History Bump

Locke rejects double conformity, in which words refer to things of the world. Instead he says that they refer to ideas (24). "Mistaken trust in words has caused the assumption that they refer directly to things, as if there were a reliable 'double conformity' between thing-idea and idea-word. Therefore Locke made it a principle that it is often impossible to do a faithful translation from one language into another" (346). In the hands of Humboldt and others, the rejection of double conformity becomes the principle of linguistic relativity (346-7). Condillac, Saussure, and Taine all work from Locke's critique of double conformity (24-5). Locke's philosophy represents a word as a "knot that ties a bundle together," which "calls attention both to the arbitrariness of the idea and to the active role performed by the word in preserving the idea as well as in fostering the opinion that it is not arbitrary, on the mistaken assumption that there is some sort of real—and hence not arbitrary—connection between word and object" (76 n. 37). Aarsleff, Hans. From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.

Here (and throughout his historiographic publications) White makes this principle specific to the work of historians. It's such a simple point, yet so essential, and so easily overlooked by readers of history.