H. P. Grice on the conversational implicata of Locke's allegedly 'trifling propositions'

Trifling propositions 1. I leave it to you to decide whether the maxims treated of in the preceding chapter are as useful to real knowledge as they are generally supposed to be. But I think I may confidently affirm that there are some universal propositions which, though they are certainly true, add no light to our understandings, bring no increase to our knowledge. ·There are two kinds of such propositions. I shall discuss one in sections 2–3, the other in 4–7·. 2. First, all purely identical propositions. We can see at a glance that these appear to contain no instruction in them—·to give us no news·. For a proposition that affirms a term of itself tells us only what we must certainly have known already, before the proposition was put to us; and this is so whether the proposition •contains any clear and real idea or rather is •merely verbal—·that is, is a mere construct of words with no backing in ideas. (This is different from the notion of ‘verbal proposition’ spoken of in v.5·.) Indeed that most general proposition What is, is may serve sometimes to show a man the absurdity he is guilty of when he ·implicitly· denies something of itself. (This would happen only through circumlocution or ambiguity, because nobody is willing to defy common sense so openly as to affirm visible and direct contradictions.) But neither that received maxim nor any other identical proposition teaches us anything. . . . [In section 3 Locke mocks identical propositions, pointing out that even a very ignorant person can come up with a million of them, all certainly true and all useless—A soul is a soul, A spirit is a spirit, and so on. He continues:] This is mere trifling with words. It is like a monkey shifting an oyster from one hand to the other: if he could speak, perhaps he would say ‘Oyster in right hand is subject, and oyster in left hand is predicate’, thus making the self-evident proposition Oyster is oyster; and yet with all this he wouldn’t have been the least bit wiser or more knowledgeable. That way of handling the matter would have satisfied the monkey’s hunger about as well as it would a man’s understanding—monkey and man would have improved in bulk and in knowledge together! [The section continues with a further •three derisive paragraphs attacking the idea that in developing some branch of knowledge it is useful to go about reminding oneself or others that substance is substance, that body is body, and so on; and •two paragraphs in which Locke defends his calling such propositions ‘trifling’, and defends himself against critics of the first edition of the Essay, who had attacked him for saying that all identical proposition are trifling but hadn’t grasped how narrowly Locke was construing the phrase ‘identical proposition’.] 4. Another sort of trifling proposition occurs when a part of a complex idea is predicated of the name of the whole; a part of the definition is predicated of the word defined. This includes every proposition in which a more comprehensive term (the genus) is predicated of a less comprehensive one (the species). What information, what knowledge, does a man get from the proposition that Lead is a metal if he knows the complex idea that ‘lead’ stands for? All the simple ideas that belong to the complex one signified by the term ‘metal’ are nothing but what he had already included in his meaning for the name ‘lead’. Indeed, when someone knows the meaning of ‘metal’ and not of ‘lead’, telling him that Lead is a metal is a short way to explain the latter. . . . 237 Essay IV John Locke Chapter viii: Trifling propositions 5. ·Not only predicating •the genus of the species·—it is equally trifling to apply to some term •any other part of its definition, that is, to predicate of the name of some complex idea a simple idea that is part of it—for example All gold is fusible. Fusibility is one of the simple ideas that make up the complex one that ‘gold’ stands for, so affirming it of gold can only be playing with sounds. . . . If I know that the name ‘gold’ stands for this complex idea of body, yellow, heavy, fusible, and malleable, I won’t learn much from being solemnly told that all gold is fusible! The only use for such propositions is to point out to someone that he is drifting away from his own definition of one of his terms. However certain they are, the only knowledge they convey concerns the meanings of words. [Section 6 insists further on the uninformativeness of these ‘trifling’ propositions, exemplified by Every man is an animal and A palfrey is an ambling horse, each of which Locke takes to be true by definition of its subject term. He concludes with a contrast:] But when someone tells me things like •Any thing in which sense, motion, reason, and laughter are united has a notion of God, •Any thing in which sense, motion, reason, and laughter are united would be put to sleep by opium, he has indeed made an instructive proposition. Neither having the notion of God nor being put to sleep by opium is contained in the idea signified by the word ‘man’—·namely the idea of thing in which sense, motion, reason, and laughter are united·. So propositions like those teach us something more than merely what the word ‘man’ stands for, and therefore the knowledge they offer is more than verbal. 