🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <peeters.721781814@tasman> peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (bert peeters) writes:
>jmu@wam.umd.edu (James Marshall Unger) writes:
>
>>I highly recommend Talbot J. Taylor, Mutual Misunderstanding (Durham:  Duke
>>University Press, 1991). 
>
>Could anyone provide an abstract? The title sounds fascinating...

	Taylor examines how philosophers, linguists, logicians, and others
from Locke onward have (or, rather, have not) come to grips with the sceptical
view that we only think we communicate when we speak to one another and that
in fact (strong version) we do not or, in any case (weak version), we cannot
be sure that we do.  As a linguist who has always regarded the diagram
in Saussure showing the passage of thoughts via language between talking
heads with suspicion, it seems to me Taylor has pinpointed the right
question to ask:  why do we believe that language "works" all, or even most,
of the time?  
	Taylor does not come up with another theory of meaning, but rather a
completely new way of approaching the whole problem of how language works, a
way of looking at the situation that makes it possible to rule out both the
strong and weak sceptical views.  Needless to say, Chomsky and the formalists
get left in the dust in the early pages--what emerges is probably the closest
thing to what the writer of the note that began this string is looking for.