‘Some foundational questions concerning language studies’: Commentary

Abstract

Let me start out by declaring that I agree with the authors’ insistence that the interactive character of language has not, in general, been sufficiently noted, and that this constitutes a deep flaw in most standard approaches to the study of language. I think they are right, too, in considering the conventional division of the field into syntax, semantics and pragmatics to be profoundly misguided. In their view, the necessity for an interactive perspective is ultimately due to the fact that encodings cannot be an epistemologically fundamental form of representation, as presupposed in the predominant approach to language studies. I believe this claim, too, may be sound, in some sense. However, I had some difficulty following their arguments in support of it (a difficulty partly due to their predilection for what, to my taste, is a highly abstract form of presentation), and hence I am unsure about the way the claim is meant to be taken. Accordingly, it seemed to me that the best I could do in the interest of clarity would be to put forward what I take to be a good argument for a similar position, and then test some of the things said by Bickhard and Campbell against this line of argument. Two fundamentally different ways of thinking about linguistic meaning can, I believe, be distinguished. According to the first view, which has traditionally been a predominant conception in Western philosophy and linguistics, meaning is taken ultimately to be constituted by a direct relation between language and reality: by the power of sentences to represent facts, and accordingly, constitute true or false assertions about the way things are. The use of language in human interaction is made possible by this power of sentences, but it is a logically secondary feature of language. There is nothing conceptually amiss with the idea of a language which is never used for telling anyone anything, but simply for keeping a record of the way things are. (If no