A History of Language Philosophies (Studies in the History of the Language Sciences)

A HISTORY OF LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHIES

AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE General Editor E. F. KONRAD KOERNER Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung Jägerstrasse 10/11, D-10117 Berlin Series III – STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE SCIENCES

Advisory Editorial Board Cristina Altman (São Paulo); Lia Formigari (Rome) Gerda Haßler (Potsdam); John E. Joseph (Edinburgh) Barbara Kaltz (Aix-en-Provence); Douglas A. Kibbee (Urbana, Ill.) Hans-Josef Niederehe (Trier); Emilio Ridruejo (Valladolid) Kees Versteegh (Nijmegen)

Volume 105

Lia Formigari A History of Language Philosophies

A HISTORY OF LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHIES

LIA FORMIGARI University of Rome, La Sapienza Translated by

Gabriel Poole

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Formigari, Lia, 1931A history of language philosophies / Lia Formigari. p. cm. -- (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series III, Studies in the history of the language sciences, ISSN 0304-0720; v. 105) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Language and languages--Philosophy--History. I. Title. II. Series. P107.F668 2004 2004055092 401--dc22 ISBN 90 272 4595 9 (Eur.) / 1 58811 560 7 (US) (Hb; alk. paper) ISBN 90 272 4596 7 (Eur.) / 1 58811 561 5 (US) (Pb; alk. paper) © 2004 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. Original, Italian edition © 2001, Gius. Laterza & Figli S.p.a., Roma-Bari. English language edition published by arrangement with Eulama Literary Agency, Roma. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 63224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA



Table of contents

Foreword Chapter 1 A map of the area 1.1 Philosophy, linguistic philosophy, and the language sciences1 1.2 The sources of linguistic knowledge6 1.3 The philosophical study of language and its partitions9 Suggestions for further reading14 Chapter 2 Language, thought, and reality 2.1 Naming and knowing15 2.2 Categories of grammar, categories of thought18 2.3 The foundations of Aristotle’s semantics21 2.4 From voice to speech24 2.5 Scepticism, communication, and silence30 2.6 Signs and signs of signs35 Suggestions for further reading38 Chapter 3 A natural history of speech 3.1 Problems in naturalism39 3.2 Etymological semantics43 3.3 Communication: Animal and human46 3.4 Communication: Human and divine51 Suggestions for further reading55

ix

1

15

39

vi

Table of contents

Chapter 4 Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke 4.1 The semantics of the unsayable57 4.2 The semantics of names61 4.3 The semantics of universals64 4.4 The semantics of grammatical functions69 4.5 From Ockham to Locke77 Suggestions for further reading82 Chapter 5 Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment 5.1 The diversity of languages83 5.2 Philosophies of history, philosophies of language94 5.3 The mutations of the trivium98 5.4 Mind, language, languages107 5.5 The semantics of usage113 5.6 Languages as analytical methods117 5.7 Talking animals: Origin and history122 Suggestions for further reading128 Chapter 6 Languages, peoples, and nations 6.1 Language and communal thinking129 6.2 Philosophies of comparativism134 6.3 The science of language: Nature and history142 Suggestions for further reading146 Chapter 7 Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century 7.1 Philosophical idealism and language theories149 7.2 A critique of impure reason: Psychologism and the language sciences154 7.3 The decline of psychologism160 7.4 Critique of language and philosophical epistemology169 7.5 Communication and its forms178 7.6 Language as behavior183 Suggestions for further reading188

57

83

129

149

Table of contents

Chapter 8 Conclusion: A glance at on-going work 8.1 Mind, body, language189 8.2 The bodily basis of meaning195 8.3 Fossils, brains, and languages199 Suggestions for further reading205

189

Bibliography

207

Author index

237

Subject index

245

vii



Foreword

The standpoint of the present book, as I hope will be clear from the start, is that there can be no single perspective in the philosophical study of language. I have chosen to focus mainly on two approaches: the study of language as a cognitive tool and the study of its essential phylogenetic components. Language is always reluctant to be trapped exclusively in one domain or the other — the domain of liberty, the domain of necessity; the domain of the historical sciences, the domain of the natural sciences. Every time we isolate one of these domains, we realize we have answered only half the questions posed by theories. This happens if the notion of arbitrariness of signs is privileged at the expense of material, vocal, psychomotor language components, or vice versa; if language is considered exclusively as a product of nature or, on the contrary, of culture; if the role of innate mechanisms is stressed exclusively as opposed to learning, or vice versa. As a result, I have tried to divorce linguistic-cognitive theories as little as possible from discussions on language as a specific instinct of humans as members of the animal world. My subdivision into cognitively-oriented chapters and anthropologically-oriented ones serves a practical purpose only. It helps distinguish different itineraries on the same map, avoiding the risk of getting sidetracked into roundabout routes, crooked alleys, or dead-ends. Cross-references among chapters must be taken as street signs suggesting other possibilities to those interested in following alternative routes or carving their own path. The approach of a study is determined not solely by theoretical motives, but also, inevitably, by practical constraints. I might as well then say from the start what is not to be found in this book. Due to space limitations, it does not contain any history of individual language sciences (grammar, for example, or rhetoric). However, I have provided information on the great partitions of linguistic knowledge, and references that should help readers to orient themselves, highlighting the intersections of the philosophical study of language with the theory and practice of the language sciences. For reasons of space and competence, this book deals with only one intellectual tradition, the Western one; also, for the Middle Ages, the focus is exclusively on the Latin world.



x

A History of Language Philosophies

The first chapter of the book reviews the epistemological areas that deal with language and languages, and discusses their methods, relations, and goals. Starting from Chap. 2, I have followed the chronological order of events. Thematic distinctions between chapters, however, will force readers to some toand-fro. As a guide to readers, the name index has dates for non-living authors wherever possible, and the bibliography specifies the date of the first edition of each work. All this might seem superfluous to readers already versed in the subject, but might be useful to others. Acquiring spatial and temporal coordinates is one of the prerequisites for grasping logical and historical ones, and synopses remain a respectable aid for practicing the time-honored art of memory. Given the difficulty of distinguishing between primary and secondary sources in contemporary debates, I have adopted the somewhat arbitrary bibliographical criterion of including all living authors in the second category, even those that can rightly be considered as classics of contemporary language studies and are treated as such in the book. To the list of friends and colleagues I have already thanked in the preface to the Italian edition I must add Konrad Koerner, who once again has invited me to publish the book in the series he edits since 1973, and Gabriel Poole who induced me to revise various passages before subjecting them to the severe scrutiny of English prose. The Italian edition was dedicated to Luca and Gaia, who were learning to speak while I was writing the book. To them, who are now experimenting with writing, I dedicate the English one, too.

Lia Formigari Rome, December 2003



Chapter 1

A map of the area

1.1 Philosophy, linguistic philosophy, and the language sciences Few things are the subject of so many different disciplines as language. Of few other philosophical objects do we have so many discordant definitions. It has been described as an irreplaceable analytical tool or an imperfect image of the world, as a neutral container of mental contents or, rather, the forge of thoughts, as a form of life, a calculation system, an evolutionary accident or a divine blessing, a hindrance to the free communication of souls or the meeting ground of our common humanity, as the way to truth or a devious instrument better replaced by the silent contemplation of Being. Whatever the definition, language always seems to pertain to the worldly side of human existence. It is appreciated by philosophers of secular leanings more than by metaphysicians, by those who rely on analysis more than those who trust to intuition (by Locke, for example, more than by Plotinus; by Condillac more than by Bergson). The Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni compared languages to factories constantly being restructured while production goes on. The founder of 19thcentury cultural anthropology, Heymann Steinthal, described the act of speaking as a recycling of demolition material stocked in our mind. Fritz Mauthner, a German-speaking Bohemian philosopher, and Ludwig Wittgenstein after him, compared languages to cities, which grow gradually, room after room, window after window, house after house, neighborhood after neighborhood, each element attached to the next one, and connected to others by galleries and catacombs. All these metaphors suggest the stratification of languages, artifacts among the most ancient in universal history. In the 18th century, philosophers compared languages to archives where the memory of humankind is preserved, to tracks left by a man in the desert, which he uses to find his way back. Since antiquity, monetary metaphors had been used, and they were rife in the 18th century, the age of political economy, when the comparison of verbal commerce to the circulation of currency, of lies to fake coins, became commonplace. More recently, the regularity of language

2

A History of Language Philosophies

systems has been expressed by Saussure through the metaphor of chess, and linguistic behaviors have been described by Wittgenstein as language games. This variety of judgments on language is not surprising when we consider how expression and communication systems interweave with all aspects of our lives. Thought, in its organized and communicable form, is primarily verbal thought. Controlling language can mean controlling our thoughts and those of others. The study of language forms can provide important clues to the way the mind works. For the success of any scientific program, the adequacy of adopted symbolical procedures and terminology is decisive. Words are the most complex and effective of all interaction systems used by human beings. Even the most crude and primitive form of social organization needs some degree of verbal interaction in order to make even the most basic forms of cooperation and organization possible. The study of language involves different epistemological areas, which are not always easy to distinguish. I will start off with the less controversial one, i.e., linguistics proper. Nowadays, linguistics is an institutionalized discipline; it is taught in universities and has its channels for communication and debate (associations, journals, book series, research centers, funding, agencies, etc.). It is an empirical science, descriptive and/or normative, that deals with the structure and history of natural languages, based on past and present linguistic practices, both oral and written. The term ‘linguistics’ began circulating towards the end of the 18th century; the institutionalization of the discipline took place at the beginning of the 19th century in Germany and is tied to the development of historical-comparative research in linguistics and to the reform of German universities, which soon became the dominant model for all continental Europe and have remained such until recently. In 1819, the first chair of Sanskrit was established in Bonn; in 1821 Comparative Linguistics was established in Berlin, and the chair was awarded to the great comparative philologist and Sanskrit scholar Franz Bopp. Starting with the last decades of the 19th century, chairs in these disciplines were progressively established in the majority of European universities. The field of philology was extended beyond the study of literary texts, to include the study of the culture and institutions of peoples. At the same time, it became internally differentiated, as Sanskrit studies split from Classical Philology and other specialized philologies emerged (Romance, Germanic, Slavic, etc.). Another field of knowledge endowed with its own statute and methods was staked out in the last decades of the 19th century under the name of ‘general linguistics’ and finally consecrated by the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s

A map of the area

Course in General Linguistics (1916), whose program was the study of the forces permanently and universally at work in all languages (Saussure 1966: 6). General linguistics was born out of the need of combining history and theory. Throughout the 19th century, the study of language had been unanimously considered one of the historical sciences. This does not mean that other aspects of language theory were not taken into consideration. But there was somewhat of a division of intellectual labor between linguists, who dealt mainly, if not exclusively, with the historical-comparative aspect of languages, and philosophers and psychologists, who studied language as a faculty of the mind. The birth of general linguistics had a disrupting effect on the separation between historical and natural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften were the terms used by German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, who was the first to postulate the distinction). As a theory of language, linguistics had historical data as its starting point, but there was a growing awareness of the need to integrate it with other data from cognitive psychology, physiology, and anthropology, as well as with principles and methods drawn from philosophy. This development, the result of the combined efforts of linguists and philosophers in the second half of the 19th century, already presupposed the kind of contiguity among epistemological areas that characterizes modern language research. Currently, general linguistics, like philosophy of language, takes information and empirical data from descriptive linguistics and the study of linguistic practices, but also from neighboring areas of discussion bordering on the natural sciences: logic, mathematics, cognitive psychology, the study of formal languages, the biological basis of behavior, linguistic pathologies and theories of learning, artificial intelligence, etc. The ensemble of the data and methods derived from all these sources now goes under the heading of ‘language sciences’. The distinction between general linguistics and philosophy of language is often simply a matter of institutional factors (the curricula of scholars, the organization of university departments, scientific traditions, etc.), more than a question of different methods or objects. Another concurrent factor in the integration of the study of language into philosophy was the cognitive turn of the second half of the 20th century. Since the early 19th century, linguistics and philosophy had developed as separate sciences, with separate goals. Philosophical linguistics claimed for itself the study of language as an aspect of the study of the mind and knowledge. Linguists instead focused on empirical research. Intersections of philosophy and linguistic research, and of both these disciplines with psychological or biological or medical research, if not rare were contingent. Besides, in the first half of the

3

4

A History of Language Philosophies

20th century, behaviorist psychology had denied any scientific legitimacy to introspection, the main tool of philosophical research on language and the mind. Introspection was seen as an unreliable subjective practice that did not lend itself to empirical verification, though it had long served as a privileged access route to mental phenomena, from conceptualization processes to the dynamics of abstract representation, to the function of mental images in cognitive semantics. Nowadays, neurophysiology offers evidence of the neural correlations of these phenomena, and psychology observes and to some extent measures their behavioral effects. This has certainly helped to restore to the philosophical approach generally termed ‘mentalism’ (according to which “the structure of behavior stands to mental structure as an effect stands to its cause” [Fodor 1983: 2]) the respectability it had lost in the first half of the 20th century. This rehabilitation coincided with the Chomskyan turn in linguistics (see below, 8.1). Through psychology and the theory of the mind, a number of classical philosophical issues were readmitted into language studies: the idea of an abstract system of principles presiding over the production and perception of language; the genesis of this system and its employment in verbal practices; linguistic creativity, i.e., the ability indefinitely to produce new linguistic forms. Conversely, the new interest in mental phenomena, and the associated study of the physical aspects of the mind, led linguists to view medical and biological sciences as a source of theoretical inspiration. The integration of linguistics and the study of mind is not without its problems, however. A linguistics of the internal language (the area Chomsky has varyingly defined with the more or less equivalent terms of universal grammar, competence, I-language, and which I have described above as an abstract system of principles) and a linguistics of the external language, i.e., the actual production of sentences and their properties (performance, E-language), evidently present different problems and require different approaches. The first tends to represent, through empirical or formal procedures, the system of mental principles. The second tends to collect corpora of sentences and describe their properties. What should be simply a reasonable division of labor is often presented as a separation between ‘true’ linguistics and sociological linguistics or speech analysis, and the latter is held to have much to say on the behavior of speakers, but little or nothing on language. This interpretation has been suggested by Chomsky himself, when he treats external language as purely derivative and therefore theoretically secondary, and has been officially sanctioned in the Chomskyan vulgate. Whatever its problems, the legitimation of mentalism has produced an

A map of the area

unprecedented interdisciplinary exchange in the study of the language faculty and healed the old fracture between linguistics and philosophy. This holds especially for ‘second-generation’ cognitive linguistics (see 8.2 below), which has bridged the gap between the study of language and the study of the mind on the basis of a representationalist (or conceptualist) approach. Cognitive semantics has rejected the formalist approaches typical of both the Chomskyan tradition and the tradition of analytic philosophy. The analytic theory of meaning as the truth-value of propositions or the correspondence with extra-linguistic entities has also been subject to severe criticism in favor of a more complex view of mental dynamics. The osmotic relation of philosophy of language with linguistics, or with natural and social sciences dealing with language, evidently positions it within the domain of applied philosophies. These include any philosophy that studies an aspect of human theoretical or practical activity (philosophy of language, of science, of politics, of law, etc.). They have also been termed ‘genitive philosophies’ as distinguished from ‘first philosophy’ or philosophy without any other determination (Auroux 1990). However, the ascription of philosophy of language to the domain of applied philosophies is a matter of controversy. Any philosophy can be considered as implicitly linguistic, insofar as they all entail an analysis of the concepts (and of the meaning of the concepts) through which their objects are described. And, conversely, there are questions in linguistic philosophy that resemble those typical of first philosophy (what is language?), rather than being the product of empirical observation and the description of linguistic facts. The idea that philosophy of language is in itself a first philosophy has been repeatedly upheld; in the Romantic period, for example, when Wilhelm von Humboldt described language as the transcendental condition of thought (see 6.1 and 7.1 below); or, in the 20th century, with Wittgenstein and the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy, when language was again posited as the precondition for the representation of the world (see 7.4 below). The German scholar K. O. Apel summarized the sense of this turn when he defined language as a ‘transcendental entity in Kant’s terms’ and philosophy of language as a prima philosophia (Apel 1963: 22). Philosophy of language as applied philosophy, instead, does not view language as a transcendental entity in the Kantian sense, i.e., as an unconditioned precondition of experience. On the contrary, it tries to define a theoretical framework that would include the (biological and social) preconditions for the existence of the various functions of language (cognitive, communicative, expressive, ludic, etc.), and their roots in pre-linguistic experience. From this

5

6

A History of Language Philosophies

perspective, philosophy of language no doubt overlaps in part with the language sciences. It depends on the study of natural languages and the study of speech acts, since the faculty of language manifests itself primarily in the form of those natural and historical entities known as languages. The fine line that separates philosophy of language so understood from general linguistics should not be a reason for concern: it is in the nature of every applied philosophy to have a permeable relationship with the empirical disciplines that study its same object. The greater or lesser contiguity with one discipline or the other may serve to distinguish different ‘styles’ within philosophy of language (philosophy of linguistics, linguistic semiotics, analytic philosophy and so on).

1.2 The sources of linguistic knowledge A primary source for the philosophical study of language is what we could term a ‘protolinguistics’, a body of commonsensical notions belonging to all speakers, which we more or less consciously use to evaluate the correctness and clarity of our own and others’ utterances. This knowledge is not dependent on professional training, and has no scientific terminology nor methodology of its own; yet it is organized enough to embody common principles for explaining and predicting phenomena. In exceptional cases, this sort of linguistic commonsense turns into ‘fantastic linguistics’, imaginative practices — the invention of languages through the ‘Pentecostal’ revelation of idioms, or ‘lunatic semiology’ and syntax (Eco 1995:5) — which are the objects of various disciplines: anthropology, ethnology, sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis, literary history, and psychiatry. This does not mean that such phenomena cannot also be studied by scientific linguistics. For example, studies of this sort have been done on glossolalias, random collections of syllables purporting to be dead languages, languages from other planets, sacred languages (the famous ‘Sanskrit’ or ‘Martian language’ spoken by the Genevan medium known as Hélène Smith at the end of the 19th century). Another example is the speech of psychiatric patients, often accompanied by metalinguistic observations on the patients’ part. Such observations can provide important clues to speech mechanisms. On the other hand, fantastic languages sometimes imply a degree of theoretical competence: the utopia of a perfect artificial language may go hand in hand with positive projects of grammar reformation. Intersections and juxtapositions of the philosophical study of language with disciplines such as poetics, grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, philology, hermeneutics,

A map of the area

translation theory, etc., have been so frequent, that distinction may be difficult. In the classic age, arts of speech (artes sermocinales) was the name used for the first three great partitions of learning: grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric. The term ‘art’ seems appropriate when we consider the apparent spontaneity of speech, a natural trait of human behavior we learn without thinking and teach simply by speaking and acting linguistically. Art is the word we use for techniques that develop from spontaneous actions, which can be summarized into norms and handed down through teaching and example in order to perfect the natural abilities of the learner. But none of the three ancient arts of speech has remained completely faithful to its technical origins. Grammar — the art that teaches how to construct sentences in a given language — turns into a science as soon as it starts investigating the ‘causes’ of its rules, i.e., tracing them back to universal features of languages. From ancient grammarians to the most recent developments of generative grammar, the study of the systematic regularities of language has always had general theoretical implications, such as the question of the relation between thought and reality, or the debate on the structure of the mind and the existence of ‘universals’ governing the acquisition, production, and understanding of language. Dialectics was defined, in opposition to rhetoric, as the technique of true discourse, the logic of apodictic argumentation. Rhetoric claimed a different object: the logic of probability and the production of consensus. A technique for civil interaction, rhetoric tends to be viewed more as a pedagogical practice than a subsection of philosophy. Yet, at its highest level, it is the science of the configurations of linguistic thoughts beyond logical-formal ones. Among the various notions that relate rhetoric to the deep structures of thought, one is particularly prominent in semantic theories: rhetorical ‘figures’ — especially metaphor — are not mere discursive techniques but rather procedures deeply rooted in the modus operandi of thought. The ‘logic of opinion’ has been a subject of philosophical debate especially in two periods of the history of Western culture: the early-Renaissance (see 5.3 below) and the 20th century. In the 1930s, the English philosopher I. A. Richards analyzed the peculiarities of the cognitive strategies enacted in rhetoric (Richards 2001). In the 1950s, the Belgian logician Chaïm Perelman claimed for his ‘new rhetoric’ the unbounded field of the logic of practical reason, as against a restricted notion of reason that forces one to bring in irrationality every time an object cannot be logically investigated (Perelman & Olbrechts Tyteca 1969). In the course of the 20th century, this theme has become central in sociolinguistics thanks to numerous studies on the language of political propaganda and advertising.

7

8

A History of Language Philosophies

In other instances, too, beyond those listed above, there is no clear-cut boundary between the arts of language and the language sciences. Philology too, and even apparently obvious practices such as translation, confront us with texts conceived and expressed in differently structured languages including dead languages and archaic stages of our own language. The history of Western culture is marked by a massive labor of translation of religious and scientific texts from Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and, since the Renaissance, also of secular texts from other languages. This practice was counterpointed by an increasing insistence on the limits of translation, or at least on the true nature of translation as the re-formulation of meaning in the terms of a different culture, life-form, or world-view. From relatively simple texts to the complexity of poems to the programming of automatic translation software, every translation experience proves, time and again, the inadequacy of any naïve conception of languages as simple lexical systems, or name-lists characterized by one-toone correspondences with other name-lists. The limits of translation are stressed with greater emphasis the further we move away from a view of languages as being themselves translations of some universal mental language, if we adopt more or less radical forms of linguistic relativism and stress the importance language has in influencing our approach to reality. The most extreme case from this perspective is that of a wholly unknown language experienced in the absence of interpreters. This was not an uncommon case for travelers and missionaries in the years of European colonial expansion, and, later, for ethnologists. It then turned into a philosophical fiction, such as the ‘radical translation’ experience used by philosopher W. V. O. Quine to criticize the intuitive notion of meaning and show how the understanding of a sentence requires the understanding of the entire language where the meaning belongs (see 7.6 below). Translation theory always, more or less explicitly, refers back to theories of meaning and understanding, and translation work is always a work of interpretation. The ancient arts and sciences of speech — dialectics and rhetoric, nowadays subsumed under the common denomination of argumentation theory, and theoretical grammar, which has become a part of general linguistics — have been joined by new disciplines such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and ethnolinguistics, which have taken on some of their explicative functions. Among contemporary scholars, Chomsky is probably the one who has most clearly outlined the relation of linguistics and psychology, reducing the first to a domain of the second. Behind this drastic reduction, lies a notion of language as one of the components or modules that make up the mental system of

A map of the area

human beings. But even independently of this reduction, psycholinguistics is nowadays an acknowledged epistemological field, with well-defined objects: language acquisition processes, the production and understanding of language, the underlying mental structures, and language impairments (such as aphasia and dyslexia). Its epistemological consecration occurred in the 1950s, and current work in the field is marked by an increasing integration with neurological studies. An epistemological area bordering on psycholinguistics is cognitive semantics, which studies the procedures governing grammatical categorization, conceptualization, metaphorization, and selection of pertinent information in discourse. Finally, contributions to psycholinguistics come from the theory and practice of artificial intelligence. Another recently developed area of research is sociolinguistics, which studies discursive practices from the perspective of human interaction, in relation to other aspects of social and institutional organization, such as class, origins, gender, age, professional or political or religious categories, and so on (e.g., the linguistic usage of immigrants, teen-agers, politicians, etc.). To this, another relatively independent area of research has been recently added, viz., feminist language studies. As a variant of sociolinguistics, since the 1960s, ethnolinguistics has begun studying linguistic phenomena related to specific groups, communities, or societies, as well as the problems of inter-ethnic communication, the relation between oral and written communication, and communication modalities between populations lacking writing; in short, the linguistic side of cultural anthropology.

