Thesis ID: CBB001562305

Studies in the Understructure: The Semiotic Basis of John Locke's Empirical Epistemology (2003)

unapi

Hill, Benjamin David (Author)


University of Iowa
Cummins, Phillip D.


Publication Date: 2003
Edition Details: Advisor: Cummins, Phillip D.
Physical Details: 393 pp.
Language: English

It has long been recognized that idea was Locke's central epistemological concept. So important was it that most commentators consider it necessary to first fix what that concept was before attempting to interpret Locke's epistemology. However, identifying what it was is only possible by reconstructing how it functioned within the development and defense of his epistemology. Traditionally, in other words, scholars have approached the question the wrong way around. This dissertation is devoted to the first step of such a reconstruction, recovering the nature of the ideational understructure---what Locke called Smeitik---infixed into and informing his epistemology. Smeitik was the doctrine of signs, of which Locke recognized two types: ideas and words. Word-signs were, for Locke, significant yet it was his semiotic of idea-signs that was, philosophically, the most basic; thus that is the cynosure of this dissertation. Two basic doctrines comprised Locke's semiotic: psychological empiricism and ideational semantics. Locke, it is argued, melded an empirical account of ideas as psychological elements, an account taken from his understanding of ancient medical empiricism (rather than from Bacon, Gassendi or Epicurus, or Boyle and the Royal Society naturalists), to the termist semantics of the late Scholastics. This melding produced something altogether new, a semiotic neither Scholastic nor empiric, one utterly unique but retaining many of the hallmarks of both. In the dissertation's first part Locke's empirical psychology is addressed. After examining the failure of the debate about ideas, new interpretations of Locke's attack on innatism, his defense of empiricism, and his historical for Locke, a form of non-inferential experience and that reflection and sensation were both representational, but in a very different way than scholars have taken them to be. In the second part ideational semantics is addressed. A logical interpretation of Lockean simplicity is defended followed by close examinations of how his complex ideas were constructed out of those simple semantic elements. Finally, it is shown how the properties of ideas---clarity, distinctness, reality, adequacy, and truth---follow from their semantics.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2003): 1284. UMI order no. 3088253.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001562305/

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Authors & Contributors
Gaukroger, Stephen W.
Genna, Caterina
Waxman, Wayne
Jacovides, Michael
Wolfe, Charles T.
Sgarbi, Marco
Concepts
Empiricism
Philosophy
Epistemology
Natural philosophy
Aristotelianism
Newtonianism
Time Periods
17th century
18th century
Early modern
Enlightenment
Renaissance
21st century
Places
England
Italy
Great Britain
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