"All human thoughts come into existence by grasping the meaning and mastering the use language" Polanyi - Do you agree? Discuss what the author means in the quotation and from a language perspective discern how it relates to knowledge.

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“All human thoughts come into existence by grasping the meaning and mastering the use language” Polanyi

Do you agree? Discuss what the author means in the quotation and from a language perspective discern how it relates to knowledge.

Does Polanyi anticipate that a human thought only exist by combining the denotation and the skilful use of language? Or does he mean that thoughts are present in our head, but their existence to others is only displayed, if we have spoken about these thoughts.

Considering these aspects I took a journey through my day, searching for clues, which could clarify Polanyi´s intension with his statement and my personal point of view.

The first thing making me think about thoughts combined with language was when I read the newspaper, the part with gossip about celebrities. “Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck broke up”, just seconds after I perused that line, my mind was full of thoughts, memories -“Didn’t they want to marry, oh yes, they met during the shooting of their flop movie, what was it called again?” So all these thoughts come into our head, we are reminded of the past, what we have read about them earlier and what has happened in their relationship. Afterwards I continue reading about something else. Now I did not exploit language, or I did not communicate with others, but my thoughts still existed. I am assured Polanyi did not think about these kind thoughts, when saying human thoughts. I think in order to formulate our own opinion we have to consider that there are many different thoughts. In this example my knowledge, and therefore my thoughts come by memory.

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Later in school, Polanyi´s phrase was even more present. What we today just easily read out of a book or what we are getting taught, once could have been a problem for the people examining and scrutinizing it, hundreds of years ago, thorough a scarcity of language. For example, around the fourth and fifth centuries BC, a great controversy arose over the primordial element, which composed of all forms of matter. It is nothing new for us, as we have learned in chemistry, but at this point of time, there were no words to describe a base unit of matter; ...

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