Aka polysemia.The meaning of a sentence consists of more than one thing. — creativesoul
Sounds like rules for language use to me.If others don't imitate, then it won't become established, and if enough do imitate then it will. — Janus
If language use is open-ended then there can be no wrong way to use a word (no such thing as malapropisms), only a new way to use a word that is either imitated or not - which is another rule.It's by imitation that conventions become established, not by people consciously seeing them as sets of rules to be followed, but by people's natural tendency to imitate. This means language is an open-ended, often improvisational, practice, not a hidebound practice involving adherence to sets of rules. — Janus
Imitation isn't a rule. It is a behavior. Your explanation is a set of rules that describe what language use is or isn't.How is imitation just more rules? — Janus
IT's not a thing at all, unless you want to call acts "things"! — Banno
Malapropisms introduce expressions not covered by prior learning, or familiar expressions which cannot be interpreted by any of the abilities so far discussed. Malapropisms fall into a different category, one that may include such things as our ability to perceive a well-formed sentence when the actual utterance was incomplete or grammatically garbled, our ability to interpret words we have never heard before, to correct slips of the tongue, or to cope with new idiolects. These phenomena threaten standard descriptions of linguistic competence (including descriptions for which I am responsible). — p. 255
The problem we have been grappling with depends on the assumption that communication by speech requires that speaker and interpreter have learned or somehow acquired a common method or theory of interpretation—as being able to operate on the basis of shared conventions, rules, or regularities. The problem arose when we realized that no method or theory fills this bill. The solution to the problem is clear. In linguistic communication nothing corresponds to a linguistic competence as often described: that is, as summarized by principles (1)–(3). — p. 265
The solution is to give up the principles. Principles (1) and (2) survive when understood in rather unusual ways, — ibid
but principle (3) cannot stand, and it is unclear what can take its place. — ibid
I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. — ibid
We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions. — ibid
(1) First meaning is systematic; (2) First meaning is shared. (1) and (2) can be taken as describing only passing theories -- this is the "unusual way" — Srap Tasmaner
aren't these aspects of the prior theory? — Banno
Principles (1) and (2) survive when understood in rather unusual ways,
What's your take on the survival of (1) and (2)? — Srap Tasmaner
...which does not give us the meaning of the object sentence. Other factors must be taken into the account, and hence we can derive"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that's a nice soup latrine
or"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that's a nice soup tureen
"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that soup looks like shit
Does it prove that soccer doesn't have rules? — Srap Tasmaner
It seems you read Davidson as saying that conventions play no role in understanding what someone says. — Banno
That's not how I read the article; it's rather that conventions are not the whole of what is involved. — Banno
lexical meaning - convention - is insufficient; that language is more than following conventions.
Rule-based conventions are part of language, but not fundamental to it. — Banno
language does not rely on rules. — Banno
If you have a glance at the cluster of related Wikipedia pages, you'll find that classical malapropisms are a type of speech error and linguists generally classify them as competence errors. Mrs. Malaprop is a sort of walking Dunning Kruger effect, who believes she knows more about some English words than she does. Her speech, on the usual view, is not riddled with simple performance errors such as slips of the tongue, but with perfectly deliberate utterances that betray a lack of understanding of what the words she's saying mean.
What Davidson notices is that she "gets away with it": her interpreters take her as saying what she thinks she's saying rather than as what she's actually saying. That this happens, is a fact. That it happens in real life, is a fact. So how are we to characterize these facts? — Srap Tasmaner
my soccer story — Srap Tasmaner
Is that a problem?
— creativesoul
It leads to Harry Hindu -ism. — Banno
misattributing meaning to the words actually used — creativesoul
What we've got here is failure to communicate. — Cool Hand Luke
:gasp:I have six kids — Srap Tasmaner
Is playing chess just a matter of following the rules? In some sense, yes. Do the rules alone explain what happened in a game of chess? Obviously not. — Srap Tasmaner
there is nothing in chess analogous to malapropistic expressions. — Janus
If it were this simple... — Srap Tasmaner
If what were this simple? — creativesoul
The conventional rules of language use cannot take account of the success of unconventional use. — creativesoul
You're presupposing that the conventional discourse has 'it' right — creativesoul
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.