7. Before a man makes a proposition he is •supposed to understand the terms he uses in it; otherwise he talks like a parrot, making noises in imitation of others rather than, like a rational creature, using them as signs of ideas in his mind. The hearer also is •supposed to understand the words as the speaker uses them; otherwise the speaker is talking gibberish and making unintelligible noises. So someone is trifling with words when he makes a proposition that contains no more than one of its terms does, which both speaker and hearer were supposed to know already—for example, A triangle has three sides, or Saffron is yellow. This is tolerable only when the speaker aims to explain his terms to a hearer who he thinks doesn’t understand them; and then it teaches only the meaning of that word, the use of that sign. 8. So we can know with perfect certainty the truth of two sorts of propositions. One is the trifling propositions whose certainty is only verbal, not instructive. Secondly, we can know for certain the truth of propositions that affirm something of something else where the former is a necessary consequence but not a part of the complex idea of the latter. For example, Every triangle has an external angle that is bigger than either of the opposite internal angles. This relation of the outward angle to each of the opposite internal angles isn’t part of the complex idea signified by the name ‘triangle’, so this is a real truth, conveying instructive real knowledge. 9. senses are our only source of knowledge of what combinations of simple ideas [here = ‘qualities’] exist together in substances; so the only certain universal propositions we can make about them are ones based on our nominal essences; and these truths are few in number, and unimportant, in comparison with ones that depend on substances’ real constitutions. Therefore, this holds for general propositions about substances: •when they are certain, they are mostly trifling; and •when they are instructive, they are uncertain. 238 Essay IV John Locke Chapter viii: Trifling propositions In the latter case, we can’t have any knowledge of their real truth. however much constant observation and analogy may assist our judgment in guessing. That’s why it often happens that one encounters very clear and coherent discourses that amount to nothing. Names of substantial beings as well as others, so far as they have relative meanings—·as the meaning of ‘magnet’ is relative, because it includes ‘is able to attract iron·—can be joined negatively or affirmatively in true propositions in ways that their relative definitions make them fit to be joined; and propositions consisting of such terms can be deduced from one another just as clearly as can propositions that convey the most real truths. By this method one can make demonstrations and undoubted propositions in words without advancing an inch in one’s knowledge about things. For example, someone who has learned the following words, with their ordinary relative meanings attached to them— ‘substance’, ‘man’, ‘animal’, ‘form’, ‘soul’, ‘vegetative’, ‘sensitive’, ‘rational’ —can make many undoubted propositions about the soul without knowing anything about what the soul really is. Similarly, a man may find an infinite number of propositions, reasonings, and conclusions in books of metaphysics, school-divinity, and some sorts of natural science, yet end up knowing as little about God, spirits, or bodies as he did before he started. 10. Everyone is free to give his names of substances any meaning he likes. Someone who does this casually and thoughtlessly, taking meanings from his own or other men’s fancies and not from any enquiry into the nature of things themselves, can easily demonstrate them of one another according to the various respects and mutual relations he has given them. In doing this he can ignore how things agree or disagree in their own nature, and attend only to his own notions, with the names he has given them. But he doesn’t increase his own knowledge through this procedure, any more than someone increases his riches by taking a bag of counters and calling one ‘a pound’, another ‘a shilling’, a third ‘a penny’. This latter person can undoubtedly add correctly and reach a large sum on the bottom line, without being any richer—indeed, without even knowing how much a pound, a shilling, or a penny is, except that a pound contains twenty shillings and a shilling twelve pennies. One can do ·something analogous to· that with the meanings of words, by making them more or less comprehensive than one another. 11. Concerning most words that are used in discourses— especially argumentative and controversial ones—a further sort of trifling occurs. It is the worst sort, putting us even further from the certainty of knowledge we hope to attain through what we read. Most writers, far from instructing us in the nature and knowledge of things, use their words loosely and uncertainly. They don’t by using words constantly and steadily with the same meanings make plain and clear deductions of some from others, and make their discourses coherent and clear (even if not very instructive). Yet it wouldn’t be hard for them to do this, if it weren’t that it suits them to shelter their ignorance or obstinacy under the obscurity and confusion of their terms. . . . [In sections 12–13 Locke sums up the chapter, describing the two kinds of ‘barely verbal propositions’—the two already described in sections 2 and 4 respectively. The awkward final paragraph of section 13 boils down to this: If you want to say something in which your thoughts don’t ‘stick wholly in sounds’, something with a claim to ‘real truth or falsehood’, you must •have a known and considered idea attached to 239 Essay IV John Locke Chapter ix: Knowledge of existence each word, and •affirm of the subject ‘something that isn’t contained in the idea’ of it (or, by clear implication, deny of the subject something whose negation isn’t contained in the idea of it).]