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Question of the Month

How Do We Understand Each Other?

Each answer below receives a book. Apologies to the entrants not included.

Can you conceive of something of which you’ve had no prior experience? I cannot imagine any human being capable of doing so. This is a key to how we understand one another, because it exemplifies our reliance upon a pre-existing stimulus for thought. And if human thought is founded upon experience (see for example, David Hume), so too is social interaction. For example, if someone informs another that they fancy a sumptuous banquet (as, dear reader, you often find yourself doing), the receiver might conjure up an image based upon past attendance of banquets or knowledge of the constituent parts. Abstract concepts such as ‘love’ seem to exist in the entities which harbour them, as they are in many ways incommunicable through experience of the physical world, and are transferable only through language.

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