> Do you find nothing at all about it that's acceptable? > No I do not.
Your claim is not even about the phenomenon of meaning, but about individual psychology. And you are trying to move from a psychological claim pertaining to how you assume my mind works (based on introspection of your own, I assume), to a general metaphysical claim about minds in general. You cannot validly do this. Nor would a valid psychological conclusion about associations between languages tell you much about meaning in general, since it presupposes the notion of meaning. Finally, what my mind associates with a term does not prevent me from using it in a correct way (correctness of use seems to be the standard for 'meaning'). So all things told, you are grounding your example in altogether the wrong phenomenon. Why do you insist that associations are images in my head anyway? You are furthermore conflating a context of learning (semantic acquisition) with meaning itself. Your use of misdirection trades on this. And as people like Fodor have illustrated, language acquisition presupposes meaning. The reverse is incoherent. As is the idea that things can be associated with other things independently of meaning, broadly construed -- there would only be a chaotic jumple, not even association unless you could pick out meaningful similarities, and categorisations. On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 5:56 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Imago writes: > > > I simply don't see how words can have associations but not meanings. > > This > > sentence is sophistical. > > > Suppose I pick up an apple and display it while saying, Apelsin! > [ah-pel-seen] Apelsin! Apelsin! An hour from now, if I say to you > "apelsin", > the sound > will remind you of the apple-image you now connect with the sound. Kids get > conditioned the same way when we say, "Milk!" "Hot!" "Good boy!" "No!" Say > "No!" to a child enough, and he'll get your idea. This is what's happening > when someone "learns a language". He's not learning any "the meanings of". > He > is being conditioned by the juxtaposition of certain sounds with certain > images, feelings, ideas in his head. > > Now a confession. I just misled you: When you utter, "Apelsin!" to a Swede, > the image that comes to his mind is not of an apple; it's the image of an > orange. You probably thought you were learning "the meaning of" a Swedish > word. I misled, but not about an alleged mind-independent "meaning" - only > about the conditioned workings of a Swedish mind. > > That's my effort to demonstrate how words can have associations but not > [mind-independent] meanings. Do you find nothing at all about it that's > acceptable?
