epistemology and semantics

I thought I would address April’s question in her previous post:
I’m having a lot of trouble with page 799-800 which details concepts talked about on page 792: espistemology, semantics, other scientific theories in play.

We might look at this issue (“What is the relationship between language and knowledge?” [799]) as a disagreement with two major camps. On one side are Descartes, Condillac, and Locke, and on the other side is Vico. (Of course, there are others, but these are the ones described on these pages.)

Descartes valued empiricism, the belief that knowledge is created from human experience. He valued the use of experiments and the reformulation of logic “as a means of investigation,” not of proof (793). Descartes sought truth, not the Scholastic dispute and rhetoric, which only gets at probability and persuasion (793-794). Drawing on the Cartesian “tradition,” “Locke argues that all ideas are mental combinations of sense perceptions and that words refer not directly to things but to mental phenomena, the ideas we retain and build from sense impressions” (799). Bizzell and Herzberg suggest that Locke’s ideas were followed by various philosophers in order to “purify language” (799). Condillac proposes that there is a universal grammar and a way to perfect language for science (799). In fact, this belief that grammar is so intrinsically linked to logic led the French to go so far as to replace the university chairs of logic and metaphysics with chairs of universal grammar in 1795 for eight years (800). These philosophers believed that knowledge was possible because we perceived the world, not because we created it or because of the way we described it.

Giambattista Vico, however, was opposed to the Cartesian epistemology. Instead of viewing knowledge and language as separate, Vico understood knowledge as “bound up in human reason, passion, and imagination” and valued rhetoric more than the Cartesian method to investigate knowledge (800). For Vico, even the “certainty” of hard sciences like math comes into question because this certainty is merely belief, not actual knowledge (800). While Cartesians believed the world was something that could be perceived and thus known, Vico was of another philosophical bent: We cannot know what God has created, but only what we have created.

For Vico, a universal grammar exists for a different reason than it does for Locke and the others. The others saw a purified language as best because then one can accurately describe what one sees (empiricism). For Vico (the best I understand it at this time), all languages developed from a universal language that was used to describe and create human reality (but not affecting nature).

Does that make sense?

Further Simplification:
Cartesian: We perceive the world accurately, and the more pure our language, the more accurate our descriptions of our perceptions.
Vico: Our perceptions are bound up in our history, language, emotion, and social groups, and so therefore we can only, with the best probability, describe human affairs. We cannot have actual knowledge of the world because only God can have that.