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Title: Some Questions About Language: A Theory of Human Discourse and Its Objects by Mortimer Jerome Adler ISBN: 0-8126-9178-4 Publisher: Open Court Publishing Company Pub. Date: October, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Common sense
Comment: I'm no philosopher in the academic sense. Adler bridges two worlds: the ivory tower of the academics who know logic but not life and those who know life but who lack the language with with to say it. Today the big thing is nihilism which essentially says that us peons know nothing. Nihilism is nothing but a metaphor for the ignorant powerless workers who are expected to make their minds into silly putty for the forces of production, which happen to be what the money-makers , conservative and marxist want Joe U. Idiot to beleive. This book is fairly technical but it contains the common sense notion that we use words to express meaning, which is rather good evidence that human beings do understand things, even if economic forces are supposed to do our thinking for us. Adler is a great philosopher who spent his life standing up to weasel-word propagandists. The press establisment will hate this book, where words actually have meaning.
Rating: 4
Summary: Review of Adler, _Some Questions About Language_
Comment: Review of Adler, _Some Questions About Language_
Mortimer Adler is nearly unique among modern philosophers, a counter-academic who believes in communicating with ordinary people about philosophical issues, a neo-scholastic, an adherent of classical Christianity, and a polymath willing to deal with all the traditional philosophical questions.
For Adler, language is philosophically interesting only insofar as it involves communication about public matters. These two stipulations forestall (a) truth-conditional approaches (communication is logically prior to truth) and (b) most of what today goes under the name of pragmatics (since such things as intentions to convey certain contents, intended speech acts, illocutionary forces, most implicatures, and so on, are not public). Moreover, according to Adler all prior ontological commitments are to be avoided in developing a philosophy of language, since these "beg all the questions that philosophers... employ language to discuss." The philosophy of language must be neutral with respect to logical systems and grammatical theories.
The primary philosophical problem with respect to language is the problem of meaning. Meaning is defined as the difference between a given entity as an ordinary sound or mark and the same entity as a part of language. Most of the book is devoted to categorematic meaning, "...the acquirement of referential meaning by initially meaningless notations." (p. 44). Adler promptly argues against any stimulus-response account: meanings are imposed by a voluntary and conventional activity of mind.
Upon what are meanings imposed? Upon individuals? No, because we are almost never aware of individuals. Upon ideas? No, ideas are private; men converse about public things. Meanings are imposed upon the objects of ideas (objects of apprehension), the ideas themselves being transparent. These objects, which need not actually exist, are intersubjective. How? An idea in the mind of A and an idea in the mind of B can be one in intention.. Objectivity is intersubjectivity.
Ideas (percepts, concepts, memories, images) present objects to the mind. Ideas are signs; all signs make present to the mind things other than themselves. But ideas are not conventional signs; they are innate - natural phenomena; they do not have their significations adventitiously as do signals or linguistic sounds. P. 62: "Each idea is nothing but the meaning by which it signifies or presents an object other than itself to the mind." In fact ideas are the only signs like this that exist: they are signifiers and nothing but signifiers. They do not have meanings; they are meanings. (Indeed, failure to see that ideas are meanings is one of Adler's "ten philosophical mistakes" discussed in the book of that title.)
So in sum: notations come to have conventional meaning by being imposed upon objects of apprehension; eventually they become associated with the corresponding ideas.
The above is a hopelessly inadequate sketch of both the book's argument and of the subject itself. Adler gives due attention to difficulties and tangential issues.
Ken Miner
Rating: 5
Summary: Exposition outstanding; theory difficult but compelling
Comment: Mortimer Adler is often regarded as a superficial popularizer, but in this book (first published in 1976) he explores an important philosophical topic with all the rigor and depth one could ask for. Deliberately patterning himself after the "quaestio" form of St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa, he sets forth the questions to be answered in a logical order and answers them in a spare, rigorous style that is a joy to read. The theory expounded is too complex to be stated here, but it reasons from certain observed phenomena in the use of language to the postulation of certain unobservable entities, just as in science we reason from certain observations and measurements to the existence of (for instance) electrons. The theory has some difficulties, to be sure, but even if you don't find it convincing, you will find this a glowing example of how philosophy ought to be written.
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Title: The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense by Mortimer Jerome Adler, Deal W. Hudson ISBN: 0823216705 Publisher: Fordham University Press Pub. Date: April, 1996 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: ANGELS AND US by Mortimer J. Adler ISBN: 0020300654 Publisher: Unknown Pub. Date: 15 September, 1993 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes by Mortimer Jerome Adler, Deal Hudson ISBN: 0823215350 Publisher: Fordham University Press Pub. Date: September, 1993 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: How to Speak, How to Listen by Mortimer Jerome Adler ISBN: 0684846470 Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: How to Think About War and Peace by Mortimer Jerome Adler, John Logue ISBN: 0823216438 Publisher: Fordham University Press Pub. Date: February, 1996 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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