ABSTRACT
Before examining the physiomorphic character of psychological language in more depth, it is necessary to consider further the nature of language itself. While the account which follows has its roots (some of them anyway) in those provided by Wittgenstein, Austin, and other linguistic philosophers, it attempts to apply their insights to psychological issues from a slightly different angle to that adopted in previous efforts of this kind. Initially, then, the emergence of syntactic, lexical, language brings in its train a situation where there exists a linguistically construed universe in which all phenomena have continually to be assigned the roles of speaker, utterance, or referent. It is a fluid situation in which only the self-assigned role of speaker/listener is constant, a constancy ensured only insofar as linguistic contact with other speaker/listeners, i.e. the community, can be maintained (though see ‘Voices’, below).
