Document Type : Original Article

Author

PhD in Philosophy, ACECR Institute for Humanities and Social Studies (IHSS), Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Language sounds we make. Language sounds and letters do not carry information about the world, and it is the listener who understands a sentence and properly reacts to it based on their background knowledge of the world. This simple language behavior, i.e., understanding words and phrases instantly based on our background knowledge of the world has a very complex explanation. In the present paper, I aimed to describe a dilemma in explaining this complex issue. On the one hand, historical-cultural information (auditory or non-auditory) should be considered to exist inside the mind rather than in something outside it; on the other hand, we must believe that historical-cultural information exists outside the mind, and that it is for this reason that language sounds and letters can carry new information. Here we suggest to better understand this dilemma to focus on the concept of brain-body instead of the concept of mind, or theories that are guided by common intuition about the mind. We will show that by focusing on the concept of brain-body, the dilemma becomes a trivial problem.

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