Marcelo Dascal

There's a reasonable bit of deep lore here. Hobbes's challenge, which Dascal (a Leibniz specialist), in a weird piece of presentism, insistently places in the context of cognitive science textbooks that present Hobbes as the first person to develop a computational theory of the brain, the same as Locke gets given credit for inventing developmental psychology just because he said kids were tabulae rasae). This is Dascal's way of marketing his real, interesting argument about Hobbes's dual model of language (1. as "marking," internal shorthand for connecting ideas, to paper over the gaps between decaying memories of sense-perception from whence come all knowledge, and 2. as "signifying," when we cloak it in sound and send it out into the world to communicate those ideas to our fellows. It suffers from mission creep, as rather than go about setting forth the implications of that argument in an organized fashion it's suddenly whoa! we're talking about Condillac's weird non-Condillacian attempt to develop a philosophical language for science and whoa! Dugald Stewart shaking his head at the eighteenth century for not going far enough from language-as-a-cognitive-marchanism to language-as-a-social-practice. Those are interesting things, though, and God knows I'm the last to throw stones. The last things I did on my thesis about language philsoophy in the eighteenth century last night were quote Epicurus and google "historically popular dogs." This appeared in LR dos Santos, PMS Alves, and A. Cardoso, eds., Descartes, Leibniz, e a Modernidade.… (meer)