Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The effect of words upon the hearer is a mnemic phenomena, since it depends upon the past experience which gave him understanding of the words.

In this case, both the active and passive understanding of words is different from what it is when words are used demonstratively.

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.

Actually, while Markson and Bloom did argue against a dedicated system for learning words, they did not conclude that words are acquired by a domain-general mechanism.

Once this is done, we can, of course, replace the words corresponds to the facts' by the words 'is true'.

The more familiar we are with words, the more our "thinking" goes on in words instead of images.

Some think of them as something like mental words - words of a language of thought.

But most words (as well as smaller morphemes such as affixes) can combine into complex words such as compounds (e.g. armchair) and other derived forms (e.g. squeezability) according to principles of the component of language called morphology.

Imagine a twin earth in which you exist just as you are internally but in which the words 'colorless', 'odorless', 'river', 'lake' and 'thirst-quenching' are all used differently by your language community so as to make all of these words fail to apply to water.

Intelligent speech could exist as a motor habit, without any accompaniment of images, and this conclusion applies to words of which the meaning is universal, just as much as to words of which the meaning is relatively particular.