exactly the same with images,
If I point to the all girls with a big noses and say to my son
'pretty girl'.
Chances are that eventually that will influence his judgement of
'pretty'
On Apr 4, 2010, at 10:40 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Michael writes:
"Your Andean shepherd is "deficient" in English, so the inherently
meaningful configurations of English "have no meaning" to him only
to the extent
that they are inaccessible to him because he doesn't speak English. If
he did speak English, he could access them, and even if they
referred to,
say, "bangers," the Andean could be shown how to access whatever
that word's
configuration conveyed."
The only thing "conveyed" to the Andean's receiving apparatus is sound
waves. An English-speaker receives exactly the same sound waves -
nothing more.
Michael implies that if the sound waves are "English", they have
"inherently
meaningful configurations". I grant that the patterns and tones of
English are different from those of other languages, but I don't
grant Michael's
unsupported assertion that they are "inherently meaningful".
I assume Michael is in part prompted to call them "meaningful"
because some
auditors - those who "speak English" -- upon hearing the sounds,
will find
rising in their minds certain notions. The notions are familiar
and they
regularly occur in correlation with specific sounds. Michael's
position
apparently is that this occurs because something he calls
"meaningfulness" is
inherent in the sound-patterns. I deny this. I claim that when we
hear an
utterance that we "understand", it is not because a "meaning" is
inherent in the
sound configuration. It is because certain sound configurations
have, in our
past experience, been associated with certain notion.
That is all "understanding or learning a language" is. It is not
learning
the "meaning" inherently in certain sounds. It is learning to
associate
certain sounds with certain notions, and this "learning", this
associating,
comes about by our being repeatedly exposed to a juxtaposition of
the sound
with other notion.
Pavlov's experiment contains the following lesson: there is nothing
in the
sound-configuration of a bell that inherently "means" food-is-
coming, and
yet for the conditioned dog the sound of the bell came to "mean"
food-is-coming. The "conditioning" was solely the repeated
juxtaposition of the sound
with the experience, the notion, of food.
The English-speaker's received sound waves do not have within them,
like
tree-spirits, a second entity that the Andean's receptions lack - a
"meaning".
The only thing the English-speaker can "access" that the Andean
cannot is
remembered past associations with the sound.
That is all that "learning a language" ever is: the accumulation of
notions
associated with various sounds (or scriptions) by virtue of past
juxtapositions to the sounds. My son sees a dog. I point at the dog
and say, "Doggy!"
After I do that a few times, when he sees a dog the sound "Doggy!"
comes to
his mind; moreover, if I later say "Doggy!" the notion/picture of a
dog
comes to his mind and he looks around for a non-notional dog.
I could do that with the Andean. But if when I initially say
"Doggy" to him
I don't point at a dog, if, in other words, I do not juxtapose any
other
notion to the sound - and thus I do not create an association
between the
sound and another notion -- a visual one in this case -- he will
not "learn the
word". That's all so-called "understanding" a word is:
associating its
sound (or scription) with notion sufficiently like notion that
arises in the
minds of people familiar with the word.
When the Andean finally, because of a repeated juxtaposition,
regularly
retrieves an appropriate notion upon hearing an utterance, it is
not because he
has finally somehow acquired the ability to pluck the "meaning"
from within
the sound, or from some mind-independent sphere containing all "the
meanings", from some skull-external world where the class/category/
set of all the
meaning-entities obtain. He is simply now retrieving from memory
a notion
associated with the sound by past experience.
It is not the case that both the Andean and the English-speaker
receive
sound waves AND a meaning but only the Englishman can "access" the
meaning. The
difference between the two hearers is that the sound of "Doggy!"
does not
"remind" the Andean of anything, but it does remind the English
speaker of
previous notions associated with the sound of "Doggy!"
Put it another way: There is not, dwelling inside those sound waves
- or
inside the ink of a printed scription -- an abstract imp called
"the meaning
of" the word that carries out unceasing, motionless, abstract
activity:
"meaning", "naming", "picking out".
The more one dwells on Michael's notion of the entity he calls
"meaningfulness", the more untenable it may seem. I take it,
Michael, you think of it as
not simply a retrieved memorized associated notion. You see as a
non-notional entity. Something "out there" that is "the meaning of
XXX."
Consider the learning of new words like 'microchip' or 'chad'. We
didn't
learn 'chad's "inherent meaning". We learned what other people had
in mind
when they used the word. "This is a chad," said the Florida
official, pointing
to a hanging shred of paper on a voting-ballot. Describe the moment
when
this entity's mind-independent "meaning" initially "came into
existence". You
can't, because there is no such mind-independent entity.
What do you have in mind with your notion of "accessing" such an
entity?
For me, the accessing is merely the retrieval from memory of an
associated
notion. When people do what you would call "come up with the wrong
meaning",
I'd "explain" it by saying either their memory fails them or they
were taught
the wrong association to begin with. "Your Dad was wrong to say
that's a
dog. That's a coyote." How would you explain it with your
"accessing the
meaning" theory?
Consider my specimen utterance "foopgoom". What would you accept as
evidence proving it does - or does not - "have" a "meaning"? If I
tell you that
when I say "foopgoom" I am entertaining a notion of a material (i.e.
non-notional) entity, and the notion is as vivid in my mind as my
notion of my car or
the coffee-mug here on my desk, would you conclude the utterance
must indeed
have a mind-independent "meaning"? Even though my uttering
"foopgoom" does
