Linguistics
The debate on linguistic conventionalism goes back to Plato's Cratylus and the Mīmāṃsā philosophy of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa. It has been the standard position of modern linguistics since Ferdinand de Saussure's l'arbitraire du signe, but there have always been dissenting positions of phonosemantics, recently defended by Margaret Magnus and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran.
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