Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The above examples consist of singular terms, concrete and abstract.

The atomic sentences consist each of a predicate followed by one or more variables 'x', 'y', etc.

Again, a reason may be the way one arrives at a conclusion, e.g., when one multiplies 13 x 25. It is a calculation, and is the justification for the result 325. The reason for fixing a date might consist in a man's going through a game of checking his diary and finding a free time. The reason here might be said to be included in the act he performs.

Some existence proofs consist in exhibiting a particular mathematical structure, i.e., in "constructing an entity".

Our method might consist in looking up definitions.

The standard textbook accounts of language say that specific languages such as French or German consist of three components: a phonological component that determines how words and sentences are pronounced, a syntactical component that determines the arrangement of words and morphemes in sentences, and a semantic component that assigns a meaning or interpretation to words and sentences.

Now we are getting much closer to language, because the first phenomenon is essential to the performance of speech acts, and the second phenomenon, the repeatable devices, consist typically of words and sentences of a language.

These assertions are largely independent: there may be parts of the narrow language faculty other than recursion even if the narrow faculty is the only part that is uniquely human; and the narrow faculty might consist only of recursion even if parts of the broad faculty are uniquely human as well).

But they assign words to the broad language faculty, which is shared by other human cognitive faculties, without discussing the ways in which words appear to be tailored to language—namely that they consist in part (sometimes in large part) of grammatical information, and that they are bidirectional, shared, organized, and generic in reference, features that are experimentally demonstrable in young children’s learning of words.

If language per se does not consist of very much, then not much had to evolve for us to get it: Merge would be the only thing that had to be added to the pre-existing auditory, vocal, and conceptual systems.