We consider the notion of everyday language. We claim that everyday language is semantically bounded by the properties expressible in the existential fragment of second–order logic. Two arguments for this thesis are formulated. Firstly, we show that so–called Barwise's test of negation normality works properly only when assuming our main thesis. Secondly, we discuss the argument from practical computability for finite universes. Everyday language sentences are directly or indirectly verifiable. We show that in both (...) cases they are bounded by second–order existential properties. Moreover, there are known examples of everyday language sentences which are the most difficult in this class (NPTIME–complete). (shrink)

We investigated the effects of everyday language exposure on the prediction of orthographic and phonological forms of a highly predictable word during listening comprehension. Native Japanese speakers in Tokyo (Experiment 1) and Berlin (Experiment 2) listened to sentences that contained a predictable word and viewed four objects. The critical object represented the target word (e.g., /sakana/;fish), an orthographic competitor (e.g., /tuno/;horn), a phonological competitor (e.g., /sakura/;cherry blossom), or an unrelated word (e.g., /hon/;book). The three other objects were distractors. (...) The Tokyo group fixated the target and the orthographic competitor over the unrelated objects before the target word was mentioned, suggesting that they pre-activated the orthographic form of the target word. The Berlin group showed a weaker bias toward the target than the Tokyo group, and they showed a tendency to fixate the orthographic competitor only when the orthographic similarity was very high. Thus, prediction effects were weaker in the Berlin group than in the Tokyo group. We found no evidence for the prediction of phonological information. The obtained group differences support probabilistic models of prediction, which regard the built-up language experience as a basis of prediction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 113-126 [Access article in PDF] Gadamer on Poetic and Everyday Language Christopher Lawn Gadamer's writings since the appearance of his ground-breaking Truth and Method 1 elaborate and defend the diverse claims of his much-contested philosophical hermeneutics. This is taken further in many recently translated essays where we witness the application of basic hermeneutical insights to areas as various as pedagogical theory and (...) modern medical practice. These investigations are important, as they testify to the universality of hermeneutics. Yet more significant in Gadamer's recent work is a pronounced turn towards "the poetic." Despite large claims in Truth and Method about the irreducibility of the linguistic, there is precious little on the poetic in this work, apart from a few asides about the relationship between poetry and the everyday language of conversation. The distinction between poetic language and everyday language of the "life world" makes a token appearance in Truth and Method (TM, pp. 469-70) and increases in significance in more recent works, especially those occasional essays devoted to aesthetics, poetics, and hermeneutically inspired readings of modern German lyric poets. 2A good deal turns on the distinction between "everyday" or "ordinary" language and "poetic" language. Gadamer's increasing appreciation of the poetic leads him into interpretations of contemporary poetry, notably the hermetic lyric of Paul Celan. 3 The different dimensions to language are brought into relief when considered in relation to the notion of play. Like the poetic, "play" and "playfulness" are cursorily mentioned in the First Part of Truth and Method as repressed aspects of the truth of the work of art. When hermeneutically reclaimed, they stand as a buttress against subjectivist, modernist versions of the aesthetic. Yet Gadamer fails to fully thematize "play," as it disappears [End Page 113] from view in Parts Two and Three of Truth and Method, losing itself in the interpretive turn towards those other facets of hermeneutic truthfulness, historicality and language. In the later essays, specifically those reflecting upon the poetic and the aesthetic, "play" becomes wider and assumes a much greater significance. Play, and this is most evident in the language of poetry, reveals itself to be a fundamental characteristic of language itself.Notions of "play" and "language-games" are more obviously associated with the later work of Wittgenstein. Many critics have observed, en passant, an obvious proximity between Wittgenstein and Gadamer, although their closeness has been noted rather than explored 4. Converging around the issue of everyday language, Gadamer and Wittgenstein radically disagree vis-à-vis "poetic language." For all his appreciation of language's specificity and consequent resistance to theory, its endless slipperiness and variety, Wittgenstein, early or late, seldom confronts language at its most opaque and elusive, that is, in the poetic.What does this Wittgensteinian silence about "poetic language" reveal? The movement away from a logic-driven picture theory of meaning (in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) to the more informal, loosely textured, pragmatics of language (in the Philosophical Investigations), represents hostility to philosophical abstraction and an appreciation of the "rough ground" of ordinary, philologically speaking, "living,"language. What should we say of the literary and poetic dimensions to language, themselves significant dimensions to "living" language? The ability of the language-games to change, the capacity of language to transform itself and work in new uncharted regions--about these Wittgenstein is largely silent.Gadamer's concern with the poetic shows how many of these questions might be addressed from within another philosophical tradition. Were Wittgenstein less inscrutable, it would be tempting to regard the ordinary/poetic distinction, and its dependence upon the notion of "play," as a clear advance on the familiar language-game model. This is a temptation I partially resist. Wittgenstein's enigmatic comments, in the closing pages of the Philosophical Investigations, on "aspect-dawning," "seeing-as," gestures, and pictures, not to mention his compressed and aphoristic "poetic" style, force one to draw back from such an easy conclusion. [End Page 114] I In "Philosophy and Poetry" (OTROTB, pp. 131-39) the different aspects of language are likened to types of currency in... (shrink)

