ABSTRACT
Locke devotes a good deal of the Essay to the topic of language, and this may, superficially, appear to give a rather modern cast to his philosophy – for philosophers in recent decades have been almost obsessed with language, both as a supposed source of insight into perennial philosophical problems and as a particularly perplexing phenomenon which sets us apart from other intelligent creatures. But in fact Locke, in common with many other seventeenth-century philosophers, tends to see language as little more than a necessary but dangerous convenience: necessary as a means to clothe our thoughts in forms fit for others to apprehend them, but dangerous in being liable to abuse by those more concerned to persuade us by the force of their rhetoric than by the cogency of their arguments. On this view, language can serve quite as well to disguise the absence of thought – even to its own user – as to provide a vehicle for genuine communication. Such healthy scepticism is, unfortunately, too rarely to be found amongst present-day philosophers. (Locke, it is worth remarking, devotes two lengthy chapters of the Essay to the ‘abuse of words’ and its remedies.)
