On Mar 20, 2008, at 12:07 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Martin doesn't question that words "have meanings". He simply
accepts that
they "have" them, and he takes his job to be to discover what these
"meanings"
-- that in some sense each word "possesses" -- "ARE". But
why doesn't he ask just why he has come to believe this? My position
is that
indeed words DON'T "have meanings", that it is the repeated
association of the
utterance of word -- "milk", "hot", "doggy" -- with a given word
that causes
the notion of milk, hot, or dog to arise thereafter in our minds
when we hear
those words. If I utter "doggy" to a shepherd in the remote Andes,
no picture
of a dog will arise in his mind. But if 'doggy' "has a meaning", why
doesn't
that happen? Because he hasn't been exposed to repeated association
of the
sound, "doggy", with real dogs that his parents pointed at when they
said the
word.
As I understand the rudiments of language and emotional processing in
the brain and of Tourette's Syndrome, the subject involuntarily utters
words or guttural sounds. Many of them are obscene words. The
interesting thing is that the word itself is different in different
languages. And, indeed, Americans do not *feel* the rudeness of
"bloody," which is considered an offensive or impolite word in Britain.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprolalia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourette_syndrome
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
