"Hear" as "understand"

[Tom Givon]

Maybe it would be in order to insert a philosophical footnote?

It is heartening to see how all those languages we know and love--and 
thus their speakers--agree that perception (seeing, hearing) leads to 
cognition (understanding, knowing). In this regard, humans appear to be 
rather orthodox Aristotelian empiricists. In the first paragraph of his 
"De Interpretatione" ("On Understanding"), Aristotle, who borrowed the 
passage from Epicure, launches philosophical empiricism with the 
observations that knowledge/ understanding is a true (iconic) derivative 
of perception. (In the same paragraph he also launches linguistic 
structuralism, observing that the connection between thoughts and 
linguistic symbols is arbitrary. But that's another matter...). But the 
inference from perception to cognition is much older. Indeed, it is 
pre-human. There is lots of work on primates computing a conspecific's 
knowledge of a situation from that conspecific's looking at the 
situation. A lot of sneaky deception behavior in chimps is related to 
this capacity to compute knowledge from perception. The startling thing 
is that you find this also in Corbits (the crow family). Some species of 
jays can hide--and remember the exact location of--thousands of seeds. 
If a jay observes that another jay is watching him/her while s/he is 
stashing a seed, s/he would later go back and change the hiding place of 
the seed. Whether consciously or not, then, the jay (and the chimp) is 
computing knowledge from perception.

Cheer up, guys, you're not alone.  TG

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Nino Amiridze wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
>
> I was wondering whether you could help me in finding languages that
> use the verb 'hear' for 'understand', just like English uses 'see' for
> the same purpose (I see (=I understand)).
>
> I would be grateful if you could give data and/or references, if there
> are investigations on the use of the 'see' vs. 'hear' verbs in
> figurative language.
>
> Thank you very much.
>
> Best regards,
> Nino Amiridze
> http://www.hum.uu.nl/medewerkers/n.amiridze/
>