Carina and Jeff's Post

-Sign systems are arbitrary. Language is a signifier of truth, not truth itself. Vico writes that eternal truths stand above nature, but within nature all is mutable(872). Sign systems are a human implement for navigating knowledge, and thus are subject to human fallibility (865). Vico proposes that a speaker should always give their words “the appearance of truth” (873); the implication is that words resemble truth, but are not in an of themselves truth.

-In Vico, the mind arises with (and through) language. Various languages using variable vocabularies and grammars change the nature of the philosophy of those people who speak them: French thought is ardently emotional, Latin elegaic, Greek pure, Roman heterogenous (874-875).

-Following from the last conclusion, language would then reveal “real” cultural and sociological information about a nation. The idiosyncrasies of each language demonstrate the national character of their speakers. Vico says that the famous topic of debate, as to whether “genuis is a product of language, not language of genuis,” is answered as the former by the national character of French intellectualism (874). Conversely, Bacon was deeply concerned with the way that language and oratory warped truth and reason (737).

-Rhetoric is a help to probability and a guide to inquiry. Vico names common sense as essential to eloquence/rhetoric, and he also states that common sense is necessary in good philosophical critique (868). Philosophical critique supplies “fundamental verity” (866). Since man must deal with probabilities as opposed to concrete Truths, common sense, eloquence, and dialectic are necessary to determine the truth of things.

-Ingenuity is seen in imagination, not in metaphor. For Vico, ingenuity is based in applying the ars topica to argument (869). Bacon, on the other hand, sees topoi as a strong background to which one can apply imagination (740). Vico names the imagination as “a most favorable omen of future development,” and insists that it not be dulled in students (868); but the imagination under discussion is not rhetorical invention but rather based in memory and oblique access to abstract truth.

-Youth should be trained for civic action. Vico laments academic focus on the sciences to the exclusion of a study of ethics (871), and insists on politics as a fundamental field of education. He writes that, while physical phenomena are unambiguous, human nature is dificult to determine and deal with, due to free will and human variability (871). Vico regards the study of human nature and civic matters both as more complex than the sciences, and as a necessary pursuit. Bacon again diverges here from Vico – his concern is for the way that social institutions incorporate and distort knowledge.

-Vico believes that the rhetor is a scientist. The rhetor can approach any topic by imposing the appropriate topos upon it (869), whereas Bacon posits that a rhetor can apply the topoi to oratory. He acknowledges that the topoi can be used as a point of departure for a more creative approach (740).

ALEX concordance results:

Answering the question “What are ideas? And how are they reached?”

From our search of the ALEX concordance, we discovered that Locke sees ideas as perceived stimuli. One observes the exterior worl d and draws conclusions from perception and sensation. By extension, one uses Reason to come to extrapolate further and more complex knowledge. Language is used afterwards in order to communicate percieved and reasoned knowledge to other people.

Logic: 31 hits

All of these hits were either, in a few cases, from introductory material. Most of them were notes directing towards JS Mill or the Port Royal Logic. “Logic” does not seem to be Locke’s chosen term; he demonstrably prefers “reason.”

Language: 114 hits

“The use of Language is, by short Sounds to Names of mixed Modes to signify with ease and dispatch general Conceptions; wherein not only abundance of particulars may be contained, but also a great Variety of independent Ideas collected into one complex one.”

“But Men, in making their general Ideas, seeing more the convenience of Language and quick dispatch, by short and comprehensive Signs, than the true and precise Nature of Things, as they exist, have, in the framing their abstract Ideas, chiefly pursued that end, which was to be furnished with store of general, and variously comprehensive Names.”

Reason: 84 hits

Locke claims that humans alone possess the capacity for both Reason and Language.

“But if that particular Being be to be counted of the Sort Man, and to have the Name Man given it, then Reason is essential to it, supposing Reason to be a part of the complex Idea, the Name Man stands for : as it is essential to this thing I write on to contain Words, if I will give it the Name Treatise, and rank it under that Species. So that essential, and not essential, relate only to our abstract Ideas, and the Names annexed to them...”

“There are Creatures in the World that have Shapes like ours, but are hairy, and Our abstract want Language, and Reason.”

Perception: 20 hits

“…yet the Idea of the cause of Light, if we had it ever so exact, would no more give us the Idea of Light it self, as it is such a particular Perception in us, than the Idea of the Figure and Motion of a sharp piece of Steel, would give us the Idea of that Pain which it is able to cause in us. For the cause of any Sensation, and the Sensation it self, in all the Simple Ideas of one Sense, are two Ideas ; and two Ideas so different, and distant one from another, that, no two can be more so.”

“The whole extent of our Knowledg, or Imagination, reaches not beyond our own Ideas, limited to our ways of Perception.”

Sensation: 26 Hits

“…to give Names, that might make known to others any Operations they felt in themselves, or any other Ideas, that came not under their Senses, they were fain to borrow Words from ordinary known Ideas of Sensation, by that means to make others the more easily to conceive those Operations they experi-mented in themselves…all their other Ideas ; since they could consist of nothing, but either of outward sensible Perceptions, or of the inward Operations of their Minds about them ;