To reconcile his Rational method with his Catholic faith, Rene Decartes (who coined the rationalist phrase, "I think therefore I am") proposed two fundamintal substances: the physical and the spiritual.
This can be seen in the dyadic Semiologie of Ferdinand de Saussure, where the fundamental unit of meaning, the Sign, is described as a physical Signifier (a sound packet or written word), and mental Signified object. So the image of a horse is invoked by the use of the word "horse".
This, in turn has influenced 20th century thought through Saussure's Strucuralism. This can be seen, for example, in the design of computer in memory:
- a name, a physical location in memory, is the address of
- a byte of data, an ephemeral value, which relates to some external concept.
OLP is a reaction to Dualism. It is generally considered to have been initiated by Gilbert Ryle, in his book The Concpet of Mind, which terms Dualism as the Ghost in the Machine. However, this can be also be seen in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in the book the Meaning of Meaning of C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. This in turn draws on the triadic sign of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Peircean Semiotics is often referred to as Monist as it is grounded in some medium. For linguists, the grounded medium is the utterance.
OLP was developed by Austin and Grice in the 1955 and 1957 William James Lectures at Harvard. Austin developed a triadic model, of
- locution - what is uttered;
- illocution - what is meant;
- perlocution - the felicitous outcome by what is said.
Grice defined meaning as what is implied by what is said. This is dvided into conventional and conversational implicature.
Enguage shows speech, itself, to be Turing Complete (i.e. a computational device). Think of Turing’s Universal Machine but one which works on large (Gödel?) numbers rather than Turing’s High German characters onto binary digits.
Enguage maps an utterance onto the utterances this implies. Each of these thoughts is silently utteranced to provide a functional approach to language.
The felicity of what is said is maintained, encoded into each reply, to providing conditional processing of subsequent thoughts. This functional approach is recursive, allowing loops to be formed and speech to be Turing Complete.