In Emile, Rousseau advances significant ideas about language, language learning and teaching: He posits a universal natural language that develops as the child matures; focuses on ‘private’ words invented by children, on the challenge facing children in their understanding of exceptions to general rules of the mother tongue and on recommended methods of teaching the mother tongue. The paper explores these notions, which feature at the end of Book I of Emile. It seeks to explain and interpret them as postulations (...) regarding language, language learning and teaching and, moreover, to show how they relate to Rousseau's general principles of education. (shrink)

I suggest two main ways of interpreting Reid's analysis of the perception of the quality of hardness: Reid endorses two distinct concepts of hardness. The distinction between the two lies in a profoundly different relation between the sensation of hardness and the concept of hardness in each of them. The first concept, which I term as a “sensation-laden concept”, is “the quality that arises in us the sensation of hardness.” The second concept, which I call a “non-sensational concept”, is “the (...) cohesion of the parts of the body with more or less force.” Reid is thinking like a developmental psychologist and postulates what I consider as a gradual development from one concept to the other according to which the initial sensation-laden concept of hardness, which we form during our early childhood, gradually develops into a mature non-sensational concept of hardness. (shrink)

Reid's principle of credulity may be interpreted as equivalent to a principle of charity, due to the nature of three beliefs it implies concerning the interlocutors, which are held by the person who attempts to acquire their language: They are telling truth in the sense that they are saying what they really think, perceive, feel, believe; they are veracious in the sense that what they say is objectively true; they use language consistently. This interpretation relies on Reid's straightforward remarks on (...) his principle of credulity and on his view of two related correspondences: One correspondence is between the principle of credulity and the principle of veracity. The other is between these two principles and the principles that create the ‘language of nature’ and guide us in our efforts to unravel it. (shrink)