This article maintains that an important class of scientific generalizations should be reinterpreted: they have typically been understood as ceteris paribus laws, but are, in fact, generics. Four arguments are presented to support this thesis. One argument is that the interpretation in terms of ceteris paribus laws is a historical accident. The other three arguments draw on similarities between these generalizations and archetypal generics: they come with similar inferential commitments, they share a syntactic form, and the existing theories to make (...) sense of them are alike. Once these generalizations are properly understood as generics, the recent cognitive approach to generics can be extended to the study of the relevant sciences. The last section indicates ways in which this extension is fruitful for the two strands of research that we combine: the philosophy of science literature on generalizations and the semantics literature on generics. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz made a point which is crucial for understanding communi­cation and social coordination. Through symbols, signs or indications we experience that which transcends our experience. However, Schutz never solved the conceptual problems his claim implied. A solution is proposed through constructive criticism of Schutz. Symbols, signs and indications are based on typical expectations. In contrast, ‘experiences of transcendence’ are analyzed as experiences which deviate from typical expectations due to a tendency inherent to experience, as opposed to deviations prompted by (...) the frustration of types. Such experiences are shown to be constitutive of our use of symbols, our use of language, and our relation to individual others. Experiences of transcendence do not passively reflect the situation, but they are motivated in their selectivity by ‘anxiety.’ Anxiety is phenomenologically under­stood as the expectation of atypical experiences. While anxiety motivates deviations from types, it is itself motivated by previous frustrations of types. Through this dynamics of motivation, experiences of transcendence and typical experiences refer to each other. Even so, the two categories are logically distinct. The possibility of communication and social coordination can only be explained by assuming, in addition to shared types, anxiety as a shared readiness to transcend types. (shrink)

There are several linguistic phenomena that, when examined closely, give evidence that people speak through characters, much like authors of literary works do, in everyday discourse. However, most approaches in linguistics and in the philosophy of language leave little theoretical room for the appearance of characters in discourse. In particular, there is no linguistic criterion found to date, which can mark precisely what stretch of discourse within an utterance belongs to a character, and to which character. And yet, (...) without at least tentatively marking the division of labor between the different characters in an utterance, it is absolutely impossible to arrive at an acceptable interpretation of it. As an alternative, I propose to take character use seriously, as an essential feature of discourse in general, a feature speakers and listeners actively seek out in utterances. I offer a simple typology of actions in discourse that draws on this understanding, and demonstrate its usefulness for the analysis of a conversation transcript. (shrink)

Although now largely forgotten, the international language movement was, from the 1880s to the end of the Second World War, a matter of widespread public interest, as well as a concern of numerous scientists and scholars. The primary goal was to establish a language for international communication, but in the early twentieth century an increasing accent was placed on philosophical considerations: wanted was a language better suited to the needs of modern science and rational thought. In this (...) paper, we examine the example of the English scholar C.K. Ogden's international language Basic English and his efforts to win the Vienna Circle philosophers Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap over to the project. Basic is shown to be an implementation of key ideas in Ogden's philosophy of language, ideas shared to a large extent with Neurath and Carnap. This we see through an examination of their unpublished correspondence, as well as through the collaboration that emerged between Ogden and Neurath, in which Neurath's Isotype, a system for graphically representing statistical data, became closely aligned with Basic. Through the ideas and endeavours we investigate here, we gain a new perspective on this crucial period in the history of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

