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), Illustrations, section 3, pp. 161–162.

  27. If my utterance signifies the fact that snow is white, thereby allowing my listeners to infer that the world contains white snow, it signifies, of snow existing in the world, that it is white.

  28. I realize that I am saddling Locke with a “realist” view of facts, one closer (say) to J. L. Austin’s (in his essay “Truth,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 24 (1950), pp. 111–128) than to P. F. Strawson’s (in his essay of the same title, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 24 (1950), pp. 129–156). This seems to me justified by Locke’s definition of truth (Essay IV v 2) and by his remarks on real as opposed to merely verbal truth at IV v 8.

  29. My source for quotations from Berkeley is The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, nine volumes (London: Thomas Nelson, 1948–1957). References, by section or dialogue and sometimes by page number, are provided in the text.

  30. I quote from A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), cited by book, part, section, and paragraph number, and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), cited by section and paragraph number. I also provide page references to A Treatise of Human Nature, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) and Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, third edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), both edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, and referred to collectively as “SBN.”

  31. There is a compelling statement of Hume’s general point in David Pears, Hume’s System (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 112.

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Winkler, K.P. Signification, Intention, Projection. Philosophia 37, 477–501 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9150-8

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