Talbot J. Taylor | College of William and Mary (original) (raw)
Papers by Talbot J. Taylor
Language & Communication, 2023
Everyday metalinguistic ascriptions ("My name is Oliver", "Swahili ng'ombe means cow", "She lied ... more Everyday metalinguistic ascriptions ("My name is Oliver", "Swahili ng'ombe means cow", "She lied about you") seemingly attribute properties to phenomena of a distinctively linguistic ontology. However, non-representational approaches to cognition, such as ecological psychology, cannot accommodate this linguistic ontology without contravening their nonrepresentational principles. An alternative might be to construe metalinguistic ascriptions as 'folk' fictions which are, strictly speaking, false. Yet this would render unintelligible the practical role that metalinguistic ascription occupies in everyday discourse. We suggest another alternative. By analogy to mindshaping approaches in folk-psychological debates, we propose a nonrepresentational account of metalinguistic ascription as a form of language-shaping. Metalinguistic ascriptions shape language behavior over temporal and social scales by prospectively shaping discursive niches.
Language Sciences, 2021
In everyday speech, language is often the topic of talk. In this paper we aim to draw attention t... more In everyday speech, language is often the topic of talk. In this paper we aim to draw attention to the role of such metalinguistic activity in early language development. We approach this topic through an ecological lens. To achieve this goal, we examine observational data from a single child participating in conversational episodes concerning linguistic phenomenadepisodes which we term "metalinguistic exchanges"dat 2 and 3 years old. We draw attention to how this child, at 2 years old, participates in naturallyoccurring metalinguistic exchanges without yet having a productive command of metalinguistic vocabulary. The sequential organization of the metalinguistic exchanges enables her caregivers to scaffold her participation. We then compare the child's participation in metalinguistic exchanges recorded at 2 years old with a second set of exchanges recorded when she turned 3. This comparison shows that the child's participation in metalinguistic exchanges becomes increasingly skillful and agentive as she learns to initiate metalinguistic exchanges herself. We end the paper with recommendations for future research in an ecological approach to language development. We suggest that, in order to investigate the role of metalinguistic activity in language development, it is crucial to look at children's increasingly skillful and agentive participation in naturally-occurring metalinguistic exchanges.
For the past two millennia, the explananda of language theory have been inherited from the Wester... more For the past two millennia, the explananda of language theory have been inherited from the Western linguistic tradition. The legacy is what might be called “the Western linguistic imaginary”: an indeterminate but deeply mesmerizing inventory of entities, properties, and powers of language commonly attributed to language and language-users and which therefore seem to stand in need of explanation. In recent years, naturalistic research programs in the cognitive sciences have provided illuminating explanations of basic (“lower-order”) cognitive phenomena. The challenge today for the science of language is whether, in transforming itself along the lines of epistemological naturalism, it can provide similarly illuminating explanations of any of its traditional explananda. In addressing this challenge, greater attention needs to be given to the source of such explananda in the everyday, culturally-diverse practices of folk metalinguistics.
In his influential critiques of the theoretical foundations of the language sciences, Nigel Love ... more In his influential critiques of the theoretical foundations of the language sciences, Nigel Love claims that modern linguistics is based on “a cultural metafiction” and that it must “emancipate itself from what is no more than a profoundly important but nonetheless culturally parochial way of construing linguistic phenomena.” This paper reviews Love’s account of the historical sources and modern consequences of this cultural metafiction and asks why it is so frustratingly difficult to emancipate the language sciences from its epistemological presuppositions. In addressing this question, the paper explores the accountability of expert metalinguistic discourse in the language sciences to the normative rhetoric of commonplace metalinguistic practices—or, in Wittgenstein’s distinctive use of the term, to the ‘grammar’ of those practices. This normative accountability, it is argued, is an ineliminable component of the cultural-discursive ecology within which expert metadiscourse in the language sciences must live and make any sense that it is able to make.
