You write:
>If "thinking" is limited to the manipulation of these discrete
>word-like concepts
-- but not even _words_ are all that discrete in spoken language. Thinking
that they are is our "scriptist bias" as Roy Harris (and others) tells us.
Thinking is something we do: a bodily choreography (dance-with-the-world)
that may proceed without many outward signs. And speaking, too, is
something we do: an audible dance-with-the-world.
I should think that Jay was gesturing in this direction when mentioning
>the paralinguistic and 'acoustic'
>aspects of speech
Writing may be the dance where we cut speech up and when written is, _then_
we can see discrete words (makes me think of examples of old manuscripts
without spaces between words that I have seen. Which is also the way young
children tend to write if they are encouraged to write before they read.)
Being thoroughly literate it takes some unthinking to view words as
recurring patterns in mindful-vocal gesturing (it's so awfully useful to be
able to sort words into dictionaries) -- and I'm not at all sure where this
train of thought goes theoretically...
>I'm inclined to think
>there is much more to hunches and pattern recognition than we realize.
Eva