Propositions : an essay on linguistic content (original) (raw)

Linguistics and philosophy (2016 pre-print)

Final version available in: K. Allan (ed.). Routledge Handbook of Linguistics, London: Routledge, pp. 516-531, 2016

Philosophy and the study of language are intimately connected, to the extent that it is impossible to say from which point in human intellectual history the study of meaning in natural language can be regarded as an independent enterprise. Natural language syntax, semantics and pragmatics are now considered to be sub-disciplines of theoretical linguistics, surrounded by the acolytes in the domains of language acquisition, language disorders, language processing (psycholinguistics and neuroscience of language), all using empirical, including experimental, methods in addition to rationalistic inquiry. However, philosophical problems associated with the structure of language as well as with meaning in language and in discourse still remain, and arguably will always remain, the backbone of syntax and semantics, and a trigger for progress in theorizing. It is impossible to summarise the impressively rich tradition of thinking about language in the history of philosophy. One would have to start with Presocratics in the 6 th and 7 th centuries BCE in Ancient Greece (see e.g. Curd 2012) and cover two and a half millennia of intensive questioning and argumentation over the relations between language, reality, truth, and the human mind. Or, one could try to delve into the history before the Greeks, then move through the landmarks of Plato, Aristotle, and the later Stoics into the current era (see e.g. . In this brief introduction we shall focus on much later debates, starting from the period when discussions about topics that are currently in the focus of debates originated, that is late 19 th century, marked by Frege's insights into an ideal language for describing knowledge and the origin of modern logic that is now used as a metalanguage for theorizing about meaning in natural human languages. From formal approaches within analytical philosophy I shall move to the 'language-as-use' paradigm of the ordinarylanguage philosophy, followed by the more recent debates on meaning as it is to be understood for the purpose of formal representation and linguistic theory. In the process, I shall address some of the core areas that philosophers of language have been drawn to such as reference and referring or propositional attitude reports. Next, I move to the topic of the role of intentions and inferences, and finish with a brief attempt to place 'linguistics and philosophy' on the map of language sciences and research on language in the 21 st century.

Twenty-five years of linguistics and philosophy

Linguistics and philosophy, 2002

A BibTeX-formatted bibliography of the first twenty-five years of Linguistics and Philosophy, with topic keywords, is available at www. eecs. umich. edu/∼ rthomaso/l-and-p/. Rather than attempting an overview of what has been accomplished in the pages of this journal, or ...

Editors' introduction: some concepts and issues in linguistic theory

On Nature and Language, 2002

Editors' introduction: some concepts and issues in linguistic theory 1 The study of language in a biological setting Dominant linguistics paradigms in the first half of the twentieth century had centered their attention on Saussurean "Langue," a social object of which individual speakers have only a partial mastery. Ever since the 1950s, generative grammar shifted the focus of linguistic research onto the systems of linguistic knowledge possessed by individual speakers, and onto the "Language Faculty," the species-specific capacity to master and use a natural language (Chomsky 1959). In this perspective, language is a natural object, a component of the human mind, physically represented in the brain and part of the biological endowment of the species. Within such guidelines, linguistics is part of individual psychology and of the cognitive sciences; its ultimate aim is to characterize a central component of human nature, defined in a biological setting. The idea of focusing on the Language Faculty was not new; it had its roots in the classical rationalist perspective of studying language as a "mirror of the mind," as a domain offering a privileged access to the study of human cognition. In order to stress such roots, Chomsky

Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics Introduction

Cognitive linguistics began as an approach to the study of language, but it now has implications and applications far beyond language in any traditional sense of the word. It has its origins in the 1980s as a conscious reaction to Chomskyan linguistics, with its emphasis on formalistic syntactic analysis and its underlying assumption that language is independent from other forms of cognition. Increasingly, evidence was beginning to show that language is learned and processed much in the same way as other types of information about the world, and that the same cognitive processes are involved in language as are involved in other forms of thinking. For example, in our everyday lives, we look at things from different angles, we get up close to them or further away and see them from different vantage points and with different levels of granularity; we assess the relative features of our environment and decide which are important and need to be attended to and which are less important and need to be backgrounded; we lump information together, perceive and create patterns in our environment, and look for these patterns in new environments when we encounter them. As we will see in this volume, all of these processes are at work in language too.

Reassessing the Project of Linguistics

J. Zlatev, M. Andrén, M. J. Falck, and C. Lundmark (eds.), Studies in Language and Cognition, 2009

It is argued that the foundational assumptions of orthodox linguistics may not be accepted as tenable since they are rooted in Cartesian dualism, which precludes a holistic understanding of cognition as a biological phenomenon. As a result, much of what orthodox linguistic thought holds as truths about language (and cognition) is nothing but myths that have never been (and may not be) empirically validated. A general ideological shift in contemporary cognitive science is identified, which consists in taking a holistic (bio-socio-cultural) stance toward language and cognition. The epistemological basis for this shift is provided by autopoiesis as the theory of the living, which opens new perspectives in the study of human cognitive powers.