Language Sciences, 2000
The reflexive (metalinguistic) properties of language are typically represented as supplemental a... more The reflexive (metalinguistic) properties of language are typically represented as supplemental and inessential. Language, so the story goes, could get along perfectly well without them. The characteristics of language are independent of reflexive discourse — independent of how in metadiscourse we talk about language and its characteristics. This paper challenges this web of received opinion by asking: What might ‘first-order’ language be like if there were no way to talk, write, or sign about it — that is, if there were no ‘second order’ metalinguistic practices? By considering the consequences for writing, translation, pragmatics, semantics, and language acquisition and evolution, the conclusion arrived at is that without ‘second-order’, reflexive properties, ‘first order’ language itself could not exist. Language is essentially reflexive.
Rethinking Linguistics (H.Davis and T.J. Taylor, eds.), 2003
One way of thinking about the study of language acquisition is to see it as concerned with questi... more One way of thinking about the study of language acquisition is to see it as concerned with questions that are divisible into two major kinds. On the one hand, there are questions concerning what the child acquires. And then, there are questions about how the child acquires it. We will refer to these two types of question about language development as the WHAT question and the HOW question. Given this way of dividing the territory, any rethinking of the topic of language acquisition should begin with the WHAT question, because it lays the groundwork for the HOW question and, so, for the ways that we might approach the latter. At the same time, we should resist the commonsense view that the WHAT question is really very simple and that it is the HOW question that poses all the difficulties. Q: "What does the child learn?" A: "Why, the language of her community, of course." Q: "How does she learn this language?" A: "Well, different theorists have different ideas about that.....". However, on reflection, we can see that there is in fact a wide variety of ways that the WHAT question might be answered. What does the child learn? Well, she learns English, or Swahili, or Pitjantjatjara, or Mohawk, etc. Or, another answer might be: She learns the phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon of the English language. (For the purposes of this general, meta-methodological discussion, we will make all our references to the acquisition of English, although with the presupposition that the major points in the discussion could be addressed to the acquisition of any language.) Or, she acquires the ability to speak and understand English. Or, she learns how to make statements and commands, to ask questions, to make requests, to express her desires, etc., in English. Or, she learns what English words and grammatical constructions mean and how to use them with those meanings. Or, she learns the recursive processes of English sentence formation which enable her to produce and understand new sentences. Or, she learns to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical combinations of English words. Or, she learns which positions to set the parameters of Universal Grammar to conform with the computational system of English. And so on.
The Language Myth in Western Culture (R. Harris, ed.), 2002
Am I conscious? Do you believe that you are reading this sentence? Do you intend to read the whol... more Am I conscious? Do you believe that you are reading this sentence? Do you intend to read the whole article? Did you understand what I just said? Do such questions make any sense? Some philosophers of mind and language claim that such commonsense questions are nonsensical, have no determinate meaning, or have only the meanings of myths and primitive superstitions. They are the product of the folk psychology and folk linguistics that have long dominated Western thinking; and, if the sciences of mind and of language are ever to progress, they need to be eliminated not only from scientific theories but also from everyday talk. This paper explains the opposition between eliminativists and anti-eliminativists in the philosophy of mind and then turns to two further questions. First, what is the connection between the Language Myth (Harris 1981) and the arguments for and against eliminativism in the philosophy of mind? Second, because it is easy to see the overlap between the concepts of so-called 'folk psychology' and 'folk linguistics', we can ask the following question: What should be the integrational linguist's position on folk psychology and folk linguistics? Specifically, should all, some, or none of the concepts in these reflexive forms of discourse be retained in the integrational study of language and communication? Should one of the integrationist's goals be to show what meaning, understanding, reference, belief, etc., really are, that is, properly seen within an integrationist approach that has freed itself from the influence of the Language Myth and its segregational underpinnings? Or, should the goal be to replace these conceptual and terminological legacies of the Language Myth with terms and concepts that (a) are motivated directly by the integrational approach and (b) do not 'carry with them' the conceptual baggage of the Language Myth? Should the integrational linguist aim to explain what it is to mean, to understand, to refer, to be true, to be a sign, etc? Or should the integrationist eschew such an explanatory goal, on the grounds that those metalinguistic terms are too infected by the Language Myth?