1.3 The philosophical study of language and its partitions Further stimuli to the philosophical study of language have come from various areas of scientific and experimental research, such as studies of linguistic pathologies, from the 17th and 18th centuries all the way down to the now classic studies by Roman Jakobson in the mid-20th century, and to modern clinical linguistics; studies of musical and mechanical acoustics; experimental studies on language sounds, from the 19th century up to recent experiments in prenatal audiometry; and, in recent years, the rapid advances in neurosciences. All these areas raise questions on the nature of non-grammatical and noncognitive aspects of language, including its biological bases. They also draw attention to the degree to which prosodic and sensory-motor mechanisms of discourse contribute to its semantic functioning. They emphasize the specificity

9

10

A History of Language Philosophies

of vocal signs compared to other semiotic systems, including gesture and writing. In the light of the synergy of physical and mental procedures which seems characteristic of human language, these studies raise again the ancient yet always new question of the relation between mind and body. This question emerges also in what has been defined as the ‘third techno-linguistic revolution’ (Auroux 1994) after the invention of writing and the grammatical description of world languages, i.e., the electronic elaboration of information, which clearly poses the problem of the relation between human and artificial intelligence. Also within the humanities some areas seem to be particularly oriented towards the study of language. A philosophical discipline with strong semiolinguistic leanings is aesthetics. Classical poetics deals among other things with fundamental linguistic phenomena such as metaphor. In 17th- and 18th-century theories of imagination, metaphor was viewed as an operation that mediates between perceptions and notions and governs the transition from the individuality of experience to the generality of signs. Romantics used to define language as a work of art, and semiotics is an important instrument in contemporary aesthetics. But among the partitions of philosophy, cognition theories have especially focused on linguistic mediation. A well-structured thought is a discursive thought par excellence. For children, language learning is a primary form of cognitive appropriation of the world, and, in everyday life, words constantly mediate our relation with people, objects, and events. Pathologies, such as hearing and speaking impairments and aphasia, sever, sometimes radically, the relation between the subject and his environment. Language philosophy is therefore inseparable from a theory of the mind, and the critique of language is an essential tool for managing experience. As we shall see, linguistic skepticism, linguistic relativism, and the analysis of ordinary language are so many ways of dealing with the power of words over the thoughts and behavior of people. Many areas of research have emerged from the epistemological debate of the past and, in time, have become autonomous disciplines. One of these is semiotics. The name was applied to the science of linguistic signs only in the 17th and 18th century, by the English philosopher John Locke and by the SwissGerman philosopher and natural scientist Johann Heinrich Lambert. Yet from the start semiotics represented an essential strand of the philosophical-linguistic tradition, insofar as the doctrine of meaning had been traditionally associated with theories of the sign, to the point of being sometimes undistinguishable from them. A very broad definition of semiotics, or semiology, was offered in modern times by the American logician and philosopher Charles S. Peirce and,

A map of the area

independently, by Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure specifically raised the question of the position of linguistics within semiology. For him, semiology is “a science that studies the life of signs within society”. Linguistics is only a part of it. The task of the linguist “is to find out what makes language a special system within the mass of semiological data” (Saussure 1966: 16). The boundaries of semiotics and its relations with linguistics have been much debated, especially in the 1960s. Some authors tended to confine semiotics to the study of signs used in communication, others extended its scope, to the point of turning it into a general theory of signification. As such, it included linguistics and tended to overlap many other disciplines, such as cultural anthropology, aesthetics, and mass communication studies. In this extended version, between 1960 and 1980, semiotics has enjoyed an incredible expansion, accompanied by the first efforts at systematization. Umberto Eco, one of the pioneers of the discipline, has recently described semiotics as an expanding galaxy of which one can no longer provide the coordinates (2000: 2). But precisely on account of this development, semiotics has become increasingly distinct from general linguistics. In the 1960s, the French linguist Émile Benveniste rightly predicted that the work of Peirce and Saussure would give rise to two separate disciplines: general semiotics and linguistic semiotics, respectively. For Peirce the sign is at the basis of the entire universe. Human beings are signs, and their thoughts are signs, too. To such a wide definition of semiotics, Benveniste objects that ‘in order for the notion of sign not to annul itself in this infinite multiplication, it is necessary for the universe to acknowledge at some level the difference between sign and signification […], for each sign to be taken and included in a system of signs. This is the condition for signifying’ (Benveniste 1974: 45). Another aspect of linguistic studies that developed from philosophy is semantics. This too is a new name for an old thing. The term ‘semantics’ was first used by the French linguist Michel Bréal at the end of the 19th century, in a very limited sense, as the study of changes in the meanings of words, along the lines of historical linguistics. In its broader application, as a general study of meaning (of words, sentences, and texts), semantics is an ancient science: early studies on the relation of names and things, the classic theory of ideas, terminist logic, theories of mental representation — all these are so many ways of raising the question of the relation between language and the world (physical and mental). Nowadays semantics is a discipline that cuts through logic, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This is due to the enmeshing of our signifying and understanding processes with all aspects of our psychological and

11

12

A History of Language Philosophies

cultural experience, each act of signification or understanding being related to what we know of the world (our ‘internal encyclopedia’) and influenced by the cognitive and affective procedures through which this knowledge is formed. There is a general agreement that semantics should not be seen as a general and unified discipline but rather as a variety of approaches to the problem of meaning. The linguistic approach to semantics consists in the study of the dynamics of signification in natural languages. The logical approach is the study of how symbols refer to what they designate; the examination of their capacity to satisfy virtual truth conditions, independently of any material circumstance such as the speaker’s state of mind and the pragmatic situation of the utterance. The semiological approach focuses on the relations of each unit of meaning with the rest of the system. The psychological and cognitive approach deals with the categorization processes through which concepts and the syntactic procedures that contribute to their meaning are formed. This is certainly the one that comes closest to the ancient philosophical study of meaning, which, as we shall see, was associated from the start with questions of ontology and knowledge. Since every semiotic process signifies, and every semantic theory implies a theory of signs and the study of semiological codes, semantics and semiotics tend to overlap. Equally uncertain is the distinction between semantics and hermeneutics. Insofar as it deals with comprehension, semantics tends to include issues traditionally covered by the ancient art of interpretation and by its theory, i.e., hermeneutics. Wherever there is a text, in the broad sense of the term, there is a problem of interpretation. Based on the nature of the texts they deal with, different partitions of hermeneutics have developed in different periods. The most ancient form is possibly juridical hermeneutics, which arose along with law, the ability to interpret laws being the basic tool of professional jurists. A hermeneutical aspect is also to be found in philology, the ability to interpret a text or document being the very least one can require of this discipline. Religious hermeneutics was born in the 17th century along with Biblical philology, when sacred texts began to be studied using the same tools that had been elaborated in the early Renaissance for studying and reconstructing classical texts. With Romanticism, hermeneutics developed into a general theory of comprehension as a repetition of the creative process, and played an important role in German philosophy. To this list we must add the hermeneutics of literature, which studies the reception of literary texts. Various reasons — the development of mass communication in complex societies, research in the psychology of perception, the practice of psychoanalysis — encouraged the study of the contextual conditions of sentences, which in

A map of the area

the past had been reserved to rhetoric, the first discipline to demonstrate how the rules for the efficacy of speech change according to the place, the public, and the situation. Anthropological research has also drawn attention to context: it will suffice to mention Bronislaw Malinowski who, in order to elaborate a theory of meaning suited to the interpretation of ethnological texts, had to extend the conditions of signification from intra-linguistic factors to the practical circumstances and theoretical context of the utterance. At the end of the essay where he tells his ethnological experiences, Malinowski (1923) concludes that language is a form of behavior, an essential aspect of action. This thesis has also been accepted in the ‘new rhetoric’, both in its Francophone (Perelman) and Anglo-American (I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke) versions. It is also the central thesis of pragmatics, which, in contrast with the notion of language as a code or formal system, sees speaking as a cooperative action among interlocutors in a given situation. In a broader sense, pragmatics is a view of language that has a relatively long philosophical history, as we shall see (see 7.5 below). In a narrower understanding, it designates a research project developed in the context of analytic philosophy (see 7.6 below). As an important development in the theory of communication, I will mention, finally, cognitive pragmatics, i.e., the study of the mental states of actors in communicative interaction. Semantics (the study of the relation between linguistic and real entities), pragmatics (the study of the purpose and conditions of sentences), and syntax (the study of the properties of verbal signs and their relations) have been a dominant triad in language studies since 1938 when the American philosopher Charles Morris introduced this division, derived from Peirce. It has recently been challenged by Chomsky, who subsumes into syntax the core of his cognitive approach, i.e. the analytical aspects of meaning (see 8.1 below), leaving all other aspects to pragmatics, dismissed as an irredeemably nonscientific practice. Cognitive semantics (see 8.2 below) has recently brought out the semantic import of grammatical categories and claimed scientific respectability for the study of semantic functions involved in conceptualization. This has made the boundaries between these three traditional areas even more permeable. Finally, the encounter with cognitive science has tempered the antipsychologist tendency that had long been a distinctive trait of analytic philosophy (see 7.6 below). It would seem that language needs to be explained more and more in the context of a general theory of the mind, and is less and less a universal pass-partout that will open the doors of every philosophical closet. This change has expanded the epistemic potential of philosophy to an extent it

13



14

A History of Language Philosophies

is still difficult to assess. For language theories, too, the ‘rediscovery of the mind’ seems destined to become a new frontier.

Suggestions for further reading History of the language sciences
: Schmitter, ed. 1987ff.; Robins 1990; Auroux, ed., 1990–2000; Itkonen 1991; Dascal et al., eds. 1992–1996; Lepschy, ed. 1994–1998; Koerner & Asher, eds. 1995; Harris & Taylor 1997; Seuren 1998; Verburg 1998; Auroux et al., eds. 2002–2004; Joseph et al. 2001; Stammerjohann, ed. 1996. Folk linguistics
: Eco 1995; Niedzielski & Preston, 2003. Analytic philosophy of language
: Hale & Wright, eds. 1997; Dummett 1993; Stroll 2000. Semiotics
: Sebeok 1994; Sebeok, ed. 1994; Posner et al., eds. 2004–2005. Semantics
: Stechov & Wunderlich, eds. 1991. Pragmatics
: Dascal 1983; Mey & Asher, eds. 1998; Mey 2000; Verschueren & Ostman 2003. Theory of translation
: Baker, ed. 1998; Venuti 2000; Eco 2001, 2003; Frank et al. 2004–2005. Language and Artificial Intelligence
; machine translation
: Lawler 1998; Somers 2003. Phonetics
: Clark & Yallop 1995. Morphology
: Booij et al., eds. 2000; Bendjaballah 2001; Spencer & Zwicky 2001. Syntax
: Jacobs et al., eds. 1993–1995. Sociolinguistics
: Ammon et al., eds. 1987–1988; Trudgill 2001, 2003. Feminist linguistics
: Talbot 1999. Ethnolinguistics and linguistic anthropology
: Duranti 1997; Foley 1997. Psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, linguistic pathologies
: Blanken et al., eds. 1993; Eling 1994; Garnham 1994; Stemmer & Whitaker, eds. 1998; Fabbro & Asher, eds. 1999; Ree 2000; Fava, ed. 2002; Rickheit et al. 2003.



Chapter 2

Language, thought, and reality

2.1 Naming and knowing In ancient Western philosophy, theories of language first arose as a byproduct of ontology. Investigating the meaning of names was tantamount to studying how names refer to things and events, and how we can know reality through names. As far as we may gather from scattered extant documents, the relation of language to reality was crucial for a number of Greek philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., who laid the foundations for a question that was to be much debated by posterity: whether men are guided by nature and take into account the essence of things in giving names, or derive them instead from usage according to arbitrary conventions. The first position implies a belief in the correspondence of language and being, that is absent in the second position, according to which the two domains are completely separate and their relation is purely institutional. The alternative between nature and convention is explicitly set out in one of the founding texts of Western language philosophy, Plato’s Cratylus. The thesis expounded by Cratylus, Socrates’s main interlocutor in the dialogue, implies a sort of natural coalescence between things and words, between being and language. A similar position has been attributed to Heraclitus, Cratylus’s teacher according to Aristotle, but we would be hard put to find any decisive evidence of such a notion in the obscure and fragmentary texts by Heraclitus that have come down to us. The opposite (conventionalist) position, expressed by Hermogenes in the dialogue, has been ascribed to the school of Parmenides, who maintained against Heraclitus the priority of being over logos. A much later testimony, that of Proclus, a Neoplatonic Greek philosopher of the 5th century A.D., includes one Democritus among the upholders of the conventionalist theory and opposes the ‘conventionalists’ Democritus and Aristotle to the ‘naturalists’ Pythagoras and Epicurus. It may well be, however, that this rigid division of philosophers into naturalist and conventionalist camps that we have inherited from ancient doxography was actually a projection of later interpreters (Brancacci 1986: 17).

16

A History of Language Philosophies

In general, given the condition of extant documents, caution must be the first rule when evaluating evidence and hypotheses on philosophers of the preclassic Greek period. It is possible that a tentative naturalist onomatology was indeed present in Pythagoras’s philosophy. Denomination, he maintains, is a state of knowledge inferior to that of reason, which uses mathematical symbols to grasp abstract notions. Yet names are made in Reason’s image. The Sophists instead had to opt for conventionalism. They were teachers of rhetoric, the theorists of effective discourse as an instrument of social pedagogy, so they probably elaborated a repertory of norms. Grammatical and lexical studies are attributed to the sophist philosophers Protagoras and Prodicus; this is a plausible claim, given the convergence of the theoretical, practical, and even professional interests that characterized them. The very ideal of effective discourse necessarily implies a degree of faith in a correspondence, if only relative, between the forms of language and thought, thereby encouraging the study of language structures. This then is, in brief, the background of Cratylus. Plato places two characters alongside Socrates and entrusts them with a discussion of the appropriateness of names. Hermogenes represents conventionalism (“no name belongs to any particular thing by nature but only by the habit and custom of those who employ it and who established the usage” [Crat. 384d–e]). Cratylus represents naturalism (“correctness of a name […] is the quality of showing the nature of the thing named” [428e]). Both adopt extreme, and opposite, positions, such as perhaps no previous author had so radically formulated. In fact, Plato uses them as a foil to introduce a third intermediate position, the idea of names as instruments of knowing. This idea begins to emerge in the first part of the Cratylus (385a–391b), where Socrates confutes Hermogenes, by going to the roots of the latter’s subjectivism. For Hermogenes, naming is an idiosyncratic act: we name things as we wish and the same things have different names for Greeks and Barbarians (385e). Socrates makes him admit, however, that things, like actions, must have a stable essence (386e) and proceeds to outline his view of the name as an instrument. Every action (cutting, weaving, etc.) is performed using an appropriate instrument. The same holds for naming. Thanks to names “we teach one another something and separate things according to their nature” (388b). By defining names as instruments for teaching and for distinguishing things, Plato attributes to the act of naming a double function: communicative and cognitive. Names do indeed serve to designate things, but to do this they must first distinguish them according to their essence, in other words, classify and

Language, thought, and reality

categorize them. Like any other tool, names can be used rightly or wrongly. It depends on the degree to which they conform to the intentions of the lawgiver who imposes a usage that gradually consolidates into a norm. The only criterion for establishing the congruity of a name is its quality as an instrument, independently of its specific nature. Blacksmiths can use different types of iron to forge the same instrument and, so long as it is suits its purpose, it will be neither better nor worse for having being produced in Greece or among Barbarians. On the same basis, then, “you will judge the lawgiver, whether he be here or in a foreign land, so long as he gives to each thing the proper form of the name, in whatsoever syllables” (390a). The judge of the fitness of the linguistic instrument is he who uses it in arguing through questions and answers, i.e., the dialectician. Here, the opposition between nature and convention loses some of its force: usage must necessarily conform to general criteria functional to the purpose of names. If language is a tool, it must be suited to purposes that cannot be exclusively subjective. So much for conventionalism. The confutation of naturalism is more subtle. It consists in a long etymological analysis in which Socrates applies Cratylus’s theory, pretending to accept it, only to perform its reductio ad absurdum. I will limit myself to summarizing the structure of the argument and its theoretical outcome. Socrates starts by analyzing proper names, then the names of gods, natural phenomena, and moral notions. Names are congruous if they describe the qualities and role of people. Astyanax (“lord of the city”) is a congruous name for the son of Hector (“he who holds firm”). Both indicate the sovereignty of their bearers. This analysis, however, which would seem to confirm Cratylus’s theory, is then overturned by Socrates in favor of instrumentalism. The primary use of a name is to classify things, perpetuating the being of things in the genealogy of names. It is right to call lion what is born of the lion and horse what is born of the horse and to give a kingly name to a king’s son; the sound of a name is irrelevant so long as the essence is preserved (393d). This notion of meaning was to become classic: meaning resides in the capacity of a name to designate a genus, conceived as form or essence. Forms are the result of categorizing processes and have a cognitive function; in Cratylus they are not conceived metaphysically as, for example, in Phaedo. This is why the theory of forms as found in Cratylus has been associated with Aristotle’s notion of universals as forms intrinsic to sensibilia (Kahn 1986: 99–100). Cratylus was for centuries a model for speculative etymology, whose purpose was not to reconstruct the roots and the phonetic and semantic evolution of words, but rather to ascertain the reason behind them, the ‘cause’,

17

18

A History of Language Philosophies

as they called it. The method consists in subdividing a word into its smallest units to show the semantic congruity of its primitive elements. To explain how the elements of words can bring out the characteristics of things, Socrates uses a theory of phonetic symbolism, analogous to the symbolism of gestures and mimicry. We can raise a hand towards the sky to designate things that are high, or lower it towards the ground to designate low and heavy things; to indicate a running horse, we can mimic its movements. In the same way, sounds should designate things by similarity (the r indicates movement, because the tongue vibrates while pronouncing it; the sibilants indicate things associated with sibilating or blowing, etc.). But Socrates points out that in fact this is not the case. He forces Cratylus to agree that “custom, not likeness, is the principle of indication, since custom, it appears, indicates both by the like and by the unlike”; then “both convention and custom must contribute something towards the indication of our meaning when we speak” (435a–c). The main novelty of Cratylus is the exposition of Socrates’s instrumental theory as an alternative to the two extremes of naturalism (which merges reality and language) and skepsis (which leads to incommunicability). The idea of language as an instrument for controlling and organizing experience is valid for any philosophy that distinguishes between the sphere of thought and the sphere of being. Confuting the more extreme positions, Plato affirms that words are one thing and entities are something else, and asserts the cognitive function of language along with its limitations. In all the Socratic dialogues, questions and answers are used to establish the definite and univocal meaning of words. Names are not correct because they resemble things but because they serve to classify and represent them. The relation between language and reality is a question that resurfaces often and in many forms in the history of linguistic theories. All the answers or hypotheses offered (even those that devaluate the power of words and consequently the intellectual capabilities of men) incorporate an idea of language as the highest cognitive tool and the primary artefact mediating between the mind and the world.

2.2 Categories of grammar, categories of thought In Cratylus, as we have seen, Plato distances himself from both the idea of language as the revelation of being and the Sophists’ attack on its ability to express truth. Both options were incompatible with the dialectical method as practiced by Socrates, founded on the heuristic power of speech. Language is an instrument.

Language, thought, and reality

In the Greek polis, the study of this instrument was indeed an essential aspect of the education of the cultivated classes. One way to study it was the reading and commenting of poems, and Homer’s language had to be a challenge for people speaking the various dialects of the Greek community. Since the 6th century B.C., the clarification of difficult terms and obscure passages in classical works had turned into an early form of philology. Active participation in politics was another incentive to the study of language. Judging from the titles handed down to us by Diogenes Laertius — the Greek writer whose Lives of Eminent Philosophers (1965) is one of our most important sources for Greek philosophy — Democritus had written a number of works on language. Proclus, in a much debated note found in his commentary to Cratylus (of which however we have only indirect testimonies), attributes to one Democritus the study of such phenomena as homonymy, synonymy, etc. From what we know, it seems that the Sophists too studied these and other technical aspects of discourse. According to Diogenes Laertius (IX, 53–54), Protagoras was the first to distinguish between different types of discourse, including non-declarative sentences such as prayer, question, answer, command, etc. During the same period, long before the elaboration of a proper grammatical theory, the study of discourse had already begun to elaborate notions that were to remain central to linguistic theory. One of these is the notion of parts of speech. This notion has been criticized and revised by some of the most eminent language theorists of the 20th century on account of the heterogeneity and vagueness of its taxonomic criteria (Lagarde 1988: 93). It remains, however, such an ancient and traditional metalinguistic instrument that it can be considered part and parcel of the grammatical common sense of the West. According to Aristotle, Protagoras, in his considerations on style, had been led to discuss the congruity of words and had already distinguished the gender of nouns. But this is not the same thing as a classification of the parts of speech. Indeed, the first attested notion of language describes it as a mere nomenclature (Lallot 1988) and it is only in the 4th century B.C. that words are divided into two (and, for the time being, only two) grammatical categories, onoma and rhema. The first term was also used to indicate words in general; but, when used in opposition to rhema, it referred to a name serving as subject in a proposition (Baratin & Desbordes 1981: 14). The second term (mostly translated as ‘verb’) indicates any sequence serving as predicate. In a controversial chapter of the Poetics (XX), Aristotle lists the parts of speech on the basis of contemporary linguistic notions: letter (i.e., the phoneme:

19

20

A History of Language Philosophies

“a letter […] of which an intelligible sound can be formed”, not therefore one uttered by animals); syllable; conjunction, and preposition; arthron, i.e., articles and pronouns; nouns; verbs; case (ptosis), indicating an inflection of either nouns or verbs; and finally propositions (a composite semantic unit, which could be either a simple judgment or an indefinitely long sequence of connected signifying units such as the Iliad). Under the guise of a mere list, what we have here is actually a progression that illustrates the transition from the nondivisible (the ‘letter’) to the divisible (all other parts of speech) and from nonsignificant to significant. The Stoics distinguished five parts: proper name, common or appellative name (including adjectives), verb, conjunction, and article (Diogenes Laertius, VII, 57–58). In time, this taxonomy evolved as the canonical classification into eight grammatical categories: noun, verb and its conjugation, participle (declinable like nouns, and having modes like verbs), article, pronoun, preposition, adverb, conjunction. A ninth category was sometimes added by dividing names into proper and appellative, and a tenth by distinguishing between interjection and adverb. This eight-part systematization is found in a text that marks our entire grammatical tradition, the Art of Grammar, ascribed to Dionysius Thrax (2nd century B.C.). From the start, a semantic component was present in this logical-morphological taxonomy. For centuries thereafter, theories of meaning were an integral part of the studies of logic, and semantic criteria were identified with the criteria for constructing propositions. Authoritative scholars have noted this overlapping of semantic and morphological elements among the Stoics, in Apollonius Dyscolus (a grammarian probably living in Alexandria in the 2nd century A.D.) and Priscian (a Latin grammarian of the 6th century A.D.). Going further back, one also finds grammatical and semantic criteria are deeply implicated in the theory of the parts of speech. The most significant Platonic text, from this perspective, is the Sophist, where the nature of dialectics, hence the nature of speech, is discussed. One of the interlocutors identifies nouns and verbs as essential speech elements, their simultaneous presence being the minimum requirement for the existence of a sentence. Words “do no denote the action, inaction, or being of anything that is or is not, until verbs have been mingled with nouns. Then, and only then, have we a concord and a discourse with the immediate emergence of the primitive combination, which we may call the most primitive of discourses” (Sophist 262c–d). The same thing holds for signs, as for the things they stand for: “some can be fitted together and some cannot, and those which so fit together effect discourse” (ibid.). In other words, grammaticality

Language, thought, and reality

(i.e., the capacity of the elements of a system to relate to one another according to certain rules) has a syntactic presupposition (the fact that its elements are ordered in a certain way) and a semantic one (the fact that its elements are signifying words). Both criteria are actualized in sentences formed by onoma and rhema. The co-implication of grammar and semantics is evident in Aristotle as well. According to readings that have become traditional — starting at least from that of the German philosopher Adolf Trendelenburg in the first half of the 19th century — Aristotelian categories are, in the last analysis, derived from the grammatical distinctions of the Greek language. Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection are the ten categories, i.e., the general classes of the predicates that can be attributed to a subject. That is how Aristotle listed them in some of the works on logic in the collection we know as Organon. The predicative category of substance corresponds to the grammatical category of nouns; quantity and quality correspond to the class of adjectives; relation to the comparative; place and time to the pertinent adverbs; position, state, action, and affection correspond to the modes and features of the Greek verb. Other scholars too, after Trendelenburg, held that Aristotle’s categories of thought are nothing but the transposition of the fundamental categories of the language he thought in: not attributes to be discovered in things, but classifications derived from language. It is the unusual flexibility of the verb to be in Greek and, in general, in Indo-European languages — copula in judgment (Latin, est), nominal notion (esse), present participle (ens), etc. — that, according to Benveniste (1966: 63–74), made the development of classical metaphysics possible by predisposing the notion of Being itself to its later philosophical interpretation.

2.3 The foundations of Aristotle’s semantics The first chapters of the work known by the Latin title of De Interpretatione (Greek: Peri hermeneias), where speech and its parts are defined, are the locus classicus of Aristotle’s semantic theory. De Interpretatione is one of the works on logic collected in the Organon, and deals with declarative sentences (judgments, whether affirmative or negative, therefore liable to be either true or false). Other types of speech (prayer, for example, which is a form of discourse that is neither true nor false) pertain to rhetoric and poetics. The noun (“a sound having meaning established by convention alone but no reference whatever to time,

21

22

A History of Language Philosophies

while no part of it has any meaning, considered apart of the whole”: De int., Chap. 2) and the verb (“a sound which not only conveys a particular meaning but has a time-reference also”) are the minimum necessary verbal categories required for a judgment. “They indicate nothing themselves but imply a copulation or synthesis, which we can hardly conceive of apart from the things thus combined” (Chap. 3). They are the only two parts of speech that Aristotle deals with in this work. De interpretatione opens with a formula that for centuries was to remain the incipit of all theories of meaning: Words spoken are the symbols or signs of affections or impressions of the soul; written words are the signs of words spoken. As writing, so also is speech not the same for all races of men. But the mental affections themselves, of which these words are primarily signs, are the same for the whole mankind, as are also the objects of which those affections are representations or likenesses, images, copies […]. As at times there are thoughts in our minds unaccompanied by truth or by falsity, while there are others at times that have necessarily one or the other, so also it is in our speech, for combination and division are essential before you can have truth and falsity. A noun or a verb by itself much resembles a concept or thought which is neither combined nor disjoined. Such is ‘man’ for example, or ‘white’, if pronounced without any addition. As yet it is not true nor false.

