to 2nd: Why don’t you become a philosopher?” 2nd speaker: ”Don’t have any-
thing to do with philosphers, they are underhand.” 3rd speaker: ”Why don’t
you become a philosopher.” Sentence themselves are often ambiguous because
they contain ellipses and indexicals, again they have to be dis-ambiguated by
being put in the perspective of a wider context. This gives rise to a “holistic”
view of the meaning of a word, this has been expressed by Davidson (1984) [8]
p.22 as follows:
”If sentences depend for their meaning on their structure, and we
understand the meaning of each item in the structure only as an
abstraction from the totality of sentences in which it features, then
Frege says that only in the context of a sentence does a word have
meaning; in the same vein he might have added that only in the
context of the language does a sentence (and therefore a word) have
meaning.”
Again it would appear that the starting structure is a thought; thus the models
all assume that a thought occurs first and is processed into words, i.e. that
thought and words are not identical, but are independent entities. Davidson
(1984) [8] addresses this question, however he seems just to be concerned that
if thought can occur without words, then this is also subject to radical interpre-
tation, for example on p.157:
”the chief thesis of this paper is that a creature cannot have thoughts
unless it is an interpreter of the speech of another.”
this suggests to me that Davidson thinks that words and thoughts are concomi-
tant simultaneously.
6.4 Sememes and Phonemes verses Thought and Talk.
The preceeding suggests that generally psychologists require sememes/thought
to exist independently and prior to phonemes/talk; whereas philosophers are
wary of thoughts existing independently. This is summed up by Wittgenstein’s
remark on where one cannot speak one cannot think. This is perhaps because of
their different attitudes to studying communication. Psychologists are mainly
concerned with explaining some particular aspect of language. Philosophers are
most interested in accuracy and rigour of thought, if these are not written down
they are hard to refute.
6.5 Justification of Prior Thought
The assumption of the models, namely that thought can exist without words,
is justified for at least five reasons. The first is because of Brown and McNeill’s
(1966) [5] demonstration of the existence of the tip of the tongue (TOT) phe-
nomena. This occurs when people appear to be at a loss for the word that
they are looking for. The second is because of the nature of musical instrument
tuition, where it is possible to think about phrasing, etc . . . , without recourse
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