In Penser l’histoire des savoirs linguistiques. Études épistémologiques, historiques et linguistiques en hommage à Sylvain Auroux, sous la direction de Sylvie Archaimbault, Jean-Marie Fournier et Valérie Raby, 2014
chapter 6 of Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II: The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2001)
People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them from ... more People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them from these presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in. One must so to speak regroup their entire language. (Wittgenstein 1993: 185) We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential, in [philosophical] investigation, resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, proof, truth, experience, and so on. This order is a super-order between-so to speak-super-concepts. Whereas, of course, if the words "language", "experience", "word", have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words "table", "lamp", "door". (...)
Language Sciences, 1997
Questions about the origin of language hold an important position in the self-images of many, pos... more Questions about the origin of language hold an important position in the self-images of many, possibly all, of the world's known cultures. It seems, after all, a natural question to ask, from within a culture, about the historical foundations of that culture's practices. Are not some of the first reflective questions that children ask of the kind: Why do we do this? And is it not a natural response to such questions to provide an account of how the practice in question began? Why do questions about the origin of language continue to fascinate us? Perhaps this is because an account of the origin of language provides a narrative way of satisfying a people's feeling that they are special; it is a vivid and comprehensible way of explaining why, from their intra-cultural perspective, they are different, whether in contradistinction to other groups of people or to other animal species. Animal behaviorists have said that, from the perspective of the animal in the wild, the fundamental phenomenological divide is between those who want to eat me and those whom I want to eat. However, from the internal perspective of a human culture, the most important phenomenological division is between those who make sense and those who do not; or to put it in another, slightly more enlightened way, between those who make sense the way we do and those who do not. In the first case, we humans as a species are on one side of the divide and all nonhuman animals are on the other. Whereas in the second case, the divide is between those within our culture and those 'others' who, because what they say makes no sense, the ancient Greeks simply called 'barbarians'. A culture's self-image is formed as a reflexive by-product of the daily tasks of making sense of its environment, of its members' biological being, of its group activities and interactions, and of those very methods it uses, primarily verbal methods, in order to make that sense. Accordingly, those who do not make sense as we, in our culture, do-that is, members of other cultures and other species-will typically not be perceived by us merely as different versions of the same basic kind of thing that we are, but rather as categorically different: as different kinds of things entirely. Our culture's account of the origin of language is a readily grasped way of making sense of why we make sense, and they don't. An origins myth is a compelling way of explaining to ourselves, and thereby justifying to ourselves, our ways of making sense. It might, in this respect, be likened to a reflection in a mirror of that mirror's own reflective properties. Today, however, the origin of language has become the focus of scientific research. Indeed, it has become a pivotal topic in the modern sciences of man, drawing attention from a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive psychology, anthropology, evolutionary science,
It is ironic that, before the advent of the institutionalized practice we call "modern linguistic... more It is ironic that, before the advent of the institutionalized practice we call "modern linguistics", the notion of language as a normative activity was central to discourse on language. But the complex ideological process of defining modern linguistics as the scientific study of language involved the explicit exclusion of issues of linguistic normativity. To determine how best to redefine linguistics we must first examine how it came to be given its current definition. Following this, the paper discusses the implications of redefining linguistics so that, once again, the normativity of language holds a central position.
Language Sciences, 2013
This paper addresses the normative and reflexive foundations of language socialization. In severa... more This paper addresses the normative and reflexive foundations of language socialization. In several publications Meredith Williams makes a strong case for placing Wittgenstein’s discussions of the normative character of social learning at the heart of an account of the child’s development of language and mind. This paper examines Williams’ argument, concluding that it needs to be complemented by an account of the child’s scaffolded socialization into the community’s metadiscursive practices. It is by means of the child’s increasing metadiscursive competence that the child comes to measure the phenomena and experiences of language as ‘we’ do in ‘our’ community’s linguistic-cultural world.
Does the child’s emerging understanding of other minds interact with his/her growing understandin... more Does the child’s emerging understanding of other minds interact with his/her growing understanding of language? If so, in what ways? This paper focuses on the recent proposals of Daniel Hutto and colleagues regarding the role played by the child’s developing skills in narrative discourse in his/her acquisition of folk-psychological understanding. What must the child understand about the properties and powers of language in order to become a competent participant in narrative exchanges and so, according to the proponents of Hutto’s narrative-practice approach, acquire an understanding of other people’s thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions, and reasons for acting?
