Language demands a mind
This is a working paper which will probably be rewritten several times in the next
months
AUTHOR: Dr. Gerd Döben-Henisch
FIRST DATE: February 19, 1996
DATE of LAST CHANGE: February 28, 1996
If someone talks with someone else he produces utterances
which communicate a content which is normally different from the utterance itself. This content, also called
meaning, is related to states inside of the body
of the speaker/ hearer. You can associate these inner states
partially also with the actual situation, but everything from a situation which is
relevant to the speaker/ hearer has necessarily also to be represented as some inner
state, otherwise a speaker/ hearer could not respond to this aspect with an individual
responsibility. The reverse is not true: not every inner state which can influence
the ability of a speaker to communicate with a language has to be represented in
the `outside' situation.
If the `inner states', which are involved in a lingual communication, would not be
known by the speaker/ hearer, they nevertheless could not be part of his conscious
attitudes related to his perceptions of the world. Without a consciousness, without
a mind, without knowing what is going on, therefore without an individual responsibility,
he would receive stimuli from the outside and he would react `without knowing' what
he is doing. In such a context the concepts of stimuli and perception would become
empty. What is a perception without knowing, that one has some perceptions?
To avoid these perplexities it makes sense to assume from the individual point of
view of a speaker/ hearer that there exists an individual knowledge of perceptions,
bodystates, feelings, imaginations, etc. and that all this knowledge together reflects
that what pre-scientificly is named consciousness
or mind
(see: J.SEARLE [1992]).
On account of this fact that the possible meaning of an utterance is therefor intimately
related to internal states of someone's mind it is not recommended to use a purely
behavioral oriented approach in the analysis of meaning, especially if one is also
interested in the individual learning process itself. Individual mental states are
bound to the individual experience
of someone and can therefore only be reconstructed by an investigation of these individual
experience (See also: [DÖBEN-HENISCH 1995a]). Loocking to meaning from the individual point of view of the subjective personal experience implies a phenomenological point of view,
as philosophers name it.
Continue with: The phenomenological point of view
Comments are welcomed to kip-ml@inm.de
Daimlerstrasse 32, 60314 Frankfurt am Main, Deutschland. Tel +49- (0)69-941963-0, Tel-Gerd: +49- (0)69-941963-10