What is in John's mind: the phoneme, the lexeme, and the rest of them

--- A computational linguist would say, the 'stratificational' -eme unit (not the gnoston).

Grice, WoW: 366.

Has John mispronouncing

'soot' to rhyme with 'suit'.

"There is something tempting about the idea
that , in order to allow for admissible
vagaeis of rendering, what are to COUNT
for a given person as rendering of
particular words"

-- 'soot' to rhyme with 'suit' in John's idiolect.

---

"can only be determined by reference to
more or less extended segments of his discourse."

---- 'He could'nt have been meaning 'suit' because he is naked.'



----

Grice goes on:

"This in turn prompts the idea that
particular audible"

but never heard

"or visible"

-- but never seen --

"renderings of words"

--- the visual grapheme is a trick. I once researched into the meanings used by Linnaeus, to mean, male and female (e.g. sparro). The shield and the arrow (of masculinity) features in the MALE sparrow. The hand mirror of Venus and femeninity features, not in the Ares or Mars of the male sparrow, but in the Venerean female sparrow. But I find out that the symbols were just clumsy renditions of Ph and Th, qua Greek letters.

Grice goes on:

"are only established
as such by being CONCEIVED
by the utterer"

"as realisations of
just those words."

Similarly, the late Eve Sedgwick. She found that 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' are "limiting categories." "As linguists use the 'allophone', I will speak of the 'allosexual'". Unfortunately she died before it made it to the OED3, but there's still hope.

Grice goes on:

"One might say"

when one got off on his Platonic foot,

"perhaps that words come FIRST"

and Bennett is wrong -- and we have a big meaning-realist here --

"and only later come their realisations."

Grice is being provocative. He KNOWS that there are LEVELS of priority. Prior-1, prior-2, conceptual prior, epistemic prior, etc.

So no need to despair: the TOKEN is the 'fundamental entity' -- the rest is a 'class' or a 'set'. What goes on in John's mind is John's problem if he has any (for which he'd first need to have a mind).


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"A wast is a terribly thing to mind."