Following the Experience

Sorry about the interruption in my discussion ofDaniel Dor ’s book,The Instruction of Imagination. Let me assure you that the problem was entirely due to life ’s trivialities and had nothing to do with the book itself, which is a very important, fresh look at language. One of the real pleasures of this blog is that it gets me to read books like  this one.Dor ’s thesis is twofold: language is socially constructed and it is used “to instruct imaginations.” This latter point means that we use language to bridge the gap between the speaker’s and listener’s experience, so that the listener can imagine what the speaker is saying. This may sound fami liar, but Dor is radical in his insistence on the social construction part. Consider, for example, how Dor accounts for our knowledge of word meanings.At the opposite end of Dor ’s theory is that of Chomsky, who insists that word meanings come from an innate collection of symbols. This theory is so perverse that if I were to spell it out in detail, you would suppose I was attacking the airiest of straw men. A more moderate version of innate symbols is Pinker’s notion th at we are born with some symbols and then develop more in accordance with experience. Common sense, of course, tells us that we get our words from the world around us. Hence, we learned to saymen, the French learnedhommes, and the Zanzibariswatu.The trouble with common sense is that you cannot program a computer to learn language just by listening. You...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Source Type: blogs