Not very long ago, cursing or swearing was considered a taboo of speech. It was considered bad manners or worse. 'Fuck', 'shit' and so on were not heard on television or radio, would never be uttered in the hearing of your children, your parents, your grandparents, in the office, in public speeches, and so on. They were reserved for shows of genuine unhinged frustration or anger, for groups of eighteen year-olds on the prowl, and so on. But it has changed rather quickly. Now almost everywhere these words are much more likely to be let fall, to the point where their being bleeped-out on the BBC seems artificial, as protecting no one.
My habits have not been affected, and indeed for whatever reason I almost never swear. I bring this up because the change seems to remove swearing from its presumably rightful place in one's psychological economy. Certain words had the effect, when uttered in the heat of the moment, of blowing off steam, precisely because, I assume, they were forbidden. In such circumstances—say if I've hit my thumb when hammering a nail—the words do pour out. Now there are no words left with anything like that sort of pungency. There is still a little of it—one wouldn't swear in the hearing of the Queen I suppose—but we seem to be approaching a world bereft of proper swearing because the words which once had the status of swear-words no longer quite have it, and it seems impossible that new ones will take their place. Will we suffer from no longer having the release of swearing?
The Concept Concept.
Are concepts the meanings of words? I have always thought so—unthinkingly as a native English speaker, and then thinkingly, as a philosopher. Not that there is anything theoretically deep going on; 'concept' is no more penetrating than the ordinary notion of the meaning of a word. One speaks of concepts rather than word-meanings primarily to transcend any reference to a particular language: the concept equality is thought to be meant by the English word 'equality', the French word 'égalité', and the Spanish word 'igualdad'. Equipped with this word, we can speculate about early Homo Sapiens; we can ask whether they had the concept equality, freely granting of course they didn't have the English word 'equality' although with the vague assumption that he had some language or other. Indeed we could speak of the notion rather than the concept (I've always liked that word—it doesn't pretend to be more precise than it is). Anyway we could have these conversations without using the word 'concept'. If awkwardly, one can speak of the meaning of the word 'equality', meaning a certain entity to which the word bears a certain semantic relation, and of Jack, Pierre, and Juan's mental grasp of this entity, without implying that there is a language common to any two of the listed speakers.
But some people think that speaking of concepts gets us closer to the real facts; indeed some think they are the stuff of what Fodor called the Language of Thought. Superficially, it has always struck me that that is at most an unnatural position, for it appears to imply that there are concepts corresponding to most if not all words—not only the concept duck, the concept rock, but the concept every, the concept in, the concept put, and so on (I think of an adaptation of a point by Wittgenstein: What concept is expressed by the finger?). I suppose I know what it means to speak that way, but such is not the language of the street, and seems to amount to what we've learned from Moliere to call a dormative virtue explanation, a trumped-up vacuous explanation. For example from YouTube videos, it is clear that for example a crow can figure out how to use a stick to retrieve a treat from some complicated setup, but does this suggest that the crow grasps concepts? What is to be gained?
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