Highlights
► Children acquire folk psychological understanding by means of narrative practices. ► Children must develop metadiscursive skills to participate in narrative practices. ► Metadiscursive Practice Hypothesis complements Hutto’s Narrative Practice Hypothesis.
Keywords: Language development; Folk psychology; Metadiscourse; The Narrative Practice Hypothesis; Daniel Hutto; Child language
Article Outline
1. Language and folk-psychological understanding
2. The Narrative Practice Hypothesis
3. Metadiscursive understanding
4. Metadiscursive nativism
5. False-belief and the folk-psychological dilemma
6. The Metadiscursive Practice Hypothesis
7. Understanding language and understanding others
Acknowledgements
References
How we learn, as initiates into a practice, is constitutive of what we learn. (Williams, 2010, p. 21)
How does the developing child bridge the ontological gap from the empirical, measurable world of ... more How does the developing child bridge the ontological gap from the empirical, measurable world of behavioral patterns, anatomical structures, and neurological processes to the world of the linguistic phenomena referred to by the expressions of commonsense metalinguistic discourse: words, meanings, names, truth, languages, understanding, and so on? Rejecting the positions both of sceptical eliminativism and of linguistic immanence, this paper argues that the linguistic identity of language emerges only gradually, by means of the child’s increasingly competent participation in the discursive processes of reflexive enculturation.
Published: January 2010 Language Sciences 32(1): 14-27
Linguistics and Philosophy: The Controversial Interface, 1993
This chapter examines whether a sense can be made of a hypothetical account of what might be call... more This chapter examines whether a sense can be made of a hypothetical account of what might be called ‘the rhetorical source’ of language theory. In order to break free from the intellectual constraints of the Western linguistic tradition, it will not be enough simply to chart the mythological features of that tradition, to uncover its logical and conceptual presuppositions, to chronicle its historical development, and to strive to solve its problems and correct its mistakes once and for all. If language theory is to avoid the mythological legacy of that tradition, it must address its rhetorical source.
Language & Communication, 1994
This paper is an exercise in what might be called 'the comparative rhetoric of inquiry'. The subj... more This paper is an exercise in what might be called 'the comparative rhetoric of inquiry'. The subjects of this exercise are two different, although closely related, fields of inquiry: the study of human communication and the study of nonhuman primate communication.
The mind as a scientific object: …, 2005
20 The Significance of Ape Language Research Stuart G. Shanker and Talbot J. Taylor No suppositio... more 20 The Significance of Ape Language Research Stuart G. Shanker and Talbot J. Taylor No supposition seems to me more natural than that certain kinds of plants multiply by seed, so that a seed always produces a plant of the same kind as that from which it was produced, but nothing in the ...
Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 1999
Page 81. APE LINGUISTICS (OR: IS KANZI A CARTESIAN?) TALBOT J. TAYLOR & STUART SHANKER Colleg... more Page 81. APE LINGUISTICS (OR: IS KANZI A CARTESIAN?) TALBOT J. TAYLOR & STUART SHANKER College of William and Mary & York University When the classical philosophers argued that'Man is by nature a political ...
Language & Communication, 2023
Everyday metalinguistic ascriptions ("My name is Oliver", "Swahili ng'ombe means cow", "She lied ... more Everyday metalinguistic ascriptions ("My name is Oliver", "Swahili ng'ombe means cow", "She lied about you") seemingly attribute properties to phenomena of a distinctively linguistic ontology. However, non-representational approaches to cognition, such as ecological psychology, cannot accommodate this linguistic ontology without contravening their nonrepresentational principles. An alternative might be to construe metalinguistic ascriptions as 'folk' fictions which are, strictly speaking, false. Yet this would render unintelligible the practical role that metalinguistic ascription occupies in everyday discourse. We suggest another alternative. By analogy to mindshaping approaches in folk-psychological debates, we propose a nonrepresentational account of metalinguistic ascription as a form of language-shaping. Metalinguistic ascriptions shape language behavior over temporal and social scales by prospectively shaping discursive niches.
