In terms of who I THINK is closer to the truth, Locke is certainly the one with a view much more closer to mine. I, an agnostic, don’t BELIEVE things exist because people BELIEVE they exist, so to me, while Mill SAYS there is a “physical” thing, that thing may not even necessarily exist. Mill intentionally chooses “sun”, a physical object commonly believed to be true (“it is true”), in his example, which makes his argument seem quite strong. However, if I replace the word “sun” with the word “God”, it is clear for many people this statement will not sound as strong anymore.
My question to Locke would be “does it seem problematic then, in such a case as you describe, people still can communicate in a degree and agree on certain issues?”
My question to Mill would be similar to what I just questioned in the first paragraph, which is “how do you explain then, when people disagree with each other on certain issues, if language necessarily reflects ‘truth’?"
The degree to which communication and mutual intelligibility is possible is pretty astounding. I don't think Locke would accept that this is a threat to his view. Certainly, if we had direct access to objects or words stood for objects and not ideas, then this would be even less of a problem, perhaps it would not arise altogether. But suppose that what we experience are in fact the ideas of objects and words stand for ideas and not objects, it doesn't follow that there can be no agreement. I think that Locke would say that certain internal mechanisms of language provide the possibility of such enormous agreement between people with very different experiences. That is, although when I use the word "happiness", I am signifying something different from when you use it, our ideas may be quite similar, even alarmingly so. He would likely attribute this similarity in the idea of happiness to some fact about the similarity between our mental capacities or internal language.
ReplyDeleteRegarding your question to Mill, I don't think Mill believes that language necessarily reflects truth. There are obvious examples of uses of language which don't set out to have a truth value, or which are deliberately false. Mill has something technical in mind when he says that words "stand for" objects, i.e., that words signify or represent something external, not ideas. I'm not so sure how Mill would respond to disagreement between language users but it seems like his notion of signification does not preclude disagreement either. Surely, he would grant that we have different ideas of the sun, but he believes that my use of the word sun "signifies" (in the technical sense) the actual sun out there, and not my idea of it.