An ethnographic or ethnomethodological turn in the history of the human sciences has been a Holy Grail at least since Cooter and Pumphrey called for it in 1994, but it has been little realized in practice. This article sketches out some ways to explore the reception, use and/or co-production of scientific knowledge using material generated by mediators such as mass-market paperbacks, radio, TV and especially newspapers. It then presents some preliminary findings, tracing the prevalence and, to a lesser extent, use (...) of selected social-science concepts in the USA and the UK from the 1930s to the 1970s. (shrink)

A sentence is never not in a context. We are never not in a situation. A statute is never not read in the light on some purpose. A set of interpretative assumptions is always in force. A sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the product of one...No sentence is ever apprehended independently of some or other illocutionary force. Illocutionary force is the key term in speech-act theory. It refers to the way an utterance is taken—as an order, (...) a warning, a promise, a proposal, a request, etc.—and the theory's strongest assertion is that no utterance is ever taken purely, that is, without already having been understood as the performance of some illocutionary act. Consider, as an example, the sentence "I will go." Depending on the context in which it is uttered, "I will go" can be understood as a promise, a threat, a warning, a report, a prediction, etc., but it will always be understood as one of these, and it will never be an unsituated kernel of pure semantic value. In other words, "I will go" does not have a basic or primary meaning which is then put to various illocutionary uses; rather, "I will go" is known only in its illocutionary lives, and in each of them its meaning will be different. Moreover, if the meaning of a sentence is a function of its illocutionary force , and if illocutionary force varies with the circumstances, then illocutionary force is not a property of sentences, but of situations. That is, while a sentence will always have an illocutionary force , the illocutionary force it has will not always be the same. Stanley E. Fish is the author of, among many other works, Is There a Text in This Class? Interpretative Authority in the Classroom and in Literary Criticism, and The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" , "Interpreting the Variorum" , "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" , "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" , and "One More Time". (shrink)

RESUMO Neste artigo, busca-se desenvolver um exercício de elucubração sobre o conceito de “ordinário do sentido”, proposto inicialmente por Michel Pêcheux. O conceito, contudo, não foi plenamente desenvolvido devido à morte prematura do filósofo francês em 1983. Assim, o que se pretende é conjecturar o que poderia ser este “ordinário do sentido”. Para tal, em acordo com as sugestões de Pêcheux, segue-se explorando a “análise da linguagem ordinária”, conforme proposto por Ludwig Wittgenstein, e sua reinterpretação culturalista elaborada por Michel de (...) Certeau nas “artes de fazer” cotidianas. Ao final do percurso, chega-se a duas hipóteses: a primeira é que o “ordinário do sentido” não configuraria um “aspecto” do sentido (ou a inclusão de novos objetos, como conversas etc.), mas sim um novo paradigma para se exercer a análise de discursos a partir de um “materialismo prático”; a segunda é que pensar o sentido em sua via ordinária faz com o que a análise do discurso tenha de levar em conta as práticas discursivas e seus diagramas de ação. Como singela homenagem às mais de 660 mil vítimas da covid-19 no Brasil, a discussão em torno dos jogos de linguagem e das práticas cotidianas será balizada pela leitura de um post do Memorial Inumeráveis em uma de suas redes sociais. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 295-310, April 2022.

Challenges the idea held by many prominent twentieth-century Sinologists that early China experienced a “language crisis.” Jane Geaney argues that early Chinese conceptions of speech and naming cannot be properly understood if viewed through the dominant Western philosophical tradition in which language is framed through dualisms that are based on hierarchies of speech and writing, such as reality/appearance and one/many. Instead, early Chinese texts repeatedly create pairings of sounds and various visible things. This aural/visual polarity suggests that texts (...) from early China treat speech as a bodily practice that is not detachable from its use in everyday experience. Firmly grounded in ideas about bodies from the early texts themselves, Geaney’s interpretation offers new insights into three key themes in these texts: the notion of speakers’ intentions (yi), the physical process of emulating exemplary people, and Confucius’s proposal to rectify names (zhengming). Jane Geaney is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond and the author of On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought. (shrink)

Everyday artistic creativity is downplayed in our schools, our lives, our culture. Yet here is an essential language of our lives, opening us to important ways of knowing, truth, beauty, and means for creative coping, as individuals and as cultures. Views of John Dewey and Suzanne Langer are each considered. A devaluation of artistic creativity may also reflect unacknowledged biases related to emotional "versus" intellectual knowing, gender stereotyping, science "versus" art, individualism "versus" interdependence, false stereotypes of creative "unhealth," (...) and eminent "versus" everyday creativity. Addressing these holds promise for our personal well-being and development, and our greater health as cultures. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 475-491, September 2019.

