John Searle on Philosophy of Language

He's talking to Bryan Magee on a BBC programme broadcast in 1978. This is excellent!


At 6 minutes 8 seconds on how we use language to abstract from a continuum of experience, and how the language we use actually determines our conscious experiences. See Aristotle on The Continuum. On normative models, see David Lewis' excellent Convention.

At 38 minutes 30 seconds on Chomsky's idea of form of Universal language, it's just a fixpoint operator which produces a normative dissection of the continuum of experience as the child develops. See How To Be A Genius and Edsger W. Dijkstra on Reasoning about Processes.

At 7 minutes 7 seconds this was recorded a year or so after this appeared: Michael Craig-Martin - An Oak Tree (1977).

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