Fifteen Eighty Four

Human beings, homo sapiens, are linguistic creatures. One of the things that make us particularly sapient is our ability to convert a seemingly never-ending stream of thoughts into coherent language, interpretable by other similarly equipped creatures. This phenomenon is many-dimensional. When our thoughts leave our lips or shape our hands they take on a form, specific to each language, but also possibly reliant on an innate core system of mental templates common to our species. Our thoughts have meaning, they can map aspects of the world to the arbitrary symbols and signs we use to describe that world. But beyond this literal mapping, we can also coerce our linguistic forms and meanings into subtle service when we want to be poetic, metaphorical, or circumlocutory. In other words, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are essential to understanding human language. This much philosophers and linguists have generally agreed upon; the importance not the details. In fact, philosophers like David Lewis,  Richard Montague, Paul Grice, and Robert Stalnaker to name a few have contributed to these linguistic disciplines alongside linguists like Noam Chomsky, Barbara Partee, Joan Bresnan, Geoff Pullum to name a few more. For the most part, the cross-fertilisation has been fruitful enough to spawn a new philosophy of science: the philosophy of linguistics (Scholz et al. 2021, Nefdt 2023).

However, linguistics is so much more than the syntax-semantics-pragmatics triumvirate. But few philosophers have ventured beyond the confines of these particular subdisciplines. Part of the reason could be that all of the above tend not to stray too far from the logico-mathematical underpinnings that much of analytic philosophy is steeped in. Syntax has traditionally taken inspiration from proof-theory (although there are model-theoretic and non-formalist alternatives). Semantics started its life in model theory (although there are proof-theoretic and non-formalist alternatives). Pragmatics can be logic-based but more recently has moved towards Bayesian probability and game-theory. Asking philosophers to go beneath the word and beyond the sentence can feel like moving from terra firma to quicksand. But there are philosophical treasures to be found in the less formal and more dynamic side of linguistics. For instance, phonology is a trove of tonal delights, from questions of the connections between language and gesture, to the ontological reality of the phoneme or the chereme. Computational linguistics has recently asked uncomfortable questions about how human human language really is. Can a machine, trained on flattened text,  Big Data and deep learning neural networks, ever achieve true linguistic understanding? For those who are sceptical, there was a time when syntactic competence was a fever dream. However, now with transformer-based artificial networks, the price of the Gold Standard in computational linguistics is relatively cheap.

In my new book, The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics, each chapter starts a new philosophical conversation with a different subdiscipline of linguistics. Even the aforementioned triumvirate gets renewed and broadened scope to include cognitive linguistics, social pragmatics, and supersemantics. For those philosophers who are unfamiliar with the vicissitudes of phonology, computational linguistics, and language evolution, there are helpful guides to further reading and accessibly pitched explanations of the core elements required for the philosophical analysis to come.

I’ll highlight three interconnected points made in the book here. The first starts with a question so deep that it touches on the research on universal grammar, linguistic diversity, the neuroscience of impossible languages, and even socio-pragmatics: what is a possible human language? My argument (and subsequent framework) focuses on how the philosophy of possibility (both modal logic and its metaphysics) can shed light on this all-encompassing pursuit of linguistic possibility. It’s a marriage between Andrea Moro’s neurolinguistics (Moro 2016) and Franz Berto’s philosophy of impossibility (Berto & Jago 2019). The resulting offspring is a modal framework for determining the bounds of the linguistically possible in terms of contemporary linguistic theory. Consider for a moment how we might determine the bounds of physical possibility. One route, favoured by many older philosophical traditions and perhaps common to general conversation, is by using our intuitions as a guide. The other is to explore and expand on the principles established by our best science. For example, forward time travel is allowed by the laws of physics while entropy and thermodynamics seem to challenge the possibility of backward time travel. Similarly, I argue linguistic theory shows us what is possible from what is actual. But importantly, acquisition, evolution, and cognition constrain that possibility. The best sci-fi novels and movies, in my opinion, are not the ones that start with a priori unconstrained possibility but those that delicately dance between what science says and which worlds it allows us to imagine.

The second point places phonology, and especially sign-language phonology, at the centre of the debate concerning the relationship between language and action. To what extent is language action-based? We can all appreciate that when language is realised in the physical world, it co-opts our sensi-motor mechanisms. But to what extent is language grounded in action? In the chapter, I explore the interconnections between gesture, sign, and utterances. Phonology, it turns out, resembles the structure of motor cognition in some important respects. This, I argue, can form the basis for an action theory of language more reasonable than certain syntactic approaches. Lastly, the novel account is linked to views in the embodied cognition literature.

Finally, theorists have often favoured minimal idealisation in their models of language. This is a not uncommon technique in the sciences. If we want to study a complex phenomenon, we often try to find a core set of causal mechanisms which give rise to the phenomenon in question. We could also only be interested in some aspect of a given target in which case we case we can safely abstract over the irrelevant factors. In the theory of language evolution, this is no different. Minimalist analyses have been proposed along the lines of the syntactic-focused framework of biolinguistics (Berwick and Chomsky 2016). I think biolinguistics is on the right track given its three main assumptions of explaining the emergence of language within a 100k period, assuming the core of language is syntax, and claiming that communication is a peripheral exaptation. These assumptions (based on solid evidence) suggest not only a saltation account but also a science of simplicity or explaining the emergence of a simple macromutation like Merge. But what if we question each of those assumptions (based on different evidence)? My proposal is a complexity science in what many of the strands of the book, pluralistic theoretical tools, and multiple interacting factors form the basis of an account of language evolution. I call the view systems biolinguistics and draw from work in systems biology (O’Malley & Dupré 2005) and complexity science (Ladyman & Weisner 2020). The view aims to unite theory with data and integrate the language sciences with the full resources of evolutionary biology. Minimalist syntax then becomes an important part of a tapestry of components, causes, and connections all responsible for the emergence of linguistic complexity across paradigms of research.

References:

Berto, F., & Jago, M. 2019. Impossible Worlds. Oxford University Press.

Ladyman, J., & Wiesner, K. 2020. What Is a Complex System? Yale University Press.

Moro, A. 2016. Impossible Languages. The MIT Press.

Nefdt, R. 2023. Language, Science, and Structure: a journey into the philosophy of linguistics. Oxford University Press.

O’Malley, M., & Dupré, J. 2005. Fundamental issues in systems biology. BioEssays 27:

1270–76.

Scholz, B., Pelletier, J., Pullum, G., Nefdt, R. 2021. Philosophy of linguistics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2024/entries/linguistics