Imago, I can't deny you show assiduity in your reading of philosophers, and I admire that. But the bleak truth is that though you read philosophers - Augustine, Wittgenstein, Hume, Ockham, (et al, including Cheerskep!) -- you evidently don't understand them.
For example, you say my "model of language" is Augustinian: "Your example of your son operates according to an Augustinian model of language and language acquisition (the very same one that begins Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations)." Perhaps you were misled by the opening line of the Augustine quote cited by Wittgenstein: "When my elders named some object. . .I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out." This sounds close to a paraphrase of my claim that repeated juxtaposition of a sound and the sight of an object forges in the mind a link, an association between the two. But Augustine goes on to say, ""Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learned to understand what objects they signifiedb&" Wittgenstein then does a pretty fair job of "interpreting" Augustine: "These words, it seems to me, give us [Augustine's] particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: individual words in language name objects. . .Every word has a meaning. The meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands." But, Imago, I have almost incessantly maintained that words DON'T signify, DON'T "mean", don't denote, refer to, or name. From which I infer you certainly misunderstood me, or Augustine, or both of us. You go on: " As Wittgenstein shows, however, that model of language neither captures what we do when we use language, nor the meanings involved, nor even the process of language acquisition." It's not clear which alleged model you're indicting since Augustine's notion and mine are distinctly different. Since you seem to think our notions are the same, I'll assume you think Wittgenstein was effectively dismissing both of us. But he wasn't. Wittgenstein's gripe here in section #1 of PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS is that Augustine's description of "language" is to primitive, too narrow - largely because it seems to apply only to objects like a chair or table, but not, let's say, to more general terms or to actions. Wittgenstein says, "The teaching of language to a child is not explanation, but training." He is talking here about solely the teaching of Augustine's simple nouns for objects. He does not want to say that by pointing at an object and saying, "Horsey!" you are "defining" 'horsey' by "ostensive definition" . Instead, he says, "I will call it 'ostensive teaching of words'." (The reason Wittgenstein gives for not wanting to call it "ostensive definition" is, "because the child cannot yet ASK what the name is." That's a bad expression of what was on Wittgenstein's mind. Is a child unable to ask because it can't talk yet, or because he hasn't yet taken on board the misconception that objects "have names"? Writing, as he was, over sixty years ago, I suspect that Wittgenstein himself never questioned the notion that objects "have names". Indeed, I'd claim that even today living philosophers -- e.g. Saul Kripke - are deeply mistaken in their thinking about "names".) Wittgenstein then goes on to say something that Imago should read: "This ostensive teaching of words can be said to establish an association between the word and the thing." Familiar? However, he goes on: "But what does this mean?" I claim this is an unwise locution for Wittgenstein to use at this point, because it assumes on page 3 what should have been a central question of the 232 page PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS: Does language carry out an action called "meaning"? Wittgenstein continues: "Well, it can mean various things; but one very likely thinks first of all that a picture of the object comes before the child's mind when it [sic] hears the word." >From all of which, and more, I infer Imago doesn't follow Wittgenstein any more than he follows me or Augustine. Finally (in this posting) Imago on Ockham: "Remember also that Okham was a monimalist, which emant that once you conceive an abstraction, it exists. So I very much doubt that he would agree with you about the nonexistence of abstractions. After all, Okham's razor = do not multiply entities beyond necessity. Some abstractions are, I am afraid, necessary." Many of Wikipedia's entries on philosophers are wanting, but the entry on Ockham has some virtues (albeit also some fuzziness). Here's the opening of the passage on Ockham and nominalism: "A pioneer of nominalism, some consider him the father of modern epistemology, because of his strongly argued position that only individuals exist, rather than supra-individual universals, essences, or forms, and that universals are the products of abstraction from individuals by the human mind and have no extra-mental existence.[9] He denied the real existence of metaphysical universals and advocated the reduction of ontology. Ockham is sometimes considered an advocate of conceptualism rather than nominalism, for whereas nominalists held that universals were merely names, i.e. words rather than existing realities, conceptualists held that they were mental concepts, i.e. . . . the universal concept has for its object, not a reality existing in the world outside us, but an internal representation which is a product of the understanding itself and which "supposes" in the mind . . . Ontological parsimony: One important contribution that he made to modern science and modern intellectual culture was through the principle of parsimony in explanation and theory building that came to be known as Occam's Razor. This maxim, as interpreted by Bertrand Russell,[11] states that if one can explain a phenomenon without assuming this or that hypothetical entity, there is no ground for assuming it, i.e. that one should always opt for an explanation in terms of the fewest possible number of causes, factors, or variables. He turned this into a concern for ontological parsimony; the principle says that one should not multiply entities beyond necessity. . ." Again I have to conclude that Imago has got a philosopher diametrically wrong. When Imago writes, "Some abstractions are, I am afraid, necessary," I infer he believes they are what Ockham denied: "a reality existing in the world outside us." But exactly why Ockham denied the non-mental ontic status of "abstractions" is that everything attributed to abstractions can be "accounted for" by dualists (people who believe there are only two kinds of "things" - material and consciousness) - and even by physicalists - people who believe there's only one kind of thing - material. So "abstractions", being an "unnecessary" hypothetical entity, should be put to the razor. Imago, I hope you can understand why, when you in effect say, "Cheerskep's position on such-and-such has already been destroyed by the philosopher So-and-So," you have not persuaded me.
