Human Language: Knowledge and Truth
Knowledge and Language
The Form of Knowledge: The Sign
Language is a system that expresses ideas. For Saussure, linguistic signs are composed of a signifier (expression) and a signified (concept).
Animal Language and Human Language
- It was noted that the fundamental difference between human and animal language was that animal language was innate, and human language is learned.
- Animal language is often credited with a mimic character. Animal communication systems are grouped into three designs: an endless repertoire of calls, analog signals, and random variations on a theme.
Human language is an articulated system with double articulation. It is heuristic. Modern linguists consider human symbolic language to be absolutely irreducible to other forms of animal communication. Human language is abstract and symbolic.
Characteristics of Human Language
- The capacity to make sounds with symbolic content.
- The capacity to combine words, building phrases with different meanings.
Language serves to bring order to the world, classify, and understand it. Its main purpose is communication, and hence other basic skills that language presupposes are to understand and decipher the message.
The Relationship Between Knowledge and Language
As cognitive processes become more complex and abstract, language appears as the necessary instrument; without it, one could not think about certain realities.
- Thought is before language: Aristotle states that thought is independent, prior to language. In the twentieth century, the main proponent of this thesis is the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who said that language originates from maturation. Ways of thinking should precede linguistic language acquisition.
- Language is prior to thought: There is no world that is perceived objectively, in a pure mode. Everything that appears to a speaker, if understandable, is through language. Sapir-Whorf said that speakers of different languages tend to pay attention to different aspects of reality. This resulted in linguistic relativity, which states that every language has a peculiar way of seeing the world.
- The complex relationship between thought and language: Today, we hear of a dialectical relationship between thought and language that interact and influence one another, though language is usually considered to exert an active and constituent role in thought.
The Classic Argument Between Empiricism and Rationalism
- From an empirical perspective, critical theories that consider external factors from the environment and social environment are highlighted. There are no thoughts at the moment that there is no language.
- A rationalist line can be found in Noam Chomsky’s interpretation, which supports the existence of innate linguistic universals and basic structures that all future speakers are born with. Each speaker comes with an internalized grammar, with principles underlying the organization and regulation common to all languages.
The Importance of Language in Contemporary Philosophy
A characteristic of 20th-century philosophy is the linguistic turn.
- The central concern of the philosophy of language is making connections between language and reality. At the end of the century, positivists and logical atomism posed that the origin of many philosophical problems lies in the weaknesses and vagueness of language. Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap first addressed the problems using formal logic.
- There is a more pragmatic line that originates in the second period of Wittgenstein’s works and tries to apply the critical attitude of philosophy to everyday language.
Knowledge and the Problem of Truth
In Parmenides’ 5th century BC, two ways had been distinguished: truth and opinion. For Plato, there was only one kind of knowledge: true knowledge. Marx and Engels in the 19th century noted that throughout the history of mankind there have been false and ideological conceptions that have tried to present themselves as true.
The process of knowing involves a subject and an object. If we put weight on the subject, then this is the one who creates or builds the object (idealism). If we put the weight on the object, it means that the outside world dominates the idea (realism).