On Locke and Mill [Yuchen Jiang ]

 In this discussion, I consider Mill as being more convincing with his understanding of names, especially the distinction he draws between general and particular names. For Locke, he believes that people abstract general names from particular names, where the general names can be predicated to those within the under same species. Here, Locke somehow dismisses the point that general names cannot equivalently function as attributes. I think Mill has an insightful point about this distinction of attributes by themselves and those attributes as being possessed by things. As gives the example, of White and Whiteness, where the former is denotes that an object has the attributes of Whiteness, which can refer to different things, while the latter refers to only an attributes.

For Locke, his idea that language applies to the idea within people’s mind is somewhat too radical. Since if words or names only refer to ideas within our mind instead of those material objects, the communicative power of language is somewhat undermined. If language after all only applies to things in a person’s mind, given that people cannot reach out to other people’s mind intuitively, communication via language only possible when two individual accidentally have a common or similar reference for a word that they share.

However, from Mill’s perspective, there could be argued that even though a name can apply to an attributes, such as whiteness, the process of grasping this concept of Whiteness requires empirical experiences, which may lead to the result that Whiteness is a manifested concept based on a generalization of observing white object. In this way, Whiteness, any general names, are not attributes of the object, rather they are imposed by people onto objects through generalizing the similarities among these objects.