Volume 1

Aphasia and kindred disorders of speech / by Henry Head.

  • Head, Henry, 1861-1940.
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Aphasia and kindred disorders of speech / by Henry Head. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    61/576 (page 41)
    CH. Ill] HUGHL1NGS JACKSON embodying no proposition, A proposition—e.g. gold is yellow—consists of two names, each of which, by conventional contrivance of position, etc.,. . .modifies the meaning of the other. All the names in a random succession of words may, it is true, one after the other, excite perception in us, but not perceptions in any relation to one another deserving of the name of thought. The several per¬ ceptions so revived do not make a unit. We are told nothing by a mere sequence of names, although our organisation is stirred by each of them. Now a proposition is not—that is to say, in its effect on us—a mere sequence. When we apprehend a proposition, a relation between two things is given us—is for the moment, indeed, forced upon us by the conventional tricks which put the two names in the respective relations of subject and predicate. We receive in a two-fold manner, not the words only, but the order of the words also1. Single words are meaningless, and so is any unrelated succession of words. The unit of speech is a proposition. A single word is, or is in effect, a proposition, if other words in relation are implied. ... It is from the use of a word that we gather its propositional value. The words “yes” and “no” are propositions, but only when used for assent and dissent; they are used by healthy people interjectionally as well as propositionally. A speechless patient may retain the “ no,” and yet have only the interjectional or emotional, not the propositional use of it; he utters it in various tones as signs of feeling only. He may have a propositional use of it, but yet a use of it short of that healthy people have, being able to reply “ no ” but not to say “no” when told. . . . On the other hand, elaborate oaths, in spite of their propositional structure, are not propositions, for they have not, either in the mind of the utterer or in that of the person to whom they are uttered, any meaning at all; they may be called “ dead propositions.”2 . . . Loss of speech is, therefore, the loss of power to propositionise. It is not only loss of power to propositionise aloud (to talk) but to propositionise either intern¬ ally or externally, and it may exist when the patient remains able to utter some few words. We do not mean by using the popular word “power,” that the speech¬ less man has lost any “faculty” of speech or propositionising; he has lost those words which serve in speech, the nervous arrangements for them being destroyed. There is no “faculty” or “power” of speech apart from words revived or reviv- able in propositions, any more than there is a “faculty” of coordination of move¬ ments apart from movements represented in particular ways. We must here say, too, that besides the use of words in speech there is a service of words which is not speech; hence we do not use the expression that the speechless man has lost words, but that he has lost those words which serve in speech. In brief, speech¬ lessness does not mean entire wordlessness3.