From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!ames!haven.umd.edu!darwin.sura.net!wupost!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!minsky Wed Oct 14 14:58:53 EDT 1992
Article 7233 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Brain and Mind (was: Logic and God)
Message-ID: <1992Oct12.165931.9154@news.media.mit.edu>
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Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <1992Sep30.205233.662@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com> <1992Oct5.174528.20148@usl.edu> <1aqirgINN5u9@smaug.West.Sun.COM>
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 16:59:31 GMT
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In article <1aqirgINN5u9@smaug.West.Sun.COM> dab@ism.isc.com (Dave Butterfield) writes:
>mhf4421@usl.edu (Flynn Matthew H) writes:
>>Derrida and De Sausare (sp.?) argue rather convincingly that language is
>>arbitrary, and there is no real reason why any particular word, letter, or    
>>phoneme need mean what we accept it to mean.
>
>The origin of the word "mama" (and its close relatives in other languages)
>appears to contradict that statement.  "Ma" is one of the easiest syllables
>to utter, and is one of the first spoken by infants.  The first entity that
>an infant wants to refer to is his mother.  The association of that word to
>that concept was not arbitrary.  Reference the OED for more detail.

On pp310-313 of The Society of Mind is a theory of how some infantile
"social groundings" might be built into brain hardware. But so far as I
can tell, no one has ever read that far into the book.  Comments would
be welcome.

.



