John Locke (b. 1632, d.

1704) was a British philosopher, Oxford academic and medical

researcher. Locke is often classified as the first of the great English empiricists. This reputation
rests on Locke's greatest work, the monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/

J. Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding “For I thought that the first Step towards
satisfying the several Enquiries, the Mind of Man was apt to run into, was, to take a Survey of
our own Understandings, examine our own Powers, and see to what Things they were adapted.
Till that was done, I suspected that we began at the wrong end, and in vain sought for
Satisfaction in a quiet and secure Possession of Truths, that most concern'd us whilst we let
loose our Thoughts into the vast Ocean of Being, as if all the boundless Extent, were the natural
and undoubted Possessions of our Understandings, wherein there was nothing that escaped its
Decisions, or that escaped its Comprehension. Thus Men, extending their Enquiries beyond their
Capacities, and letting their Thoughts wander into those depths where they can find no sure
Footing; ‘tis no Wonder, that they raise Questions and multiply Disputes, which never coming to
any clear Resolution, are proper to only continue and increase their Doubts, and to confirm
them at last in a perfect Skepticism”.
• J. Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Book 1)   Book I argues that we have no
innate knowledge. (In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and
Leibniz.)
• So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes.

J. Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Book 2)

• In Book II Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from
experience.
• The term ‘idea,’ Locke tells us “…stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding,
when a man thinks” .
• Experience is of two kinds, sensation and reflection.
• One of these — sensation — tells us about things and processes in the external world. The other
— reflection — tells us about the operations of our own minds.
• Some ideas we get only from sensation, some only from reflection and some from both.
• Locke has an atomic or perhaps more accurately a corpuscular theory of ideas. There is an
analogy between the way atoms or corpuscles combine into complexes to form physical objects
and the way ideas combine.
• Ideas are either simple or complex.
• We cannot create simple ideas, we can only get them from experience. In this respect the mind
is passive.
• Once the mind has a store of simple ideas, it can combine them into complex ideas of a variety
of kinds. In this respect the mind is active.
• Thus, Locke subscribes to a version of the empiricist axiom that there is nothing in the intellect
that was not previously in the senses — where the senses are broadened to include reflection.
J. Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Book 3)
• Book III deals with the nature of language, its connections with ideas and its role in knowledge.
• The importance of abstract general ideas to knowledge enables our ranking all the vast
multitude of particular existences. Thus, abstract ideas and classification are of central
importance in Locke's discussion of language.
• Words stand for ideas. Locke distinguishes words according to the categories. So there are ideas
of substances, simple modes, mixed modes, relations and so on.  
J. Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Book 4)
• In the fourth book of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke tells us what knowledge
is and what humans can know and what they cannot (not simply what they do and do not
happen to know).
• Locke defines knowledge as “the perception of the connection and agreement or disagreement
and repugnancy of any of our Ideas”.
• This definition of knowledge contrasts with the Cartesian definition of knowledge as any ideas
that are clear and distinct.
• Locke's account of knowledge allows him to say that we can know substances in spite of the fact
that our ideas of them always include the obscure and relative idea of substance in general.

Gottlob Frege

• The German mathematician and philosopher, Gottlob Frege, is widely regarded as the father of
analytic philosophy.
• His work has shaped everything which has been written in the philosophy of language in the
analytic tradition.
• There are two principal reasons for this:
1) his philosophy of language presents a way of accepting what seems most natural and intuitive
about the kind of approach to language found in Locke, while decisively rejecting what seems
most questionable about it.
2) his work offers the prospect of a thoroughly systematic approach to meaning.
• Frege shares with Locke these three crucial assumptions:
1) The nature of language is defined by its function;
2) The function of language is to communicate;
3) What language is meant to communicate is thought.

But his clearest disagreement with the Lockean tradition comes in his treatment of these two
assumptions:
1) Words signify or mean the components of what language is meant to communicate;
2) The components of thought are Ideas.
3) Locke had the following conception of how words are components of sentences: Individual
words – or most of them, at least – stand for selfstanding Ideas in the mind of the speaker, and
these are combined into something sentential by an action of the speaker’s mind.
4) Frege rejects this: sentences are, in some sense, basic, and individual words only make sense in
the context of sentences.
• Frege’s Context principle
• Frege established a principle known as the Context Principle.
“ [N]ever to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a sentence”.
And here’s another version:
“[It] is only in the context of a sentence that words have any meaning.”
“ There is no more to the meaning of a word than its contribution to the meaning of sentences
in which it may occur.”
Frege: Innovations
• The other striking innovation of Frege’s philosophy of language is his use of the materials of
formal logic to characterize the meaning of words.
• His first great work was the invention of a new system of formal logic. This new system forms
the basis of what is studied as elementary logic today: it has completely superseded the
Aristotelian logic which was dominant before, and is taken for granted in all analytic philosophy.
• Almost all analytic philosophy of language works with some variant of this Fregean logical
system.
Frege’s Second Order Logic
• Frege's second-order logic included a Rule of Substitution, which allows one to substitute
complex open formulas into logical theorems to produce new logical theorems.
• This rule is equivalent to a very powerful existence condition governing concepts known as the
Comprehension Principle for Concepts. 
Frege's Puzzle
About Identity Statements
Here are some examples of identity statements:
• 117+136 = 253. 
• The morning star is identical to the evening star.
• Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens.
Frege believed that these statements all have the form ‘a=b’, where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are either names
or descriptions that denote individuals.

