ABSTRACT
Before we can examine Locke’s own theory of language in any detail, we need to consider in more general terms precisely what we might expect a philosophical theory of language to achieve. It is, I think, a helpful starting-point to see such a theory as primarily concerned to explicate the interconnections between three quite distinct kinds of relation holding between three different kinds of item. These three kinds of item we may respectively call, with a certain degree of caution, words, thoughts and things-or, to avoid the danger of treating these items too atomistically, language, thought and the world. (Of course, on any account, language and thought are also parts of ‘the world’, but this is a complication which we can ignore for the time being.) Such a tripartite framework may, but need not, receive a ‘realist’ interpretation, since an ‘idealist’ construal-which would make ‘the world’ itself somehow a part of ‘thought’—is also conceivable. All such ‘metaphysical’ considerations I wish to set aside for present purposes, however. Thus I shall not be concerned to rebut the objections of those simple-minded devotees of the deconstructionist slogan il n’y a pas de hors-texte (often translated as ‘there is nothing outside the text’) who would rebuke me for supposing there to be a world of things beyond words. Their position is simply a particularly implausible form of ‘linguistic idealism’.
