Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Although some philosophers still wanted to account for meaning in terms of an apparently unexplainable faculty of human mind, many others strived either to discard the concept of meaning completely, or at least to explain it in an utterly non-mentalist way. Does this mean that meanings are destined to end up in the naturalist mill constructed to produce a unified scientific theory of the whole universe?

Conceptualism seems to claim that, first, the particulars which are relevant in lingustics are mental entities (or contents of consciousness, or the internal wirings of our ‘language faculty’), and, second, that the theoretician of language has no use of abstract entities whatsoever.

The issue of what is special to language The most fundamental question in the study of the human language faculty is its place in the natural world: what kind of biological system it is, and how it relates to other systems in our own species and others.

The first is which aspects of the faculty are learned from environmental input and which aspects arise from the innate design of the brain (including the ability to learn the learned parts).

If the language faculty has many features that are specific to language itself, it would suggest that the faculty was a target of natural selection.

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).

The abstract of HCF makes the very strong proposal that the narrow language faculty “only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language.

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).

But this interpretation is more strained, and is inconsistent with the preceding two quotations, which simply identify the narrow language faculty with recursion.

Similarly, Chomsky’s frequent use of the terms “language faculty” and “mental organ”3 underscore his belief that language is distinct from other cognitive abilities, and therefore distinct from the abilities of species that share those abilities but lack the ability to acquire languages.