Spoken sounds signify only in their entirety in the case of individual words (nouns and verbs); they are analyzable in partial meanings in the case of sentences. Only the latter, and not its constitutive terms, can be true or false. I have already referred to the passage in Poetics Chap. XX where Aristotle presents an elaborate taxonomy of the parts of speech. Here, we also have a distinction between parts that convey a meaning and parts that do not. Phonetic parts — letter and syllable — have no semantic import. Conjunctions and prepositions, i.e., the syntactic elements of sentences, contribute to signification only if they connect parts that are already significant in themselves (nouns, verbs, elementary propositions). Inflection is not mentioned, but it is obvious that its semantic function is at the most subservient to the signification of nouns and verbs, of which it indicates the modalities. We may conclude that the only parts of speech that carry signification are those that refer back to an ontological content and produce a mental image of it. This is borne out, for example, by the chapters of Metaphysics where Aristotle appeals to this condition in order to confirm the logical law of contradiction. A word cannot definitely designate the being and non being of a given thing.

Language, thought, and reality

If […] it be said that ‘man’ has an infinite number of meanings, obviously there can be no discourse; for not to have one meaning is to have no meaning, and if words have no meaning there is an end of discourse with others, and even, strictly speaking, with oneself; because it is impossible to think of anything if we do not think of one thing. (Met. iv, 4, 1006b 10–11)

In short, signification is always defined by means of an extra-linguistic operation, the reference of the symbol to the symbolized. It is true that the same speech can express many things and that a single name can indicate more than one object. But only a Sophist would infer from this that signification is indeterminate. Let us now return to the initial passage of De intepretatione where Aristotle deals with the affections or impressions (pathemata) of the soul, of which the articulated voice is the symbol, and with their objects (pragmata). Pragmata evidently include not only objects in the proper sense but any event that can make an impression on the soul. It can be translated as data, in the sense the term has in modern philosophy, i.e., of objective equivalents of mental representations, or even as ‘state of affairs’, as Nuchelmans (1973: 33–36) and de Rijk (1987: 31–39) do. A no less broad interpretation is necessary for the term pathemata, which designates representations in general, mental contents of all sorts: images, concepts but also propositional attitudes such as understanding, thinking, believing, supposing (following an acceptation of pathemata found also in Plato; cf. H. Arens 1984: 26). Aristotle also defines noema (notion) as the meaning of a term in the absence of a predicative relation. In De anima III, he insists on the function of images as data that affect the soul and are associated with thought. The noemata pertain to an apprehension that precedes judgment. The fact that meaning is based on the immediate apprehension of a definite representation does not imply an underestimation of the intrinsic polysemy of natural languages. On the contrary, Aristotle indicates various uses of language that derive from the various uses of reason: practical, technical, theoretical. To Aristotle we owe a treatise on Rhetoric, where the strategies typical of the various forms of discourse are analyzed in detail. To him we also owe the analysis of phenomena such as homonymy, synonymy, paronymy (already defined at the beginning of the treatise on Categories), and of fundamental figures of speech such as metaphor. Certain sections of Topics can be read as actual studies in semantic analysis. In both Poetics and Rhetoric the cognitive functions of metaphor are discussed. Metaphor is an essential instrument of communication (Rhetoric
: 1404b 33–35; 1410b 13–1411a 35–36) and lexical innovation (Poetics 1459a 6–7). It is, in short, a conceptualizing tool. This idea

23

24

A History of Language Philosophies

of the heuristic value of metaphor was taken up by Cicero, Quintilian, and 16th-century commentators of the Poetics, such as Ludovico Castelvetro. Through them it was passed on to Giambattista Vico, who called metaphor ‘a little definition’ and posited it as a central mechanism for the linguistic understanding of the world. Semantics originates as part of a theory of declarative sentences, i.e., propositions subject to the criterion of truthfulness. Studies on different forms of expressions and sentences, however, are not lacking in Greek philosophy. Diogenes Laertius ascribes to the Sophists a systematic consideration of the various types of speech. Both he (VII, 66 ff.) and Sextus Empiricus, a Greekspeaking physician and philosopher living around the turn of the 2nd century A.D. (Against the Logicians II, 70–73), tell us that the Stoics distinguished among various forms of expression besides judgment, such as interrogation, command, oath, prayer, hypothesis, address, etc. The fact remains, however, that the declarative function is taken as the basic function of language. As has been said of Plato — but the same thing applies to Aristotle or the Stoics — “truth is that relation which makes the linguistic map of reality possible. Without it, language would have no connection with reality, and would be irrelevant to it” (Abraham 1987: 17). In other words, the various types of sentences should be considered as variants of a fundamental sentence, the declarative one, the only one that either affirms or denies something, the only one that expresses predication, and represents discourse in its purest form.

2.4 From voice to speech Aristotle is the first philosopher who treated language as a phenomenon pertaining to various sciences, such as biology and psychology, logic, poetics, and rhetoric, and therefore studied it from a corresponding variety of perspectives: acoustic, physiological, logical, semantic, stylistic, and pragmatic. His writings represent a first encyclopedia of the sciences of language of the Western world. In De Anima (II, 8), Aristotle distinguishes between voice proper (phone) and sound (psophos), defining them as following. Voice is the sound produced by animate beings (we speak of a musical instrument’s voice only in metaphorical terms). More specifically, it is “the impact of the inspired air upon what is called the windpipe under the agency of the soul in those parts”. However, not every sound made by a living creature is a voice, “but that which even causes the

Language, thought, and reality

impact must have a soul, and use some imagination” (De An., II, 8). Voice is a voluntarily emitted sound, endowed with communicative function, and associated to a mental image. To better clarify the relation between the biological aspect of voice and its linguistic use, we may refer to a passage of De interpretatione where Aristotle states that voiced sounds are symbols (symbola) of the affections of the soul and written letters are the symbols of the sounds of the voice. Shortly thereafter he reaffirms that sounds and letters are first of all (protos) signs (semeia) of the affections of the soul. Sedley (1996: 91–92) notes that the word protos serves to stress the primacy of this meaning of ‘sign’: the sign is the symptom of an affection of the soul, equally expressed by the human and animal voice. Kretzmann (1974) and Chiesa (1986) have pointed out the distinction between sign and symbol, in order to stress the difference, along with the continuity, between the biological and institutional aspects of vocal sounds. They are first of all natural signs, symptoms or semeia. They become symbols only if they are used according to their institutional function as names. This is confirmed shortly thereafter: Aristotle explains that a noun is a “sound having meaning established by convention” (De Int. II, 16a 20–21), and adds that “no sound is by nature a noun: it becomes one, becoming a symbol”, as evidenced by the fact that the sounds of animal voices also express something but are not nouns (pp. 30ff.). The same continuity between spontaneous vocal sound and communicative sound is affirmed in the Poetics (Chaps. I–III), where Aristotle derives the arts of language from the bodily arts of dance and rhythm and organizes them in a series according to the extent they employ bodily or musical rhythm. Similarly, in Rhetorics (1428b, 21ff.), prosody contributes to the production of meaning through opening and closing clauses of the sentence that serve to distinguish the syntactic and semantic units. Thus, there is a continuity between the spontaneous, symptomatic use of voice as immediate expression of the affections of the soul and the institutional use of the articulated voice, even in its most arbitrary and abstract form. Those that Aristotle calls agrammatoi psophoi, unarticulated sounds, the ones that cannot be further divided into discrete units, are the precursors of the articulated voice. The phonological study of language and its elements presupposed a knowledge of alphabetical writing, which had been elaborated at the start of the first millennium and was used in all the major Greek dialects. The grammarians of the Hellenistic Age contributed the graphical representation of accents. The articulation of words was by definition related to writing: the articulated voice, according to a Latin grammarian cited by Desbordes (1986a: 340), “is the voice

25

26

A History of Language Philosophies

that can be written”. Analogously to writing, sounds are combined to form syllables, syllables to form words, words to form sentences. In the ancient world, musicians, too, along with grammarians, studied phonetics, using syllables as metrical units; physicians, from Hippocrates to Galen, described the anatomic structure of the organs of phonation and studied their movements and pathologies. Philosophers focused on the mechanisms that transform voice into signifying speech. We have already seen the description of this transition from mere bodily action to symbolizing function in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione. Thanks to this function, the Stoics included the study of voice as signifying sound into dialectics. The Stoics’ philosophy of language can only be reconstructed through the fragments, testimonies, and commentaries of later authors. One of these is Diogenes Laertius. His description of the Stoics’ encyclopedia gives us an idea of the breadth of their approach to language, which bordered on psychology (because the theory of meaning is inseparable from a theory of mental representation) and ontology (because dialectics deals with signified things and their verbal expression). It included a theory of grammar, a theory of rhetorical argument (with its subdivisions: deliberative, forensic, encomiastic), a theory of style dealing with the virtues and defects of discourse. The virtues go under the general heading of Hellenism, whose distinguishing features were listed by Aristotle in Rhetoric V (perspicuity and clarity, a balanced articulation of the sentence, etc.). The Stoics too listed purity, perspicuity, concision, convenience (i.e., suitability to the subject), the absence of dialectal expressions, among the requisites of Hellenism. Defects are ‘barbarisms’ (i.e. contravening against classic models), solecism (or syntactic incoherence), amphibology (or semantic ambiguity). The study of grammar and the elaboration of grammatical categories merge with the study of the logical and semantic mechanisms that transform voice into speech, and, on the other hand, with the study of the techniques used for correct and effective rhetoric. There has been some debate on whether one can legitimately speak of a ‘Stoic grammar’. Certainly, in Stoic doctrine, there is no specific section dedicated to grammar. Yet they do speak of grammar both from the perspective of dialectics (when they deal with the truth conditions of sentences, an aspect that relates language to ontology), and from the perspective of rhetoric (when they deal with the effectiveness and correctness of discourse). The point is, whether these two approaches imply the same notion of grammar. Indeed, if we interpret what we know on the Stoic doctrine in the light of later evolution, we might find here the roots of the dichotomy between scientific and

Language, thought, and reality

technical grammar. The grammatical observations found in dialectics are not aimed at describing a natural language (Greek); rather, it is the natural language that is used as a repertoire of examples serving to validate theories on the functioning of verbal thought. What we have is therefore a grammar of thought, a general grammar, aimed at studying the universal traits of all languages. On the other hand, the notion and practice of normative grammar was implicit in the notion of Hellenism. One could therefore say that the two grammars (the philosophical and the technical grammar) are both found in the works of the Stoics and that they are a source of subsequent distinctions between mental grammar and the grammar of natural languages. Another interesting trait of Stoic linguistics is their view of the theory of meaning as a branch of dialectics. According to Chrysippus, a Stoic philosopher of the 3rd century B.C. (Diogenes Laertius VII, 63), dialectics is the science that studies the semainon (that which serves to signify something) and the semainomenon (that which is signified). Now, the distinction between semainon and semainomenon is an ontological one: the first is a material object (the voice, for example), the second an immaterial object (a mental representation, “as is the case with incorporeal things and all other presentations which are received by reason” [VII, 51]). The first stage in the specialization of voice is the articulated voice (which as such is a form of expression); the articulated voice can in turn be non-semantic voice or a semantic voice produced by thought. Only in this case it is speech. What follows in Diogenes’s text seems at first glance a mere list of subjects, but in fact constitutes an actual systematic encyclopedia of the sciences of language and clearly indicates the intertwining of logic, morphology, and grammar. First come the historical and geographic variants of expression, that is the languages created by the various races and populations. Then follow the basic phonic elements of all languages (the twenty-four letters of the Greek language), the basic morphological elements (the parts of speech), the stylistic criteria governing speech and their violations. Diogenes then lists the types of speech and their characteristics. He describes poetic composition and declarative discourse. The latter implies the existence of categorizing principles and the capacity of ranking genera according to degrees of generality. Finally, he lists the semantic and morphological aspects of expressions (VII, 63). The intermediate space between ontology and semantics is dominated by the notion of mental representation. Since it is neither thing nor quality, representation is “quasi-substance or quasi-attribute” (VII, 61). It generates mental images in the absence of objects. It mediates between the domain of

27

28

A History of Language Philosophies

things and their attributes and the domain of the articulated voice. A mental representation according to the Stoics is an impression or alteration made on the soul, comparable to the wax imprint of a seal. It is the first act of apprehension, a precognition or prolepsis, a natural understanding of the universal (VII, 54). Representation comes first; then lekton (what is ‘said’ or is ‘sayable’), i.e. representation insofar as it is expressed in a propositional form (VII, 49). Diogenes’s testimony should be integrated with that of Sextus Empiricus, an essential source for the study of ancient semantic theories, that he describes from a Skeptic point of view. Sextus denies that preconception (prolepsis) can be a truth criterion (Against the Log. I, 401–407) and that the semantic evidence of representation is sufficient to guarantee the truth of the lekton. This is how Sextus summarizes the semantic paradigm of the Stoics. They distinguish (II, 11–12): […] the thing signified [semainomenon], the thing signifying [semainon] and the thing existing [tynkhanon]; and of these the thing signifying is the sound (‘Dion’, for instance); and the thing signified is the actual thing indicated thereby and which we apprehend as existing […] whereas the Barbarians although hearing the sound do not understand it; and the thing existing is the external real object, such as Dion himself. And of these, two are bodies — that is, the sound and the existing thing — and one is incorporeal, namely the thing signified and expressible, and this is true or false.

Of the three elements of this semantic procedure, two are of a material nature: the voice and the extra-linguistic datum. The third, immaterial entity — the lekton, i.e., the mental representation as far as it is verbally expressed or expressible — mediates between the two corporeal entities. Herein lies the distinctive feature of lekta compared to other forms of representation. They are not just physical modifications of the mind but mental contents in propositional, and therefore communicable, form. The proof is that the voice evokes these contents for us, but not for Barbarians. In various passages of his works, Plato had defined thought as the silent speech of the soul to itself. This definition implied a structural similarity between the speech of the soul and vocal speech, as well as the priority of the first (thought comes first, language follows as externalized thought). Stoic philosophers offered a psychophysical interpretation of the question: the internal word is the breath produced by sound organs before coming out of the mouth as voice. The distinction between inner and uttered speech was to have a long history. We find it in the debate on the mind of animals in the Hellenistic Age; in Plotinus’s philosophy (see 2.5 below), where the uttered word is the image of

Language, thought, and reality

internal speech, which in turn is the image of the divine Word; in Augustine (see 2.6 below), who relates the word to the Christian doctrine of Incarnation; in the medieval theory of the three orationes (scripta, prolata, mentalis). According to Long (1971), the notion of lekton carries an implicit distinction between meaning and reference that is absent in Aristotle. For Aristotle, the notion reflects the object, therefore meaning and reference are one and the same. The Stoics, instead, interpose the lekton between the two, which allows them to identify different meanings even when the reference is the same (as when one refers to Cicero as the ‘author of the De finibus’ or ‘Catiline’s adversary’). Closer to the Aristotelian model is Epicurus’s semantic theory, where there is no mediating element between voice and signified thing. On this point, Sextus (Against the Log. II, 13) opposes Epicurus to the Stoics because the former admits only two aspects: the signifying voice and the datum. Plutarch makes a similar point when he tells the Epicureans: you retain only words and name-bearers and abolish lekta, or sayables, “to which discourse owes its existence” and “by means of which learning, teaching, preconceptions, thought, impulses and assents come about” (HP 1987: I, 100; cf. II, 103). For Epicurus, if Sextus and Plutarch correctly represent his theory, the elements found in a semantic relation are two: the voice and the extra-verbal datum. The only mediation is at the most represented by prolepsis, which is a psychological act and not a linguistic function. It is a prenotion, an anticipation, an immediate apprehension of reality, the sudden act of recognizing that makes us say, in discerning a figure, ‘it is a man.’ It is the operation thanks to which “the object primarily denoted by every term is [made] plain and clear” (Diogenes Laertius X, 33). Prolepsis is essential to the recognizing of objects through names, when an object is named on the basis of a pre-existing anticipation or is recognized, if it already has a name, as belonging to a given class of objects. It guarantees the generic value of a name and its capacity to designate not this or that individual, but every individual belonging to a given class. It is a purely psychological operation, a structuring of sensorial data, which would otherwise remain ‘alogical’ and non-memorizable (X, 31). It is a procedure that, with the help of names (and possibly, but not necessarily, on the basis of past experience) transforms sensations into notions. Prolepsis contributes to recognizing through names (as well as to all other recognizing acts, including non-linguistic ones) by fostering the direct reference between the voice and the object or event. In fact, the immediacy of reference contributes to the efficacy of names. Epicurus’s faith in the proleptic (nondefinitional) power of names goes hand in hand with his contempt for dialectics

29

30

A History of Language Philosophies

and its paraphernalia of definitions and classifications. In his Letter to Herodotus, he voices an important methodological principle of argumentative procedure: “the primary signification of every term employed must be clearly seen, and ought to need no proving […] if we are to have something to which the point at issue or the problem or the opinion before us can be referred” (Diogenes Laertius X, 37–38).

2.5 Scepticism, communication, and silence It is commonly held that the studies of logic by Aristotle and the Stoics provided the theoretical framework for the work of the grammarians of the school of Alexandria, laying the foundations of an art that was to be codified by Dionysius Thrax and then by Apollonius Dyscolus, through a peculiar synthesis of philology and philosophy (Lallot 1997: 13). On the other hand, technical grammar had managed to become an autonomous profession only because the study of morphology and syntax had ceased to be part of philosophical dialectics and had become an aspect of philological practice (Baratin & Desbordes 1981: 34–37). The importance of morphology as an introduction to philology is witnessed by the vast grammatical production of the authors of Alexandria (of which, incidentally, almost nothing is extant). It was mainly functional to the reconstruction of texts, the elaboration of school manuals, the interpretation and commentary of literary works, and the art of writing in its various aspects. The Latin grammarian Varro listed four functions of grammatical study: lectio (reading aloud), enarratio (interpretation of texts), emendatio (their correction when necessary) and iudicium (their evaluation). Quintilian described grammar as a practical discipline aimed at speaking correctly and interpreting literary texts. Sextus Empiricus also refers to the dual nature of grammar — practical and descriptive as well as theoretical and systematical — in his treatise Against the Grammarians (or: Against the Professors). What is at stake here is the relationship between grammar and philosophy, the ambition to transform a purely instrumental art — the art of reading and writing — into a general theory of language. There is a technical grammar, which teaches us to read and write. It is an art as praiseworthy as medicine, for it “cures a most inactive disease, forgetfulness, and contains a most necessary activity, memory” (Against the Prof. I, 52). Grammarians do not agree even on the definition of their art. Dionysius Thrax identifies grammar with philology. Others would extend it to

Language, thought, and reality

include language and its meaning as a whole, which is impossible since “no scientific inquiry deals with anything unlimited, such inquiry itself being the chief agent of limitation, for science is what binds down the undefined: but things signified and things signifying are unlimited”. This problem is made even more complex by semantic change: “Time is the lover of change and that not only in regard to animals and plants but also to words. But concerning a stationary infinite, not to speak of a changing one, no human knowledge can be found” (Against the Prof. I, 81–83). As far as I know, this is the first statement on the impossibility of reducing language to a theory, an irreducibility that also affects technical grammar. For Sextus, indeed, it is impossible even to enumerate the sounds of a language. Vowels vary in number depending on whether one distinguishes between long and short, acute and grave, smooth and rough vowels, or takes diphthongs into consideration. Moreover, it is even impossible to actually distinguish between short and long syllables, since there is no unit of measure; and one cannot go by ear, since what grammarians treat as a short syllable can in fact be further subdivided from an acoustic perspective, since we may perceive it as two distinct sounds (Against the Prof., I, 126). Finally there comes the Skeptic attack on the showpiece of philosophical grammar, the theory of speech parts. Sextus takes into consideration only one part, the noun, “doing much as the wine-merchants do; for just as they judge of the whole cargo from a little taste, so too we, when we have first dealt with a single part of speech, such as the noun, will gain […] a general view of the skill of the grammarians” (Against the Prof., I, 141). In the first place, there is no rational criterion in the choice of gender and number. Male names are used for the females of the species and viceversa; plural names, such as Athenai, are used to designate a single city, etc. Varro (De lingua lat. VIII, 7–8) had explained these anomalies as the consequence of the name-givers’ subjective motivations. But Sextus denies the existence of any motivations at all, even merely psychological ones, in name-giving. Fire warms and snow cools everyone, Greek and Barbarian, sage or ignorant. “What affects us ‘naturally’ affects all men alike”, but this does not imply a uniformity of names (Against the Prof. I, 147–148). Sextus’s argument proceeds beyond its immediate target to strike against the thesis of the natural congruity of names and things. There is no dependence of language on the modalities of perception, let alone on the nature of things. With his attack on spelling (Against the Prof. I, 169–175), Sextus arrives at the core of normative grammar. Spelling variations, on which grammarians waste so much time, are irrelevant and do not affect the meaning of words. A

31

32

A History of Language Philosophies

similarly empirical criterion is applied to Hellenism, i.e., the usage of proper Greek. The Hellenism of those who refer to prevailing usage is legitimate, while the Hellenism of those who go against it in the name of analogy, i.e., an abstract regularity imposed by grammarians, is condemnable (ibid., I, 178–179): For just as in a city where a certain local coinage is current, he who makes use of this is able to carry on his business in that city, without hindrances, but he who does not adopt it, but coins for himself some new money and desires to have this passed, is a fool, so also in ordinary intercourse the man who refuses to follow the mode of converse — like the coinage — which is usually adopted, and cuts out a new way of his own, is near to madness.

Hellenism is thus reduced to socially determined acceptability, entrusted more to the derision of bystanders than the judgment of grammarians (I, 191). In the alleged controversy between analogists and anomalists, Sextus would clearly belong to the anomalist camp. I say ‘alleged’, however, because the two positions (those that referred to analogy, or regularity, as the supreme grammatical criterion, and those that saw anomalies, or exceptions, as a functional principle of all living idioms) probably never corresponded to two clearly identifiable camps or schools. They were presented as such by a number of 19th-century scholars, possibly influenced by the dichotomic exposition of the question contained in books VIII–IX of Varro’s De lingua latina. Varro’s account certainly reflects to some degree the state of the question, but the prevalent opinion is that it represents a dramatization of the actual situation (Taylor 1996: 9–10), and that in fact already at the time both regularity and irregularity were usually acknowledged as features co-existing in all languages. Yet, even in the absence of two clearly separate camps, one could reasonably assume that there were ‘purists’ who tended to overestimate analogy at the expense of anomaly, while Sextus should be placed among the anomalists. Be that as it may, in Sextus’s own doctrine the analogy/anomaly issue appears ultimately irrelevant, if measured against the superior criterion of usage. However, Sextus stresses that even this criterion is far from univocal, since technical language imposes its own conventions, and language varies according to the social condition and geographical provenance of the speakers. Thus, the true ‘Hellenizer’ is one who speaks as a philosopher to philosophers and as a doctor to doctors, using barbarisms with servants and cultivated language with more sophisticated interlocutors (Against the Prof. I, 231–3). Sextus does not question the legitimacy of ordinary linguistic practice; instead he attacks the idea of reducing language to a theory. A sort of pragmatism goes

Language, thought, and reality

hand in hand with his theoretical skepticism. If the purpose of words is to communicate, linguistic criteria will be established through the spontaneous practice of ordinary language, while technical languages and jargons — each of them ‘ordinary’ in a given professional group or social class — will produce their own specific norms. When the foundational criterion of truth is questioned, one can resort to common sense as a repertoire of pragmatic truths of which ordinary language is the expression. A radical skepticism, instead, is directed against the very roots of language in Neoplatonic theology. Plotinus, a Greek-speaking philosopher active in Rome, makes only scattered observations on the philosophy of language in his Enneads. But where he does mention language, it is to stress the inadequacy of verbal thought. In the process of knowing, which reverses the emanation process by climbing upward from the many to the One, the mind is hindered by language, tied up by verbal thought to the realm of division, segmentation, and diversification. Compared to the undifferentiated unity of being, speech is the domain of plurality, temporality, and seriality, since “discursive thought, in order to express anything in words, has to consider one thing after another: this is the method of description” (Enneads V, iii, 17). Language is the way of that part of the soul that can only apprehend things through material images and conceive a thing only by abstracting some of its aspects. As spoken language, compared to internal language, is fragmented into words, so is the language of the soul fragmented when compared to the divine word (I, ii, 3). Language betrays the inadequacy of those who speak it; it is used when intelligence no longer suffices. The craftsman starts reflecting when he encounters a difficulty, being otherwise guided by his art; thus, it is need that makes us use words. As we understand at a glance the feelings of a silent friend, thus in the spiritual domain thought flows without mediations. Souls understand each other through purely intuitive acts: each soul “is like an eye, and nothing is hidden or feigned. But, before one speaks to another, that other has seen and understood” (IV, iii, 18). Notwithstanding the scarcity of specific references to language, a philosophy of language is indeed present in Plotinus’s work. It would be a mistake to underestimate it, especially in the light of the later developments of the theolinguistic tradition, which was strongly and variously influenced by it. The One is ineffable, for “whatever you say about it, you will be always being speaking of a ‘something’, and He is merely ‘One’ and no ‘something’ is mingled in Him” (Enneads V, iii, 13). A tradition dating back to Plato’s Timaeus proclaimed the impossibility of theological language. Even assuming that one can know God,

33

34

A History of Language Philosophies

it is impossible to speak of Him, except in negative form, saying what He is not. “We speak about it, but we do not speak it. For we say what it is not, but we do not say what it is”. The madness of “those who have a God within them and are in the grip of divine possession” (V, iii, 14): this is the condition for speaking of God in ‘negative’ theology. Language is thus severed from Being. This separation is sanctioned in the first three treatises of the 6th Ennead, where the genera of Being, i.e., the categories, are reduced to the role of accidental units, mere denominations extrinsic to things. Plotinus denies that the same categories are applicable to the objects of the senses and intelligence, thus rejecting Aristotle’s theory of genera and categories as forms immanent to sensibilia as well as the instruments of their intelligibility, which can be adequately expressed in speech. The celebration of silence is another aspect of this severance of language from Being. Traces of it are found throughout the religious tradition of the West, both Christian and non-Christian. Augustine, in his Confessions (X/10, 25), says the disappearance of all signs is the precondition for accessing God. If the tumult of the flesh fell silent […], and silent too were the phantasms of earth, sea and air, silent the heavens, and the very soul silent to itself […], if dreams and revelations […] were silent, if every tongue and every sign […] were wholly stilled […] for they have pricked the listening ear to him who made them, and He alone were to speak, not through things that are made […], not through fleshly tongue nor angel’s voice, nor thundercloud, nor any riddling parable […]

In a lesser known text, a few centuries earlier, Philo, a Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher living in Alexandria, had voiced the same notion in a even more dramatic form. In one of his Bible commentaries, a text on drunkenness (De ebrietate, 70–71), Philo praises priesthood as an extreme condition: to prepare for it — he says — one must kill his brother, his neighbor, and his nearest relative; these are, respectively, one’s body, sensations, and language: We shall kill our ‘brother’ […] the body […]. We shall kill, too, our ‘neighbour’ […], the troop and company of the senses […]. Again we shall kill our ‘nearest’; and nearest to the understanding is the uttered word […]. Why, then should we not at once take vengeance on him too, sophist and miscreant that he is, by sentencing him to the death that befits him — that is silence, for silence is the death of speech?

