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Hands as the Language of Thought: Correcting a Kant Attribution

There is a line about hands that travels well. It reads cleanly, carries an air of philosophical dignity, and arrives in print wearing the name of Immanuel Kant. “The hand is the visible part of the brain,” runs the most common English form, or, in an older rendering, “the hand is the outer brain of man.” The phrase appears in publishing copy, in teaching materials, on Goodreads quotation pages, in popular psychology, in surgical textbooks, in neurology lectures, and in essays on sign language and gesture. It has the shape of something Kant should have said. The difficulty is that no reliable evidence supports treating it as a verified Kant statement.

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Yellow Lives in Common Crevices

I was on the phone the other day with a designer I hired to work on a project.

When you talk on the phone — words become even more vital in trying to pin down an abstract image.

We were working to find the right “feel” for yellow on the page — that’s a hard thing to do because light yellow doesn’t “read” on a page and dark yellow quickly becomes orange.

ME:  We need a different yellow.

DESIGNER:  Like a morning pee yellow?

ME:  That’s too dark.

DESIGNER:  Like a kidney infection pee yellow?

ME:  Too cloudy.

DESIGNER:  So a lighter tainting of blood in the urine?

ME:  Let’s try that.

Our similar, shared, experiences give meaning and context to abstract ideas.

Language lives in common crevices.

Describing the crevice reveals how a person relates to the world.

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Concepts of Foreign Languages

by María L. Trigos-Gilbert

Foreign languages are those “mysterious” and external words to one’s own country and culture. Furthermore, languages are undoubtedly the most important accomplishments of human beings for a variety of communicative purposes. The Random House Webster’s Dictionary gives us the following definition for language: “A body of words and systems for their use common to a people of the same community or nation.”

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