Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Meaning as an imprint of the mind In his On Interpretation, Aristotle famously claimed that "spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words".

For our purposes we can ignore phonology because it is not essential to language that it be spoken.

It is important, however, that any language, whether spoken or not, must be thinkable.

This is why it does not matter to the identity of the speech act whether, for example, the language spoken requires that the verb phrase comes before or after the subject noun phrase.

Words, for example, are specifically a part of language, but the use of the lungs and the vocal cords, although necessary for spoken language, are not limited to language.

Each stimulus consisted of a sequence of nonsense syllables spoken by a female voice followed by an equal number of syllables spoken by a male voice. Phonological content was irrelevant, and the learning could have been accomplished by counting from the first syllable of each subsequence (high:1–2–3; low:1–2–3).

It helps account for why we have the specializations we do: why children learn spoken language instinctively but written language only with instruction and effort, why the system for recalling memories satisfies many of the specifications of an optimal information-retrieval system, why our preferred sexual partners are nonsiblings who show signs of health and fertility.

Now, certain overly enthusiastic regulists have spoken of the "sense meaning rules" of a language, arguing that the hook-up of an empirically meaningful language with the world is a matter of rules of linguistic usage.

Actions, to follow Ryle, are those actualities which appropriately can be spoken of as deliberate or impulsive, careful or careless, etc.

The fact is neither German nor English, although it is, of course, described or spoken about in our metalanguage, which is English: the fact is non-linguistic, it is a fact of the real world, although we need of course a language if we wish to talk about it.) And what our metalinguistic assertion asserts is that a certain (German) statement corresponds to a certain fact (a non-linguistic fact, a fact of the real world) under conditions which are precisely stated.