In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke set out to offer an analysis of the human mind and its acquisition of knowledge still very current and important today. Locke offered also an empiricist theory according to which we acquire ideas through our experience of the world. The article examines Locke’s views on language and his principal innovation in the field of linguistic theory, represented by the recognition of the power of language with respect to the classification of the world, and its relative independence from reality. In particular the following topics are discussed: a) the polemical contrast with Cartesian philosophy b) the criticism that Locke levels against innatism c) the function of abstraction of the mind d) the concept of semiotics as a theory of thought and its expression e) the radical concept of arbitrariness f) the pragmatic factor intrinsic to Locke’s linguistics described as “communicational scepticism”.

http://journals.euser.org/files/articles/ejls_v5_i3_19/Prato.pdf

Why is Locke's Linguistic Theory Still Current and Interesting Today?

Este ensayo examina los aspectos fundamentales de la teoria lockiana a traves de un lectura detallada del Essay on human understanding, mostrando como el empirismo en el que se basa toda su filosofia desempena un papel fundamental tambien en la determinacion de la concepcion radical de la arbitrariedad del signo linguistico y del estatuto general de la semiotica.

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La teoría lockiana del lenguaje

The paper focuses on the analysis of Jean Itard’s writings documenting the program of linguistic re-education of Victor de l’Aveyron, a wild child found in France at the end of the eighteenth century. When discovered, the boy was seemingly twelve or thirteen years old and suffered from a severe form of deficiency in his intellectual and linguistic development, which made him utterly unable to speak and communicate with others. Itard’s original method of re-education is examined here in relation to both the positive results he achieved from a cognitive point of view (but also the negative ones from the point of view of the ontogenetic birth of language) and the most significant outcomes reached by the eighteenth century philosophy of language through Locke’s and Condillac’s semiotic theories.

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Alessandro Prato

Papers

La teoría lockiana del lenguaje

A Special Case of Philosophical Reflection about the Origin of language: Victor, the Wild Child of Aveyron