Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

But if you understand these as relating in a certain way to human intentionality, you can see the different types of illocutionary acts and in so doing, you already get the commitments that typically go with those types of illocutionary acts.

I have throughout this article been drawing attention to several remarkable features of human language.

None is more remarkable than this: In human languages we have the capacity, not only to represent reality, both how it is and how we want to make it be, but we have the capacity to create a new reality by representing that reality as existing.

The answer derives in part from the fact that speaking is a voluntary activity, perhaps the most paradigmatic form of the human freedom of the will, and where free voluntary actions are concerned, people perform these actions in their own free voluntary ways.

It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract.

And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion.

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 vocal tract, for example, is clearly not exclusively used for language, yet in the course of human evolution it may have been tuned to subserve language at the expense of other functions such as breathing and swallowing.

A third question is which aspects of the language capacity are uniquely human, and which are shared with other groups of animals, either homologously, by inheritance from a common ancestor, or analogously, by adaptation to a common function.

The system of sound distinctions found in human languages is both specific to language and uniquely human (partly because of the unique anatomy of the human vocal tract).