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Aug. 18th, 2006 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnyPonderings (unrelated to A-level) prompted vaguely by de Saussure.
Something that's always interested me is the theory of language acquisition - whether language is something that's innate. I had a bit of trouble with this theory initially, and it's been a hell of a long time since I've read any Chomsky or Pinker or the like, but essentially there's the argument that language acquisition is something that's inborn; that features in common across languages, such as coherent grammatical structure and so forth, make for a pretty persuasive argument that it is in our nature not only to use language to communicate but to use a specific kind of language to communicate.
What interests me most about it is that it set me wondering whether there's a school of thought in Theology which covers the same sort of ground.
I did an essay for my Religious Studies A-level coursework which covered the topic 'why is there religion', and let me tell you I cursed that essay title with my every breath. I used to draw little doodles of wheels under the title and me, pushing, and a helpful nearby cliff. But a lot of the reading I did for that topic and a lot of the reading I've done since has shown certain similarities between religions, religions that really shouldn't have had much contact or any major effect on each other. So this could pretty much indicate a couple of things; that there is in fact something Up There, Down Here, or Somewhere Around The Place that's affecting the way we think and attempting to garner belief, or that we are in some way genetically programmed towards beliefs and the structuring of them. That spirituality is, along with a predisposition towards language, innate.
Anyway, yes. I'm going to go read some more de Saussure, now. I just thought that was interesting. :)
Something that's always interested me is the theory of language acquisition - whether language is something that's innate. I had a bit of trouble with this theory initially, and it's been a hell of a long time since I've read any Chomsky or Pinker or the like, but essentially there's the argument that language acquisition is something that's inborn; that features in common across languages, such as coherent grammatical structure and so forth, make for a pretty persuasive argument that it is in our nature not only to use language to communicate but to use a specific kind of language to communicate.
What interests me most about it is that it set me wondering whether there's a school of thought in Theology which covers the same sort of ground.
I did an essay for my Religious Studies A-level coursework which covered the topic 'why is there religion', and let me tell you I cursed that essay title with my every breath. I used to draw little doodles of wheels under the title and me, pushing, and a helpful nearby cliff. But a lot of the reading I did for that topic and a lot of the reading I've done since has shown certain similarities between religions, religions that really shouldn't have had much contact or any major effect on each other. So this could pretty much indicate a couple of things; that there is in fact something Up There, Down Here, or Somewhere Around The Place that's affecting the way we think and attempting to garner belief, or that we are in some way genetically programmed towards beliefs and the structuring of them. That spirituality is, along with a predisposition towards language, innate.
Anyway, yes. I'm going to go read some more de Saussure, now. I just thought that was interesting. :)
