In a message dated 1/24/2016 2:03:25 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx writes:
"I believe they are co-essentials, language and humans, you can't have one
without the other."
The next question would be 'why'.
I offer a Popperian and a better Griceian reply.
Popper never wrote the 'brain' part of his co-authored "Self and Brain"
book (I elude the 'the's -- or rather the 'the' as applied to 'self' and 'its'
as applied to brain -- why is 'self' gender-neutral?), but I'll take it as
if he did. For Popper, a brain of Homo sapiens is different from the brain
of, say, a mouse. Therefore, a man has language, while a mouse doesn't.
This allows man to play with what Popper calls w3, i.e. objective knowledge.
A mouse can find the way out of a maze, but what man can do is MORE
aMAZing. For he can abstract sense perceptions (like "this seems to be the
right
way out off this maze -- or 'mess', as Geary prefers to pronounce, somewhat
sloppily) into things like the Apollo del Belvedere.
The Griceiain reply runs (but not too fast) along similar lines. Grice
notes that m-intentions are only human, in that they were conceived to elude
counterexamples by S. R. Schiffer, his student at Oxford, and a human to
boot. "Therefore, it is otiose to imagine that subhuman critters can elude
Schifferian counterexamples; therefore m-intentions, from which lingo derives,
are human and human only."
Cheers,
Speranza
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