The idea of language as a close relative of the body recurs throughout the Neoplatonic tradition. ‘If souls were naked like bodies, they would turn to

Language, thought, and reality

naked notions. But being locked in bodies, they cannot reciprocally convey their thoughts except through words’, writes Philoponus, a disciple of Neoplatonist Ammonius (Hoffmann 1987: 83–84). According to Simplicius, a 5thcentury Greek philosopher, language is a provisional area situated between the original identity, which has no need for words, and the return to Being, where words cease to be. Language disappears in what Simplicius’s master, Damascius, called the inaccessible sanctuary of silence (ibid.). It should be clear why I have placed in this section a skeptic like Sextus Empiricus alongside a theologian like Plotinus. Their theories are opposite poles of the critique of language. Sextus stresses the reluctance of speech to be reduced to norm, but continues to consider it as a valuable currency in social exchanges. The divorce between language and being does not occur within ancient Skepticism, but in Neoplatonist theology. Only a vague analogy connects the world of sensibilia to that of intelligibilia (Plotinus, Enneads VI, iii, 1). It is a mere homonymy: the intelligible and the sensible substance have only a name in common (VI, i, 1). The two domains require two different approaches. Verbal thought, modeled on the flow of time and the plurality of objects, remains incommensurable to the indivisible unity of Being.

2.6 Signs and signs of signs What is the use of speaking? This is the opening question of De Magistro, the first great work written by Augustine after his conversion to Christianity (A.D. 387). It is addressed to his son Adeodatus, his interlocutor in the dialogue. The thread of the argument is evident from the start. Language serves to communicate and to bring to mind notions that originate elsewhere (direct observation, internal illumination). It has no cognitive power. Language is what we use when we “give an outward sign of what [we] want”. Not by singing, therefore, where rhythm is essential, but words are not; not by prayer, which can be uttered by the faithful in the sanctuary of his soul, or by the priest “not so that God may hear, but in order that men may hear” (De Mag. I, 2). Here a central theme of Augustine’s thought is introduced: the notion of inner speech. When we think words without uttering sounds, we are always speaking internally in our souls. In inner speech, too, words have only a memorizing function. They are associated with the memory of the things of which they are the signs (I, 1–2). “Si nihil ex tanta superis placet urbe relinqui” (If nothing of so great a city the gods wish to spare) is, in Latin, a verse of eight words or signs. Tell me what

35

36

A History of Language Philosophies

the individual words signify, is Augustine’s challenge. The analysis goes no further than the third word, and Adeodatus finds himself mired in a series of semantic enigmas. What is the ‘thing’ signified by the word si (if)? It is at most a state of mind, a doubt. Nihil (nothing) suggests perhaps an affection of the soul when it discovers the absence of a thing; ex (of) is a synonym of de and indicates the separation from something. But in this way we have explained “words by words, that is, signs by signs, and what is familiar by what is equally familiar” (De Mag. II, 3). It is also useless to try to point out objects: this can be done only for names, and only for names of things that are material and in our presence, and even in this case, only in relation to their visible qualities. Furthermore, a pointing finger is a sign, and it is “more of a sign of what indicating is itself than it is of any of the things being indicated”, as is the use of the adverb ecce (look!) (X, 34). Not even the language of the deaf-and-dumb or of mimes can escape the vicious circle that leads from words to words, from signs to signs, since movements and gestures are also signs (III, 5–6). In the following paragraphs, Augustine presents a series of metalinguistic observations in support of the above theory. There are cases in which a sign denotes a class that includes the sign itself: ‘word’ is a word and therefore signifies itself along with all other words (IV, 10). In the sentence “utrum homo sit homo”, the word homo (man) can be considered from the viewpoint of the sign (the word man) or from the viewpoint of the thing it means (a man
: VIII, 24). All words that can be used as subjects in propositions are nouns. Thus, in the sentence “non erat in Christo est et non, sed est in illo erat”, the verb (est) is a noun (V, 12–14). Yet, notes Augustine, we can ask what is the name of something, but not what is the word of something (VII, 20). Thus word and name are not one and the same thing. This digression is capped by a final image that summarizes Augustine’s thesis that the semantic universe consists in a continuous referring of signs to other signs. To treat words with words is like “scratching one’s fingers, where it is almost impossible to tell, except for the person doing it, which fingers are itching and which are relieving the itch” (V, 14). The conclusion is that “the realities signified are to be valued more highly than their signs” (IX, 25). Nothing can be taught but through signs, yet nothing can be known exclusively through signs. I know how the fowler’s equipment works only if I have seen him use it, and I recognize a word in a text only if I know its meaning. “It is rather a question of learning the sense of the word, that is, the meaning hidden in the sound, from a previous knowledge of the reality signified, than it is of perceiving that reality from a sign” (X, 34). Words do not place things before our eyes, senses, or mind. At the most they stimulate us to

Language, thought, and reality

search for things. In order to know things “it is not the outward sound of the speaker’s words that we consult, but the truth which presides over the mind itself from within, though we may have been let to consult it because of the words” (XI, 38). The arts of language are dealt with in another of Augustine’s works, De Doctrina christiana, a treatise of biblical hermeneutics, written in a didactic and systematic style, quite remote from the paradoxical tone of De Magistro. Reconciling the great classical tradition with the new requirements of Christian preaching was a problem of which we find many traces in the writings of the Church Fathers. A contemporary of Augustine, Ambrose, bishop of Milan, poses it dramatically when he asks what, after all, do Horace and the Psalter, Virgil and the Gospel, Cicero and Paul the Apostle have in common; how can one reconcile fasting with the reading of Cicero, the reading of Plautus with tears of contrition. Ambrose dreams of finding himself before the supreme Judge, who declares: “Thou dost lie — thou are not a Christian, but a Ciceronian. Where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also” (Murphy 1974: 53). Augustine was to become an example of eloquence based on the primacy of truth over the word, and a model of sacred rhetoric for the following centuries. His theory of expression called into question once again the power of signs and their relation to things. He provided a number of definitions that were to become canonical in Western philosophy. Among these is the definition of sign as “a thing, which besides the impression it conveys to the senses, also has the effect of making something else come to the mind” (De Doctr. chr., II, 1). He distinguishes between natural signs (signa naturalia
: smoke ‘signifies’ fire; tracks, the passing of an animal; facial expression, the mood of a person) and conventional signs (signa data), whose purpose is communication (II, 2–3). Divine signs, too, are signa data because they are expressed in the human language of sacred writers. Among signs, words are not only the most numerous and important for human communication, but also the only ones capable of denoting other signs. Of all others kinds of signs “I have been able to give an account in words, while in no way at all could I give an account of words with these other kinds of signs” (II, 4). Words transform objects (water, bread, wine) into Sacraments, turning them into symbols or visible verba. The primacy of the word in the semantic universe does not eliminate the dependence of voiced speech on mental speech. This is confirmed in Augustine’s treatise De Trinitate. When we speak, every movement of the body, every gesture or word, is anticipated by “a word uttered inside ourselves” (De Trin., IX, 12), a locutio cordis in which material representations are interpreted in the

37



38

A History of Language Philosophies

light of pure intelligence that is neither Greek nor Latin (XV, 18–19). This inner word retains acquired notions, but — more important — also contains inner notions derived from God. The inner language — the human word, in which we can see the Word of God as “through a glass” (XV, 20) — incarnates in the voice, but also in the material images that accompany our thought when we silently think the words of any language or recite poems and rhythms and melodies without speaking. The inner word is as natural as the expressed word is institutional, as immediate as the latter is contrived and unsatisfactory; it is “a word before any sound, before any thought of sound” (XV, 21). Thought is as quick as lightning. While speech is taking place, thought has already hidden in its recesses (De Cat. Rud. II, 3). On the other hand, thought leaves its traces in memory, which last as long as the syllables that are uttered. These traces form auditory signs of what we call Latin, or Greek, or Hebrew, or any other language, which can be uttered or even simply thought. But those traces are neither Latin, nor Greek, nor Hebrew, nor do they belong to any other language; they are produced within the soul somewhat as facial expressions are produced within the body. ‘Anger’ can be said in one way in Latin, in another in Greek, and so on for all the different languages. But an angry face is neither Latin nor Greek. The voice cannot express with the same efficacy and clarity of a face the traces that the intellect impresses on memory. From which one understands “how far must the sound of our lips be from the lightning of the mind, if it does not even resemble the trace of memory” (ibid.)

Suggestions for further reading Philosophy, semantics and the theory of signs
: Baratin & Desbordes 1981; Baratin & Desbordes, eds. 1982; Manetti, ed. 1988; Manetti 1993; Manetti, ed. 1996; Sluiter 1997. Grammar
: Lallot, ed. 1985; Sluiter 1990; Taylor 1996; Lallot, ed. 2000. Plato
: Sluiter 1997; Joseph 2000; Barney 2001; Sedley 2003. Aristotle
: Arens 1984; Modrak 2000; de Rijk 2002; Charles 2003. Stoics
: Baratin 1982; Egli 1986; Schenkeveld & Barnes 1999. Epicurus and the Epicureans
: Asmis 1996. Sceptics
: Desbordes 1982; Spinelli 1991; Glidden 1994; Marcondes 1999. Augustine
: Baratin & Desbordes 1982; Arens 1990; Munteanu 1999.



Chapter 3

A natural history of speech

3.1 Problems in naturalism In this chapter, we shall cover the same historical ground of the previous one, but from a different angle. Hitherto, we have considered language as a procedure for conceptually elaborating, syntactically organizing and communicating thoughts. We shall now consider speech as an intrinsic aspect of the phylo- and ontogenetic history of humankind, a system in which instinct (nature) and learning (nurture) play an equally crucial role. We shall not focus on language in general as much as on the way it manifests itself in the plurality of languages. At the beginning of Chapter 2, I referred to one of the founding texts of the Western philosophical tradition, Plato’s Cratylus, in order to define the alternative between naturalism and conventionalism. In this chapter, instead, I will start off from a few lines of Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus, found in Diogenes Laertius, to lay out the terms of a different question: whether and to what degree language is connatural to humankind or acquired through the humanization of the species. In the course of the chapter, I shall refer to different meanings of the term ‘naturalism’ in relation to language. The first is the one already used in Chapter 2, naturalism as Cratylism, i.e., belief in a natural correspondence between words and things. This meaning resurfaces repeatedly in the history of linguistic theories: in the speculations on the Adamitic language, in the use of etymologies, in the theolinguistic tradition known by the German term of Logosmystik (see 5.2 below). It is present in every theological vision of human origins, where words are always the objects of revelation, and therefore the congruity or even the specularity of names and things is a given. One should note, however, that even in this case the alternative between nature and convention is never expressed in radical terms: naturalists and conventionalists all agree, as in Cratylus, on the fact that language is an institutional product. The disagreement is on the extent to which names correspond to or, conversely, are independent of the things they name.

40

A History of Language Philosophies

A second meaning of naturalism is the belief that language develops as an artifact from human skills and social intercourse. Its syntactic structures are gradually built up as men ‘discover’ the parts of speech and their possible connections. It is learned by imitation and usage. This model is generally opposed to the theological one. However, the latter is also ‘naturalistic’ in a way: human skills are conceived as God’s gifts, and the correspondence of words and things is a natural one, i.e., founded in divine revelation. Finally, a third meaning of naturalism, the most common nowadays, is the belief in the decisive importance of phylogenetic and biological factors (a specific ‘language instinct’) in the learning and use of natural languages (see 8.1 below). The choice between nature and convention, instinct and learning, was never a real dilemma. For polemical purposes, philosophers would often represent the opposing positions in an extreme or even paradoxical form (we have seen some good examples of this tactic in Socrates’s arguments). But language is never treated as an acquired mechanism completely independent of any natural predisposition. Nor, on the other hand, is it treated as something biologically innate to the point that the actual learning of this or that language has little or no bearing on its functioning. Even the radical opposition between an empiricist approach (the mind is originally a tabula rasa, speech is learned by experience) and the rationalist one (speech develops spontaneously as a natural endowment of man) is largely a stereotype. A philosophical theory of language has to keep the two aspects of the problem together. In other words, it must explain semantic arbitrariness without denying the universality of the mechanisms governing the logic of language, describe the multiplicity of languages without denying the unity of language, distinguish between the accidental aspects of learning and the results of linguistic instinct. In short, it has to keep history and nature together. This approach is clearly exemplified by Epicurus in his Letter to Herodotus: …we must suppose that nature […] has been taught and forced to learn many various lessons by the facts themselves, that reason subsequently develops what it has thus received and makes fresh discoveries, among some tribes more quickly, among others more slowly, the progress thus made being at certain times and seasons greater, at other less. Hence even the names of things were not originally due to convention, but in the several tribes under the impulse of special feelings and special presentations of sense primitive men uttered special cries. The air thus emitted was molded by their individual feelings or sensepresentations, and differently according to the difference of the regions which the tribes inhabited. Subsequently whole tribes adopted their own special

A natural history of speech

names, in order that their communications might be less ambiguous to each other and more briefly expressed. And as for things not visible, so far as those who were conscious of them tried to introduce any such notion, they put in circulation certain names for them, either sounds which they were instinctively compelled to utter or which they selected by reason or analogy according to the most general cause there can be for expressing oneself in such way. (Epicurus to Herodotus, in Diogenes Laertius X, 75–76)

Different and concurring explanatory principles are mentioned here in the space of a few lines: the urge of linguistic instinct is balanced by the liberty of invention; reason and analogy govern the sounds of passion and make them into a common language, while random or willful innovation generates the variety of idioms. In the following centuries, these ingredients were variously re-elaborated and mixed together in varying proportions to produce a series of anthropological and linguistic theories. Lucretius’s poem De rerum natura contributed to the circulation of Epicurus’s glottogenetic model. An Epicurean of the 2nd century A.D. called Diogenes of Oenoanda (HP 1987: I, 101; II, 98) ridiculed the idea that the origin of language could be attributed to a god, but was equally ironical towards those philosophers who believe it was created deliberately, as if some self-appointed schoolmaster had seized a pointer and begun to touch one thing after the other saying: This is called rock, this is called stick, this is called man, this is called dog. We cannot know for sure which philosophers he was referring to. Certainly, the ‘contractual’ thesis derided by Diogenes is attested among Aristotle’s 5th-century commentators, if not elsewhere (Hoffmann 1987: 79–81). They even go as far as postulating a double instituting act: first the designation of objects and then the division of the parts of speech in names and verbs. Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus gave rise to a naturalist paradigm that has often been charged with having omitted any explanation of the transition from private to public language. In fact, however, there was no transition to explain; any separation between the two phases — private individual invention and the social use of signs in communication — is excluded from the start, not only by Epicurus (Brunschwig 1977), but by the whole naturalist tradition. Invention is set off by universal mental mechanisms. Since the stimuli of the environment for each community of speakers are largely the same, the linguistic responses within the community are similarly uniform. Thus, the private language phase never takes place; from the outset natural signs enjoy the same degree of consensus that characterizes actual languages. Words are never, not even in their ‘natural’ phase, the expression of purely subjective and private emotions.

41

42

A History of Language Philosophies

From the start they are geared towards a communicative function. Eight centuries after Epicurus, the question of the rise of language out of gesture, facial expression, and prosody expressing needs and desire, is dealt with in Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine remembers (or claims to remember) how he learned to talk: It was not that the older people taught me by offering me words by formal institution, as was the case soon afterwards with reading. No, I taught myself, using the mind you gave me, O my God, because I was unable to express the thought of my heart by cries and inarticulate sounds and gestures in such a way as to gain what I wanted or make my entire meaning clear to every one as I wished; so I grasped at words with my memory; when people called an object by some name, and while saying the word pointed to that thing, I watched and remembered that they used that sound when they wanted to indicate that thing. Their intention was clear, for they used bodily gestures, those natural words which are common to all races, such as facial expressions or glances of the eyes or movements of other parts of the body, or a tone of voice that suggested some particular attitude to things they sought and wished to hold on to, or rejected and shunned altogether. In this way I gradually built up a collection of words, observing them as they were used in their proper places in different sentences, and hearing them frequently I came to understand which things they signified, and by schooling my own mouth to utter them I declared my wishes by using the same signs. Thus I learned to express my needs to the people among whom I lived, and they made their wishes known to me; and I waded deeper into the stormy world of human life. (Augustinus, Conf., I, 8)

This passage has enjoyed a certain circulation because Wittgenstein cites it as an example of a referential theory of meaning. But Augustine’s description can better be read as a manifesto of a pragmatic theory of language learning, that sets out from the elementary expression of emotions and feelings and moves all the way up to the communicative complexity of vitae humanae procellosa societas, the stormy world of human life. In De Trinitate, Augustine takes the naturalist paradigm from the classic tradition but reformulates it in two important ways. First, he argues that in order to ask oneself the meaning of a word, one must already have recognized it as a sign. This signals an important difference even in regards to the above cited passage of his Confessions, where observation and the natural mechanisms of inference are presented as the only requirements for the learning of language. In De Trinitate, learning and investigation of the meaning of words requires instead a sort of pre-knowledge, a ‘linguistic sense’. This is in fact a general rule; precognition, for Augustine, lies behind all theoretical and practical activities.

A natural history of speech

If we had not at least tentative notions of the various sciences, we would lack any reason for learning them. Thus, says Augustine, the person who, upon hearing a word he does not know, such as the obsolete word for wine, temetum, asks himself its meaning, must already know it is a sign and not a meaningless sound. The second innovation in Augustine’s naturalism is the introduction of an ethical motivation in language learning. We wonder about the meaning of words because we see language as foundational knowledge for the community of humankind, and we understand “what a great and good thing it would be to understand and speak all the languages of all peoples, and so to hear nobody as a foreigner, and to be heard by no one as such either” (De Trin. X, 2).

3.2 Etymological semantics An important aspect in naturalism is the theory of the motivation of names, the idea that their imposition cannot be entirely gratuitous, but must be governed by some ‘reason’ that ensures their congruity with things: the common nature of humans, according to the Epicurean tradition, or divine revelation according to Christian philosophy. In any case, it must be possible to reconstruct their origin. The Stoics, too, apparently agreed on this point, since they were attributed with a theory and practice of etymology. Nowadays ‘etymology’ means the reconstruction of the phonetic and morphological evolution of a word. But in ancient Greece the practice of etymology developed as a way to investigate the origin and congruity of words, and it remained for centuries a form of “ontological semantics” (Fresina 1990: 110). An imposing testimony to this use of etymology is found in books five to seven of Varro’s De lingua latina. A classic confutation is found instead in Sextus Empiricus’s Against the professors. As a theory of the origin and evolution of words, etymology was traditionally the first section of grammar, followed by morphology and syntax. The coexistence of the grammatical and ‘antiquarian’ aspects is a constant in classic etymology; the explanation of semantic change went along with the reconstruction of the original linguistic forms that time was supposed to have obscured. These two aspects were disjoined (and even in this case not always and not immediately) only with the rise of comparative linguistics in the 19th century. The search for the ‘true’ meaning of names gave rise to various explanations of semantic change. The meaning of words changes with the disappearance of their original iconic character, i.e., the power of the sound of words to evoke

43

44

A History of Language Philosophies

images related to their sensory origin. Meaning changes on account of semantic shifts and the proliferation of concepts signified by the word. It changes when metaphorical transpositions open new areas of signification. In any case, semantic change is dependent on the strategies used by the mind to comprehend the world. The reconstruction of the history of languages and speculation on their prehistory interweaves with another century-old theme, that of the origin of language. This theme exceeds the boundaries of linguistics in the direction of anthropology, philosophy of history, and theology. For example, the search for the root of a word, its etymon, was often used to support allegorical interpretation, as in explanations of the ‘true meaning’ of certain gods (Whitman 1987: 36–37). For etymology, as for grammar, the Stoics are a good starting point. Once again, as with grammar, we are faced with a lack of direct sources and forced to rely on the often hostile testimonies of later authors. Foremost amongst them (along with Sextus Empiricus) are Cicero and Augustine, auctores whose writings were for centuries part of the ideal library of any educated person in the Western world. In a text that most scholars now believe to be authentic, De dialectica (Chap. VI), Augustine criticizes the effort to reconstruct the origin of every word: a pointless exercise, like the interpretation of dreams. The Stoics, says Augustine, “assert that you must search until you arrive at some similarity of the sound of the word to the thing, as when we say ‘the clang of bronze’, ‘the whinnying of horses’, ‘the bleating of sheep’, ‘the blare of trumpets’, ‘the rattle of chains’…”. For things that have no sound they invoke synesthesia, the analogy with other senses according to which “words are perceived in the way the things themselves affect us”. Thus, lene (smoothly) itself has a smooth sound, asperitas (roughness) a rough one, voluptas is gentle to the ear … The Stoics think they arrive “at the cradle or root of words, or more precisely the seed of words”, wherefrom semantic innovation develops according to the laws of transposition: by similarity (the leg, crus, would take its name from cross, crux, because it resembles one of its pieces); by contiguity (the artificial pool, piscina, is so named because men swim in it like fishes, pisces…); opposition (war, bellum, is so named because it is not pretty, bellus, etc.). The principles invoked (onomatopoeia, metaphor, extension by similarity, contiguity, opposition) are part of a broad texture of analogies providing the basis for semantic innovation. The reconstruction of the various steps that gave rise to that texture are thought to lead to the discovery of some kind of original natural motivation, albeit a remote one, the sensory origin of the naming act.

