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Locke-ing onto Content

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

Our reading is a passage from John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, Chapter II, § 2.

When a man speaks to another, it is that he may be understood; and the end of speech is that those sounds, as marks, may make known his ideas to the hearer. … Words being voluntary signs, they cannot be voluntary signs imposed by him on things he knows not. That would be to make them signs of nothing, sounds without signification.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2001

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