And therefore such application of names as
would make them stand for ideas which we have not, must needs cause
great disorder in discourses and reasonings about them, and be a great
inconvenience in our communication by words.
22. VI. By proceeding upon the supposition that the words we use
have a certain and evident signification which other men cannot but
understand. Sixthly, there remains yet another more general, though
perhaps less observed, abuse of words; and that is, that men having by
a long and familiar use annexed to them certain ideas, they are apt to
imagine so near and necessary a connexion between the names and the
signification they use them in, that they forwardly suppose one cannot
but understand what their meaning is; and therefore one ought to
acquiesce in the words delivered, as if it were past doubt that, in
the use of those common received sounds, the speaker and hearer had
necessarily the same precise ideas. Whence presuming, that when they
have in discourse used any term, they have thereby, as it were, set
before others the very thing they talked of. And so likewise taking
the words of others as naturally standing for just what they
themselves have been accustomed to apply them to, they never trouble
themselves to explain their own, or understand clearly others'
meaning.
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