A natural history of speech

In principle, motivation does not exclude conventionality. The naming of a thing requires an act of creative interpretation of the object or event that is to be named, and thus necessarily entails variety and arbitrariness. If I buy a slave, says Varro (De lingua lat. V, 21–22), I can name him as I wish. The scope of subjectivity is limited solely by morphology: whatever name I give to the slave, I shall decline this noun according to generally established norms. The principles of ancient etymology remained an important part of naturalism, along with biological metaphors already present in Varro’s notion of the enduring generative power of words: words are like trees with branches and roots; like human beings, words are related to one another by direct and collateral lines; the etymon and morphology are respectively the source and the river (De lingua lat., VIII, 3–5). These metaphors still abound even in modern comparative linguistics. Etymology was also practiced as an interpretative strategy in early Christian literature, in poems, homilies, apologies, in the Latin version of the Bible by Hieronymus, a contemporary of Augustine, and in his writings on ancient Jewish antiquities, on onomastics and toponymy (Amsler 1989: 84). Also in preChristian or non-Christian literature, sacred onomastics was considered as a tool of exegesis. In the Old Testament, we find the idea that a name expresses the essence of a person or thing, and that to change one’s name has a mystical meaning: it may signal a change in one’s lifestyle or nature. Philo of Alexandria devoted so much of his commentary on Genesis to this question, that it ended up being known as an independent work with the Latin title of De mutatione nominum, or the equivalent title in Greek. Etymology gradually became a codified heuristic tool: this is the case for example of Etymologiae, a great encyclopedic work by Isidore, bishop of Seville in the Visigothic kingdom of Spain (6th–7th century A.D.). It was used in morphological analysis, to study the way words derive from one another (for example, homo-humanitas). It was equally a tool for semantic analysis, the identification of the ‘cause’ of words (for example, in the case of flumen, river, the fact that it is formed by flowing, fluere). Knowing the genesis of a name means knowing its value (vis); not knowing names means not to possess things. The world of forms coincides with vocabulary. Jolivet (1987: 72) attributes to the influence of Isidore’s unwitting Cratylism the tendency towards the ‘grammatical Platonism’ of theologians such as Frédegis of Tours, Godescalc of Orbais, and, later, Thierry of Chartres. The correspondence between words and things is ensured by the fact that the forms or essences of things exist eternally and immutably in God’s mind, as exemplars for both the objects of the sensory

45

46

A History of Language Philosophies

world and linguistic signs. Isidore’s work handed down to posterity a number of principles of ‘sacred philology’ that were to circulate for a long time in European culture. Hebrew is the most sacred of all languages. All post-Babelic languages derive from this original mothertongue, just as all human races belong to the original community that was dispersed when God scattered the people. But Greek and Latin are also sacred, albeit to a lesser degree, because they derive directly from Hebrew (so it was thought), and hence are still quickened by the spirit of truth of the mothertongue. The letters of the three alphabets have a symbolic and mystical meaning of their own, even before being combined into words: the alfa and the omega indicate the beginning and the end, T stands for the Cross, Y for the choice between vice and virtue, and so on (Amsler 1989: 150–151). The merging of etymological criterion and symbolic significance is another important trait of sacred hermeneutics. Spring — explains Rabanus Maurus, a writer of the Carolingian period — is called ver in Latin because it is green, viridis
; and therefore it signifies baptism, resurrection from death, etc. (Whitman 1987: 132–133). Etymology is a heuristic practice that applies to all knowledge: the sciences of the word, but also sacred and profane history, music, geometry and astronomy, as well as cosmology, metallurgy, architecture, agriculture, and the arts used to create the most various artifacts (weapons, ships, tools). Etymology re-establishes the organic connection between the system of names and the system of nature. This is one of the great principles of Medieval encyclopedism. It enjoyed unquestioned fortune until the 12th century, when grammar began to be dominated by dialectics and the notion of derivation was restricted to its morphological acceptation. The “etymological suturing” (Amsler 1989: 250) between words and reality remains acceptable, however, in poetry, sacred hermeneutics, and mythography. We find it, in a more sophisticated form, under the guise of what has been called the “eponymic causality of Forms” (Libera 1996: 56–59). It is a theory indirectly derived from Plato’s Phaedo
: what constitutes the essence of a thing is its participation in a Form subsistent in itself. Thus, Forms are eponyms of things, the ‘causes’ of their names.

3.3 Communication: Animal and human Another central theme in the natural history of speech is the relationship between human and animal language. An outline of the question is found in the

A natural history of speech

texts in which Sextus Empiricus describes the Stoics’ semiotics (Against the Log. II, 141–299; Outlines of Pyrr. II, 97ff.), starting from their distinction between mnemonic signs, which allow us to infer things that are temporarily not evident (smoke, for example, can suggest fire when the latter is not visible), and indicative signs, by which we infer things that are permanently not evident (for example, the mind, which we know only through the acts of the bodies). The ability to infer not only from observable natural signs, but also from verbal ones is what distinguishes humans from animals. Indeed, articulated voice alone is not enough to define language; there must also be an ability to compose, associate, and dissociate impressions and representations, to go from one to the other. This is a specifically human endowment. Voiced speech is the epiphenomenon of an inner speech whose signs can syntactically be linked into sentences, to signify even absent things, including those that will never become materially available to perception and representation. According to Sextus’s account, for the Stoics humans do not differ from animals in respect to uttered reason, but in respect to their “conception of logical sequence”, thanks to which they immediately grasp the notion of sign; “for in fact the sign in itself is of this form: ‘If this, then this.’ Therefore the existence of sign follows from the nature and structure of man” (Against the Log. II, 275–276). Sextus agrees with the validity of mnemonic signs, which we all rely on in everyday life. But he rejects the idea that one can legitimately infer from indicative signs the existence of non-observable objects. On the other hand, he also comes very close to attributing animals with the same kind of homology between inner and outer speech that was generally considered a distinctive trait of the human mind. The capacity of a dog to adapt signs to circumstances is an element in favor of the homology theory (Outlines of Pyrr. I, 74–76). Sextus credits animals with inferential capabilities and an actual intraspecific language that humans do not understand, just as civilized people do not understand the language of Barbarians, which sounds to them like a hodgepodge of indistinct sounds. In contrast with the firmly negative positions of the Stoics, adopted by later grammarians, a number of authors beside Sextus argued in favor of animal language, at least in the sense of a system of signals adaptable to circumstances. No one, as far as I know, ever went so far as to attribute animals with a propositional mental language and an outer language endowed with a corresponding syntactic organization. No one, on the other hand, denied that animals have the ability to use signs and are endowed with some degree of semantic ability. What philosophers differ on is the actual extent of this capability.

47

48

A History of Language Philosophies

Tabarroni (1988) has shown how the various positions often depend on a different theoretical dislocation of notions such as articulation and meaning. According to Priscian, articulated voice is always meaningful in some way, because it expresses an act of the speaker’s mind (sensus mentis). But voice may be either literata or illiterata, that is, it may be analyzed (and written) in letters, or not. Therefore we have different combinations of the notions of articulation, transcription, and meaning: (i) articulated sounds that can be written and understood (human speech); (ii) articulated sounds that can be understood but not written (human expressions such as whistles or moans); (iii) non-articulated sounds that can be written but not understood (animal voices); (iv) nonarticulated sounds that cannot be written (mere noises). Tabarroni compares Priscian’s analysis to that of another more or less contemporary author, the Neoplatonist Ammonius. For Ammonius, an articulated voice is always analyzable into letters, but not necessarily signifying. From the different combinations of the pair ‘articulated (analyzable)/nonarticulated (non analyzable) voice’ with the pair ‘signifying/non-signifying voice’, articulation is singled out as the quality peculiar to human speech. Words are signifying sounds that can be written; the dog’s bark is a signifying voice that cannot be written. Thus Ammonius, while upholding the specificity of human speech (which alone is both signifying and articulated), attributes semantic capabilities to animals. This position is also found among Aristotle’s commentators, while among the grammarians, as among the Stoics, the semantic criterion prevails (Tabarroni 1988: 106–108). Ammonius also relates articulation to the institutional nature of human signs. The use of the articulated voice for semantic purposes marks the transition from natural signs to symbols which, according to a passage by Aristotle (see 2.3 above), transforms mere vocal sounds into names. Thus, what distinguishes human language from animal language is not, finally, the ability to signify, but the ability to signify through conventional signs. The question of animal rationality had divided the ancient Stoics from the philosophers of the Academy of Athens (the school founded by Plato in 387 B.C., which lasted till the 6th century A.D., when it was shut down by order of Emperor Justinian). Among the latter was Carneades, headmaster of the Academy around the middle of the 2nd century B.C. As far as we know, his teachings were exclusively oral, but his ‘animalist’ opinions are echoed by a significant number of authors, including Plutarch (Terian 1981: 49–50). The two opinions — animals have or do not have some kind of language — are contrasted in De animalibus, a treatise on animals by Philo of Alexandria.

A natural history of speech

The text can be divided into two parts (1981: 10–72 and 77–100), in which Philo’s nephew, Alexander, and Philo himself set forth in turn their positions. Alexander believes that the ethical principles governing the relations between men (particularly, the protection weaker subjects are entitled to) should be extended to animals. To support this opinion, he argues that animals possess both of the two types of reason found in humans, though in proportion to their nature. The first type, “located in the mind, is like a spring which issues from the sovereign part of the soul”, while the second, uttered reason, “is like a stream which, in the natural usage, courses over the lips and tongue and on to the sense of hearing” (De anim. 12). The existence of uttered reason is attested in animals by their use of hearing as a mediating function between perceptions and mind, and by their ability to learn signs. The presence of inner reason is attested, according to Alexander, by a great number of observations and by anecdotes taken from classical sources of natural history: the perfection with which the spider weaves the web, which no human weaver can hope to attain; the intelligence of bees, the foresight of the swallow, the adaptability of the monkey, the skill of circus animals, the astuteness of elephants, the collaboration of gregarious animals, animals’ ability to medicate their wounds and find antidotes, the domestic economy of many species, the inferential procedures adopted by hunting animals. It is attested by their virtues: sobriety in food and sex, courage, and the justice according to which certain animal communities are governed. All these are evidence that the seal of reason leaves its imprint on all beings: in some cases the imprint is light, difficult to discern and ill-defined, in other cases it is clearly evident. The difference is only one of quantity and degree. Philo, instead, begins his confutation with a clearly qualitative distinction between two types of speech: there is a diction “which results from the up and down movements of the tongue and terminates at the edges of the mouth”, and one “which stems from the sovereign part of the soul and, through the marvelous development of the vocal organ, makes sensible utterances” (De anim. 73). The former is mere articulation; the latter is meaningful articulation, which is found only in human language. Equally marked is Philo’s distinction between the technical powers of animals, exercised with the same spontaneity with which plants bear fruits, and the capabilities of humans, which are exercised deliberately. In Philo’s position (Terian 1981: 46–48), the Stoics’ belief in the lack of reason in animals combines with the anthropocentrism of Mosaic law as expressed in the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. Indeed, it is to Moses that Philo appeals in a text on the Confusion of Tongues (1949). According to a popular pagan story, says Philo, all the animals of the earth, waters, and

49

50

A History of Language Philosophies

skies originally spoke the same language, and out of this communality of languages supreme harmony was born. But Moses “brings his story nearer to reality and makes a distinction between reasoning and unreasoning creatures, so that the unity of language for which he vouches applies to men only” (De conf. linguarum, IV, 9). An ethical principle supports Alexander’s love of animals; an opposite ethical principle makes Philo say (these are the last words of his argument) that raising animals to the level of humans is a sacrilege, among the wickedest of deeds. A moral purpose is also at the root of Porphyry’s argument in favor of vegetarianism. A Greek-speaking Syrian living in Italy and a disciple of Plotinus, Porphyry argues, against the Stoics, that our relation with animals must also be governed by justice. It is true that justice applies only to the community of rational beings. But language itself indicates that animals too are endowed with reason. When the voice becomes a sign, it serves to express the feelings of the soul and can be institutionalized for communication purposes. The question is proving that this applies equally to animals. Porphyry uses arguments so similar to those of Philo and Sextus, that one is led to believe that all three were relying on some common lost source. He argues that each species has its own language, and therefore reason manifests itself equally in all, even when their language is incomprehensible to other species, in the same ways it happens between Barbarians and Greeks (De abst. III, iii, 3). For Porphyry, the idea of a unitary form of reason is not undermined by the difference between human languages (which can be reciprocally translated and can be learned) and animal languages (which cannot be translated or learned by other species). Indeed, he gives examples of ‘translation’ between animal and human languages, citing episodes in which humans and beasts have understood each other: this minimum degree of interspecies communication suffices for him to clinch his argument. A single form of reason is present in varying degrees in all beings, gods included (otherwise we would have to deny them reason, since they do not articulate words). The difference is only one of degree, since one and the same is the representation in the speaker’s mind and on his tongue (De abst. III, v, 2). From this debate on animal rationality, two paradigms emerge, which we will meet again, for example in 18th-century anthropology (see 5.7 below) or in the present debate on the mind-body problem (see 8.3 below). The first paradigm (represented by Alexander in Philo’s text and upheld by both Sextus Empiricus and Porphyry) posits a continuity between humans and other animals. Language is an instrument for knowing and interacting, more developed in humans, but common to all animals. The differences in language

A natural history of speech

complexity and underlying mental structures are purely quantitative. For centuries this position was integrated in the metaphor of the Great Chain of Being: the idea that all creatures have their place in an ascending series that goes from inanimate objects, to the various plant species, to animals, and, finally, to Man, and then, through the hierarchies of Angels, all the way to God. The differences in intelligence and language among the various species and between these and humans were seen as different steps in one and the same continuum. Beginning in the 19th century, a new notion of continuity emerged, and the various species were represented instead as different stages in natural evolution. The other paradigm (adopted by the Stoics and then by Philo) posits from the start a qualitative distinction between the human mind and the animal mind, and denies the existence of any continuity between various species or any common destiny among the subjects of evolution. Language is a genetic endowment belonging exclusively to humans and cannot be reduced to a general model of animal communication.

3.4 Communication: Human and divine The functions and effects of language, the practical and mental operations it uses, are not limited to the denomination and categorization processes described in Chapter 2 above. There are also non-cognitive functions, the study of which does not pertain to logic. However, the first great Rhetoric, which for centuries was a canonical repertoire of non-cognitive uses of language, was written by Aristotle, who, in his Organon, was at the same time laying down the foundations of Western logic and cognitive philosophy. According to one tradition, the codification of forensic rhetorical discourse had begun in the 5th century B.C. with the expropriation of lands in Sicily. But we know that in Athens trial speeches were written by professional ‘logographers’; this implied a previous existence of canons, albeit not codified. Besides the forensic and deliberative genres, an epideictic genre also arose, aimed at the expounding of arguments. In the form of elegies, panegyrics of cities or champions or divinities, epideictic practice continued to be a school exercise up to the second half of the 19th century, when rhetoric was finally excluded from school curricula all over Europe. Primarily aimed at preachers, the study of epideictic discourse was also used for centuries for the education of liberal arts professionals. The distinction of functions among genres is not always clear-cut. Epideictic discourse can also be used to create in people an inclination to act in a

51

52

A History of Language Philosophies

given way, a consensus, a sharing of social values, as suggested by the performances of the great Athenian orators Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Aeschines. Following the breaking up of rhetoric in the modern age, the forensic and deliberative genres were included in philosophy, while the epideictic genre was absorbed into the theory of literature. The Sophistic art of antilogy (the defense of opposite theses) had certainly been a great school of argumentative technique. Plato, who discussed it in various dialogues, distinguished Sophistic rhetoric, the art of illusion, from philosophical dialectics, which was aimed at demonstrating the truth. The opposition between rhetoric and dialectics remained for centuries a commonplace in the arts of speech. Aristotle gave systematic form to the discoveries of the rhetorical tradition, integrating them with a logic of argumentation, a theory of passions, and a stylistics. He describes rhetoric as the legitimate search for persuasive arguments allowed in given circumstances, and no longer as the art of persuasion at all cost. Thus, in Aristotle’s encyclopedia, rhetoric is not incompatible with dialectics. It adopts the technique of probative reasoning. It relies on enthymemes, i.e., syllogistic arguments that lead to probable but still disputable conclusions, unlike true syllogisms, whose conclusions cannot be confuted. In Roman culture, Cicero firmly established the primacy of rhetoric among human disciplines. Formal and orderly expression of thought is the main prerequisite for the practice of liberal arts, and the distinguishing trait of those who are well versed in them. Cicero emphasizes not only the informative function but also the pragmatic function associated with delivery. Schools of rhetoric flourished in Rome starting from the 2nd century B.C. A classification of different types of discourse was established (forensic, deliberative, and epideictic) and the canonical divisions of discourse were systematized (inventio, the search for arguments; dispositio, their order; elocutio, their actual utterance; memoria, mnemonics or the art of memory; actio, the art of using voice and gestures in delivery). Cicero’s works (De inventione oratoria, De oratore, Brutus, Orator, Topica), and the Rhetorica ad Herennium, long attributed to him, provided a systematization of the art that lasted for centuries and also served as a model for the art of writing. Rhetoric tended to merge with poetics and stylistics, a fusion which is at the origin of the very idea of literature. Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria described the education of the rhetor, from language learning, to grammar studies, to the study of the art through narrationes and declamationes, and prescribed the rules that are to govern the practice and ethics of the profession. The Dialogus de oratoribus, attributed to the

A natural history of speech

historian Tacitus, expressed the idea that the art of oratory is associated with political freedom, and declines under tyranny. In the humanistic tradition, his name remained associated to an ideal of concinnitas (conciseness of expression). The early Christian apologists used the principles of forensic oratory to defend Christianity and attack pagan beliefs. But the great new field that opened for rhetoric was that of catechesis and preaching, which used traditional codified techniques to express new contents. Late Antiquity was in many ways a very important period for the theories of language. In the philosophical and religious syncretism of the period lie the roots of an entire mysteriosophic and mystical tradition in language philosophy (see 2.5; 3.2 above; 3.4, 4.1, and 5.2 below). At the same time, the Old Testament inspired literature and fueled the imagery of believers. The creative power of divine acts, the figure of Adam as the giver of names, the Babelic confusion of tongues, all these became commonplaces. The same happened for some of the notions of the New Testament: the idea of a creating Logos, the identification of the Word with the second person of the Trinity, etc. The reading of the sacred texts gave rise to debates on the use of philological instruments, translation problems, and the limits of interpretation. “God the Creator named the things created so that each thing could be known through its name. Nothing was without a name, and no name was imposed to a non-existing thing”. This is how Frédegis of Tours (De nihilo, 284–285), around the year 800, explained why the Bible had to be read literally. For others instead interpretation was made necessary by the diversity of languages and their human origin. The theory and practice of allegory and the study of tropes gave rise to the study of semantic ambiguity, the respective limits of eloquence and knowledge, and the compatibility between metaphorical expressions and logical consistency. The writings of the Greek and Latin Church Fathers, starting with Origen, were a true mine of metalinguistic observations, founding an actual ‘exegetical grammar’ (see Amsler 1989:57–132). The debate on the symbolical nature of the sacraments generated a sort of sacred semiotics. Liturgy expanded the horizons of linguistic descriptions. Sacred music, for example, was first conceived as pronuntiatio significativa, mere ‘sung language’, subject to the same techniques of grammatical description as common speech. Later, starting from the 9th century, the analogy of the musical sound to the letter, the basic element of written speech, gave way to the analogy with arithmetical units and a quantitative description of music that is still at the root of modern musical theory (Duchez 1981). Most of these themes found their way into Augustine’s writings, which may be read as a summa of Christian pedagogy. The linguistic knowledge of antiquity had

53

54

A History of Language Philosophies

been selected, re-elaborated, and integrated into the Christian encyclopedia. Among the organizing principles of linguistic culture was the idea of the monogenesis of languages, all of them being related to a single ancestral language. This opinion was reinforced by the Biblical account of Adam’s naming things. But it must have circulated in the classic world as well, given that the Greek historian Herodotus tells the legend of Psammetichus, king of Egypt, who had a child raised in isolation in order to ascertain the natural language of humans. Another dominant notion is that of the divine origin of language, borne out by Scripture. One of the rare contrasting opinions, that of Gregory of Nyssa, in the 4th century, ended up by being handed down as ‘Epicurean’, i.e., materialistic, although the author was counted among the leading theologians of his time. Between the 5th and 6th century, the educational curriculum began to take the form it was to maintain throughout the Middle-Ages: the arts of speech (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics) were gathered into the trivium, which was followed by the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music). The culture of the liberal arts was codified between the 5th and 7th century in encyclopedic works by authors such as Martianus Capella, Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore of Seville, and adapted for teaching in schools set up in monasteries and cathedrals. The need to transmit the contents of those works to a public whose native tongue was no longer Latin probably explains the massive production of grammatical studies and the fact that linguistic annotations were disseminated also within the commentaries to the Scriptures. Grammar and dialectics became functional to the study of theology, and considerations on the meaning and power of names became an important part of the theurgy, i.e., the art (or science) of communicating with God. Let us now consider this last aspect, with the help of a few texts dating from the beginning of the 4th to the end of the 5th century. Starting from the 14th century, these texts were held to be exemplary works representative of a secret wisdom of the ancients, and as such had an influence on the mystical trends in language philosophy. The work known with the Latin title of De mysteriis Egyptiorum, attributed to the Greek-speaking philosopher Iamblichus, is a classic text of the anti-speculative currents of Neoplatonism, which were marked by the belief that divinity could be accessed only by performing “ineffable works […] surpassing all intelligence”, whose efficacy does not depend on the officiant but on the intrinsic power of symbols. Signs “perform by themselves their proper work […], the things which properly excite the divine will [are] divine signs themselves”. The theurgic union is enacted



A natural history of speech

through arcane signs and inexplicable symbols, through the names of gods, from which all logical explanations must be eliminated (De myst. II, xi, 96–97; VII, iv, 254–256). Proclus, in his Theologia platonica (I, 29), organized names on a scale of imitation increasingly remote from God-given names. Only the names closest to the source are credited with the full efficacy of theurgic symbols. Iamblichus considers such mystical words as the inheritance left by sacred nations, such as Assyrians and Egyptians. Translated into a different language, they lose all their power (De myst. VII, v, 257). Iamblichus is one of the apologists of paganism. But the theory of divine names is transversal, being attested also in a classic of Christian mysticism, the body of writings falsely attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, disciple of Saint Paul, datable in reality to the end of 5th century. In one of these writings, the treatise on Divine Names (I, 1 588B), God is called the Anonymous par excellence, because his being infinitely transcends any human power of naming and knowing. He has many names, however, because he can be assigned infinite attributes (ibid., I, 7, 596C). But God’s names are all purely symbolical, since the qualities that can be attributed to him apply in fact to his creatures and only metaphorically to him, who remains unknowable. The supreme Being, inaccessible to language, manifests himself however in linguistic form in the Holy Scriptures. This ambivalence of words, which veil and at the same time unveil Being, remained at length a commonplace in the critique of language, even when the theological origin of the notion was lost. The image of the Anonymous of many names certainly contributed to the merging of language philosophy and mystic theology, whose roots we have already seen in Plotinus (see 2.5 above), and which became an important feature of Medieval philosophy. Words are a help to the senses, but the senses do not participate in the act through which the soul captures the divine essence. Negative theology begets a ‘negative linguistics’ (Amsler 1989: 232).

Suggestions for further reading Theory of voice
: Wollock 1997, Chaps. I–IV. Animal language
: Tabarroni 1988; Labarrière 1997. Rhetorics
: Desbordes 1986; Wardy 1998; Porter 2001; Murphy, ed. 2003. Philosophy of language in Late antiquity and Early Middle-ages
: Mortley 1986; Amsler 1989. Isidore of Sevilla and the method of etymology
: Schweickard 1985.

55



Chapter 4

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

4.1 The semantics of the unsayable In Late Antiquity, language sciences, like all partitions of learning, were reelaborated in order to fit them into the encyclopedia of sciences of institutionalized Christianity. I have already mentioned hermeneutics (see 3.4 above) as one of the disciplines where the expressive power of words and the effects of polysemy were first tested. Textual analysis was first applied to the Scriptures, an open work par excellence. The literal sense was viewed as a shell containing the spiritual sense, which imparts moral teachings or conveys religious truths and the hope of salvation. “Sacrae Scripturae interpretatio infinita est”, wrote John Scotus Erigena (Periphyseon II, 560A), the great mediator of Neoplatonic doctrines in Carolingian culture. The sense of the divine word is manifold, “just as in one and the same feather of a peacock and even in a single small portion of the feather, we see a marvellously beautiful variety of innumerable colours” (ibid., IV, 749C). Infinite like their Author, the Scriptures make cumulative interpretations possible: new readings do not erase the preceding ones (III, 690B). But infinite interpretation carries a risk of subjective distortion, of misinterpretation, and of heresy. Thus, there are recurrent references to the limits of interpretation, culminating in the admonishment by Thomas Aquinas, the great systematic theologian of the 13th century, who warns never to lose sight of the primacy of the literal meaning. Secular hermeneutics also encounters textual polysemy. When applied to the texts of classic literature and philosophy, it adapts the myths and figures of ancient culture to Christian symbology. Christians communicate with God. They read His words in the Scriptures, they perceive His symbols when contemplating natural forms. They speak of God in exegetic discourse and with God in prayer and rituals. Yet, speaking of God entails an intrinsic contradiction. Verbal procedures necessarily focus on specific attributes of the object at the expense of others. But the divine essence is an undivided unity, which cannot be dismembered into a plurality of propositions.

