Carina and Jeff's Post (In Reduced Form)

Sorry this is a little late, it's been a hectic weekend/beginning of the week:

- Language is a signifier of truth, not truth itself. Vico writes that eternal truths stand above nature, but within nature all is mutable (872). Sign systems are a human implement for navigating knowledge, and thus are subject to human fallibility (865).

-In Vico, the mind arises with (and through) language. Various languages using variable vocabularies and grammars change the nature of the philosophy of those people who speak them: French thought is ardently emotional, Latin elegaic, Greek pure, Roman heterogenous (874-875).

-Following from the last conclusion, language would then reveal “real” cultural and sociological information about a nation. The idiosyncrasies of each language demonstrate the national character of their speakers. Vico says that the famous topic of debate, as to whether “genuis is a product of language, not language of genius,” is answered as the former by the national character of French intellectualism (874).

-Rhetoric is a help to probability and a guide to inquiry. Vico names common sense as essential to eloquence/rhetoric, and he also states that common sense is necessary in good philosophical critique (868). Philosophical critique supplies “fundamental verity” (866). Since man must deal with probabilities common sense, eloquence, and dialectic are necessary to determine the truth of things.

-Ingenuity is seen in imagination, not in metaphor. Bacon, on the other hand, sees topoi as a strong background to which one can apply imagination (740). Vico names the imagination as “a most favorable omen of future development,” and insists that it not be dulled in students (868); but the imagination under discussion is not rhetorical invention but rather based in memory and oblique access to abstract truth.

-Youth should be trained for civic action and insists on politics as a fundamental field of education. Vico regards the study of human nature and civic matters both as more complex than the sciences, and as a necessary pursuit. Bacon again diverges here from Vico – his concern is for the way that social institutions incorporate and distort knowledge.


ALEX concordance results: Answering the question “What are ideas? And how are they reached?”
From our search of the ALEX concordance, we discovered that Locke sees ideas as perceived stimuli. One observes the exterior worl d and draws conclusions from perception and sensation. By extension, one uses Reason to come to extrapolate further and more complex knowledge. Language is used afterwards in order to communicate percieved and reasoned knowledge to other people.
Logic: 31 hits
Language: 114 hits “The use of Language is, by short Sounds to Names of mixed Modes to signify with ease and dispatch general Conceptions; wherein not only abundance of particulars may be contained, but also a great Variety of independent Ideas collected into one complex one.”
Reason: 84 hits Locke claims that humans alone possess the capacity for both Reason and Language. “
Perception: 20 hits “The whole extent of our Knowledg, or Imagination, reaches not beyond our own Ideas, limited to our ways of Perception.”
Sensation: 26 hits