Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

And how would this square with the fact that I know what my words mean; that I can retrieve their meanings from my memory etc. – without being interpreted by somebody else?

Just as I can retrieve from my memory the function of a long unseen tool which I worked with long ago, so I can retrieve the meaning of a word whose meaning I encountered long ago.

Hans Kamp has suggested to me that one of the ways to express this is the following: „A theory of the implementation of memory presupposes a theory of understanding of meaning“.

We have here two independent orders of events (1) the order of events in our memory.

Call this memory time. (2) the order in which information is got by asking different people, 5 - 4 - 3 o'clock.

Call this information time. In information time there will be past and future with respect to a particular day. And in memory time, with respect to an event, there will also be past and future.

Now if you want to say that the order of information is memory time, you can. And if you are going to talk about both information and memory time, then you can say that you remember the past.

For example, the words "before" and "after" mean something different according as one depends on memory or on documents to establish the time of an event.

Some people say we have an ideal before our minds in the same way we have a memory image when we recognise a colour.

The first step would be one that many philosophers have resisted and that is to see linguistic meaning, the meaning of sentences and speech acts, as an extension of the more biologically fundamental forms of intentionality that we have in belief, desire, memory and intention, and to see those in turn as developments of even more fundamental forms of intentionality, especially, perception and intentional action.