Názov (SK): Jazyk, myšlení, racionalita
Názov (ENG): Language, Thought, and Rationality
Autor: Tomáš Hoskovec (Pražský lingvistický kroužek)
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1207-5582
Jazyk: čeština
Bibliografické údaje: Litikon, 2023, roč. 8, č. 1, s. 63 – 73
Bibliografické údaje (ENG): Litikon, 2023, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 63-73
Abstrakt (ENG):
Introductory lecture to the series of public conferences entitled “European Values, and How to Grasp them: on the Strength of Everyday Experience”, held in autumn 2022 by the Prague Linguistic Circle on the occasion of the Czech presidency in the Council of European Union. – Rationality is without doubt a fundamental European value. However, it is constantly attacked as being weak, limited, insufficient, illusory, impossible, and even culturally imperialistic. The author argues that rationality is perfectly possible, all it needs is to be duly, instead of dully, mastered. Human thought takes place in human language, i.e., in human communication. Human thought takes form in texts, both oral and written, that are inherently subject to interpretation. Language understanding as it results from interpretation, and thus mutual comprehension when communicating thoughts and feelings, is only made possible because it is, on its turn, subject to a plenty of impersonal social norms. The structure of those norms amounts to a particular cultural value which must be recognized, known, learned, practised, and required within human communities. All this understanding results in a strict deontology. A detailed analysis is subsequently produced of a public television emission reporting on a grave accident. On the strength of the analysis, it is shown how insidiously, and in what an extent, the television chain destructs and abolishes the ambience of social practices and moral norms indispensable to communicating thoughts. Curiously enough, the television chain under examination is far from being a tabloid one; on the contrary, it is one of great moral and intellectual ambitions. The actual source of its actual both moral and intellectual failure consists in that the television chain sticks much more to its inner “professional” rules than to impersonal cultural norms and values.
Keywords:
language, thought, rationality, deontology, text interpretation, discourse
analysis, functional structuralism, encompassing philology
DOI: