ABSTRACT
The same upheavals in space and place theory that toppled the topoi from their high role in rhetoric also gave rise to a revolution in theories of language. This revolution occurred because of John Locke. Locke aimed to explain how human understanding arises from simple ideas that our minds combine, manipulate, and reflect upon. Language was vital to this process, and Locke's ideas on mind and language utilized both conventional spatial ideas and new conceptions of space. The chief conventional use occurs in his navigational metaphors, the need to compare the points of view that different locations offer, and his overall conception of the "way of ideas," a spatial metaphor of a path or route that explains the process of assembling simple ideas into more complex ideas. The new conceptions, which relate directly to his spatial metaphors, are reflected in his analysis of our ideas of place and space, an analysis that makes these much more contingent and conventional than his contemporaries had thought. I will explore these metaphors and ideas and then trace the consequences of the spatial treatment of language in the way his followers dealt with the problem of abstraction. Together, these thinkers treated language as a cognitive mapsomething far beyond a mere lexicon the mind uses for objects in the world. Language provided an architecture with its own structure which, like the conventions of mapping, allow us to represent the world in a different medium. Language is the mind's space. Just as objects exist in space in the world, certain ideas exist only in words and can be located and related to other ideas only through language. Understanding language in Locke and his followers resembles understanding a system of navigation. We have our familiar locales wherein we move comfortably, but moving from a familiar locale to a strange one far away requires arbitrary reference points and compass directions. Locke showed that to go from ordinary knowledge to
foreign perspectives, or to understand the ways in which the mind creates knowledge, entails a similar need for a system of points and directions. His exploration of language comprised the epistemological equivalent of terrestrial navigation.