58

A History of Language Philosophies

Many discussions on language would be incomprehensible, if the importance of these problems were underestimated. What happens to language when it is used to signify divine things? What happens to temporal modalities when applied to the Eternal? The answer had been offered many centuries earlier by a pagan philosopher, Plotinus, who explained that categories applying to the empirical sphere are different from those applying to the meta-empirical sphere (see 2.5 above). Augustine (De Trin. V, 8) also noted that categories of time and space apply to God only metaphorically. Boethius, in a short tract also entitled De Trinitate (IV, 8–10), so described the mutation of categories. “When categories are used to predicate them of God, what can be predicated changes utterly”. In Him substance and attributes are one and the same thing, quality and quantity designate a sole substance, which includes, for example, justice and greatness. The category of space is different if we say ‘the man is in the square’ or ‘God is everywhere’: in the first case we provide information on the man, but we say nothing of his essence; in the second case we do not provide any information on God, but we say that all places are present at once in his essence. The category of time is different if one says that a man ‘came yesterday’ or that God ‘is always’; “our ‘now’, by fleeing, forms time and sempiternity, while the divine ‘now’, still, stable, and constant, constitutes eternity” (De Trin., IV, 68–70). In his Periphyseon (III, 708 C–D) John Scotus Erigena notes how time combines with language in tenses which are incongruous when we have to speak of a-temporal acts such as Creation. Time penetrates discourse, for “every science which in the mind of the wise man is formed as a whole can be communicated to the ears of his hearers only by being divided into parts and ordered in words and syllables and sentences which follow one another in temporal succession”. The theme of the application of categories — such as quantity, quality, relation etc. — to theological discourse became a locus classicus. God is not subject to quantity, yet we can say that He is great; He is not subject to quality, yet sublime virtues can be attributed to Him; He does not depend on any relations with other things, yet He is Father in relation to the Son. Theological language is the domain of metaphor, it applies words and notions to God that properly pertain only to the creature (Periphyseon, 458C). The notion of metaphor — the semantic slippage that occurs in any discourse on God — was “at the crossroads of the arts of language and theology” (Rosier 1997: 155). In the ‘theolinguistics’ of the 12th and 13th centuries, semantic procedures were described by authors such as Abelard, Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, Alain of Lille, Gilbert of Poitiers, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas.

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

The ‘regulae’ of theological language were inferred through contrastive analysis: the parts of speech were examined one by one to see how they functioned on the sacred page and in ordinary language (see especially Alain of Lille, Regulae XXII–XLV). From the texts of Pseudo-Dionysius (fl. 500) up to the sentences of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, an actual grammaire raisonnée of theological language developed. Like all other doctrinal questions, also sacred grammar can be found in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. Only by analogy can we apply to God verbs, participles, and pronouns that imply time, space, and relation. Through deictic expressions (i.e., expressions understandable only on the basis of their extra-linguistic context, such as this) we designate Him as an object of intelligence, never as an object of the senses. When we name things, we implicitly define them. But this does not hold for God, who can only be named by analogy with the qualities of His creatures (Summa theol. I, 13, 5). Analogy remained at the center of debates on the nature of theological language well beyond the Middle Ages. It has been discussed even in the 20th century, by theologians such as Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. An entire tradition of studies sprang from Thomas Aquinas’s texts. The analysis of theological discourse, the distinction between various types of analogy, and the discussion of related themes fostered the study of linguistic techniques at large: univocality and equivocality; metonymy, and synecdoche, which play on relations of cause and effect, contiguity, part and the whole, on the shift between genus and species; metaphor, which establishes proportions; catachresis, which makes up for the poverty of vocabulary by extending names to things that lack one. Theological questions such as the modus essendi of God, the unity-distinction of the Persons of the Trinity, the mutation of substance in the Eucharist and Incarnation, all posed challenges also for grammatical norms. Alain of Lille effectively described the subversive nature of theological discourse, where words lose their usual meaning, adjectives are made into nouns, predicates express mere identity (God is), the subject is immaterial, what is affirmed is always improper, and what is negated is true (see Valente 1995: 40–44; Rosier 1995: 141–142). Semantic and grammatical analysis help to explain formulas that would otherwise be outrageous to reason. ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness’: the plural expressions (‘let us’) here refers to the three Persons, but the singular name (‘image’) indicates their unity. ‘Vobis deo’
: here the simultaneous use of plural (vobis, ‘to you’) and singular (Deo, ‘to God’) follows the rules of ‘true’ grammar, which are different from those of common grammar. These examples are found in the writings of Godescalc of Orbais, grammarian

59

60

A History of Language Philosophies

and theologian of the Carolingian period. Jolivet, who was among the first to draw the attention of scholars to the connections between grammar and theology, notes that these analyses turn both on the meaning of words and the circumstances in which they are used, and perceives this as ‘a passage from the abstraction of single terms to their syntactical role as indicated by morphology’ (Jolivet 1958: 48). Another tool for resolving linguistic incongruities is the study of the modes of signifying (see 4. 4 below). The parts of speech and their inflections are ways to express different points of view on things: thus the feminine deitas, which as such is not suited to God, suits our (‘feminine’) representation of God as He who listens to us (Rosier 1995: 40). Finally, another important aspect of the intersection of theology and the language sciences, brought to light in various studies by Rosier, is the theory of the sacraments, which borders at times on a ‘sacred pragmatics.’ The specific purpose of sacramental signs is not to express meanings but to produce effects. This function is then subject to a sophisticated grammatical analysis, touching on the problems of translation, including properties such as synonymy, redundancy, and deixis; things such as lapsus and the intentions of the officiant. I shall summarize the question through one of Rosier’s essays (1990). In the first place, if the sacrament is one, how can this be reconciled with the diversity of languages? Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, in line with the grammatical tradition, appeal to the common deep structure of languages (the same that makes it possible to translate not only between scriptural languages, but also from the latter into vernaculars). If the surface structure is irrelevant, then we may vary sacramental formulas, using, for example, synonyms. But usage engenders stability (Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure); any possible deviation must be evaluated on the basis of the intentions of the officiant (Thomas Aquinas, Kilwardby, Roger Bacon). As for redundancy, it has a semantic function. In the Latin formula ‘Ego te baptizo’, for example, the grammatically redundant subject ego serves to underline the taking on of the role by the officiant. As for deictics, the question is what they refer to. For example: does hoc (this) in the Eucharistic formula hoc est corpus meum (this is my body) designate the bread before or after the formula has been entirely voiced? Questions such as these gave rise to a complex sacramental casuistry but also encouraged discussion on themes that were absent or marginal in the grammar of the schools. Thus, in the 13th century, the era of speculative grammar (see 4.4 below), which was concerned above all with general principles for the construction of sentences, grammatical analysis occasionally focused on subjects such as the context of the speech act or the intention of the speaker,

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

which traditionally pertained to the rhetorical tradition. The focus on the effort required to express theological contents through ordinary language and its logic encouraged the exploration of everyday mechanisms of speech and their organization.

4.2 The semantics of names One of the most evident testimonies of the continuity between the Latin Middle-Ages and its classic sourses is the reception history of Aristotle’s logical works. The editing of the Organon is an extraordinary saga stretching out over a number of centuries, from the first systematization of the Aristotelian corpus by Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century B.C.), up to the early printed editions in the last two decades of the 15th century in Italy (Isaac 1953; Arens 1984). Parts of the Organon were translated into all the learned languages of the time: Latin, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, and annotated in numerous texts, many of them lost. Among the commentators, there are Greeks, like the Neoplatonist Porphyry (3rd century), Islamic authors between the 9th and 11th century (among them al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroës), and even a greater number of writers in Latin. Categories and De interpretatione were the first works circulated in Latin, followed in the 12th century by the other works from the Organon. For centuries, these continued to be the basis of logic and dialectics in the West. Along with works by Aelius Donatus and Priscian, they constituted the core of grammatical doctrine. Arens, to whom we owe a synoptic table of the editions, translations, and commentaries of the Organon (1984: 7–15), lists the names — quaestiones, glossae, exercitata, disputata, dicta, lecturae, lectiones, rationes, glosulae, summulae, scholia, compendia, summae — under which expositions and paraphrases were presented to the Latin world between the 5th and 13th centuries by philosophers such as Boethius, Abelard, Albert the Great, John Duns Scotus, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as in the teaching routine. In regards specifically to De interpretatione, Boethius’s translations and commentaries were the core of the logic tradition in Medieval Europe and the source of its terminology. In Porphyry’s Isagoge, an introduction to the Aristotelian doctrine of categories, we find a first mention of what in the 12th century was to become the problem of universals, although the question is introduced only to be immediately set aside. Porphyry declares that he will not deal with the nature of genera and species, i.e., whether they exist independently or are simply mental representations and, in the first case, whether they are corporeal

61

62

A History of Language Philosophies

or incorporeal, and exist independently of sensible things or only in connection to them. A. de Libera (see Porphyry 1998: X xxvi–xxxvii) reads the passage in the light of the Medieval debate on universals, in which opposite opinions clashed: genera and species are either separate forms that really exist (the Platonist point of view), or concepts produced on the basis of sensible data through a process of abstraction (the Aristotelian point of view). Porphyry’s position is the starting point for Boethius; in two commentaries (and especially the second, Boethius 1906: 23–32, 161–167), he proposes a tentative solution. Universals are mental representations (the mind ‘has the power of composing separate things and analysing composite ones’ [ibid., 165, 3–4]). They are not independent substances. Otherwise how could a universal be at the same time one and yet pertain to many things? Species (‘man’, for example) are constituted on the basis of the similarity between individuals, while genera (‘animal’, for example) are constituted on the basis of similarities common to more than one species. The theoretical import of the question is evident and was to emerge fully in the theory of universals (see 4.3 below). Indeed, the status of general, or common, names is problematic. While individual, or proper, names (Socrates, Plato) refer directly to individuals, there is nothing, no res, that corresponds to general names. To explain their meaning it was necessary to re-formulate the relation between language and ontology. Boethius, in his commentary on the Categories (1860, 185 CD), offers a glottogenetic explanation of the Aristotelian distinction between first substances (individuals) and second substances (universals): the things one tends to name first are always those closer to perception. The person who used the word man first, for example, did not do it to indicate man as a universal, but to indicate a specific human being. In the second of his two commentaries on De interpretatione Boethius, in order to restore a ‘correct Aristotelian opinion’ (1877–1880: II, 29, 13), formulated a semantic model that was to remain canonical. Perceptions are primary data on which intelligence then operates and from which it derives concepts. Words do not signify things, nor the mental images that accompany thought, but concepts. Voiced speech is the expression of a mental speech already structured in parts, and to these two kinds of speech one must add another one ‘that is written with letters’. Likewise each part of speech exists in three kinds: ‘[T]here are verbs and nouns that are written, others that are voiced, others that are silently used in thought’ (ibid., II, 30, 6–10). As we can see, Boethius gives a twist to Aristotle in order to stress the homology, including grammatical similarity, between inner and uttered speech.

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

When Aristotle writes, in Boethius’s version: “sunt […] ea quae sunt in voce earum quae sunt in anima passionum notae et ea quae scribuntur earum quae sunt in voce”, we must understand ‘ea’ to refer to an unexpressed ‘verba et nomina’ (‘those [verbs and nouns] which are in the voice are marks of the affections of the soul, and those that are written are the marks of those which are in the voice’ [ibid., 30, 11–31, 8]). Nouns and verbs are therefore already ‘in the soul’ as parts of speech and designate concepts. The distinction between voice as an instrument of speech and voice as such is analogous to that between coins and the material of which they are made. A piece of copper is called a coin when it is equivalent to a price; a voice is called a verb or a noun when it is the equivalent of a concept (ibid., 32, 25–29). Unlike written and oral signs, which vary from one people to the other, concepts are produced naturally and are therefore the same for everyone (ibid., 38, 3–4). A characteristic of philosophical semantics was to focus mainly on two grammatical categories: noun and verb. This is the first difference with grammatical semantics (see 4.4 below), which dealt instead with all the parts of speech. The semantics of names, however, was to remain fundamental to the philosophical theory of meaning, offering the most direct approach to the problem of the relation between language and reality. An example is found in the analysis of paronymy. Paronyms (or denominative names, in Boethius’s translation), are derived names, such as brave from bravery or grammatical from grammar. Aristotle in Categories had described paronymy as a type of morphological derivation. Neoplatonic interpreters of Aristotle had transformed this morphological notion into a metaphysical one, engaging in a sort of ‘Platonism smuggling’, according to Libera (1996: 59), and Boethius had introduced it into the Latin-speaking world. According to this version, paronyms partake in the essence of the names from which they derive (‘grammatical’ partakes of the essence, or idea, or form of grammar, ‘white’ partakes of whiteness, etc.). This participation is not simply a partaking of words, it is also an ontological participation: ‘Three things are […] necessary in denominative terms: in the first place the partaking in a thing, in the second place the partaking in a name, and finally a certain transformation of the name’ (Boethius 1860, 167D–168A). Jolivet (1987b: 157) interprets this fusion of two different notions of derivation (real and grammatical) as a Platonizing trait that persists throughout the history of the question, ‘as if the noun signified an idea of which the adjective signifies a reflection or degradation, as if white indicated whiteness descended into matter’. A particular case of paronymy — utrum Deus sit divinitas, whether God and divinity are one and the same thing — had important

63

64

A History of Language Philosophies

theological consequences, and was debated throughout the second half of the 12th century (Nielsen 1982: 34). More than five hundred years after the death of Boethius, Anselm of Canterbury in his De Grammatico contributed to the discussion on paronyms with his distinction between appellatio (i.e. denotation) and significatio. The two semantic functions converge in the case of substances (‘man’ denotes and means a man) but are distinct in the case of paronyms (‘grammarian’ means the grammar and denotes the man who knows grammar). Anselm stressed the discrepancy between logical and grammatical forms, as well as the peculiarities of ordinary language (communis locutio) and the inconsistencies produced when these peculiarities are transferred into scientific language. He analyzed sentences having a negative subject, and the use of verbs such as can, and do. He distinguished a significatio secundum formam loquendi (i.e., from the point of view of grammaticality) and a significatio secundum rem (i.e., from the point of view of reality). In so doing, he made an important distinction between grammar and logic, between grammatical and logical semantics.

4.3 The semantics of universals Medieval semantics is so closely interwoven with the question of universals, that it is necessary to deal with the latter at least to the extent of singling out the aspects that are most relevant to linguistic theories. We have already examined the origins of the question in discussing Boethius and then, through him, Porphyry. Universals resurface as a central problem in dialectics only in the 12th century, i.e., many centuries later (Porphyry was active between the 2nd and 3rd century; Boethius, his Latin translator and commentator, wrote between the 5th and 6th century). One reason the problem arose, in the 12th century, was Trinitarian theology (Libera 1996: 127); the question was whether the three Persons are three distinct entities or a single one. But long before that, philosophers had debated whether universals were things, concepts, or words. Owing to a ‘fatal ambiguity’ of certain passages by Aristotle, Neoplatonic interpreters had stressed a latent Platonism in his notion of categories, while later philosophers had sought to reconcile Aristotle’s ontology with Plato’s (ibid., 29–34). From a semantic point of view, a universal is the apex of a hierarchy of classes at the basis of which are individual substances. It is the end product of a progressive generalization from individuals to species, from species to genus, and from a narrower to a broader genus, and so on. An individual belonging to a given class

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

corresponds to the definition of that class (if man means, for example, ‘rational animal’, then all individuals to whom the definition applies will be men). As products of induction by means of abstraction, universals are secondary to things (post rem). This model was handed down by the tradition of logic divulged by Neoplatonic commentators of Aristotle and is found also in Boethius. But universals can also be metaphysically interpreted as essences (gr. ousia, lat. quidditas), in which case a universal is the particular form of the concrete individual, that which characterizes it as such. Universals are thus inherent in things themselves, in re. There is no incompatibility between the Aristotelian conception of eidos as the formal cause of the combination of matter, and the conception of form as something that constitutes the individual entity. Reality pertains to individual substances, and the one presupposes the many. According to this notion of universals, which we shall call ‘eidetic’, the formation of classes and corresponding denominations are, so to speak, guided by the survey the mind makes of the characteristic form of the object. Finally — according to another metaphysical interpretation of universals as essences — universals can be viewed as separate forms. Forms are prior to individual things (ante rem); they are models of which individuals partake in varying degrees. In any case, they are differentiated by species within the genus, and by number within the species. This is a Platonic model, not yet evident in the Cratylus (see 2.1 above), but clearly present in other dialogues (Phaedo, for example). Forms exist as such, and things derive their denomination from their participation in them. In Christian Platonism, forms are often identified with ideas in the divine mind. The metaphor of ousia, ‘essence’, as the source of genera and species, is found for example in Scotus Erigena’s Periphyseon (493B), where it expresses a realist position. I have drastically simplified a very complex matter. Indeed, even the identification and listing of the various schools is a controversial issue. What is clear, at any rate, is that the linguistic import of the question of universals is more evident in the first position (universals as semantic classes). A particularly interesting proponent of this position is Abelard, a philosopher active in France in the first half of the 12th century. Abelard has long been considered a nominalist. According to nominalism universals are only signs, present in the mind as names that can be predicated of more than one concrete individual object or event. Individuals are the only entities that truly exist. More recently, however, Abelard’s identification with nominalism has been questioned. For one thing, the term nominalistae became current later on, and the continuity between later nominalists and the previous

65

66

A History of Language Philosophies

nominales of Abelard’s generation cannot be taken for granted (Courtenay 1991, 1991a; Normore 1992; Libera 1996: 133–134). The theory of nominales concerned the unity of the name, which is an entirely different question. They held that, as the sentence (dictum or enuntiabile) is a mental proposition that can be verbalized in various ways, so the nomen is a unity of thought that precedes all possible voces and grammatical forms of the various languages. In favor of the nominalist interpretation of Abelard is the fact that in his two treatises on logic (Ingredientibus and Nostrorum, which take their titles from their opening words) he discusses universals through a critique of realism. In his Glossae to Porphyry, found in his first Logic, the difference between universal and particular is grammatically explained. If we exclude the realist solution, says Abelard, all we have left is to ascribe universality to words alone. For, as grammarians call some nouns common and some proper, so do dialecticians call some terms universals, and some others particular or singular. A universal term can be predicated severally of many, just as the noun man can be associated to particular names of men according to the nature of the subjects on which it is imposed. A singular term is the one that can be predicated of a sole thing, such as Socrates, which is valid as a name for only one individual (Log. Ingr., 16; Log. nostr., 522). Reducing universals to the way in which a term is used in propositions does not mean, however, identifying logical predication and grammatical structure. From the point of view of grammaticality, the proposition ‘man is a rock’ is as legitimate as the proposition ‘man is an animal’; not so from the perspective of the dialectician, who must look to the nature of things (Log. Ingr., 17). Universals can be predicated of different individuals, so long as they are unified by a ‘common cause’, which Abelard (ibid., 20) calls status (a controversial term, which Tweedale 1976 translates with ‘type’; for example, the status of man is the very fact of his being a man). Thus, universals are defined in virtue of their peculiar semantic behavior. Unlike individual terms, which evoke the form of a single substance, universal terms evoke an indistinct image of many things (Log. Ingr., 28; Log. Nostr., 526–527). When someone utters the word man, what comes to mind is something that pertains to all men and not individually to each one of them (Log. Ingr., 21–22). If I say “I want a mantle”, I do not mean this or that mantle, though certainly it must be a specific mantle (Log. Nostr., 531). Universal terms ‘do not signify all the things they name’ (Dialectica: 113), i.e., the individual things of which they are the name, or the particulars of which the name can be predicated. The word signify can be used properly only in the sense of ‘generating a concept’. A concept (intellectus) is an act of understanding

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

either expressed through a term (‘what the speaker means’) or generated by the term in the mind of the listener. Thus, also significare has the same twofold meaning of expressing the speaker’s thought and generating a thought in the mind of the listener. Appellare, nominare, demonstrare, designare — the function that Abelard also calls significatio de rebus, thus distinguishing it from de intellectibus, which is signification proper — is something different: it means denoting objects. As Tweedale (1988) notes, extension and intension are thus clearly distinguished, extension being the totality of objects to which the term is applicable, intension being the ‘thought’ called forth by the word. Sense, or significatio, pertains to the intensional sphere. The artificial nature of human universals does not make them epistemologically unreliable. They are formed and applied in the same way terms are; i.e., both are founded on abstraction and guided by attention, which isolates the pertinent traits in objects and separates things that are joined in nature. ‘He who makes up a word has first considered the nature of the thing that has to be indicated by the name he imposes’ (Log. Ingr., 112–113). Thus the ‘nature of things’ is the ultimate guarantee both of the reliability of concepts and the congruity of words. There is a point that resurfaces every time we encounter the question of the imposition of names. Modern interpreters have often branded the very notion of impositio as a sign of intellectualism (as if names could be invented ‘on paper’!) or glottogenetic naiveté. It is true that imposition was often associated with mythical accounts, such as that of Adam as name-giver. But every text must be read within its own symbolical system. Correctly viewed, the imposition of names corresponds largely to what we call categorization. The question that underlies both notions is the same: what are the criteria of resemblance or typicality that lead us to reduce objects to classes sufficiently well-defined and recognizable for their objects to be included under a single name? The difficulty, in the case of Abelard, is that one finds no positive answer to this question in his works. The unifying criteria that serve to group objects and categorize them under a single term (criteria of nature, status, type, etc.) are defined only negatively (classes are not things, are not collections of individuals, etc.). The notion of status remains moot. Libera (1996: 149; cf. Jolivet 1987d, 1992) sees it as the foundation of a doctrine he calls ‘non realism’ rather than nominalism: a Platonic non-realism that led Abelard to maintain that universal terms are founded on a status ‘which is not a thing […], it is not even the idea of a thing’, and yet it is a category that exists in the divine mind. Tweedale (1976: 207) offers a different interpretation. Abelard’s statement that the status,

67

68

A History of Language Philosophies

or type, of man is the very fact of his being a man, may seem banal. But Abelard is not asking “why men are men, but only why we can correctly apply to them the word man”; what matters is that “the fact of speaking of ‘being a man’ or another similar type does not force us to presume the existence of some universal thing above and beyond the concrete individuals who share this type”. These two apparently distant interpretations are not in fact irreconcilable. The banality of Abelard’s solution, noted by Tweedale, may be read as a result of his notion of God as an artisan (Jolivet 1987d: 276), who categorizes things as he creates them. The idea of a creation in which things are already categorized in types from the start is certainly Platonic (or Neoplatonic). It authorized Abelard to leave the notion of status unanalyzed, taking for granted a metaphysical realism (things belong to classes in the mind of God) not incompatible with a semantic anti-realism (universals are not things, nor ideas of things). The gist of the matter is that the term ‘nominalism’ itself must be differentiated if we are to use it for both Abelard and later authors such as William of Ockham (Jolivet 1974, 1992). As already said, the imposition of names and the constitution of concepts are symmetrical procedures. This is why general terms can evoke concepts in the mind of the listener, a function which could never be performed by individual terms. The efficacy of a universal depends on its being undetermined: “solus et nudus et purus”, free of ties to the senses and their objects (Log. Ingr., 23–27). This purity makes it possible to speak of past or absent things. The name ‘rose’ still means something when there are no longer any roses (ibid., pp. 29–30). Mental meanings differ from real ones (denotations), because the former are permanent while the latter are ephemeral (Log. Ingr., p.309). Names have (mental) meanings only because they do not completely adhere to individual objects (Log. Nostr., p. 532). But this does not in the least undermine their efficacy as tools for knowing: a valid concept, ‘man’, for example, corresponds to a state of affairs, unlike an empty concept, such as ‘chimera’, which corresponds to nothing (Log. Ingr., pp. 326–327). But empty does not mean false, because a concept in itself is never true or false; it becomes true or false only when included in affirmative or negative sentences. Thus, meaning and truth are not the same thing, and a name can also mean something false or non-existent. If signifying means generating a notion, this must be taken in a broad sense, so as to include any mental contents, including those related to non-existentia (ibid., p. 136). Up to here, I have followed Abelard in his theory of the abstract function of terms. But an important part of his semantics concerns the function of words in actual use in sentences. This will be the subject of the next section.

