In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments against writing: "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls [of people, M.N.]; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling these things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon, a potion; some translate it as recipe] not for memory, but for reminder" (274-278e).
Oraltity and Language Today: What Do People Understand When They
Understand Language?
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. Guinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.
Amos Oz refers to self-constitution in language as follows: "…a language is never a 'means' or a 'framework' or a 'vehicle' for culture. It is culture. If you live in Hebrew, if you think, dream, make love in Hebrew, sing in Hebrew in the shower, tell lies in Hebrew, you are 'inside'. […] If a writer writes in Hebrew, even if he rewrites Dostoevksy or writes about a Tartar invasion of South America, Hebrew things will always happen in his stories. Things which are ours and which can only happen with us: certain rhythms, moods, combinations, associations, longings, connotations, atavistic attitudes towards the whole of creation, and so forth," (Under This Blazing Light, Cambridge, England: University Press, 1979, p. 189).
J. Lyons. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Semantics requires that one "abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their designata" (Vol. 1., p.115).
Noam Chomsky. The distinction between competence and performance in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Many scholars noticed the dualism inherent in the Chomskyan theory. Competence is "the speaker- hearer's knowledge of his language;" performance is "the actual use of language in concrete situations" (p.4).
Noam Chomsky started to formulate the idea of the innate constitution of a speaker's competence in the famous article A review of B.K. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in Language, 35 (1959), an idea he has developed through all his scholarly work. In the review, he considered the alternatives: language is learned (within Skinner's scheme of stimulus-response), or it is somehow innate. In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1965), Reflections on Language (London: Fontana, 1976), and Rules and Representations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), the thought is constantly refined, though not necessarily more convincing (as his critics noticed).
Roman Jakobson. Essais de Linguistique Générale, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963.
Jakobson refused to ascertain any "private property" in the praxis of language. Everything in the domain of language "is socialized" (p. 33).