| Popis: |
The book examines how we make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words. As philosophers and cognitive scientists have emphasized, articulating a thought can be astoundingly easy. We generally have no trouble expressing complex ideas that we have never considered before. But not always: a far less noted fact is that articulating a thought can sometimes be extremely hard. Our difficulties in articulating thoughts pervade many aspects of philosophical inquiry as well as many ordinary situations. We may face them in articulating an objection in a seminar, an insight into a movie, or a sudden realization about a friend. An important feature of these thoughts is that we often articulate them in order to find out what they are. In many cases, we would not bother articulating our thoughts if we already had this knowledge. Yet, when we find the right words, we can often immediately tell that they express our thought. So how do we manage to recognize the formulations of our thoughts, in the absence of prior knowledge of what we are thinking? And why is it that producing a public language formulation contributes in any way to the private undertaking of getting clear on our own thoughts? |
