Locke's deployment of his linguistic thesis against the Aristotelians raises the specter of self-refutation. For all we have said so far, it is unclear how Locke can argue that the Aristotelians talk nonsense because they use categoremata without corresponding ideas while helping himself to discussions of God, real essence, and substance. In all three cases, Locke denies that experience provides us with ideas of these things. In order to make room for significant speech about that which lies beyond the bounds of experience, Locke must relax the linguistic thesis; but if he is not to vitiate his arguments against the Aristotelians, he must be wary of giving too much ground. I shall argue that Locke's considered view accomplishes precisely this. The goals of the present chapter are twofold: to show that Locke escapes self-refutation and, perhaps more importantly, to deepen and in some respects revise our understanding of the linguistic thesis.

NONSENSE

As we have seen, Locke's thesis that words signify ideas and acts in the mind of the person speaking them imposes a limit on the senseful use of language. The argument we have been examining is an instance of what Irving Thalberg has called the “argument from nonsense,” common throughout modern and later empiricism. Such an argument tries to show that a given claim is not false but nonsensical. “Nonsense” has several different senses: we sometimes apply it to obviously false statements or to the gibberings of infants.