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

4.4 The semantics of grammatical functions In the two above sections, I have reconstructed a first aspect of Medieval semantics, i.e., the question of names. A second important aspect is the analysis of the properties of terms and the study of their modes of signifying, i.e., the semantics of grammatical functions: a ‘terminist logic’ which deals with words viewed as functional elements in a propositional context and with their combinations. Starting with the 11th century, the borderline between grammar (which follows a morphological approach to the study of names) and dialectics (which follows an ontological one focused on the relation between names and things) had become increasingly blurred (Tweedale 1988). Since the first half of the following century, interest in syntactical theory was predominant (de Rijk 1962–1967, II, 1: 113–125; 1982: 161). Bursill-Hall, who has written several articles on the subject, stresses the importance of commentaries on Priscian for the development of this tradition of grammatical semantics. There are more than two hundred of these commentaries extants, few of which have been published. The anonymous Glosulae in Priscianum (second half of the 11th century) was the starting point of analysis of the properties of terms. The first author to consider is, again, Abelard. From his Dialectica, which contains a list of modes of signifying, I shall take some examples of analysis of the semantics of terms within propositions. A first example is the study of the function of verbs. Abelard confutes Aristotle on this point; the specific function of verbs is not to ‘co-signify’ time, because this is not an exclusive prerogative of this part of speech. Rather it is to provide completeness to propositions. Homo currit (man runs) and homo currens (man running) are in principle equivalent clauses. Yet the second is an incomplete sentence; the listener ‘remains suspended and wishes to hear more in order to arrive at a complete meaning’. He expects an is, for example, or some other verb. ‘It is for this reason that almost all types of complete sentences take their name from their verb: declarative, imperative, etc.’ (Abelard, Dial., 148). The verb not only completes the sentence, producing an oratio perfecta, but also expresses, in the complete sentence, various ‘states of mind’. The different expressions corresponding to the various modes of the verb (declarative, imperative, optative, etc.) are not semantically equivalent. For example, in apparently equivalent clauses such as “Come!” or “If only you would come”, the mode of the verb determines the modality of meaning (Abelard, Dial., 149). What Abelard is stressing is the different semantic function of the various grammatical forms. He distinguishes in names a primary and ‘almost substantial’

69

70

A History of Language Philosophies

signification and a secondary, accidental, signification (ibid., p. 124). This corresponds to the distinction (later codified in the theory of the modi significandi) between the essential signification of a term (its lexical meaning) and its accidental significations, or co-significations (consignificationes), which are grammatical (tense, person, number, etc.). Another example of how grammar integrates with semantics is offered by the analysis of expressions such as homo albus (a nominal syntagma, or a phrase that indicates the mere inherence of two terms) and homo est albus (a complete sentence). They generate the same concept (intellectus), but the second has greater assertive force (Nuchelmans 1973: 146–147) and leads the listener to view the inherence as actually existing ‘in the world’. Many other forms of oratio perfecta are analyzed in Logica Ingredientibus (pp. 373ff.): imperative, vocative, deprecrative (i.e., prayer), optative, interrogative, etc. All these forms can be retraced to a primary signification, which takes different forms according to the speaker’s states of mind and to the ‘modes of delivery’ (Dial.: 152: modus proponendi
; Log. Ingr., 327, 374: modus pronuntiandi or enuntiandi). The same verbal form can express different mental attitudes. The expression “come soon, my friend”, for example, can be interpreted as an order, a desire, or a prayer; “Thou shalt not kill”, expresses an imperative signification through an indicative mode (Dial., 152). There is a sort of common nucleus, which is expressed in different propositions according to the different mental attitudes of the speaker (Nuchelmans, loc.cit.). The convergence of grammar and dialectics is an essential characteristic of Abelard’s theory. The so-called speculative grammar that developed over a period of about eighty years between the 13th and 14th centuries was also a synthesis of the problems, methods, and terminologies of both dialectics and grammar. An infiltration of dialectics into grammar had begun around the middle of the 11th century. De Rijk has described it in his monumental work (1962–1967; see also Bursill-Hall 1976: 166). The discovery of Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations probably contributed to this convergence between the two arts, encouraging logicians to turn to grammar for the solution to problems rooted in sophistic argumentation (Maloney 1983a: 187). The progressive emancipation of grammar from philology, which accompanied its merging with dialectics, is borne out by the fact that around the middle of the century all the works by classic authors, save for the strictly technical ones by Donatus and Priscian, had disappeared from the curricula of the University of Paris. Under the influence of Aristotle’s works and their Arabic commentaries, grammar had gradually changed from a normative discipline for understanding classical texts

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

into a philosophical one, where problems were no longer solved by appealing to the authority of classic authors but through the science of logic (Bursill-Hall 1971: 24–25). Since the 12th century, a new term, ‘suppositio’, appeared in sentence analysis. Anselm had distinguished appellatio, i.e., denotation, from significatio (see 4.2 above). Abelard had described two modes of signifying (see 4.3 above), one that concerns things, which corresponds to the denotative (extensional) function, and one that concerns concepts, which corresponds to signification proper (intensional function). The notion of suppositio took on the denotative function previously assigned to appellatio or denomination. On the process by which the notion of suppositio developed from a primitive theory of appellatio, I refer the reader to de Rijk (1982: 164–166). For an outline of the many variants of suppositio and of the reciprocal relations between semantic functions, differently elaborated by the Parisian school (Peter of Spain, Lambert of Auxerre) and the Oxford school (William of Sherwood, Roger Bacon), I refer the reader to the works listed at the end of the chapter. I shall limit myself to a few essential points. Chenu (1957:102–103) has remarked an interesting terminological parallelism. The logicians of the 12th century, through terms such as suppositum and significatum, were reproposing the pre-existing grammatical distinction between substantia and qualitas (i.e., between concrete and abstract terms). According to Albertus Magnus (cited by Chenu, loc.cit.), we must consider the term from two standpoints: what it is imposed on (the substance of grammarians, the suppositum of logicians) and the form or ratio by which it is imposed (the quality of grammarians, the significatio of logicians). Earlier authors (Boethius, then Gilbert of Poitiers) had singled out a quod est, the specific substance, and a quo est, the form that makes it what it is. The two main solutions to the question of universals (see 4.3 above) derive from the different interpretations of the relation between the two elements (inherence or participation). It is also worthwhile stressing that supposition is, in essence, a syntactic notion. A term has a referential function, when it is the subject of a verb and therefore designates, within a sentence, ‘what it is about’. Only in sentences do words manifest their eminent property of ‘standing for’ individual substances. In fact, suppositio could very well be translated as ‘substitution’. Peter of Spain, the Portuguese philosopher and future Pope John XXI, author of Summulae logicales, summarily defines supposition as the use ‘of a name in place of something else’ (in place of what it denotes). Supposition, however, i.e., the use of a term to denote individual objects, is based on an essential significatio of the

71

72

A History of Language Philosophies

word itself, which exists independently of its actual use in a sentence. In other words, supposition is the sense of the word in context, while signification is its abstract meaning: ‘signification precedes supposition, and the two are distinguished on account of this, that signification pertains to words, supposition pertains to the term already composed of voice and signification’ (Petrus Hispanus, Tractatus, VI/3). The signification of a term is provided through the act of imposition; if this act is repeated, the two functions overlap, and equivocity follows. Supposition, instead, is intrinsically plural, connected to different acts of designation (appellatio, nominatio); a term, while univocal from the point of view of signification, designates more than one individual. Other elements of the proposition, such as verb tenses, help determine what a term refers to. The so-called ‘natural supposition’ is undetermined; the term applies to all individuals who share a certain essence, independently of actual circumstances. Man applies to all past individuals, present and future. Not so its determinate or ‘accidental’ application: man is applies solely to individuals who exist at the moment, man was to individuals who existed in the past, man will be to future individuals (Petrus Hispanus, Tractatus, VI/4). To some extent, the notion of natural supposition blurs the boundary between supposition and signification. In fact, it usurps the generic semantic function of signification not yet determined by context (de Rijk 1982: 169–171). Obviously, the theory of supposition concerns so-called categorematic terms, i.e., those significant in themselves, which can be used as subjects or predicates in sentences. It does not concern the so-called ‘co-signifying’ terms, the syncategoremata (literally, ‘co-predicates’), which signify only when associated with the categorematic ones. An ample literature developed between the 12th and 15th centuries on the peculiar semantic function of terms without any autonomous referential function; such as terms that indicate distribution (viz., all, nobody), negation (not, nothing), exclusion (only), exception (other than, except), disjunction (or), etc. The various logical functions are tested in the socalled sophismata (or logical puzzles, as Libera [1986: 405] calls them), in which logical and semantic difficulties are formulated and solved (see also Read 1993). Another aspect of the integration of language theories, ontology and cognitive theories is the doctrine of the modi significandi developed in the 13th century in the context of the so-called speculative grammar. I’ll try to define this doctrine with the help of two texts. The first is the treatise on Modi significandi by Boethius Dacus (or Boethius of Denmark), active in Paris, presumably in the 1270s; he was one of the most important of first generation ‘Modistae’ (the most important according to Bursill-Hall 1976) and the one who established the

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

prolegomena to their grammatical theory. The second text, which can instead be considered the culmination of this tradition, is the Grammatica speculativa by Thomas of Erfurt, who lived a few decades later and was also active in Paris, as well as in the German city from which he takes his name. I shall not dwell on the distinctions and sub-distinctions in the modes of signifying in various authors, but refer instead the reader to Appendixes A and B in Bursill-Hall (1971: 345–399). We shall turn first to Boethius of Denmark for a definition of the new science of grammar. In quaestio 3 of his treatise, he examines and refutes the reasons for denying grammar the title of science. A science deals solely with the immutable, while the object of grammar varies among different populations; science concerns solely what is necessary, while grammar is a human invention. But according to Boethius, a sufficient condition for a science to be such is that the phenomena it studies are not casual, the laws they follow are constant, and the effects they produce are regular. If this condition were not sufficient, no physical phenomena could be the object of science (Modi sign., q. 3, 39–40). Thomas of Erfurt too, in his Grammatica speculativa (1971: 134), appeals to physics to argue that grammar is a science; in fact he specifically cites Aristotle’s Physics. This is not suprising, if we accept Rosier’s (1983a: 16) opinion that speculative grammar in the 13th century was influenced by Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and its Arabic commentaries and by the scientific models they embodied, more than by Aristotle’s linguistic theories. In quaestio 5 (41–43), Boethius of Denmark specifies that grammar (i) is necessary in itself, because it proceeds according to principles and its consequences are certain; (ii) it is necessary because it allows man to express his concepts through an adequate discourse; (iii) it is necessary as an introduction to other sciences. In all cases we are dealing with empirical necessity. The first point states that, given certain conditions, discourse, in order to be correct, must be suited to those conditions. This point expresses the necessitating, rather than the necessary nature, of grammatical principles. The second point states that grammar is necessary to man. As for the third point, grammar, the first of the three arts of the trivium, was universally acknowledged as the preliminary instrument for any curriculum studiorum. Learning it meant acquiring the instrument for perfecting man’s natural capacity to produce and understand words. The fundamental condition of grammatical science is stated shortly thereafter. Against a hypothetical interlocutor who objects that any true science deals with things, in the sense that it is ‘caused by things’, while this is not the case of grammar, Boethius asserts that what grammar deals with is

73

74

A History of Language Philosophies

indeed derived from the properties of things, as is shown by the fact that we cannot use modes of signifying that are incompatible with those properties (q. 5, 98–103, 104–107). Grammar is man-made, but as a discovery, not an arbitrary invention. In other words, behind the regularity of grammar lies the correspondence between the linguistic, intellectual, and ontological spheres. Voices not only express things but also, thanks to their morphological modifications, the modifications of things. The same mental content can be expressed according to different grammatical categories or parts of speech. For example, dolor, doleo, dolens, dolenter, and heu all express the concept of suffering according to the different grammatical categories of noun, verb, participle, adverb, and interjection (Modi sign., q. 14, 60–68). Thus ‘the mode of signifying is made in the image of the mode of knowing, and the mode of knowing in the image of the mode of being’ (q. 26, 25–27; see q. 1, 41–49). All modes of signifying — not only parts of speech, but also gender, number, person, etc., the so-called ‘accidents’ of the parts of speech, their morphological variants — arise from the properties of things through the mediation of the relative mental modalities or modi intelligendi. The gender of vir, man, can only be masculine, Socrates cannot be plural, nor can homo be comparative (q. 17, 7–17, 88–91). These modes of signifying can certainly not be made up by the impositor. The thing determines through its properties the modes of understanding that belong to it, and cannot be seen according to modes incompatible with those properties: therefore the mind in understanding follows the being of a thing, and in its modes of understanding determines modes of signifying similar to those of the understanding. Therefore it is evident that modes of signifying follow modes of understanding and are not possible without them. For which reason the properties of a thing determine the modes of signifying that are pertinent to it. (Modi sign., q. 17, 76–84)

This dependence of modes of signifying on modes of being holds also for imaginary objects (chimera) or ‘privative’ concepts (blindness, nothing), because, says Thomas of Erfurt (1971: 138, 154), though they are not real entities, yet they are mental objects and as such support signifying modes. The incompatibility that forbids us from using vir in the feminine, Socrates in the plural, and homo as a comparative — in short, the obligation to respect the consistency between the modality of the thing, and the modalities of understanding and signifying — is a formal principle. It does not depend on the vocal matter, which is in itself indifferent, pure potential ‘which does not

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

determine any mode of signifying, and is incompatible with none, in fact it is suited to all of them’ (Boethius of Denmark, Modi sign., q. 17, 90–93). Voice is merely a material support and not even indispensable at that; the sign as such can use any type of support. A brief chapter of Thomas of Erfurt’s Grammatica speculativa (1971: 146–148) clearly states this distinction between matter and form in language. From signum to dictio, to pars orationis, to terminus, there is a gradual specification of functions. The sign is not necessarily vocal. Only in dictio does the word perform the designating function entrusted to voice, which thus becomes signifying voice. With parts of speech, the sign is qualified according to the mode of signifying. Terms, finally, are parts of speech inasmuch as they are subjects and predicates of the proposition. The deep structure of languages that grammar deals with is hidden beneath the indifference of vocal matter. This holds for Boethius of Denmark as well (see Modi sign., q. 2, 45–53; see q. 4, 40–50). Languages vary in their accidents, in figuratione vocum, but they all have the same structure of parts of speech: Because the nature of things is the same everywhere, thus the modes of being and understanding are similar among all those who have different languages, and consequently the modes of signifying are similar, and consequently also the modes of constructing discourse or of speaking. Thus the grammar of a language in its entirety is similar to that of another language.

Ancient and Medieval linguistic tradition rests on the tacit presupposition that grammatical structure is universal. Speculative grammar is a development of a pre-existing widespread notion of grammatica universalis. There is only one grammar, just as there is only one physics. The parallelism between being, understanding, and signifying makes the universality of grammar explicit; the laws of grammar are regular, just like the laws of nature as represented in Aristotelian physics. The new grammarians tend, however, to distance themselves from Priscian. William of Conches, for example, in a passage cited by de Rijk (1962–1967: I I/1, 110), criticizes Priscian’s followers for not having dealt with the original causes of the development of the parts of speech and their morphological modifications. This is tantamount to saying that their approach remained purely descriptive without ever achieving the explicative power that is characteristic of a science. The same reproach is found in Boethius of Denmark, when in quaestio 9 (24–33) he speaks of grammar as a demonstrative science, i.e., capable of explaining things in terms of cause and effect. For him, Priscian did not adopt a demonstrative mode but a narrative mode, he described grammatical

75

76

A History of Language Philosophies

phenomena without explaining them. Scientific knowledge, instead, is the study of causes: thus, the ‘discovery’ of grammar pertains to philosophy. Descriptive grammar, the grammar of grammarians, requires a pre-existing philosophical analysis aimed at discovering the motivations behind the parts of speech and their ‘accidents’ (i.e., inflections). Names, for example, signify substances because they signify per modum permanentiae, i.e., according to the modality of permanence which is proper to substances (Modi sign. q. 29, 103 f.). Verb tenses signify time as an indication of state (present, past, or future). Gender is a mode that signifies the respective properties of the object as masculine or feminine, and its undefined nature as neuter (q. 83, 29–34). The distinctions between parts of speech are based on the various signifying modes (q. 14, 87–88) and these in turn are based on the modalities of being. Along with the semantic function, signifying modes have also a syntactic one: they are the principles ‘thanks to which words relate to one another in the warp of the parts of speech, so as to conveniently express the concept we have in mind’ (Modi sign. q. 62, 1–3; see q. 37, 59–70). These principles are ‘the organizing concepts of grammar. They allow us to determine the parts of speech as constructible and to establish the rules for construction’ (Rosier 1983a: 199). A reference to the syntactic role of modes can be detected also in Thomas of Erfurt’s notion of co-signification. Human understanding attributes a twofold ratio to voices: the signifying function, through which signs and words are produced; and the co-signifying function, that gives rise to the parts of speech (Thomas of Erfurt 1971: 136). Such a use of consignificatio is atypical with respect to the previous grammatical tradition, where co-signification or syncategorematicity was characteristic of those parts of speech which have no independent semantic function, but rather support the signifying parts of the expression. For Thomas of Erfurt, instead, all parts of speech can be syncategorematic insofar as they co-operate in enunciation through an ‘additional signification’ of their own (Rosier 1983a: 55; see also pp. 52–62, 79–86). The primary or lexical meaning refers back to an object or event through an act of impositio vocis which constitutes the word as such; while co-signification — a morphological-syntactic function because it pertains to words as parts of speech — indicates the various possible modalities or ‘properties’ of the word, i.e., its various aspects (tense, mode, person, gender, syntactic function, etc.). This use of consignificatio, according to Bursill-Hall (1971a: 23), implies that the sense of a word is not realized until it manifests its function within the sentence, whereupon the full meaning of the term in its correlation to reality becomes apparent. The power to co-signify, in short, is the power to signify syntactically

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

(p. 33). The grammaticality of discourse, the propria unio of its elements, depends on the convenience of the modes of signifying, on the way words inflect and combine in sentences. This congruity also determines the perfection of discourse, i.e., its completeness, its power to generate a definite meaning in the mind of the listener (pp. 314, 316). The network of syntactic links is the form of discourse.

4.5 From Ockham to Locke Notwithstanding the extreme complexity of their definitions and distinctions, the Modistae had elaborated a simple and attractive model to describe the relation of language and reality. They had produced a reassuring image of the grammarian-philosopher’s task: the structure of language is from the start an adequate representation of the world, so that all he has to do is ‘discover’ its modalities. The later ‘fourteenth-century revolution’ (Libera 1996: 306–307) was marked instead by an anti-realist option. I have already mentioned the difficulties we face and the prudence we must use in seeking to define nominalism as a unitary current or tendency (4.3 above). However, if we take the doctrine of the semantic nature of universals as its distinctive trait, there is no doubt that the works of the English Franciscan monk William of Ockham, the main leader in this revolution, can be considered a locus classicus of nominalism. Ockham’s position is clear-cut on a fundamental ontological question: the world is made up of individual entities and events. Even universals are singular, although they signify multiple extra-mental realities. ‘We must state that every universal is a singular thing and that therefore it is universal only in terms of signification, insofar as it is a sign of many things’ (Ockham, Summa log. I, 14). Of the four types of being identified by Aristotle in his Categories, only first substances and their qualities remain. Ockham eliminates ‘the entities that up to then had posed the greatest problems to philosophers’ (Libera 1996: 351), i.e., second substances (genera and species) and common qualities as real properties in which many individual substances partake. Universality becomes an exclusive function of signs, both mental (natural) and verbal (voluntary). ‘The act of understanding through which I intend man, is a sign […] which can stand for men in a mental proposition just as the words can stand for things in the verbal proposition’ (Ockham, Summa log. I, 14, 15). The relation between a sign and its referent is regulated by suppositio. Ockham deals with suppositio in various chapters of his handbook of logic

77

78

A History of Language Philosophies

(Summa log. I, 63–77), making a series of distinctions I shall not take up here (see Libera 1996: 370–374 for details). The fact that a term X in a sentence refers to all the individuals belonging to a genus, or to a specific or undefined subsystem of that genus, is something that does not concern signification but supposition (see Ebbesen 1983). Supposition has a primary role in Ockham’s semantics (Panaccio 1981: 470), where it comes up every time he wants to explain how a universal name may refer to an individual reality. It is a referential function containing an implicit ostensive element, ‘an appeal to deixis’, according to Biard. The demonstrative pronoun (‘this’) is the terminal point of language; it relates an enunciation to a subject, ‘it roots language in the world of things’, and at the same time transfers the object into the sphere of discourse (Biard 1989: 76–77, 82). At the beginning of his survey, Ockham, following Boethius and Augustine, distinguishes three types of speech: written, oral, and mental, addressed respectively to sight, hearing, and the mind. The signs of mental language are natural, the others are conventional and vary from one people to another. Ockham does not agree, however, that verbal signs are secondary to mental signs, a notion that was part of the Aristotelian tradition handed down by Boethius. It had been accepted by Aquinas, for whom the relation of name and thing is mediated by the concept or universal, which is produced through abstraction. It had been debated in late 12th-century logic (Biard 1989:31–32) and contested by Duns Scotus and his school in the name of a metaphysical realism according to which the universal is the very nature or essence of the thing. Ockham attributes both words and concepts with the same relation to objects. There is no derivation of the verbal sign from the mental, only concomitance. They refer to the same object: ‘vocal sounds are imposed to signify the same realities that are signified by the concepts of the mind’ (Summa log. I, 1). Signs — be they written, uttered, or thought — perform their semantic function in the same way: they evoke things and refer to (supponent pro) them. The mutual autonomy of the three semiotic systems — written, oral, mental — does not rule out the primacy of concepts, since while there can be a mental discourse that is not expressed, there can be no expressed discourse that is not supported by mental discourse (Summa log. I, 12). Both discourses are syntactically structured, but mental discourse has in common with expressed discourse only those grammatical aspects that have the power to affect the sense of the utterance, while it lacks purely material aspects such as prosody, accidental aspects such as ellipsis, redundancy, synonymy, and purely ornamental aspects. All these pertain to expressed speech, not mental speech. Mental discourse works with fewer parts of speech than what are used,

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

redundantly, in verbal discourse. It needs nouns, verbs, conjunctions, and prepositions, but not participles, which perform the function of verbs thanks to the addition of the copula (est). Pronouns, too — though on this point Ockham’s position is not consistent (see Panaccio 1981) — can be considered redundant because they have the same function as nouns. As for the morphological variants of nouns (the so-called ‘accidents’), number and case are necessary to both types of discourse, but gender is not: whether rock is masculine, as in lapis, or feminine, as in petra, is irrelevant in mental discourse. Whether accidents such as comparison or quality (i.e., the distinction between proper and common nouns) are relevant in mental speech is controversial. Among the accidents of verbs, the essential ones are mode, number, tense, person, active and passive voice, while the deponent form is not essential, nor are the distinctions among conjugations. In short, mental discourse uses only the essential cognitive devices. Ockham’s semantic theory is very complex, deeply rooted in the tradition of terministic analysis, rich in distinctions that I have only skimmed over. Panaccio (1983, 1984) describes Ockham’s theory as a ‘semantic atomism’: the meaning of terms is reduced to the relation they have with the singular entities of which they are signs. The extensionality of this notion of meaning as mere denotation of objects seems in some way tempered by the notion of connotatio. Ockham distinguishes (Summa log. I, 10) primary signification (the sign’s reference to real things, or also past, future, or possible things) from secondary signification or connotation. Primary signification belongs to absolute terms (nomina absoluta), those of which one can say ‘this is…’ (a rock, a tree, etc.). Secondary signification or connotation is a sort of container of all non-referential semantic functions (those that cannot be expressed with ‘this is…’). For example, relations, expressions of quantity, time, place, negative expressions, mathematical notions, and abstract terms in general. These are the terms that John Locke, three hundred years later, would group together as names of ‘modes’ as opposed to names of substances, the latter being the individual objects found in the world of experience that we can know only through their qualities. Locke too had to explain the functioning of names that do not refer to objects or individual events. For him too the term this is the terminal point of language; ostension (‘this is red’) is the only definition we have of the data of sense perception (try explaining the color red to somebody blind from birth). There are no real definitions, in a world where all that is not individual substance belongs to the class of mental constructs that correspond to general names (universal ‘by signification’, in Ockham’s words). Of these only a

79

80

A History of Language Philosophies

nominal definition can be provided. Ockham (Summa log. I, 26) very clearly states the difference between real and nominal definition (which is also very important in Locke’s epistemology). The former is the definition that expresses what a thing is, the latter is the definition that expresses what a name is. In other words, real definition answers the question ‘What is it?’, whereas nominal definition answers the question ‘What does it mean?’ The second is the only one pertinent in the case of ideas that cannot be referred to individual substances, since they are mere semiotic entities created by the intellect, whose only essence is found in their name. Technically speaking, it is impossible to provide a real definition even of substances. We do not know what a substance is, according to Locke: we simply perceive its qualities, and these cannot be defined but only displayed to those who share our sense perceptions. Any comparison between authors such as Ockham and Locke, who are separated by three centuries of philosophical debate and intellectual breaks, is open to criticism. But in the tissue of tradition a thread leads from the semiotic logic of the Late Middle Ages all the way to the 17th-century ‘scientific revolution’. Ashworth (1985) has convincingly argued this position with an eye to texts of Scholastic logic that Locke had read or might have read. Here I shall mention only one text which, while not constituting proof of an actual theoretical continuity, can at least warn us to refrain from imposing overly clear-cut divisions on the flow of intellectual history. In Mario Nizolio’s De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi (1553), we find all the recurrent arguments of Renaissance men-of-letters against Scholastic philosophy (see 5.2 below): the superiority of Greek and Latin classics, the usefulness of grammar and rhetoric as opposed to the sterility of dialectics and its jargon, and the praise of enthymeme as opposed to syllogistic argument. But we also find the central thesis of the nominalist tradition, according to which the universal (universum) is nothing but the product of a comprehensio which assumes the one in place of the many. To this the belief is added that the procedures of understanding are not the same for all men in all circumstances. Therefore, universals are psychologically and pragmatically conditioned. As we shall see further on (see 5.4 below), this conviction was to become the nucleus of Locke’s ‘psychologism’. Nizolio’s work is not a proof of a factual continuity between medieval dialectics and Locke’s semantics, but it can serve as an ideal link between the two. It can help us provide a provisional definition of Locke’s paradigm, the starting point of modern language theories. Both semiotic models — the latemedieval nominalist one and the 16th- and 17th-century empiricist one — reject any description of universals as the substantial forms, or common

Philosophy of language from Boethius to Locke

natures, of things. Universals are signs, produced thanks to the natural causality that connects the objects of experience — individual substances and their qualities — to the mind. However, there are differences. As we shall see below (5.4), Locke, following the Aristotelian tradition handed down through Boethius, believed that the name and the thing are connected through the mental sign: Ockham had denied this mediation. But there is an even more relevant divergence that needs to be brought out. While both held mental signs to be natural, for Ockham they are ‘intentions’, in the Latin sense of intentio, a mere act of referring back to the object (in this case a plurality of individual objects). Intentio is most often used as an equivalent of conceptus. However, Alain de Libera draws a clear distinction between the two notions. Intentio, a term derived from Arabic through Avicenna, suggests something different from the ‘gathering’ implicit in conceptus thanks to the Latin capere (‘take’): it is not so-much a comprehending as an intending (in the sense in which one says ‘by this I intend…’), which is also a wanting-to-say, and especially a goal
: it is […] ‘that to which one aims’ when one thinks of something or speaks of something; that to which thought ‘tends’ or ‘is brought to attention.’ The intentio has […] an intuitive dimension that the conceptus does not have: a dimension of ‘discovery’ or ‘unveiling’ that makes one see what the thing is. (Libera 1996: 178)

These words, independently of their author’s intent, describe very well the genesis and nature of universals for Locke, and show the difference between his position and Ockham’s. For Locke, a universal is a conceptus, a mental sign that does not result from a single act of immediate apprehension or intuition, but rather from the mind’s cobbling together of pieces from its store of sense-data. By the time Locke wrote his Essay concerning humane Understanding (1690), the description of mental operations had changed. The model of the mind that — even through a single act of intuitive apprehension — forms the pattern of the substance to which all similar objects must be reduced, had become obsolete. As a result, Locke drafted a model of analytical understanding that was further elaborated by 18th-century psychology. Disassembling and reassembling the primary data of perception, gathering them and organizing them into more or less complex representations: this is how the mind works.