Human language, hominin tool production modes, and multimodal communications systems of primates and other animals are currently well-studied for how they display compositionality or combinatoriality. In all cases, the former is defined as a kind of hierarchical nesting and the latter as a lack thereof. In this article, I extend research on combinatoriality and compositionality further to investigations of everyday primate skills. Daily locomotion modes as well as behaviors associated with subsistence practices, hygiene, or body modification rely on (...) the hierarchical nesting of different behavioral and cognitive actions into complex skills. I introduce a scheme which uses hierarchical organization to differentiate combinatorial from compositional skills. Combinatorial skills are defined either as aggregational or linearly hierarchical depending on whether the skill occurs momentarily in space or unfolds sequentially over time. Compositional skills are defined either as nested or interactionally hierarchical depending on whether the skill results in new constructs or in new interactions between existing constructs. The methodology I propose combines epistemological hierarchy theory with data from primatological field research and experimental and comparative psychological research and provides a means to integrate current constructionist and extended views on cognition and action with older research on behavioral logics in psychology and operational chain thinking in anthropology. The approach furthermore synchronizes with ongoing research on teleonomy, intentionality, and creativity. -/- . (shrink)

The paper examines the intercultural dimension of everyday aesthetics which was promoted by one of its most important Chinese proponents Liu Yuedi as a search for dialogue between various aesthetic traditions, in particular, those from the East and West. The aim of the paper is to explore some parallels between the traditional Chinese and contemporary Western aesthetic sensibilities, by looking for their common values and concepts which are gaining prominence in the discourse of everyday aesthetics. It begins with (...) a survey of the contributions of Chinese and Western scholars; the survey concerns the relevance of Chinese traditional aesthetics for everyday aesthetics, and examines particular features of the nature of perception in everyday aesthetics which is common to Chinese and Western artistic activities, aesthetic discourses and their conceptualizations. In the second section I discuss the “intercultural” concept of atmosphere as the de-personalized or “transpersonal”/intersubjective, vague and all-inclusive experience of the situational mood and environmental wholeness. I explore and compare the reflection of its characteristics in Western scholarship and Chinese aesthetics, especially in regard to the aural perception and sonic sensibility. The final section provides a comparative analysis of few examples of the integration of music into the environmental or everyday surrounding—in Daoist philosophy and Chinese everyday aesthetics, and Western avant-garde art. The analysis is concentrated on the perception of music in relation to the experience of atmosphere and everyday aesthetics, as they were defined in the previous sections. The paper challenges the “newness” of everyday aesthetics, especially if it is viewed from the intercultural perspective, and proposes the separation of its discourses into the investigation of its past and present. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett BourbonKatie PelkeyEveryday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett Bourbon; 200 pp. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.In Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics, Brett Bourbon probes the nature of poetry and its centrality in our everyday lives, working from the ordinary-language philosophical framework associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, W. V. O. Quine, and Stanley Cavell. (...) Bourbon's ideas contribute new dimensions to the elusive concept of poetry and pivots the reader's attention inward: how can we recognize poetry in our day-to-day and why should we? At sentence level, his claims are clear and compelling to readers across disciplines with varying knowledge of philosophy and poetry. This book is thus addressed to "poets, literary scholars, philosophers, and students of religion, and anyone who cares about the ethics of everyday life, about the surprises that punctuate and give our lives form" (p. ix).Poems themselves are such "events of form," Bourbon emphasizes, which live among us and need not be constituted by words. Wordless poems can be uncovered and embraced through the development of a "poetic vulnerability" to ordinary experiences that are not necessarily wedded to one's aesthetic reaction. Bourbon designates the alphabet as one such example of what he calls a "primal everyday poem"; the alphabet is wordless and consists of a patterned order whose mere form does not encompass its meaning. The ordinary expression "I love you" also falls under this classification; the phrase is a performative poem whose intricate connotation is simplified by common language, yet is not the equivalent of its mere words. Bourbon asserts that, like the phrase "I love you," poems of the everyday cannot be reduced to mere language, conditions, or creative modes.Of the ineffable nature of poetry, Bourbon claims, "Poetry, like death, is that which we can only know by analogy—by examples—but it has a scope beyond all our examples" (p. 108). In terms of examples, he draws from poignant personal experiences to reinforce his arguments and provide insight into his keen sensibility. In chapter 1 ("Poems of the Everyday"), Bourbon recounts his own dismissal as a young boy of poetry's worthiness until one day while watching an old film, he in fact was struck by the phrase "I love you." This ordinary phrase allowed him to reconsider the parameters of what constitutes poetry and acknowledge the dichotomy of the phrase's formal power constituted by trivial symbols.Chapter 4 ("Epithalamion") is also rooted in personal experience. Bourbon opens with the flat assertion, "I have never liked weddings" (p. 43), but he notes a difference between a "marriage of forms" and "marriage of intimacy and stability": his distaste is for the former. He believes that a successful marriage can become a poem of the everyday—an event of power and "linguistic surrogacy"—where the event itself fosters more meaning than the words alone [End Page 475] can carry. Marriage can be a poem of discovery that arises from the action of learning what it means to love. But in the objects of the wedding and all its trite, heart-shaped symbols, Bourbon remarks, no poems are to be found.Bourbon dedicates chapter 5 ("Is a Poem the Same as Its Words?") to his claim that what a poem is cannot be bound by its words entirely or by meaning alone. If one finds each line of a poem intelligible, that does not indicate that the poem's meaning is consequentially understood. Conversely, a reader may not know a poem's meaning with complete certainty; what is said may not illuminate what is meant. In Bourbon's explanation of the sentence as a model for how particular words construct a poem, he says that one must determine how such a sentence-poem would be meaningful through our own reading. He claims that a poem is more than its words and cannot be simplified into sets of sentences or phrases. "A poem, if it is a sentence, is always more than that sentence; otherwise, a poem would not be a poem but a sentence" (p. 67).Bourbon's latest publication challenges traditional, long... (shrink)

