King Kriggle , post class 1/28

After the absolutely awesome class periods that were had this week I really got to thinking more and more about how these interesting frenchmen could and would sit down and look at the meaning of words and try to get to the bottom of it. It was interesting looking back at the aspect of the “Gap” as discussed in class and how people will naturally fill things in based on their interpretations and experiences, but at the end of the day it seems to me that the overall purpose of a language is a mutual understanding. I think this understanding is dealt with in great deal with the experiences that we have in life. I related this to the idea first brought about by Watson (from furman where i used to go to school) in psychology. He came up with the idea of behavioralism, which in my opinion is most likely the best idea out there. Before him a lot of people were concerned with the structure, function, and overall systems of the mind. So naturally their theories followed suit with structuralism, functionalism, and other forms that looked at the mind and body as a sort of machine. Well my boy Watson, like these fine frenchmen, had a different idea whereas his idea of behavioralism (behavioralist psychology) states that we all start out roughly the same, not too far off from the tabula rasa (blank slate) idea in philosophy, and that our experiences govern the way that we interpret, react, and carry out the basic functions that we will encounter in our lives. Looking at language it is interesting to me how this idea seems so profound because to be honest with you I can’t think of one word without attaching a picture, a smell, a memory, a sound, or something to it in my head. An experience could be attached to a word as simple as “tea”, i might think of something my grandmother makes or something of the such and with this craft a meaning behind it. That is after all how people communicate in different languages, to understand one word in a different language we must see a picture of it or compare it to something in our native tongue. well anyway it kinda sparked some interest with me.