[Xmca-l] Re: sense, meaning and inner aspect of word

[Martin John Packer]

On Jan 27, 2015, at 12:16 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> I did a search on "Thinking and Speech" for all the uses of the word "inner". 283 of the 329 of them are "inner speech" and all the others are referring to mental or psychological, and then there's "inner aspect of a word."

Without wanting to get blokey, it seems to me that these paragraphs in Chapter One of T&L are very clear:

"However, what is such a unit, which cannot be further resolved and in which are inherently contained the properties in verbal thinking as whole? To us it seems that this unit can be found in the internal [inner, interior] aspect [side] of the word [внутренней стороне слова], in its meaning [значении].

"This inner side [внутренняя сторона] of the word, until now, has hardly undergone any special studies. Word meaning [Значение слова] was dissolved in the sea of all the other conceptions (представлений, predstavleniĭ) of our consciousness or all other acts (актов, acts) of our thinking, just as sound, torn from meaning [значения], was dissolved in the sea of all of those remaining sounds existing in nature. Therefore in exactly the same way that, with respect to the sound of human speech, contemporary psychology cannot say anything which would be specific to the sound of human speech as such, so too psychology in the field of the study of verbal meaning [словесного значения] cannot say anything besides the facts that characterize in identical measure verbal meaning [словесное значение] and all the other ideas and thoughts [представления и мысли] of our consciousness.

"Thus the matter proceeded in associative psychology, and so, in general, it proceeds in contemporary structural psychology. In the word we always recognize only one side, that which is turned towards us. The other, the inside, has ever remained and remains today unstudied and unknown as the other side of the moon. Meanwhile it is precisely in this, the other side, that the possibility lies of resolving the problems that interest us concerning the relation of thinking and speech, for it is precisely here, in word meaning [значении слова], that we find tied together the knot of that unity [завязан узел того единства] that we call verbal thinking [речевым мышлением]."



Martin