Words as Power

I think this is one of the more interesting and different categorizations of writing and words that I’ve come across. Something that jumped out at me:

“It is true, as to civil and common conversation, the general names of substances, regulated in their ordinary signification by some obvious qualities, (as by the shape and figure in things of known seminal propagation, and in other substances, for the most part by colour, joined with some other sensible qualities,) do well enough to design the things men would by understood to speak of: and so they usually conceive well enough the substances meant by the word gold or apple, to distinguish the one from the other. But in philosophical inquires and debates, where general truths are to be established, and consequences drawn from positions laid down, then the precise signification of names of substances will be found not only not to be well established, but also very hard to be so.”

I find it interesting that Locke divides words into ‘civil’ and ‘philosophical’ use. His whole discussion of this issue really hits at what the nature of words is.

Last fall I took a class titled Book History. As the name suggests, it was literally a class about the history of writing as a technology, from stone slabs to the digital age. It seems very simple, but this was the first class that brought up much of the same issues that Locke is discussing. In the class, the main question brought up is what the nature of writing and books is. Is it the physical object or the ideas held within it? In the same way, Locke seems to be asking similar questions. What is the nature of words? Are they simple pictures processed by our brain? Or are words the inherent concept and meaning contained within the scribbled pictures? I’ll use his simple example of an apple. Is apple the word or the concept? We seem to have a chicken and the egg situation on our hands.

I haven’t quite made up my mind on Locke yet. I (well, kind of) understand the links he is making, but there is something unsettling about it too. If words have more meaning than mere words, what are they? I think Locke and Gorgias would get along well; the essence of both of their pieces we have read is that words have power. Which is an unsettling thought; now our other rhetoricians’ focus on morality makes more sense.