Linguistic Creativity

Abstract

This chapter examines the fact that the linguistic turn in philosophy has failed to find a neutral standpoint for the resolution of philosophical questions. The original modest claim that linguistics provides a source of philosophically neutral data has been gradually replaced by the view that the linguistic data itself must be evaluated against the background of the emerging science of linguistics. If the word science was being used to indicate that linguistics had achieved the level of a systematic study of language that is appropriate to that phenomenon there would be no problem but, in fact, it has been taken to mean that linguistics must conform to a mechanistic paradigm. Philosophy has imposed its own reductive mechanistic agenda on linguistics, and the linguistic data, indeed, language itself, is redefined so as to bring it into accord with the metaphysics of mechanism. The linguistic turn has been reinterpreted as the project of turning linguistics into a mechanistic science. This science is, of course, replete with metaphysical assumptions. This has resulted in another classic example of the self-fulfilling prophecy: If the linguistic data is only judged to possess empirical integrity (Churchland), if it is mechanism-friendly, then there is no doubt that the data will support some mechanistic theory or other—for it is, quite literally, made so as to do so. The illusion is fostered that the debate can only be about which mechanistic theory will triumph, not about whether there is any alternatives to mechanism or whether mechanism is even coherent.