Language, Culture, Science, Technology and Philosophy

Abstract

It is proverbial that what distinguishes human languages from their subhuman antecedents and animal contemporaries are their infinitely remarkable capacity for production and reproduction of endlessly new combinations. But there is another distinguishing feature that one may wish to note, which is nearly as fundamental; it is the stand-alone sentence. The signal systems of animals are limited to simple occasional sentences and such also are the human sentences on which a dog (and other animals that humans have domesticated) learns to act. Serving, as it does, as the medium of science and history, the standing sentence - indeed the ‘eternal’ sentence - must be accounted useful. It confers one conspicuous benefit straightaway, in the domain of its origin, as an aid to ostension itself. Universal categoricals and standing predications serve admirably in speeding up the ostensive learning of new terms.