® InfoJur.ccj.ufsc.br
AUTHOR: Dr. Gerd Döben-Henisch
FIRST DATE: February 19, 1996
DATE of LAST CHANGE: February 28, 1996
If someone talks with someone else he produces utterances which
communicate a content which is normally different from the utterance itself.
This content, also called meaning, is related to states inside of the
body of the speaker/ hearer. You can associate these inner states
partially also with the actual situation, but everything from a situation which is
relevant to the speaker/ hearer has necessarily also to be represented as some inner
state, otherwise a speaker/ hearer could not respond to this aspect with an individual
responsibility. The reverse is not true: not every inner state which can influence the
ability of a speaker to communicate with a language has to be represented in the `outside'
situation.
If the `inner states', which are involved in a lingual communication, would not be known
by the speaker/ hearer, they nevertheless could not be part of his conscious attitudes
related to his perceptions of the world. Without a consciousness, without a mind, without
knowing what is going on, therefore without an individual responsibility, he would receive
stimuli from the outside and he would react `without knowing' what he is doing. In such a
context the concepts of stimuli and perception would become empty. What is a perception
without knowing, that one has some perceptions?
To avoid these perplexities it makes sense to assume from the individual point of view of
a speaker/ hearer that there exists an individual knowledge of perceptions, bodystates,
feelings, imaginations, etc. and that all this knowledge together reflects that what
pre-scientificly is named consciousness or mind (see: J.SEARLE
[1992]).
On account of this fact that the possible meaning of an utterance is therefor intimately
related to internal states of someone's mind it is not recommended to use a purely
behavioral oriented approach in the analysis of meaning, especially if one is also
interested in the individual learning process itself. Individual mental states are bound
to the individual experience of someone and can therefore only be
reconstructed by an investigation of these individual experience (See also:
[DÖBEN-HENISCH 1995a]). Loocking to meaning from the individual point of view of the
subjective personal experience implies a phenomenological point of view, as
philosophers name it.
Continue with: The phenomenological point of view
Comments are welcomed to kip-ml@inm.de