Frege's Puzzle
About Identity Statements
• Frege noticed (1892) that this account of truth can't be all there is to the meaning of identity
statements.
• The statement ‘a=a’ has a cognitive significance (or meaning) that must be different from the
cognitive significance of ‘a=b’.
• We can learn that ‘Mark Twain=Mark Twain’ is true simply by inspecting it; but we can't learn
the truth of ‘Mark Twain=Samuel Clemens’ simply by inspecting it — you have to examine the
world to see whether the two persons are the same. 
• Now the problem becomes clear: the meaning of ‘a=a’ clearly differs from the meaning of ‘a=b’,
but these two identity statements appear to have the same meaning whenever they are true!
• For example, ‘Mark Twain=Mark Twain’ is true just in case: the person Mark Twain is identical
with the person Mark Twain. And ‘Mark Twain=Samuel Clemens’ is true just in case: the person
Mark Twain is identical with the person Samuel Clemens.
• But given that Mark Twain just is Samuel Clemens, these two cases are the same case, and that
doesn't explain the difference in meaning between the two identity sentences.
• The puzzle Frege discovered is:
how do we account for the difference in cognitive significance between ‘a=b’ and ‘a=a’ when
they are true?
Frege's Puzzle
About Propositional Attitude Reports
• A propositional attitude is a psychological relation between a person and a proposition.
• Belief, desire, intention, discovery, knowledge, etc., are all psychological relationships between
persons, on the one hand, and propositions, on the other.
• When we report the propositional attitudes of others, these reports all have a similar logical
form:
x believes that p 
x desires that p 
x intends that p 
x discovered that p 
x knows that p
• If we replace the variable ‘x ’ by the name of a person and replace the variable ‘p ’ with a
sentence that describes the propositional object of their attitude, we get specific attitude
reports. So by replacing ‘x ’ by ‘John’ and ‘p ’ by ‘Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn’ in the first
example, the result would be the following specific belief report:
• John believes that Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn.
• Since the identity sentence ‘Mark Twain=Samuel Clemens’ is true, we can substitute ‘Samuel
Clemens’ for ‘Mark Twain’ without affecting the truth of the sentence.
• And indeed, the resulting sentence ‘Samuel Clemens was an author’ is true. In other words, the
following argument is valid:
Mark Twain was an author. 
Mark Twain=Samuel Clemens. 
Therefore, Samuel Clemens was an author.
• Similarly, the following argument is valid.
4 > 3 
4=8/2 
Therefore, 8/2 > 3
But Frege, in effect, noticed the following counterexample to the Principle of Identity
Substitution. Consider the following argument:
• John believes that Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn. 
• Mark Twain=Samuel Clemens. 
Therefore, John believes that Samuel Clemens wrote Huckleberry Finn.
This argument is not valid. There are circumstances in which the premises are true and the
conclusion false.
• John may not believe that Samuel Clemens wrote Huckleberry Finn.
• The premises of the above argument, therefore, do not logically entail the conclusion.
• So the Principle of Identity Substitution appears to break down in the context of propositional
attitude reports.
• The puzzle, then, is to say what causes the principle to fail in these contexts. Why aren't we still
saying something true about the man in question if all we have done is changed the name by
which we refer to him?
•
• John Locke – empiricist approach, a corpuscular theory of ideas (simple or complex), there is
nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses.
• Gottlob Frege - analytic philosophy, it is only in the context of a sentence that words have any
meaning (The Context Principle), a Rule of Substitution (to substitute complex open formulas
into logical theorems to produce new logical theorems.

Bertrand Russell
• Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, logician, essayist and
social critic.
• He is best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy.
• After a life marked by controversy—including dismissals from both Trinity College, Cambridge,
and City College, New York—Russell was awarded the Order of Merit in 1949 and the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1950.
He is noted also for his many spirited anti-nuclear protests and for his campaign against western
involvement in the Vietnam War, Russell remained a prominent public figure until his death at
the age of 97

• Russel’s most influential contributions include his championing of logicism (the view that
mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic).
• He refined Gottlob Frege’s predicate calculus (which still forms the basis of most contemporary
systems of logic).
• Russel established a concept of neutral monism (the view that the world consists of just one
type of substance which is neither exclusively mental nor exclusively physical).
• He is well known for his theories of definite descriptions, logical atomism and logical types.
Russel on Definite Descriptions
• ‘Alexandra’, ‘Rasputin’, and ‘Felix Youssoupoff ’ are all proper names:
• They’re names of the wife of the last Tsar of Russia, the monk she admired, and the man who
shot that monk, respectively.
• We use these names to refer to those people: that seems to be what the names are for.
• But what about those other phrases:
• ‘the wife of the last Tsar’,
• ‘the monk she admired’,
• ‘the man who shot that monk’?
• Phrases like these are known as definite descriptions.
• What do they do?
• How do they work?
• Do they refer to the people in question?
• Do they work like names?
• A famous article by Bertrand Russell “On Denoting” (1905) argued that definite descriptions
work quite differently, despite initial appearances.
 The Law of Excluded Middle
• The law says that, for every meaningful sentence, either it or its negation is true.
• Consider Russell’s sentence ‘The King of France is bald’. By Russell’s Law of Excluded Middle,
either that sentence is true, or its negation – ‘It is not the case that the King of France is bald’ –
is true.
• But if ‘the King of France’ is a singular term, then neither sentence can be really true, since there
is now no King of
• France. Russell thinks that logic demands that the Law of Excluded Middle
• be upheld, so there’s a problem with thinking of phrases like ‘the King of France’ as singular
terms.
Russell's Paradox
• Russell's paradox is the most famous of the logical or set-theoretical paradoxes.
• Also known as the Russell-Zermelo paradox, the paradox arises within naïve set theory by
considering the set of all sets that are not members of themselves.
• Such a set appears to be a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. Hence the
paradox.
Russel on Ideal Language
• According to Russell, it is the philosopher’s job to discover a logically ideal language — a
language that will exhibit the nature of the world in such a way that we will not be misled by the
accidental, imprecise surface structure of natural language.
• As Russell writes, “Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really
asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and
mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say” (1931, 82).
• Just as atomic facts (the association of properties and relations with individuals) combine to
form molecular facts in the world itself, such a language will allow for the description of such
combinations using logical connectives such as “and” and “or.”

Willard Van Orman Quine

• Willard Van Orman Quine is a great American philosopher and logician.

• Quine dominated the English-speaking philosophical world in the middle years of the twentieth
century, with an enormous influence on both doctrine and style.
• Quine followed Russell in his treatment of definite descriptions and proper names.
• Indeed, he went even further, proposing that all singular terms be replaced by, or reconstructed
as, definite descriptions.
Quine’s Indeterminacy of Translation
• Some philosophers hold that the idea of indeterminacy is absurd, or that it amounts to an
extreme form of scepticism about whether we ever understand one another, or whether correct
translation is possible at all.
• One picture of communication is like this: you have an idea, a determinate meaning, in your
mind and convey it to me by your utterance.
• To those who have that picture, indeterminacy threatens the whole idea of communication, for
it suggests that the conveying is always vulnerable to drastic failure.
• In the case of translation, the analogous view is that synonymy, or sameness of meaning, is the
criterion of correct translation;
Quine’s Indeterminacy of Translation
• For Quine, the criterion of successful communication, whether or not it involves translation, is
fluent interaction, verbal and nonverbal: “Success in communication is judged by smoothness of
conversation, by frequent predictability of verbal and nonverbal reactions, and by coherence
and plausibility of native testimony” (1990, 43).
• From this point of view, talk of synonymy and of ideas in the mind is simply a theoretical gloss
which is (at best) in need of justification. 
Two kinds of indeterminacy
• The first is indeterminacy of reference: some sentences can be translated in more than one way,
and the various versions differ in the reference that they attribute to parts of the sentence, but
not in the overall net import that they attribute to the sentence as a whole.
• This doctrine is also known as “ontological relativity” and “inscrutability of reference”. 
An example which has become famous: a given sentence might be translated as
• “There’s a rabbit” or as
• “Rabbithood is manifesting itself there” or as
• “There are undetached rabbit parts”, or in other ways limited only by one’s ingenuity.
All that is needed is what Quine calls a proxy function, which maps each object onto another
object and each predicate onto one which is true of a given proxy-object if and only if the
original predicate is true of the original object.
• The second kind of indeterminacy, which Quine sometimes refers to as holophrastic
indeterminacy, is another matter.
• Here the claim is that there is more than one correct method of translating sentences where the
two translations of a given sentence differ not merely in the meanings attributed to the sub-
sentential parts of speech but also in the net import of the whole sentence.
• This claim involves the whole language, so there are no examples, except perhaps of an
exceedingly artificial kind.