The essential role of language in rational cognition is analysed. The approach is functional: only the results of the connection between language, reality, and thinking are considered. Scientific language is analysed as an extension and improvement of everyday language. The analysis gives a uniform view of language and rational cognition. The consequences for the nature of ontology, truth, logic, thinking, scientific theories, and mathematics are derived.

This book applies the formal discipline of logic to everyday discourse. It offers a new analysis of the notion of individual, suggesting that this notion is linguistic, not ontological, and that anything denoted by a proper name in a well-functioning language game is an individual. It further posits that everyday discourse is non-compositional, i.e., its complex expressions are not just the result of putting simpler ones together but react on the latter, modifying their meaning through feedback. The (...) book theorizes that in everyday discourse, there is no algebra of truth values, but the latter can be both input and output of something which has no truth value at all. It suggests that an elementary proposition of everyday discourse can, in principle, be indefinitely expanded by adding new components, belonging neither to subject nor to predicate, but remain elementary. This book is of interest to logicians and philosophers of language. (shrink)

Looking at objectivity in scientific practices from a rhetoric point of view, this paper focuses on three related strategies of objectification found in the early psychoanalytic situation (1901-1924): formalisation and purification of language, accumulation of symbolic capital, and social distancing. On the one hand, these strategies help empower psychoanalytic discourse while, on the other, they reduce its proponents at the same time to subjects of these strategies. The aim of the analysis is to look at the moment when this (...) happens and for this purpose focuses on the many transformations, adaptations and alterations in one of Freud's most popular and influential books, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and its subsequent editions, as a collective effort by Freud and his students to build a language of their own. In the conclusions, the question as to if and in what way an objectified discourse can be resisted is addressed. (shrink)

Heidegger reflects on technology, language, and tradition, and he guides us into rethinking the common conceptions of technology and language. He argues that the anthropological-instrumental conception of modem technology is correct but not true, as it does not capture what is most peculiar to technology: the demand to challenge nature. The common conception of language as a mere means for exchange and understanding, on the other hand, is taken to its extremes in the technological interpretation of (...) class='Hi'>language as information. Heidegger also argues that the technological transformation of language represents an attack on what is peculiar to language as saying, i.e., as letting-appear. Such attack constitutes a threat to our very essence. The traditional or non-technologized everyday language, however, preserves what is original and contains new possibilities. The opposition between traditional language and technological language thus concerns our essence, our world-relation and world-living. (shrink)

