I remember!
A few posts ago, I talked about Descartes' dream argument, and how I didn't agree with it because it led to a problem:
...we could say that we are in a dream, which then presupposes the idea of a reality outside this dream...but how do we know that that reality is also not a dream, and so on, ad infinitum? I forget what it's called, but in essence it's the same paradox that exists when we try and think about the beginning of time and existence. You can say that God made the world, but who made God, and what made that God, etc.? At some point, "something had to come from nothing" (to paraphrase Jostein Gaarder) - unless you believe that God had "always existed", which seems to me to be just as absurd....
I now remember that it is called "infinite regress". That is all.
Well, that's not all. Speaking of infinite regress, yesterday while teaching one of my rather unprecocious little students, I began to appreciate how much we take our faculties of reading, expression and understanding for granted. The entire concept of phonics - why "A-B" makes the "ab" sound and "A-D" makes the "ad" sound, and by the way "b" and "d" are not the same letters, Daveena! - is appallingly difficult to convey to a round-eyed 7-year-old child who has never read a word in her life. Be grateful you are literate.
But anyway, I digressed. My point was that, some people say that when you understand a language, you translate it into a language you already know. So for example, if you take a course in Mandarin, and you understand the phrase "hen hao!", you translate it into English: "Very good!" BUT, if this principle is correct, then how do young children learn and understand their native language? Possibly, some philosophers contend, the toddlers translate the sentences they hear into an innate mental language, which the philosophers call "mentalese". But this isn't an explanation either - how do the children understand "mentalese"? According to the principle, they must translate that into some other, deeper language they already know. Hence: infinite regress - and therefore, it is wrong...?
It's fascinating. How do we learn language, anyway?