Locke & Mill [Adam Plesser]

Locke and Mill are both right insofar as they are answering different questions. Locke is making a descriptive claim about our epistemic access to reality; namely, that the "primary or immediate signification" of words can only be those things in our minds which we are trying to describe with the words we use. However, the secondary signification, the thing which we actually wish to refer to, is the thing outside of our mind. This latter meaning is the one Mill has in mind and it is the one in terms of which we most often consider language. If Locke does not admit that Mill is also right in a certain way, as I have, then his view faces the problem that it implies that we have no way of describing or discussing the external world; his theory of language entails a degree of solipsism. Mill's view, on the other hand, does not account for the fact that the same word, used to denote the same physical object, can be meant to express vastly different things based on the particular speaker or context.