Heidegger reflects on technology, language, and tradition, and he guides us into rethinking the common conceptions of technology and language. He argues that the anthropological-instrumental conception of modem technology is correct but not true, as it does not capture what is most peculiar to technology: the demand to challenge nature. The common conception of language as a mere means for exchange and understanding, on the other hand, is taken to its extremes in the technological interpretation of (...) class='Hi'>language as information. Heidegger also argues that the technological transformation of language represents an attack on what is peculiar to language as saying, i.e., as letting-appear. Such attack constitutes a threat to our very essence. The traditional or non-technologized everyday language, however, preserves what is original and contains new possibilities. The opposition between traditional language and technological language thus concerns our essence, our world-relation and world-living. (shrink)

Many secret signs and symbols area associated with the Yoruba as we have it amongst many tribes in Nigeria. Some of these signs and symbols have deep meanings and have connotations amongst the tribe. They form the everyday language of the people and a thorough understanding of them is key in their relationship with one another as a people. The objective of this study is to express the cultural connotations of selected symbols in relation to the Yoruba people (...) of Nigeria. The study hinges on the theories of Mimesis, Structural Formalism and Semiotics. This was validated through ethnographic study of symbols such as art, architecture, clothing, body marks and decorations among others to discover deep and hidden information about cultural beliefs and assumptions among the people under study. Pertinent literatures were reviewed, interviews were conducted, information was sourced from the internet and personal experience was explored. The study points out to the fact that a lot of deep and secret meanings are attached to the selected signs and symbols. The paper concludes that meanings expressed are generally accepted by a host of the Yoruba people; however, there could be slight differences in belief system from one locality to another. The paper had contributed to the pool of knowledge by bringing unknown and hidden meanings of selected signs and symbols of the Yoruba people to limelight. The paper recommends that signs and symbols commonly used in communication among the Yoruba people of Nigeria should incorporated into the curricula of schools; especially Yoruba as a subject and taught to preserve the tradition from extinction. It is also recommended that folklores, mythology and oral tradition be encouraged among younger generation so as to preserve cultural values. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's treatment of private language has received more attention than any other aspect of his philosophy. Yet, for more than fifty years, a remarkably self-contained exegetical tradition has defined the terms of debate and the principal positions that are discussed. Orthodox interpreters hold that the proof that a private language is impossible turns on showing it is ruled out by some set of systematic philosophical commitments about logic, meaning, and knowledge. Leading candidates for this ground on which (...) the argument depends have included the analysis of concepts, the grammar of our everyday language, the logic of criteria, or the nature of our rule-following, practical activity, or form of life. This article introduces an alternative interpretive tradition, which not only rejects the orthodox methodology, but also rejects the presupposition that Wittgenstein's principal aim is to provide a deductive proof that the idea of a private language leads to contradiction. Finally, it examines some of the leading readings of Philosophical Investigations §258, the passage most frequently discussed by orthodox interpreters. -/- . (shrink)

Imagine a telephone conversation between a presidential aide and a wealthy supporter, shortly after news breaks that the president plans to veto a bill that the supporter strongly favors. The nervous aide opens with “I'm calling to let you know that the president regrets his, uh, his decision…” The supporter's hopes rise at the intimation that the president changed his mind. But when the aide continues: “… did not meet with your apparel, I mean, your approval,” the crestfallen (and, perhaps, (...) former) supporter realizes that the president is sorry merely about the impact of his decision, not the decision itself. The aide's utterance seems to mean one thing at first, but something entirely different in the end. Unintentional verbal about‐faces of this kind are common in everyday language use – the outspoken owner of an American baseball team recently said that she regretted her remarks offended many people – yet listeners rarely notice the miscues, the wealthy supporter notwithstanding. This is one of the chief motivations behind the psycholinguistic study of language use. (shrink)

The Human Mind undertakes two tasks. One is to demonstrate that centuries of debate over how to state correctly the nature of the human mind and its relation to the human body arise from muddled thinking. By attending with care to ordinary, everyday language, this bogus thinking is exposed. The traditional distinction between the human mind and the human body is revealed as misbegotten. For that reason it is to be junked, along with centuries of misguided competing theories. (...) The second task is to draw attention to an alternative distinction we already make in everyday language. It is the distinction between a person and that person’s body. A previously undetected set of arrangements in everyday language is teased into full view to expose the character of a person’s physical and mental capacities. This set of arrangements applies to talk of all human capacities, such as the capacities to think, make a promise, dislike, be annoyed, turn left or reach for a banana. There is one simple pattern or formula that personal capacities have in common. To understand this arrangement in everyday language is to have the key to authentic understanding of the human mind and its place in the universe. (shrink)