CONCEPTUAL DOMINANTS OF JOHN LOCKE’S MORAL TERMINOLOGY PART 2

Abstract

This work aims to explore the ways the English philosopher John Locke shapes the terminology for describing the system of morality in philosophy. Terminology for presenting the principles, laws, and foundations of morality is chosen with respect to tradition of religious texts of the previous two centuries. Moreover, he does not use the concept of innate ideas, but tries to describe simple and complex ideas based on sensations, perceptions, and other psychological notions. However, we observe significant shifts in conceptual dominants that occur in Locke’s text. The term ‘conceptual dominant’ being used in cognitive linguistics studying discourse is applied to Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The article examines in detail the concept of conceptual dominance in relation to Locke’s philosophy and terminology of morality. This concept allows us to consider the emergence of a new point of view on human knowledge about the world, which is associated with its comprehension under the impact of socio-cultural factors that can bring to the fore certain conceptual characteristics in the semantics of language units in the process of communication. In Locke’s discourse, a number of metaphors are highlighted that also help to understand how a scientist describes the processes of perception and understanding, among them LINE, PLANE, CONTAINER are highlighted, which help to describe the terminology of morality. We can observe that the scientist pays special attention to the perception of the world and the objects located in it, which become the SOURCES of knowledge (“fountains of knowledge”), as well as the heart, soul, understanding of a person. In his description, he relies on images known to his contemporaries.