Name Strategy: Its Existence and Implications



to words; this is contrary to Davidson’s assertion, that a creature cannot have
thoughts unless it is an interpreter, quoted at the end of §
7.3, irrespective of
whether musical conventions and performance are sub ject to radical interpre-
tation, simply because notes are not speech. The third is that animals have
brains and so are able, at least to some extent, to have something similar to
thoughts, see for example Terrace (1985) [
47] and Premack (1988) [35]. The
fourth is semantic amnesia studies, DeRenzi et al (1987) [
10]; their patient L.P.
appears to have selective damage which suggests that semantics and phonetic
are separable, for example on p.579:

”The linguistic performance of L.P. was marked by a striking disso-
ciation between impairment of semantic knowledge and the preser-
vation of phonetic, grammatic, and syntactic rules.”

The fifth and clearest reason is because of the existence of name strategy, this
not only shows that thoughts can exist independently of words, but futhermore
colour name strategy allows quantitative statements of the degree of indepen-
dence to be made; in colour name strategy there is a perceived movement away
from the boundary between colours, and the amount of this movement could
provide such a measure. There is the question of the temporal order of the
independence, thought before talk seems to be the assumption of speech pro-
duction models and seems to occur, but there is the possibility of the reverse
which can be facetiously put as talking without thinking. In colour perception
the existence of a switched focal colour word in a speakers repertoire adjusts the
perception of colour, so that it appears that talk, in the form of name strategy,
can occur prior to thought.

7 Implications for the Philosophy of Language

7.1 Radical Interpretation

Philosophy of language is concerned with how language has meaning. David-
son’s (1984) [
8] view is that meaning is obtained through radical interpretation
of sentences; or perhaps, Lewis (1974) [
25], a larger structure. Radical interpre-
tation optimizes the correspondence between language and the world and also
the self-consistency (or coherence) of the language. I have given an outline of
some aspects of my approach to it in Roberts (1998) [
36] and this section follows
on from there. In §
2 it was shown that the existence of a colour name strategy
reduces the correspondence between the true colour of a chip and its perceived
colour; thus language does not help the mind in producing an accurate repre-
sentation corresponding to the world, in fact in hinders it. In other words the
use of a more polished language is obscuring truth. The assignment of truth val-
ues to statements is essential in the traditional picture of radical interpretation.
Thus the question arises: is the existence of name strategy compatible with a
modified form of radical interpretation, and if so exactly how is it necessary to
change radical interpretation?

15



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