Language

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LANGUAGE

What is a "language"? Is it an internal component of a speaker's mind, or is it wholly dependent on our external behavior? Is it a matter of social practice, or are languages to be viewed as independently existing abstract objects? Arguments have been offered in favor of each of these conceptions.

Adherents to these different positions can agree that linguistic theories provide the most precise way of characterizing particular languages. A theory, or grammar, supplies a set of rules describing the semantic properties of the basic expressions and their permissible syntactic combinations into meaningful wholes. The disagreements that arise concern the interpretation of linguistic theories and the nature of the linguistic objects and properties they describe.

Platonists, for instance, argue that languages are purely formal, or abstract entities, whose natures are fully specified by formal theories. For the Platonist, linguistics is a branch of mathematics. In contrast, mentalists see linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology and take linguistic theories to be about the psychological states or processes of linguistically competent speakers. For others, linguistic theories can be seen as systematizing a vast range of facts about the behavior of an individual or community of speakers, with the rules describing regularities in individual or social practice.

For Platonists, such as J. Katz and S. Soames, languages with their properties of meaning and structure exist independently of speakers. A firm distinction is drawn between languages and linguistic competence: Theories of the former are not to be confused with theories of the latter. The formal properties of a language, on which its identity depends, owes nothing to its users. Speakers of those languages may be blind to some of its properties of meaning or structure, although these may be deduced from the theory. Moreover, languages with just these formal properties exist whether anyone speaks them or not. They may be defined, according to D. Lewis, as sets of expression meaning-pairs, with the set of human (or natural) languages making up a very small portion of the set of all possible languages. The task for Platonists is to explain what makes one rather than another of these abstract entities the language of a given individual or population. To explain this the Platonist must define an actual-language relation between speakers, or populations, and particular abstract objects (see Schiffer for discussion). This may depend, as Lewis thinks, on facts about the conventions that exist among a population of speakers. Or it may be based upon psychological facts about speakers' competence such as the claim that speakers have internalized a grammar that somehow generates either the set, or a subset, of the sentences described by the formal theory.

Mentalists, such as Noam Chomsky and Jerry A. Fodor, insist to the contrary that the best account of speakers' actual languages should fit the facts about the meanings and structures individuals actually give to expressions: Theories of language should be tailored to the contours of linguistic competence. Thus for Chomsky, a theory of language is a theory of a speaker's knowledge of language. The formal entities described by Platonists are just projections of the linguistic properties that speakers give to the expressions they produce and respond to. For mentalists, language is not in the world. The world contains only marks and sounds. Language is in the mind of speakers and consists in the assignments of meaning and structure given to particular marks and sounds.

For Chomsky, a grammar is a theory of the speaker's linguistic competence: An internalized system of rules or principles a person uses to map sounds to meanings. This is a body of tacit knowledge that the speaker puts to use in the production and comprehension of speech. It contains a largely innate, and species-specific, component common to all human language users. The workings of this component are described by universal grammar. Linguistic competence is just one of the factors affecting linguistic performance. Memory, attention, and other cognitive factors contribute to the actual production of speech. For Fodor, by contrast, the rules of grammar describe the actual psycholinguistic mechanisms at work in our production and comprehension of language. Language is just one of the perceptual modules, or sensory input systems, that serve our central cognitive processing.

In contrast to the Platonist and mentalist construals of language, behaviorists insist that grammars are merely theoretical representations of a speaker's practical abilities: The ability to use expressions in particular ways. For Willard Van Orman Quine, a language is a set of dispositions to verbal behavior. Quine argues that the only evidence for linguistic theory is linguistic behavior, and that many grammars will serve equally well to generate the set of sentences a speaker is disposed to produce and respond to. Thus grammars and the sentence structures they describe are construed as artifacts of theory. Chomsky denies that behavior provides the only evidence for testing theories of grammar. Psycholinguistic evidence and language acquisition are also relevant. He also argues that we could not have learned to produce and respond to so many novel sentences just on the basis of observed behavior. The data are too impoverished to support such inductive inferences: Sentences alike in surface structure differ in underlying levels of structure, and speakers respond to them differently. Chomsky concludes that speakers must bring their own internally generated representations of structure to bear on the evidence. Predictions of the sentences they find acceptable and unacceptable, and the interpretations they can and cannot allow, will be based on the fewest linguistic generalizations that fit the pattern of elicited data, and explain any gaps in the data. Claims about a speaker's grammar are thus based on inference to the best explanation about the principles by which she generates structural descriptions (SDs) for the utterances she hears. A speaker's language is an internally generated set of structures.

Donald Davidson, like Quine, accepts that all facts about meaning must be exhibited in behavior. But unlike Quine, he holds that the assignments of meaning depend on facts about what the speaker believes and intends. Thus linguistic meaning cannot be reduced to behavior. The notions of belief and meaning are settled together by a total theory for interpreting what a speaker says and does.

Finally, is language an essentially social phenomenon? Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett argues that a language is a shared social practice upon which the possibility for communication among speakers depends. Lewis, although a Platonist, also argues that facts about the conventional regularities maintained by populations relate them to particular languages. Chomsky and Davidson, on the other hand, conclude that the fundamental notion of language is that of an individual's language, or idiolect. Differences in grammar and vocabulary between speakers ensure that no two speakers have exactly the same language: They can still communicate because there is often overlap in idiolects, and they can work out what others are saying. Chomsky distinguishes between E-languages, which are ill-assorted, externally described, and extensionally characterized social practices, and I-languages, which are the intensionally characterized, internalized grammars of individuals that assign SDs to expressions. For Chomsky, the former notion is ill-defined, so only the latter is of use in the scientific study of language. He argues that a language L cannot be identified apart from its structure, and the structure of L is the structure assigned to it by its speaker(s). He thus casts doubt on behaviorism. Many languages will share the same sounds: Whether a string of sounds is a sentence depends on how different speakers perceive those sounds. Relative to one structural assignment, the sound string may be grammatical, relative to another it may not. Quine's and Lewis's idea of a set of well-formed strings, which can be generated by different grammars, becomes problematic; instead we have a set of structures that speakers assign to sounds and signs. We might reconstruct the notion as follows: An E-language is a set of grammatical strings, where a "string" is grammatical if it has at least one structural description (SD), which is permitted by the I-language of some set of speakers in the sense that it conflicts with no principles of universal grammar (UG).

In the case of meaning, Tyler Burge has argued that word meaning depends on the social norms operating in the speaker's community; while Hilary Putnam stresses that the meaning and reference of natural terms are settled by a group of experts to whom ordinary speakers defer in their use of these terms. These social factors are compatible with the claim that the primary notion of language is that of an idiolect, as they concern vocabulary items only. Each of these different conceptions of language may coexist, all of them serving a different philosophical or scientific interest.

Bibliography

Burge, T. "Wherein Is Language Social." In Reflections on Chomsky, edited by A. George. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.

Chomsky, N. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New York: Praeger, 1986.

Davidson, D. "Radical Interpretation." In his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Dummett, M. "Language and Communication." In Reflections on Chomsky, edited by A. George. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.

Fodor, J. "Some Notes on What Linguistics Is About." In The Philosophy of Linguistics, edited by J. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Katz, J., ed. The Philosophy of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Lewis, D. "Languages and Language." In his Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Putnam, H. "The Meaning of Meaning." In his Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Quine, W. V. O. "Methodological Reflections on Current Linguistic Theory." In Semantics of Natural Language, edited by D. Davidson and G. Harman. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972.

Schiffer, S. "Actual-Language Relations." In Philosophical Perspectives, edited by J. Tomberlin. Atascadero, CA, 1973.

Soames, S. "Semantics and Psychology." In The Philosophy of Linguistics, edited by J. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Barry C. Smith (1996)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy