Reference and Verbal Gestures

The aim of the article is to solve the problem of causal dependence between an objective reference to objects of external experience and reference to mental states. Research material for solving the problem is findings of contemporary psychologists who study the conditions and course of human intellectual development from an early age, as well as the results of a logical analysis of a natural language in the works of contemporary analytical philosophers. Particularly, contemporary research in the field of developmental psychology confirms one of the main theses of Willard Quine that human thinking, which deals with the ontology of everyday experience, needs not only individual, but also general terms, based on shared reference. Our learning of common concepts ensures contact not only with the everyday reality of the surrounding objects and events, but also the transition to abstract concepts that are characteristic of scientific ontology. In the course of the research, the author starts from the fact that the main prerequisite for reference to objects with the help of single or general concepts is the knowledge that others also refer to the same objects and their properties using the same words. From this, we can conclude that the condition of objective reference is the intersubjective experience of perception of objects and events. Such intersubjective triangulation is the core of the concepts of truth and objectivity, without which thinking and language learning would be impossible. Hence it follows that such intersubjectivity assumes a common experience shared with other people only if from a certain age we have some knowledge of these people's mental states. However, psychologists have not yet advanced beyond establishing a correlation between the ways a child grasps the concepts of the identity of objects and of other people's mental states. Nevertheless, the author has established that a child from an early age can comprehend general concepts about objects, learning to refer not only to individual perceived objects, but also to an unobserved set of similar objects. Thus, the author proposed a solution to the question of causal dependence between objective reference and reference to mental states. The solution consists in the fact that knowledge of others' mental states not only gives reference its intersubjective character, but is also a condition of objective reference to the objects around us in general. To substantiate this solution, the author has introduced the notion of verbal gestures to unobservable objects and events. Such verbal gestures not only characterize our perception of other people's mental states, but ultimately permeate our perception of the world as a whole. The general conclusion of the article is that the perception of other people's mental states is not secondary or additional to the perception of objects, it is not a primitive theorizing or predicting someone else's behavior. On the contrary, our reaction to other minds is in fact a primary phenomenon of our perception.

Keywords

Authors

References