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Locke-ing onto Content
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
Our reading is a passage from John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, Chapter II, § 2.
When a man speaks to another, it is that he may be understood; and the end of speech is that those sounds, as marks, may make known his ideas to the hearer. … Words being voluntary signs, they cannot be voluntary signs imposed by him on things he knows not. That would be to make them signs of nothing, sounds without signification.
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