I had all these ( primacy of trust) arguments ready to publish them then I found this video (today) and now I know my ideas aren't original at all.. Like I read Wittgenstein's On Certainty and Løgstrup's work but I still thought I could put out smth original.. guess not. Anyway, the lecture is very very very good. Thank u professor.
Great video, and amazing series in general! I don't think your point about language works though. The reductionist can surely explain language acquisition without reference to testimony. What you do when you learn language is really just observing connections between words and objects. So when your dad says "that is an apple", you learn that "apple" is used to refer to "that" in your speech community. To say that you are aquiring knowledge through testimony, it seems you need to say that there is some necessary connection between apples and the word "apple", meaning apple is the *right* word for apples. But this seems to be refuted by other languages having different words like "æble" or "apfel" - unless you want to say that other languages are wrong. Furthermore, it seems *someone* would have had to discover the right word for apples at some point. But if that is possibly done by a single individual, then why couldn't you also do so?
But apple is the right word for apple... *in our language community*. It's one thing that my father uses it. It's something else to trust that it will also work when I go to the shop, or the daycare centre, or wherever. So I do think that an element of trust is in there. Furthermore, language acquisition isn't just a matter of connecting words to things; I suspect -- but linguists no doubt have researched this, and I'm just speculating -- that quite a bit of language acquisition goes through learning truths like 'dogs are animals', 'if it's not sour then it's not yogurt', and so on.
@VictorGijsbers hmm yes, I guess that a reductionist could explain that with a sort of extrapolation or induction: my dad says that "that" is "an apple"; here is another person who is similar to my dad, so probably they too will say that "that" is "an apple". In this way, we form "working hypotheses" about how words are used in our language community and the extent of our language communities. When I then meet someone who doesn't use "apple" as the name of "that", bur instead "apfel", I then revise my hypothesis--perhaps that they belong to a different language community, or that there is something different about this thing that causes this person to use another word. In this way we can work out the rules of our language without the need to trust anyone, but instead simply by forming hypotheses about the linguistic behaviour of other people. Now, I am not sure whether this is actually how people learn languages, but it at least looks like it provides the reductionist with a way to account for language acquisition without invoking trust.
I had all these ( primacy of trust) arguments ready to publish them then I found this video (today) and now I know my ideas aren't original at all.. Like I read Wittgenstein's On Certainty and Løgstrup's work but I still thought I could put out smth original.. guess not. Anyway, the lecture is very very very good. Thank u professor.
And of course Baier's and Karen Jones' work..
Thank you!
You're welcome!
Nice work
Great video, and amazing series in general! I don't think your point about language works though. The reductionist can surely explain language acquisition without reference to testimony. What you do when you learn language is really just observing connections between words and objects. So when your dad says "that is an apple", you learn that "apple" is used to refer to "that" in your speech community. To say that you are aquiring knowledge through testimony, it seems you need to say that there is some necessary connection between apples and the word "apple", meaning apple is the *right* word for apples. But this seems to be refuted by other languages having different words like "æble" or "apfel" - unless you want to say that other languages are wrong. Furthermore, it seems *someone* would have had to discover the right word for apples at some point. But if that is possibly done by a single individual, then why couldn't you also do so?
But apple is the right word for apple... *in our language community*. It's one thing that my father uses it. It's something else to trust that it will also work when I go to the shop, or the daycare centre, or wherever. So I do think that an element of trust is in there. Furthermore, language acquisition isn't just a matter of connecting words to things; I suspect -- but linguists no doubt have researched this, and I'm just speculating -- that quite a bit of language acquisition goes through learning truths like 'dogs are animals', 'if it's not sour then it's not yogurt', and so on.
@VictorGijsbers hmm yes, I guess that a reductionist could explain that with a sort of extrapolation or induction: my dad says that "that" is "an apple"; here is another person who is similar to my dad, so probably they too will say that "that" is "an apple". In this way, we form "working hypotheses" about how words are used in our language community and the extent of our language communities. When I then meet someone who doesn't use "apple" as the name of "that", bur instead "apfel", I then revise my hypothesis--perhaps that they belong to a different language community, or that there is something different about this thing that causes this person to use another word. In this way we can work out the rules of our language without the need to trust anyone, but instead simply by forming hypotheses about the linguistic behaviour of other people. Now, I am not sure whether this is actually how people learn languages, but it at least looks like it provides the reductionist with a way to account for language acquisition without invoking trust.
A reductionist who would start learning piano with a teacher would have a hard time and the teacher would fire him rather quickly ! 😂