Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The first such new way is inseparably connected with the name of Richard Montague (1974), who was the first to show (or at least the first to persuade a broad audience) 2 that if we accept intensional logic with possible-world semantics, we can account for many nontrivial problems of natural language which are beyond the scope of extensional logic.

But this definition has small explanatory value; for the notion of self-contradictoriness, in the quite broad sense needed for this definition of analyticity, stands in exactly the same need of clarification as does the notion of analyticity itself.

HCF differentiate (as we do) between aspects of language that are special to language (the “Narrow Language Faculty” or FLN) and the faculty of language in its entirety, including parts that are shared with other psychological abilities (the “Broad Language Faculty” or FLB).

These assertions are largely independent: there may be parts of the narrow language faculty other than recursion even if the narrow faculty is the only part that is uniquely human; and the narrow faculty might consist only of recursion even if parts of the broad faculty are uniquely human as well).

We agree that it is conceptually useful to distinguish between the language faculty in its broad and narrow sense, to dissect the broad language faculty into sensorimotor, conceptual, and grammatical components, and to differentiate among the issues of shared versus unique abilities, gradual versus saltational evolution, and continuity versus change of evolutionary function.

These too would be uniquely human aspects of the language faculty in its broad sense, but would be part of a system for non-linguistic reasoning about the world rather than for language itself.

To reconcile the recursion-only hypothesis with the fact that vocal learning and imitation are distinctively human (among primates), HCF refer to a “capacity for vocal imitation” and assign it to the “broad language faculty” which subsumes non-languagespecific abilities.

They reconcile the contradiction by retaining the idea that the narrow language faculty includes only recursion but weakening the idea that only the narrow language faculty is uniquely human; specifically, they relegate word leaning to the broad language faculty.

But they assign words to the broad language faculty, which is shared by other human cognitive faculties, without discussing the ways in which words appear to be tailored to language—namely that they consist in part (sometimes in large part) of grammatical information, and that they are bidirectional, shared, organized, and generic in reference, features that are experimentally demonstrable in young children’s learning of words.

As such they fall under the broad rubric of heuristic reasoning, which tends toward likely solutions rather than guaranteeing correct ones.