Common Use in Locke’s Philosophy of Language

Buffalo Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, 16–17 October 2026

Locke on Common Use
University at Buffalo · Friday 16 October 2026 · 11:00

Abstract (as submitted to the seminar)

Locke is usually interpreted as a semantic voluntarist (i.e., Humpty Dumptyism) because of Essay 3.2.2 “Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them.” I argue that Locke was in fact not a semantic voluntarist. Instead, he maintained that meanings are determined by ideas shared among language users through “common Use,” the rule of semantic propriety for established languages. My argument consists of two movements. First, I establish, pace Guyer 1994 and Dawson 2007, that Locke genuinely posited and used a normatively thick concept of Common Use (the ordinary usage of words) as the measure for linguistic behavior. The evidence is primarily textual, showing that Locke’s appeals to Common Use were couched in strongly normative language (obligation and “must”), provided a true remedy for the abuses and imperfections of words, and were the basis for blaming abusers of words. I also show that Common Use satisfied Locke’s conception of a “Law of Fashion” (Essay 2.28.13) and that Locke defended it as such. The second movement establishes that Locke’s appeal to Common Use was philosophically motivated and grounded in his theory of ideas. The evidence is a combination of textual and analytic. My “smoking gun” text is Essay 3.6.45: “These Words, Kinneah and Niouph, by degrees grew into common use; and then the case was somewhat alter’d. Adam’s children . . . were obliged to conform the Ideas in their Minds, signified by these Names, to the Ideas that they stood for in other Men’s Minds, as to their Patterns and Archetypes.” I then analyze this concept of Common Use archetypes and establish that they are “imperfect” (i.e. indeterminate) ideas created during the process of language learning, lodged in memory, and functioning simultaneously as sources for individual speakers’ meanings and bridges to communal ordinary uses of words. The indeterminacy of these memorial ideas, mediately or secondarily signified, is the solution to the problem of how Common Use can supply a shared standard given the privacy and variability of ideas and not a weakness in the account. The indeterminacy is the mechanism that makes Common Use regulatory. Because they are imperfect—neither fully determinate nor fully private—they can bridge the variation in individual speakers’ ideas to a shared communal standard without collapsing into subjectivism. Indeterminacy is what makes the archetype genuinely common, in other words. This revisionist account of Essay 3.2.2 raises productive questions for further discussion: whether Locke’s normatively thick Common Use is compatible with the prescriptive definitions a panel of semantic experts would offer; how the account handles legitimate linguistic change, innovation, and metaphor; and whether speakers who deploy indeterminate Common Use archetypes as their communal source violate Locke’s prohibition on using words without clear and determined ideas—a challenge the speaker meaning/standing meaning distinction, which I independently attribute to Locke, is well-positioned to address.

Keywords: Locke; language; semantic voluntarism; common use; Humpty Dumpty speech; semantic instability; semantic authority; standing meaning