Explanation and Understanding in the Theory of Language

Abstract

I will be dealing here with a meta-scientific question, namely, what type of theory should a theory of language be? The words that I have used in the title of my paper, ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding1 express two main possibilities and at the same time they indicate a contention that I hope you will share. It is the following: When we, as philosophers or linguists, work on a theory of language, it is not enough to subscribe to the simple syllogism ‘all interesting subjects should be treated scientifically; language is an interesting subject; therefore language should be treated scientifically’. We have to go further and ask: What is the specific interest we take in language? What is it that we want to know? Information of what type will we accept as answers to our questions?KeywordsSyntactic FunctionPractical SyllogismPragmatic MeaningfulnessComplex UtteranceUnderstanding TypeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.