Two more examples of how mental states and lingusitic expressions are not identical: 1. I've often found myself laughing in a movie when no one else is, or laughing a few seconds ahead of everybody else. This always makes me stop and think, and what I always think is that I don't know why I laughed, I just did. THEN I realize how to put it into words, and it begins to make sense to me. One can respond "conceptually" to something that's funny, but not put it into words until later.
2. Along the same lines: I often find myself starting a sentence and I start have a sense that I don't know the word that I will need in a minute to finish the sentence. I keep on going with the sentence, while my mind rummages around at the same time looking for the word. Finally I finish the sentence, sometimes with the correct word and sometimes without it.
[+1] 9 1 9 5 9 9 7 0 6 5 {palma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx} wrote:
an easy way to test whether one can identify mental states indipendnetly from their linguistic expressions: CONSIDER A CRUCIAL MARXIAN DICTUM; "last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. What he was doing in m y pajamas is anybody's guees" (wrongly) attributed to G. Marx well, Consider the first clause of the sentence. It works and produces its humour effect precisly because of its ambiguity (if you dop not see it, you are language blind) hence there are two mental states (menaings? expressions? propositions? brain states?) that get to be linguistically expressed by on and only sentence. a fortiori mental states are not identical with linguistic expressions, since 2 is never equal to one. qed
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