Philosophy Response

Graduate School
1

<p>Please read the following excerpt and then read my questions below:</p>

<p>"Why is it, that the act of speaking fundamentally changes cognitive disposition? It is not that it would be impossible for me to type these words if I were not speaking them aloud, however the thoughts coupled with the auditory feedback, which is necessarily lagging the initial cognition due to the laws of physics (i.e. the sound of my voice must travel from my vocal chords to my ears). And while the distance of my vocal chords to my ears, particularly in the cavity of my skull can be found almost inconsequential, there is a particular phenomenological variable worth noting. The physical act of hearing thoughts is fundamentally different than the non-audible internal monologue of so called “silent thinking.” Can this be true? Even at this junction, I find myself speaking simultaneously with the unconscious rhythm of typing. And as I misspell words, which my computer automatically corrects, in close, but not perfect accordance with the true intention of my linguistic thoughts, I must reread what I am thinking so as to not loose track. And this I believe, with this referring to the aggregate symbolic combination of letters and syntax proves vexing. I am now deliberately not rereading my writing because I know that it will influence the genuine nature of thought. It is as if my mind, when made audible, is riddled with error that only becomes manifest when I speak audibly and read visually. These are the two principle ways that I verify the truth of thought. Moreover, this is profoundly true when another conscious entity, usually only human, but possibly a divine entity, decodes these symbols imbedded in a syntactic sea."</p>

<p>This type of philosophy fascinates me, but I don't know what to read to dig further into this type of conundrum. I know it deals with linguistics, theology, consciousness, etc. but is there a unifying branch that encapsulates them all? Please comment/analyze what you see in this excerpt and suggest what I might read to delve into this type of philosophy further.</p>

2

<p>That was kind of uncomfortable to read (is that how most philosophy texts read?), but it sounds like a combination of speech physiology, acoustic phonetics, auditory phonetics, and psycholinguistics (a hybrid between psychology and linguistics) to me; psycholinguistics is probably the closest to encompassing and unifying all of those topics. I think it’ll be difficult to find current linguistic discussions of those topics that include theology in their analyses, though they sometimes may be somewhat philosophical in nature. </p>

<p>This might not be what you’re looking for, but that’s what it looks like from a non-philosophy perspective.</p>

3

<p>Interesting isolated piece of text, definitely has relevance to philosophy of mind and language. Some influential works you’ll probably want to familiarize yourself with so you can write a good response would be essays by Russel, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. Probably avoid Wittgenstein since Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations are too long to read for this essay. In philosophy, try to research broadly on the topic, and write specifically. Background research on this kind of topic should be from philosophy of language, phil. psychology, and phil. mind.</p>

<p>Here are some things you can look into to give you better ideas, these are just wiki pages on specific areas of philosophy that applies to the above excerpt. Hope it helps in some way:</p>

<p>[Bertrand</a> Russell’s views on philosophy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“Bertrand Russell's philosophical views - Wikipedia”>Bertrand Russell's philosophical views - Wikipedia)
[Ludwig</a> Wittgenstein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“Ludwig Wittgenstein - Wikipedia”>Ludwig Wittgenstein - Wikipedia)</p>

4

<p>Reminds me of readings I did in Semiotics - Saussure, Roland Barthes. I can see some echoes of what some of the Poststructuralists have written on as well, but those guys can be tedious.</p>