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Kaye Separovic: > Also, a brief reference to meaning? Perhaps what we refer to as thoughts are > no more than chemical impulses or activitiy inside our heads that become > meaningful when we can refer to them as thought? Culture, or cultural forms > and ones exposure to them (which also brings in issues of class etc), then > become a limit upon the articulation and expression of thought. > My question remains as one concerned with the existence of thought as > thought and of how this relation to language has shaped it. Without language > what form would thought assume? > Food for thought? It seems to me that language and thought as they are presently constituted in all extant languages are hopelessly entangled in the 'problem of universals'. Try as we might (in Hegel, etc.), it is impossible to get away from the old medieval controversy of universals vs. particulars. Ockham, c. 1340 said that everything existing is singular and the consequences of this revolutionary statement have not yet played out fully. It was Abelard who found himself on the horns of a particularly sticky dilemma: everything existing seems to be singular, but don't we require recourse to the universal even to understand in the most basic way the ordering of the world? If I say to myself, "I must get that pen", I must have the abstract concept of _any_ possible pen in mind to identify the particular pen I am seeking. One can extend the principle of the universal term globally: every word in any language now existing conforms to the idea of the universal term. Yet all concretely existing things are singular. Nietzsche: "It's clear we still have faith in God, since we still believe in grammar." "Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things." "We obtain the concept by overlooking what is individual and actual." My cat can find her favorite toy in a basket filled to the brim with different toys (it's almost always the same one, her "favorite"), and she singles it out and brings it into the center of the room where she "knows" I will notice it. Does she have a universal concept of "toy" in her "mind" to be able to find it? It's hard not to come to the belief that the universal was born of a basic insecurity in the human soul that needs to delimit, identify, in a world where no such prospect of strict denotation is truly forthcoming. Everything only "seems", it "is" not. But no one wishes to admit that this is as good as description gets for us. Thus the universal persists beyond its time of necessity. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: "Changing language fundamentally alters basic instruments of perceiving the world. The structure of language constrains the thought patterns of participants in the culture associated with that language." Whitehead: "The alternate philosophic position [to that founded on Aristotelian principles] must commence with denouncing the whole idea of 'subject qualified by predicate' as a trap set for philosophers by the syntax of language." The implications of these suppositions are not hard to draw out. The label, as an artifact of the unbridgeable gap between the individual object and our concept of it, falsifies reality according to the rules associated with the particular structure of the given system of meaning generation, i.e. language. Thus thought and language can only be viewed as incommensurable. David Westling