John Locke's Aristotelian rift

Daniel Stern is certainly not the first to raise the question of how mental representations are expressed. Contemporary philosophers have a convenient way of dealing with Aristotle’s rift between incoming forms and their signification by words. They speak about epistemic and semantic aspects in the mind’s operations. Separating these aspects allows them to bypass the problem how mental representations are transformed into words.

This is not, however, a novel solution. I recognise it as an "analytic jump" in John Locke’s An essay concerning human understanding between the Books II and III. Book II deals with the path from sense operations to the formation of mental ideas:

The soul begins to have ideas when it begins to perceive. To ask, at what time a man has first any ideas, is to ask, when he begins to perceive; - having ideas, and perception, being the same thing. (Locke, Book II, Chapter 1. Of ideas in general and their origin). 

Locke’s analysis of how ideas are generated in Book II soon becomes quite complex. Not all ideas stem from “privative causes”. Bodies have primary qualities, secondary qualities, etc. This complexity does not, however, alter the fact that the analysis begins from sense perception, which is largely understood in an Aristotelian way as a passively receptive process. Then, the very first page in Book III introduces human expression by the following quote:

 Man fitted to form articulate sounds. God, having designed man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination, and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him also with language, which was to be the great instrument and common tie of society. Man, therefore, had by nature his organs so fashioned, as to be fit to frame articulate sounds, which we call words.

To use these sounds as signs of ideas. Besides articulate sounds, therefore, it was further necessary that he should be able to use these sounds as signs of internal conceptions; and to make them stand as marks for the ideas within his own mind, whereby they might be made known to others, and the thoughts of men’s minds be conveyed from one to another.”

 

Locke dodges the problem of how representational ideas transform into expressive signs by referring to God’s kindness. As modern secular scientists, psychologists cannot solve the problem in this convenient way. Hence, Stern is quite right when he points out in “The motherhood constellation” that the transformation of mental representations into expressions remains an enigma.