Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

I have throughout this article been drawing attention to several remarkable features of human language.

None is more remarkable than this: In human languages we have the capacity, not only to represent reality, both how it is and how we want to make it be, but we have the capacity to create a new reality by representing that reality as existing.

HCF?s hypothesis appears to be a radical departure from Chomsky?s earlier position that language is a complex ability for which the human brain, and only the human brain, is specialized: A human language is a system of remarkable complexity.

This strikes me as a remarkable misreading of the current state of science.

It is remarkable concerning the operations of the mind, that, though most intimately present to us, yet, whenever they become the object of reflexion, they seem involved in obscurity; nor can the eye readily find those lines and boundaries, which discriminate and distinguish them.

Secondly, We are not able to move all the organs of the body with a like authority; though we cannot assign any reason besides experience, for so remarkable a difference between one and the other.

This has been the case in the long disputed question concerning liberty and necessity; and to so remarkable a degree that, if I be not much mistaken, we shall find, that all mankind, both learned and ignorant, have always been of the same opinion with regard to this subject, and that a few intelligible definitions would immediately have put an end to the whole controversy.

A more explicit discussion of the relation between human language and animal communication systems appears in a recent discussion by the comparative ethologist W. H. Thorpe. He points out that mammals other than man appear to lack the human ability to imitate sounds, and that one might therefore have expected birds (many of which have this ability to a remarkable extent) to be “the group which ought to have been able to evolve language in the true sense, and not the mammals.

At one point Goodman remarks, correctly, that even though “for certain remarkable facts I have no alternative explanation ... that alone does not dictate acceptance of whatever theory may be offered; for the theory might be worse than none.

In fact, as I have now pointed out several times, very strong empirical hypotheses have been proposed regarding the specific choice of universal features, conditions on the form and organisation of phonological rules, conditions on rule application, and so on. If these proposals are correct or near correct, then “similarities among languages” at the level of sound structure are indeed remarkable and cannot be accounted for simply by assumptions about memory capacity, as Putnam suggests.