CONCEPTUAL DOMINANTS OF JOHN LOCKE’S MORAL TERMINOLOGY. PART I

Abstract

The article provides the reconstruction of the English terminological system of morality and its language features in one of the most famous papers of John Locke An Essay Сoncerning Human Understanding (1689). We study this philosophical paper within the framework of cognitive and discursive paradigm of linguistic knowledge and aim to investigate the ideas about human nature and the principles behind the work of human mind. Laws and principles were formulated by the scholar on the basis of nature determination in human thinking and ideas appearance in individual psychological system. The article investigates in detail conceptual dominants of the moral philosophy and terminology in Locke’s paper and, besides that, key metaphors in Locke’s discourse used for the description of human thinking including tabula rasa, empty cabinet, fountains of knowledge, knowledge is light. On the one hand, these conceptual metaphors are deeply rooted in the historical and philosophical context, and on the other, they were understandable to his contemporaries, as he used recognizable words and images. Locke not only changes the actual linguistic representation of some of the traditional philosophical metaphors, but shifts the emphasis, leading to novel interpretations and complicating the system of ideas as a whole. To understand main components of the philosopher’s framework we took into account earlier papers of various scholars as the material for comparison. These components include the process by which new types of knowledge are formed and pathways by which the already existing types are recategorized under the impact of sociocultural factors. It was shown that the system of morality is grounded on the 17th-century views on how the human mind works and embodies the language representation of terminological sphere of morality.