language

William S. Lear rael at zopyra.com
Sat Mar 20 07:27:53 PST 1999


On Friday, March 19, 1999 at 14:48:29 (-0800) Sam Pawlett writes:
>...
> I strongly disagree with this argument. Words are defined by [their]
>reference to reality. A word is given its baptism in the language with
>regard to what it refers to. When a person uses that word in can be traced
>back via a causal chain to its original baptism. ...

I'm going to disagree somewhat: We have what was once termed "innate ideas" (though I think the accepted concept today is slightly different), which is not really the same thing as a definition. For example, try to define the word "climb". You'll find it very difficult. In fact, I believe many pages in a fairly recent linguistics journal were devoted to this very task, with incomplete results. However, children pick up the concept perfectly. Chomsky goes over this in his *Language and Problems of Knowledge*.

So I'd say that we have to be careful about what we mean by "reality", and how words therefrom derive their definitions. "Reality" is very much built in to our brains in a certain sense, and words and language spring from the growth of the brain/mind while interacting with the environment.

Bill



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