76 definitions
The book's index
Language and Mind
61 concepts · 76 definitions
- abduction1
- aggression1
- animal communication2
- anti-psychologism1
- behavior1
- behavioural science2
- birdsong1
- childhood1
- common sense1
- communication1
- competence1
- conservation1
- deep structure1
- dialect1
- dualism1
- emergence1
- empiricism2
- evolution of language3
- experience1
- experiment1
- explanation1
- first language1
- freedom1
- generative grammar1
- genius1
- gesture1
- grammatical transformation1
- habit1
- human language1
- innate idea4
- instinct1
- intelligence1
- language5
- language acquisition2
- language faculty1
- learning theory1
- linguistic competence1
- linguistic creativity1
- linguistic diversity1
- linguistic pattern1
- linguistic universals1
- linguistics1
- mathematical linguistics1
- mind2
- natural selection1
- percept1
- perception2
- phonology1
- poverty of the stimulus1
- a priori1
- reflection1
- romanticism1
- second language1
- semantics1
- structural linguistics1
- structuralism1
- symbolic system1
- totemism1
- triangle1
- universal grammar1
- worldview1
Language (n.) lives nowhere but in minds, so every one of its properties was put there by the mind that invents it afresh each generation.
Language (n.) can be a mirror of mind only if the rationalists were right that all tongues share a hidden core.
Language (n.) comes to every normal child, while even its rudiments stay out of reach of an ape that is otherwise clever.
Language (n.) serves to deceive, to show off, to think aloud or simply to play, so asking what it is for tells you little about what it is.
An Innate idea (n.) works like a template: shown a crooked triangle drawn in ink, the mind grasps the perfect one it already carried, not the smudge in front of it.
Innate idea (n.) were never claimed to work without a nudge from the senses, so Locke's famous refutation hit a doctrine nobody held.
Innate idea (n.) are no more mysterious than a computer program set to react to rough shapes as clean ones; they only offend those who will not let empiricism be questioned.
Innate idea (n.) is no way of postponing the riddle of learning: if true, it is the answer, and if false, a wrong answer rather than a delay.
The Evolution of language (n.) from animal calls is about as sensible a story as walking evolving out of breathing: the two stages share a name, not a mechanism.
The Evolution of language (n.) may be a non-question: if creatures built like us had no real alternative to our grammar, there was nothing to choose between.
The Evolution of language (n.) out of simpler signalling is a puzzle as misframed as asking how atoms evolved from clouds of particles.
Animal communication (n.) is not a poorer version of speech; a sliding signal like birdsong actually has more possible values, because human language moves in discrete steps.
Animal communication (n.) shares language's 'purposive, syntactic, propositional' badges only at a height where walking earns them too.
Language acquisition (n.) is not inventing an abstract theory from rubbish data but choosing among a few grammars the mind already allows — a multiple-choice test, not an essay.
Language acquisition (n.) means trusting a theory that throws out much of its own evidence: the child must decide which heard sentences are slips, fragments or nonsense.
Behavioural science (n.) names itself after its evidence rather than its subject, as if physics renamed itself the study of dial readings.
Behavioural science (n.) drifted from studying the mind to managing conduct, until it began to see itself as an engineering of control.
Empiricism (n.) fails one of two ways: made precise, the facts refute it; left vague, it says nothing at all.
Empiricism (n.) about the mind was never earned by evidence; it is one guess among many that simply got used to ruling.
The Mind (n.) has no special right to be simpler than the liver or the eye; assuming its inborn equipment must be modest is dogma, not science.
The Mind (n.) being a product of nature's laws gives it no guarantee of grasping them; a machine built by physics can still churn out absurd theories.
Perception (n.) and learning are not passive intake; the mind decides much of the shape of what it comes to know.
Perception (n.) is wired for lines, angles and motion before any experience; the world only switches the circuits on, it does not design them.
Childhood (n.) performs Peirce's miracle daily: the odds against every four-year-old hitting on the true theory of a language are even worse than against science finding its laws.