A Radical Empiricist Theory of Speaking: Linguistic Meaning Without Conventions

Abstract

I propose an account of speaking that draws on radical empiricist philosophy, which conceives of the environment as a network of relations. The argument takes the following form: (a) affordances are relations that exist between an animal and structure in its environment; (b) these affordance relations exist even when the animal is not attending to them; (c) these relations are themselves public and can in principle be perceived by an observer; (d) in the case of language-using humans, these relations can be directly acted upon by other speakers; and (e) one tool for acting upon another person's web of relations is linguistic structure. This description scheme offers a way to incorporate linguistic meaning into the framework of ecological realism while avoiding any notion of conventional meaning. Speech is conceived not as the production of messages to be decoded but as action controlled with reference to relational properties of the environment; the function of verbal actions is to influence the behavior of others in ways that are adaptive to the speaker's purposes. It is argued that the shape of the system of relations must result from the personal learning history of individual language users and therefore that early word learning is the appropriate place to begin an ecological analysis of speaking.