Phonological Quotes

“If Wittgenstein is right—if the capacity to employ and discern signs, on the one hand, and the capacity to employ and discern symbols, on the other, are two aspects of a single capacity—then strictly thinking through the thought-experiment of the logical alien should leave us with someone who is not only a logical alien but also more of a phonological alien than, in initially framing such a thought-experiment, one might at first suppose. Moreover, if Wittgenstein is right, there should be limits on how far either one of these two dimensions of what can be alien in the language of another can vary independently of the other—how far the possibility of the discernment of the repetition of utterly alien signs can come into view apart from some discernment of the actuality of their intelligible use as the sensibly apprehensible aspects of meaningful symbols. Philosophical efforts to imagine the possibility of a logical alien often involve a peculiar combination of intimacy and strangeness: they imagine the logical alien as saying things that, on the one hand, we are in one sense able to understand without difficulty (in the sense of phonemically parse, we are supposed to be able to report straight off—verbally repeat—the utterances of the alien), but that, in another sense, we are unable to understand at all (inasmuch as we are supposed to be unable to make sense of how the different things the speaker says hang together as a coherent logical whole). This requires imagining the logical alien as having mastered the phonological space of our language or our having mastered the phonological space of his, while each of us remains an outsider to the logical space of the other. It requires imagining us as standing in the relation of being logically alien to one another without our being in the least phonologically alien to one another. Can we imagine that? Or does our inability to find a logical foothold in the linguistic behavior of the being with a supposedly logical alien form of thought have the con- sequence that we should be equally unable to find a phonological foot-hold in his supposedly linguistic behavior?”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics