- What a philosophy of language needs to account for is communication. Once we have explained communication there are no further facts about language that need to be explained.
- In order to account for both communication failure (the many occasions in which we talk past each other) and special cases of communicative success (when the meaning of our utterance is more than, less than, or has no overlap with what we intend to convey—as in, e.g., certain cases of definite description use, and metaphor), we must reject decoding accounts of communication and adopt relevance accounts of communication.
- Relevance accounts of communication explain communication in terms of ampliative inferences as to a speaker’s communicative intentions.
- An account of ampliative inference as to a speaker’s communicative intentions need not involve languages, only particular facts about individual speakers.
- We can explain all the facts about language-use without positing the existence of languages.
- (In practicing philosophy of language ) we should only postulate those entities required to explain the facts about language.
- Hence, we should not postulate the existence of languages.
Perhaps some doubt could be cast on 1, but I'm sceptical that any other facts a philosophy of language ought to account for would require postulating the existence of languages.
What about the faculty of language? Doesn't it exist either?
ReplyDeleteI certainly wouldn’t want to say that people don’t have language faculties, at least in some minimal sense of that claim, which I’ll explain.
DeleteI’m thinking of a language L as an abstract object (SL,DL,fL) where SL is a set containing all the well-formed expressions in L, DL is a domain of objects and fL is a function that assigns objects in DL to the names in L (i.e. provides an interpretation of the terms in L).
I also think that a methodological pragmatism regarding one’s ontological commitments is correct. By this I mean that the only good reason to posit the existence of an entity o is because o is required to exist in order for what takes place to take place (or because positing the existence of o provides the best explanation of why what takes place takes place).
What takes place that requires explanation here are communicative practices; but languages, as I’ve defined them here (and as they are commonly defined by philosophers) don’t enter into accounts of how communicative practices can take place. This isn’t to say that we couldn’t use talk of abstract languages to model real, concrete linguistic practices in some ways; it’s just that we would talk about abstract languages in order to provide an abstract representation of what goes on in people’s heads, or in linguistic communities. The existence of the abstract language itself wouldn’t be what made possible these practices.
On the other hand, it seems clear that people must have language faculties in order for communication to take place, in the sense that people must have the faculty to comprehend utterances and so forth in order for this to happen. This doesn’t tell us anything much about what particular form that faculty actually takes (whether it evolved specifically for the job etc.). Discerning these things would depend on more finely-grained considerations.