Language Sciences, 2021
In everyday speech, language is often the topic of talk. In this paper we aim to draw attention t... more In everyday speech, language is often the topic of talk. In this paper we aim to draw attention to the role of such metalinguistic activity in early language development. We approach this topic through an ecological lens. To achieve this goal, we examine observational data from a single child participating in conversational episodes concerning linguistic phenomenadepisodes which we term "metalinguistic exchanges"dat 2 and 3 years old. We draw attention to how this child, at 2 years old, participates in naturallyoccurring metalinguistic exchanges without yet having a productive command of metalinguistic vocabulary. The sequential organization of the metalinguistic exchanges enables her caregivers to scaffold her participation. We then compare the child's participation in metalinguistic exchanges recorded at 2 years old with a second set of exchanges recorded when she turned 3. This comparison shows that the child's participation in metalinguistic exchanges becomes increasingly skillful and agentive as she learns to initiate metalinguistic exchanges herself. We end the paper with recommendations for future research in an ecological approach to language development. We suggest that, in order to investigate the role of metalinguistic activity in language development, it is crucial to look at children's increasingly skillful and agentive participation in naturally-occurring metalinguistic exchanges.
For the past two millennia, the explananda of language theory have been inherited from the Wester... more For the past two millennia, the explananda of language theory have been inherited from the Western linguistic tradition. The legacy is what might be called “the Western linguistic imaginary”: an indeterminate but deeply mesmerizing inventory of entities, properties, and powers of language commonly attributed to language and language-users and which therefore seem to stand in need of explanation. In recent years, naturalistic research programs in the cognitive sciences have provided illuminating explanations of basic (“lower-order”) cognitive phenomena. The challenge today for the science of language is whether, in transforming itself along the lines of epistemological naturalism, it can provide similarly illuminating explanations of any of its traditional explananda. In addressing this challenge, greater attention needs to be given to the source of such explananda in the everyday, culturally-diverse practices of folk metalinguistics.
In his influential critiques of the theoretical foundations of the language sciences, Nigel Love ... more In his influential critiques of the theoretical foundations of the language sciences, Nigel Love claims that modern linguistics is based on “a cultural metafiction” and that it must “emancipate itself from what is no more than a profoundly important but nonetheless culturally parochial way of construing linguistic phenomena.” This paper reviews Love’s account of the historical sources and modern consequences of this cultural metafiction and asks why it is so frustratingly difficult to emancipate the language sciences from its epistemological presuppositions. In addressing this question, the paper explores the accountability of expert metalinguistic discourse in the language sciences to the normative rhetoric of commonplace metalinguistic practices—or, in Wittgenstein’s distinctive use of the term, to the ‘grammar’ of those practices. This normative accountability, it is argued, is an ineliminable component of the cultural-discursive ecology within which expert metadiscourse in the language sciences must live and make any sense that it is able to make.
Language Sciences, 2000
The reflexive (metalinguistic) properties of language are typically represented as supplemental a... more The reflexive (metalinguistic) properties of language are typically represented as supplemental and inessential. Language, so the story goes, could get along perfectly well without them. The characteristics of language are independent of reflexive discourse — independent of how in metadiscourse we talk about language and its characteristics. This paper challenges this web of received opinion by asking: What might ‘first-order’ language be like if there were no way to talk, write, or sign about it — that is, if there were no ‘second order’ metalinguistic practices? By considering the consequences for writing, translation, pragmatics, semantics, and language acquisition and evolution, the conclusion arrived at is that without ‘second-order’, reflexive properties, ‘first order’ language itself could not exist. Language is essentially reflexive.
Rethinking Linguistics (H.Davis and T.J. Taylor, eds.), 2003
One way of thinking about the study of language acquisition is to see it as concerned with questi... more One way of thinking about the study of language acquisition is to see it as concerned with questions that are divisible into two major kinds. On the one hand, there are questions concerning what the child acquires. And then, there are questions about how the child acquires it. We will refer to these two types of question about language development as the WHAT question and the HOW question. Given this way of dividing the territory, any rethinking of the topic of language acquisition should begin with the WHAT question, because it lays the groundwork for the HOW question and, so, for the ways that we might approach the latter. At the same time, we should resist the commonsense view that the WHAT question is really very simple and that it is the HOW question that poses all the difficulties. Q: "What does the child learn?" A: "Why, the language of her community, of course." Q: "How does she learn this language?" A: "Well, different theorists have different ideas about that.....". However, on reflection, we can see that there is in fact a wide variety of ways that the WHAT question might be answered. What does the child learn? Well, she learns English, or Swahili, or Pitjantjatjara, or Mohawk, etc. Or, another answer might be: She learns the phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon of the English language. (For the purposes of this general, meta-methodological discussion, we will make all our references to the acquisition of English, although with the presupposition that the major points in the discussion could be addressed to the acquisition of any language.) Or, she acquires the ability to speak and understand English. Or, she learns how to make statements and commands, to ask questions, to make requests, to express her desires, etc., in English. Or, she learns what English words and grammatical constructions mean and how to use them with those meanings. Or, she learns the recursive processes of English sentence formation which enable her to produce and understand new sentences. Or, she learns to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical combinations of English words. Or, she learns which positions to set the parameters of Universal Grammar to conform with the computational system of English. And so on.
The Language Myth in Western Culture (R. Harris, ed.), 2002
Am I conscious? Do you believe that you are reading this sentence? Do you intend to read the whol... more Am I conscious? Do you believe that you are reading this sentence? Do you intend to read the whole article? Did you understand what I just said? Do such questions make any sense? Some philosophers of mind and language claim that such commonsense questions are nonsensical, have no determinate meaning, or have only the meanings of myths and primitive superstitions. They are the product of the folk psychology and folk linguistics that have long dominated Western thinking; and, if the sciences of mind and of language are ever to progress, they need to be eliminated not only from scientific theories but also from everyday talk. This paper explains the opposition between eliminativists and anti-eliminativists in the philosophy of mind and then turns to two further questions. First, what is the connection between the Language Myth (Harris 1981) and the arguments for and against eliminativism in the philosophy of mind? Second, because it is easy to see the overlap between the concepts of so-called 'folk psychology' and 'folk linguistics', we can ask the following question: What should be the integrational linguist's position on folk psychology and folk linguistics? Specifically, should all, some, or none of the concepts in these reflexive forms of discourse be retained in the integrational study of language and communication? Should one of the integrationist's goals be to show what meaning, understanding, reference, belief, etc., really are, that is, properly seen within an integrationist approach that has freed itself from the influence of the Language Myth and its segregational underpinnings? Or, should the goal be to replace these conceptual and terminological legacies of the Language Myth with terms and concepts that (a) are motivated directly by the integrational approach and (b) do not 'carry with them' the conceptual baggage of the Language Myth? Should the integrational linguist aim to explain what it is to mean, to understand, to refer, to be true, to be a sign, etc? Or should the integrationist eschew such an explanatory goal, on the grounds that those metalinguistic terms are too infected by the Language Myth?
In Penser l’histoire des savoirs linguistiques. Études épistémologiques, historiques et linguistiques en hommage à Sylvain Auroux, sous la direction de Sylvie Archaimbault, Jean-Marie Fournier et Valérie Raby, 2014
chapter 6 of Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II: The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2001)
People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them from ... more People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them from these presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in. One must so to speak regroup their entire language. (Wittgenstein 1993: 185) We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential, in [philosophical] investigation, resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, proof, truth, experience, and so on. This order is a super-order between-so to speak-super-concepts. Whereas, of course, if the words "language", "experience", "word", have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words "table", "lamp", "door". (...)
Language Sciences, 1997
Questions about the origin of language hold an important position in the self-images of many, pos... more Questions about the origin of language hold an important position in the self-images of many, possibly all, of the world's known cultures. It seems, after all, a natural question to ask, from within a culture, about the historical foundations of that culture's practices. Are not some of the first reflective questions that children ask of the kind: Why do we do this? And is it not a natural response to such questions to provide an account of how the practice in question began? Why do questions about the origin of language continue to fascinate us? Perhaps this is because an account of the origin of language provides a narrative way of satisfying a people's feeling that they are special; it is a vivid and comprehensible way of explaining why, from their intra-cultural perspective, they are different, whether in contradistinction to other groups of people or to other animal species. Animal behaviorists have said that, from the perspective of the animal in the wild, the fundamental phenomenological divide is between those who want to eat me and those whom I want to eat. However, from the internal perspective of a human culture, the most important phenomenological division is between those who make sense and those who do not; or to put it in another, slightly more enlightened way, between those who make sense the way we do and those who do not. In the first case, we humans as a species are on one side of the divide and all nonhuman animals are on the other. Whereas in the second case, the divide is between those within our culture and those 'others' who, because what they say makes no sense, the ancient Greeks simply called 'barbarians'. A culture's self-image is formed as a reflexive by-product of the daily tasks of making sense of its environment, of its members' biological being, of its group activities and interactions, and of those very methods it uses, primarily verbal methods, in order to make that sense. Accordingly, those who do not make sense as we, in our culture, do-that is, members of other cultures and other species-will typically not be perceived by us merely as different versions of the same basic kind of thing that we are, but rather as categorically different: as different kinds of things entirely. Our culture's account of the origin of language is a readily grasped way of making sense of why we make sense, and they don't. An origins myth is a compelling way of explaining to ourselves, and thereby justifying to ourselves, our ways of making sense. It might, in this respect, be likened to a reflection in a mirror of that mirror's own reflective properties. Today, however, the origin of language has become the focus of scientific research. Indeed, it has become a pivotal topic in the modern sciences of man, drawing attention from a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive psychology, anthropology, evolutionary science,
It is ironic that, before the advent of the institutionalized practice we call "modern linguistic... more It is ironic that, before the advent of the institutionalized practice we call "modern linguistics", the notion of language as a normative activity was central to discourse on language. But the complex ideological process of defining modern linguistics as the scientific study of language involved the explicit exclusion of issues of linguistic normativity. To determine how best to redefine linguistics we must first examine how it came to be given its current definition. Following this, the paper discusses the implications of redefining linguistics so that, once again, the normativity of language holds a central position.
Language Sciences, 2013
This paper addresses the normative and reflexive foundations of language socialization. In severa... more This paper addresses the normative and reflexive foundations of language socialization. In several publications Meredith Williams makes a strong case for placing Wittgenstein’s discussions of the normative character of social learning at the heart of an account of the child’s development of language and mind. This paper examines Williams’ argument, concluding that it needs to be complemented by an account of the child’s scaffolded socialization into the community’s metadiscursive practices. It is by means of the child’s increasing metadiscursive competence that the child comes to measure the phenomena and experiences of language as ‘we’ do in ‘our’ community’s linguistic-cultural world.
Does the child’s emerging understanding of other minds interact with his/her growing understandin... more Does the child’s emerging understanding of other minds interact with his/her growing understanding of language? If so, in what ways? This paper focuses on the recent proposals of Daniel Hutto and colleagues regarding the role played by the child’s developing skills in narrative discourse in his/her acquisition of folk-psychological understanding. What must the child understand about the properties and powers of language in order to become a competent participant in narrative exchanges and so, according to the proponents of Hutto’s narrative-practice approach, acquire an understanding of other people’s thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions, and reasons for acting?
Highlights
► Children acquire folk psychological understanding by means of narrative practices. ► Children must develop metadiscursive skills to participate in narrative practices. ► Metadiscursive Practice Hypothesis complements Hutto’s Narrative Practice Hypothesis.
Keywords: Language development; Folk psychology; Metadiscourse; The Narrative Practice Hypothesis; Daniel Hutto; Child language
Article Outline
1. Language and folk-psychological understanding
2. The Narrative Practice Hypothesis
3. Metadiscursive understanding
4. Metadiscursive nativism
5. False-belief and the folk-psychological dilemma
6. The Metadiscursive Practice Hypothesis
7. Understanding language and understanding others
Acknowledgements
References
How we learn, as initiates into a practice, is constitutive of what we learn. (Williams, 2010, p. 21)
How does the developing child bridge the ontological gap from the empirical, measurable world of ... more How does the developing child bridge the ontological gap from the empirical, measurable world of behavioral patterns, anatomical structures, and neurological processes to the world of the linguistic phenomena referred to by the expressions of commonsense metalinguistic discourse: words, meanings, names, truth, languages, understanding, and so on? Rejecting the positions both of sceptical eliminativism and of linguistic immanence, this paper argues that the linguistic identity of language emerges only gradually, by means of the child’s increasingly competent participation in the discursive processes of reflexive enculturation.
Published: January 2010 Language Sciences 32(1): 14-27
Linguistics and Philosophy: The Controversial Interface, 1993
This chapter examines whether a sense can be made of a hypothetical account of what might be call... more This chapter examines whether a sense can be made of a hypothetical account of what might be called ‘the rhetorical source’ of language theory. In order to break free from the intellectual constraints of the Western linguistic tradition, it will not be enough simply to chart the mythological features of that tradition, to uncover its logical and conceptual presuppositions, to chronicle its historical development, and to strive to solve its problems and correct its mistakes once and for all. If language theory is to avoid the mythological legacy of that tradition, it must address its rhetorical source.
Language & Communication, 1994
This paper is an exercise in what might be called 'the comparative rhetoric of inquiry'. The subj... more This paper is an exercise in what might be called 'the comparative rhetoric of inquiry'. The subjects of this exercise are two different, although closely related, fields of inquiry: the study of human communication and the study of nonhuman primate communication.
The mind as a scientific object: …, 2005
20 The Significance of Ape Language Research Stuart G. Shanker and Talbot J. Taylor No suppositio... more 20 The Significance of Ape Language Research Stuart G. Shanker and Talbot J. Taylor No supposition seems to me more natural than that certain kinds of plants multiply by seed, so that a seed always produces a plant of the same kind as that from which it was produced, but nothing in the ...
Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 1999
Page 81. APE LINGUISTICS (OR: IS KANZI A CARTESIAN?) TALBOT J. TAYLOR & STUART SHANKER Colleg... more Page 81. APE LINGUISTICS (OR: IS KANZI A CARTESIAN?) TALBOT J. TAYLOR & STUART SHANKER College of William and Mary & York University When the classical philosophers argued that'Man is by nature a political ...
The papers included in this second volume of Collected Papers lay out my argument for the distinc... more The papers included in this second volume of Collected Papers lay out my argument for the distinctively reflexive character of human language and discursive practices. The implications of this argument are considered for various fields of language research, including linguistic theory, folk psychology, metalinguistics, linguistic anthropology, language acquisition, language evolution, integrational linguistics, the philosophy of language, and the epistemology of the language sciences.
History. Pergamon, Amsterdam, Jan 1, 1997
... Stuart Shanker is the obvious source of chapter 2, as Talbot Taylor of chapter 3, and Savage-... more ... Stuart Shanker is the obvious source of chapter 2, as Talbot Taylor of chapter 3, and Savage-Rumbaugh again of chapter 4. How-ever, for each chapterwith the exception of the firstit would be exceedingly hard, even for us, to determine whose ideas, whose arguments ...
Mutual Misunderstanding, 1992
The methodological framework proposed in this chapter represents the technical practice of theori... more The methodological framework proposed in this chapter represents the technical practice of theorizing language and communication (“intellectual metadiscourse”) as derived from non-technical (or “practical”) metadiscourse: that is, from our ordinary, everyday practices of talking about and otherwise engaging with what we say and do with language. This distinction is drawn according to the difference in the rhetorical norms which practitioners of these two forms of metadiscourse impose on their performance: in other words, according to ‘grammatical’ differences between how practical and intellectual metadiscourse are themselves talked about and evaluated as contextually-embedded, reflexive practices. In subsequent chapters this methodology is applied to suggest how, by the combined effect of appeals to ‘common sense’ and of anxieties about implications of relativism and eliminativism, communicational scepticism has played a determining role in the discursive development of a number of the academic disciplines concerned with the reflexive nature of human understanding.