Date: Tue, 4 Nov 1997 13:26:57 -0700 From: dsavor-AT-scienceworld.bc.ca (David Savory) Subject: Re: PLC:Reply to David >My conjecture is simply based >on the observation that societies CAN and do exist in a relatively stable way >without the philosophical niceties originated by the early Greeks, and yet it >is said (Pat will no doubt ask for references here) that the so-called >"primitive tribes" of today possess languages that are fully capable of >grasping, if required, such niceties. The fact that they haven't and that >the Greeks did, and the fact that their language is apparently capable of >structuring these "higher" concepts is what is interesting to me. Take the statement, "The Mighty Ducks suck." To what extent is it interesting that this is meaningless to Finns and New Guineans who don't speak English, to !Kung bushfolk who've never seen ice and to infants whose linguistic competence is latent? > Language and the intellectual process behind it are tools developed for >specific purposes in the evolutionary process. This is an Aristotelean assertion that is not self-evidently correct, by any means. There is not much reason to assume language is FOR something which happened to confer a survival value on whomever possessed it. You can argue that natural selection pressures selected for a larger human brain and that there were changes in the nature of the products of mind that resulted from increased neural connectivity, but you can't argue that the ability to sing instead of grunt or read instead of hunt were the results of this bulking up, anymore than you can claim that being able to fire a wristshot into the top shelf is the natural and crucial consequence of possessing opposable thumbs. It is entirely likely that language, a facility for turning mouth-sounds into meaningful utterances, is an incidental offshoot of some other competence, or even more likely, as an incidental consequence of physical form. Part of the problem is that language is not a thing, like a thumb or antlers, it's more like a performance. >Language contains >implicit conceptual structures, Language doesn't, specific languages do. David Savory dsavor-AT-scienceworld.bc.ca --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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