81



82

A History of Language Philosophies

Suggestions for further reading Theolinguistics
: Maierù 1988; Rosier 1990; Libera & Rosier-Catach 1997; Marmo, ed. 1997; Valente 1997; Gordon 2002. Medieval culture and literacy
: Marenbon 1981, 1983, 1987; Maierù 1994; Rees-Jones, ed. 2003. Rhetoric
: Murphy 1974; Murphy, ed. 1978; Camargo 1986; Fredborg 1987, 1995; Murphy, ed. 2003. Grammar
: Covington 1984, 1986; Rosier, ed. 1990; Law 1993, 1997; Luhtala 1995. Theory of signs
: Biard 1989; Eco & Marmo, eds. 1989. Semantics
: Libera, ed. 1981; Ebbesen 1983; Kretzmann, ed. 1988; Rosier 1994; Nuchelmans 1996; Rosier 1996; Ebbesen & Friedman, eds. 1999, Rosier 2004. Boethius
: Nuchelmans 1973: 123–135; de Rijk 1981b; Magee 1989; Libera 1999: 159–280. Anselm of Canterbury
: Henry 1964, 1967, 1974; Marenbon 1983: 90–110; Tweedale 1988. Theory of universals
: Tweedale 1990; Courtenay 1991, 1991a; Kneepkens 1992; Libera 1996, 1999. Abelard
: Jolivet 1969; Nuchelmans 1973: 139–163; Jolivet 1974; Tweedale 1976; de Rijk 1980, 1981a; Tweedale 1982; Jolivet 1987b, 1987d; Libera 1999: 281–498; Jolivet 1999; Marenbon 1999; Rosier 1999; Pinzani 2003. Speculative grammar
: de Rijk 1962–1967; Pinborg 1967; de Rijk 1970; Pinborg 1972; de Rijk 1977–1982; Hunt 1980; de Rijk 1981; Pinborg 1982; Spade 1982; Rosier 1983a; Covington 1984; Pinborg 1984; Rosier 1984; Fredborg 1988; Jacobi 1988; de Rijk 1988; Sirridge 1988; Tweedale 1988; Kneepkens 1990; Rosier 1990; Sirridge 1990; Rosier 1994; Sirridge 1995; Kelly 2002. Modistae
: Pinborg 1968; Bursill-Hall 1971, 1971a; Rosier 1983a; Covington 1984; Marmo 1994; Rosier 1995. Suppositio
: de Rijk, 1962–1967, II, 1; 1970; 1971–1973; Ebbesen 1981; Libera 1981a; de Rijk 1985; Kneepkens 1987; Panaccio 1990. Peter of Spain
: de Rijk 1982; Dinneen 1987, 1990. Boethius of Denmark
: Jolivet 1987a; Bursill-Hall 1976; Pinborg 1984; Bursill-Hall 1996. Roger Bacon
: Fredborg 1981; Libera 1981; Pinborg 1981; Maloney 1983, 1983a; Rosier 1983, 1984; Rosier & Libera 1986; Biard 1989: 25–42; Hovdhaugen 1990; Libera 1991; Rosier 1998a. Thomas of Erfurt
: Pinborg 1968. Thomas Aquinas
: Ashworth 1991, 1992; Rosier 1990. Ockham
: Tachau 1988; Normore 1990; Panaccio 1990, 1992; Michon 1994; Biard 1997; Panaccio 1999; Libera 1996: 351–374; Panaccio 2003.



Chapter 5

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

5.1 The diversity of languages ‘What a great and good thing it would be to understand and speak all the languages of all peoples…’. Augustine’s words (see 3.1 above), suggest the feeling of belonging that comes from sharing a language. The force of this feeling is so strong that a man would rather be with his dog than with people he cannot converse with (De civ. Dei, XIX, 7). These considerations are a good starting point for a reflection on the degree of linguistic self-awareness learned people had in the Middle Ages. We would look in vain for a positive evaluation of linguistic diversity in Ancient and Medieval world. Certainly, the story of Babel’s curse did not suggest or promote it. Even Augustine’s imperative — study the meaning of words you don’t know, master all the languages of all peoples — can be related to the ideal aspiration to reestablish the original unity of humankind. Yet, for more than a thousand years, before and after the year 1000, Europe was a multilingual society, marked by complex relations between Latin and the vernaculars. As Percival (1999) notes, the development of vernaculars was not steady and regular. Bilingualism was the normal condition of any educated person. All literati studied Latin, which must have served as a powerful factor of social identification and cohesion, in opposition to the linguae alienae and even to the speakers’ mother tongues (Murphy 1980). The approach to Greek and Hebrew was different. While traditionally listed alongside Latin as sacred tongues, the two were still living languages of the Western world. Greek was spoken in Greek settlements in Southern Italy, while Hebrew was spoken by relevant minorities in all major European cities. A passage by the English Franciscan monk Roger Bacon (cited in Dahan et al. 1995: 265) well expresses the awareness of how permeable Latin was by those two other languages of the Western culture. Roger Bacon distinguishes between native words, Latin by origin or derivation, and Greek or Hebrew ones, either

84

A History of Language Philosophies

imported without any morphological change or naturalized and adapted to Latin inflection. Arabic had an ambivalent status; it was by all means one of the foremost learned languages of the Latin Middle Ages, and a great number of philosophical and scientific Arabic texts (and Arabic versions of Greek originals) were translated into Latin throughout the 12th and 13th centuries. But it was also a spoken tongue, used in commercial exchanges in the Mediterranean. Finally, it was the language of a world, the Islamic world, that Christianity was bent on evangelizing, by force if necessary. If we are to believe Roger Bacon’s testimony (Opus tertium X, 33–34), grammatical knowledge of these languages lagged behind practical knowledge. Among Latin-speaking people who also happen to speak Greek, Arabic, or Hebrew, says Roger Bacon, few are those who know the grammar and are able to teach it. Even native speakers are unable to explain ‘the reasons and the causes’ of their language. On the other hand, a network of interlinguistic relations had indeed developed thanks to geographical contiguity, commerce, diplomatic exchanges, and military and religious events. In his Opus majus, Roger Bacon recommends the study of languages for its utility in commercial exchanges, legal controversies between foreign countries, treaties, and evangelization. As noted by Dahan et al. (1995: 268–281), long before becoming a university subject, the study of languages was fostered by religious orders active in Africa and Spain, where Christianity and Islam came into contact, and in Eastern Europe, where separate Christian confessions met. We may assume that a comparison among different languages was prompted, if not by other causes, at least by the practice of translation. Robert Grosseteste (13th century) attributed the lack of latinitas in his translation of Dionysius the Areopagite to the irreducible difference between Greek and Latin vocabulary and syntax (McEnvoy 1981). Roger Bacon wrote among other things what has been described as a “contrastive Greek-Latin grammar” (Hovdhaugen 1990: 129). He shared the idea that there was one and only one grammar for all languages, notwithstanding superficial variations (Roger Bacon 1902: 27). But he differs from the Modistae, according to Rosier (1984: 30–31), in that the universality of grammar is not postulated, but reconstructed by comparing languages. Roger Bacon argues along the same lines that all idioms share the same ‘substance’, a sort of universal language on whose usage clerici et literati (1902: 126) agree. As for translation, he states that the proprietas of a language (that is, its specific lexical and prosodic qualities) cannot be transferred as such to other languages (1897–1900: I, 66–67). Etymology was another way to establish the similarities and dissimilarities among languages. For Roger

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Bacon, indeed, diachronic etymology had to be distinguished from speculative or ‘ontological’ etymology (Rosier 1998a: 118) in the manner of Isidore of Seville (see 3.2 above). Medieval grammatical studies have often been discredited for their presumed exclusive focus on the formal aspects of language and their indifference to speech and usage. But the notion of usage as a language criterion, which was to dominate the theory and practice of Renaissance men of letters, is in fact already found in Anselm of Canterbury’s De Grammatico, where Anselm distinguishes between scientific and ordinary language. Similarly, in De signis, believed to be part of Roger Bacon’s Opus majus, usage is treated as a specific modality of impositio, called accidental, which differs from deliberate imposition, which we use when assigning a name in baptizing or when we deliberately call something in a certain way. Deliberate name giving is something the learned do, especially the ‘experts in the art of imposing’. Accidental imposition escapes the attention of the imposer and his interlocutors, who are focused on the main reason for speaking, ‘expressing the sense of a complete discourse’. Imposition continuously extends and transforms the original vocabulary, subjecting words to a continuous transumptio, a semantic slippage through which ‘all day long we are creating and renovating the meaning of words’ (De signis, 154–161). An outstanding example of deliberate imposition is the construction of artificial languages, for which Roger Bacon provides the rules (De signis, 156). One starts from a number of monosyllabic roots or primitivae dictiones (six characters at the most, warns Roger Bacon, as in stirps). From this basis the entire vocabulary is derived, consisting in dysyllabic words, ‘sufficient, if multiplied to their full capacity’. Finally, having obtained ‘an infinite abundance of terms’, one imposes ‘primary names on primary things and secondary names, i.e., derived, on secondary things associated to the first’.The recipe is basically the same one that was to be adopted in late-Renaissance encyclopedism, a ramification of signs capable of reflecting the ramification of concepts. Roger Bacon also elaborated a rudimental typology of languages, where Latin appears far removed from rationality; it does not even resemble the ‘artificialist’ model (lingua latina valde deficit ab hac arte). For this reason it is difficult to speak it fluently if one does not learn it early in life. Anglo-Saxon instead is closer to the artificialist model, easier than Latin ‘in terms of compositional criteria’ (that is syntactically), though more difficult ‘in terms of the substance of sound production’ (i.e., phonetically). Imposition as an action the speaker performs on language is, according to Biard (1981), the main operative concept in Roger Bacon’s theory. Rosier has

85

86

A History of Language Philosophies

repeatedly stressed (e.g., Rosier 1994) the importance of the studies of grammatical semantics by Roger Bacon, Robert Kilwardby, and many anonymous masters of the arts of the trivium, who centered their attention on the pragmatic aspects of speech, which is to say, the signifying intention of the speaker and the semantic specificity of figurative expressions, in short, all the internal devices and external conditions governing the acts of production and reception of speech. Questions that traditionally pertained to rhetoric rather than to grammar are here included in specifically grammatical analyses. Grammar implodes under the pressure of factors pertaining to ordinary communicational procedures, the linguistic practices of sacramental liturgy, and beliefs in the efficacy of magical or astrological signs. All this should make us wary of the dichotomies we often resort to in order to characterize periods, schools, or tendencies. Language theories of the Middles Ages and the Renaissance are commonly contrasted in terms such as logic vs. rhetoric, rules vs. usage, universality vs. historicity of languages, etc. It is certainly reasonable to assume that during the Middle Ages the doctrine of the unity of human language and the universality of grammar did serve as a powerful explicative principle. For Medieval scholars, the accidental variety of languages did not undermine a substantial linguistic unity, ensured by the structure of grammatical categories, present as such in any language, and by the ontological basis of signifying modes. Yet, the notion of linguistic unity coexisted with a naturalistic description of human origins as attested, among the Modistae, by Boethius of Denmark. In question 16 of his treatise on modi significandi, Boethius writes that he has already dealt with the question of the variety of idioms in his De animalibus. Because the latter text is not extant, we must make do with the clues found in the passages of question 16 where Boethius discusses the question of whether grammar is innate. Even if segregated in a desert, humans would learn to speak, because speech — their speech supported by their logical and grammatical structure — is connatural to them, just as other forms of speech are connatural to other animal species. Idioms cannot differ except accidentally, and only in their acquired aspects (per doctrinam habiti), not in those pre-established by nature. Idiomatic variations are described by Boethius as the result of the gradual articulation of voice, a matter undifferentiated in itself (‘free and capable of signifying any concept of the mind’ [q. 114, 85–86]). A first impositio generates the signifying voice, a second determines its signifying modes. So it happens that the gender of nouns differs in Greek and Latin, or that one language may have articles while another does not (q. 114, 98–104).

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Sirridge (1995) has provided evidence for an analogous polarity between nature and convention in a contemporary of Boethius, John of Denmark. In his case too, the articulation of the vocal matter is the point where the common linguistic structure yields to the diversity of languages. Humans have in common with animals the ‘appetitive and imaginative’ determination to vocalization. But only in humans does this lead first to an internal articulation of which even the dumb are capable, and then to the corresponding articulated utterance. The common phonic substrate that precedes articulation in the various languages is a product of natural necessity according to the so-called Ars Meliduna
: a text of the School of Melun, datable to the mid-12th century. De Rijk (1962–1967) was the first to stress its importance. The anonymous author wonders whether words have a beginning and whether they will ever cease to be. The answer is that simple voices, i.e., elementary sounds, “exist from eternity […] owing their being to nature”, while compounded voices “such as ‘man’ are not extant from eternity. Indeed, their existence has had a beginning. If you ask me when the word ‘man’ has started being, I will answer: when it started entering the speakers’ usage” (quoted by Braakhuis 1987: 109). Dante Alighieri’s treatise on vernacular eloquence (De vulgari eloquentia) is both the first systematic description of a vernacular and a tentative outline of a general theory of vernaculars. In his mapping of Italian dialects (I, ix, 4–7; x, 5–8), he stresses not only regional differences, but also more local ones, such as those between neighboring cities or even between different neighborhoods of the same city. These local differences, says Dante, have developed gradually over long periods of time, starting from the curse of Babel. They are so imperceptible that local speakers fail to note the changes. For centuries, Babel was invoked to explain the anthropological mystery of human unity-in-diversity, whether in race, language, religion, or customs. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Babel was more than a rhetorical commonplace or a convenient empirical explicative principle; rather, it was the founding event of secular history, marking the border with sacred history, the event after which the empirical explanation of human happenings becomes legitimate and plausible. So it is for Dante, who sees the confusion of tongues as the consequence of humans’ having lost their primeval language, turning into unstable and mutable creatures. Like all human habits and customs, language changes over time and space because it is not based on nature or a formal agreement (consortio), being rather the product of local de facto agreements (ibid., I, ix, 5–7). De vulgari eloquentia is a compendium of contemporary historical linguistics. Dante postulates the existence of a single ancient European language as the

87

88

A History of Language Philosophies

source of the three main language groups in Europe: Germanic languages, Greek, and what we would call Romance languages. For Dante, the latter have a common source which is not Latin but perhaps a vernacular of which literary Latin was the grammatically codified form (I, ix, 2). His main goal was to distill, so to speak, a single Italian language from the various Italian dialects. His text is in some ways at the root of the so-called questione della lingua, the longlasting debate on the formation of a common Italian language to be adopted in literary and scientific discourse and sanctioned by its use in aristocratic courts and administrations in the various Italian states and cities. The idea of a causeeffect relation between centralized political power and the development of national languages, implicit in Dante’s program, is still a key concept in the history of vernaculars. A vernacular is a tongue we speak from infancy, without any need of learning its grammar (I, i, 2). Latins, like Greeks and a few other peoples, also have a ‘secondary’ language, which is acquired only through study. Being more stable, it helps provide a common identity in the face of geographical and chronological differences (I, ix, 11). All languages share a forma locutionis impressed in the mind; it is the common structure of all idioms, obscured by the Babelic confusion, but still evident in Hebrew (ibid., I, vi, 4–5). The common Italian vernacular Dante is looking for does not correspond to any one of the existing dialects. Yet, it is potentially present in all of them, like the panther, of which one perceives the smell without being able to tell where it is (I, xvi, 1). Dante plays a little with the terminology of contemporary dialectics. The many can always be reduced to the unity of a genus, which serves as their criterion. Thus, all dialects (the species) can be reduced to the unity of a genus, and this genus is the common vernacular, which is manifested to varying degrees in each specific vernacular, somewhat as God manifests himself to varying degrees in man, animals, plants, minerals, etc. and is never found in His entirety in any of them. Here, within the usual Platonic framework, Dante introduces an anthropological notion that was destined to have a long history, viz., the notion that for each community there are a set of common identifying traits present in customs, laws, habits, as well as in languages. In the 17th- and 18th-centuries all these elements were summed up in the correlated expressions ‘genius of the nation’ and ‘genius of language’. Dante’s theory of vernaculars is all the more important when one considers the level of gramaticalization of modern European languages at the time. When Dante wrote his treatise, the only language close to the Italian vernaculars that had been grammatically described was Provençal. The first Italian and Spanish

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

grammars appeared in the late 14th century, signaling the beginning of a production of grammars, lexicons, and spelling manuals which grew significantly in the following century. The diagram in Auroux (1994: 74–75), provides a good visual representation of this production. The process extended gradually to the languages of other continents, especially those of native Americans, increasingly described especially by Spanish missionaries. Baggioni (1997) dates the first ‘ecolinguistic revolution’ to the 15th and the 16th centuries: a territorial redistribution of languages due to the spread of printing and increasing competition against Latin from vernaculars in administration, literary and scientific discourse, and even religious discourse, especially after the Reformation. The second ecolinguistic revolution occurred in the 19th century, when nation states began to unify their territories also linguistically through increased schooling and the establishment of an homogeneous administrative structure. The spread of vernaculars and direct contact with linguistic diversity did not prevent Renaissance scholars from continuing the search for an original unitary language. Though the tendency can be related to nostalgia for an Edenic condition, to the Pentecostal miracle, and to a desire for rediscovering a mother-tongue, it also anticipated to some extent the modern scientific comparative approach. Indeed, the old notion of a radical break between 19thcentury (‘scientific’) linguistics and a previous (‘pre-scientific’) tradition, is now being questioned. Borst (1995: I II), Metcalf (1974), Droixhe (1978; Droixe, ed. 1984), and Muller (1986) have produced a lot of data that suggest it was more of an internal transformation within an older tradition. Hoenigswald (1990) very lucidly summarizes the notions which had become firmly established in philology in the period from Renaissance up to the 18th century: the existence of a proto-mother tongue for the main European and Asian language groups; the splitting of languages into dialects and the evolution of dialects into independent languages; the minimum requirements for establishing the derivation of words from one language to another; the notion that, in order to ascertain the relation between languages, comparing grammar structures is more important than comparing words; the notion that the validity of an etymology must be borne out by some kind of regularity (‘analogy’) in phonetic variations; the notion of an Edenic language different from historical ones, though presumably their common source. Lay philology, sacred philology, and hermeneutics all contributed to the definition of these notions. Humanistic culture, with Lorenzo Valla, described the interpreter of sacred books as a technician who must recover the authentic texts by purging them of later manipulations. Both in Reformed and Catholic countries, the comparative value of the letter and the spirit of sacred

89

90

A History of Language Philosophies

texts was the subject of heated controversy. A manifesto of Bible philology was the Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), in which Baruch Spinoza declared that the sacred texts must be subject to the same exegetic method applied to all other objects of philological investigation. In the study of the Bible, scholars were dealing with the most ancient testimonies of Western history. It is not surprising, therefore, that in works such as Richard Simon’s ‘critical history’ of Old Testament (Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, 1680), the question of human origin was addressed and glottogenetic hypotheses were advanced. In the history of philology, from the late Middle Ages to early 19th century the theolinguistic tradition played an important role; it led scholars to identify Hebrew as humanity’s mother-tongue and to look for confirmation of Biblical events through linguistic comparisons. The primacy of Hebrew was first questioned in the mid-17th century, when the so-called Scythian hypothesis began to gain credit, i.e., the idea that all the languages that were later called Indo-European had a common origin in the region lying north of the Black Sea (Scythia). These languages were thus distinguished from Hebrew, which was identified as an ‘Aramaic’ (i.e. Semitic) language. The debate was strongly conditioned by ideological motives tied to burgeoning nationalisms; greater proximity to the presumed mother-tongue raised the status of a modern language and of the people who spoke it. A great philologist who provided an overview and passionate critical examination of the above questions was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. His historical and comparative studies must be considered in relation to his interest in the symbolical functions of thought and the possibility of expressing them through artificial writing systems or artificial languages. The first aspect, the ‘linguistic’ one, has long been obscured by the fame of the second, the ‘logical’ one. Recently, however, many studies by Dascal, Droixhe, Dutz, Gensini, and Hoenigswald have shown that the various areas of Leibniz’s research not only are not in contradiction but in fact combine to produce an actual philosophy of languages. The considerations on the limits of semantic arbitrariness are a first, fundamental aspect of Leibniz’s philosophy. In artificial languages, the sign can be absolutely arbitrary; but in natural languages it is relatively conditioned by other ‘causes’, i.e., by reasons inherent in the formation of words. The cause most commonly cited by Leibniz is the correspondence between sounds and internal affections, which manifests itself in onomatopoeia. Languages are not formed ex instituto or by law. They develop out of the natural drives of men, who adapt sounds to their affections and emotions. The origin of words is accidental, but it is regulated by the analogy between voice and the affections of

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

the soul associated to each perception. This was most likely the way Adam had named all things. On the basis of this analogy we arrive at the etymon, which survives especially in toponyms and proper names of people. The theory of onomatopoeia as a characteristic trait of the original language and an underlying principle of later languages had a long history. As we have seen, it dates back to Plato’s Cratylus and to the etymological science of the Stoics, and had been handed down to posterity by Isidore of Seville and Medieval encyclopedists. Leibniz tacitly dissociates himself from the more extreme versions of this tradition: time, he says, transforms the native meanings of words making them unrecognizable. This is why Leibniz views efforts to reconstruct the original language as futile. Gensini (1995) explains Leibniz’s interweaving of the natural and the arbitrary in linguistic production with the influence of Epicurus and the tradition of mediated Epicureanism through which the ancient linguistic naturalism was handed down to modern thought. However, the notion of sound symbolism, which Leibniz might have taken from Epicurus, is not the only limit to the arbitrariness of signs. Another more radical limit is syntactic: the ‘proportion’ between the texture of signs and the texture of things. This, too, is a natural limitation. If one can employ characters for reasoning, in them there must be some complex disposition (situs), some order suited to things, if not in individual words […] at least in their connection and inflection. And this varied order is the same, in some way, in all languages […]. While characters are arbitrary, nevertheless their use and connection have something not arbitrary, that is some sort of proportion between characters and things, and the relation between different characters express the same things. And this proportion or relation is the foundation of truth. For it ensures that, whether we employ these or those other characters, the result is always identical, or equivalent, or corresponding in proportion. (Leibniz 1931: 192)

Thus, sound symbolism and the syntactical ‘proportion’ of sign systems to things are the foundation of Leibniz’ s naturalism. Thanks to the natural proportion between real and ideal classifications, even arbitrary symbolical systems are languages. In Leibniz’s writings, the notion of meaning comes up in various contexts. I take the following list from Gensini (2000: 23–34). i.

the distinction between lexical meaning (significatio, significatus) and meaning in context (sensus). According to Gensini, Leibniz is particularly sensitive to this distinction, already elaborated by Medieval semantics, on

91

92

A History of Language Philosophies

ii. iii. iv.

v. vi.

account of his interest in juridical hermeneutics: the analysis of the meaning of words interacting within a text is decisive in legal interpretation; the role of tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, etc.) in transforming meaning; the distinction between words (verba) used in ordinary language, semantically open, and the rigidly defined terms (termini) of scientific language; the imperfections of ordinary language and how they are put to use in communication. The lack of logic is compensated by the force of imagination, familiar idiomatic expressions, and shared knowledge of the subject matter. Thus, in common language a single period may easily condense ten syllogisms; the semantic omnipotence of languages. A language can speak of anything, as nothing escapes its formative power; the power we have to speak of things of which we cannot have a corresponding mental image (for example: a polygon with a thousand sides), and the power we have to anticipate and condense thought. Both powers depend on cogitatio caeca, which proceeds without having to ‘fill in’ symbols with intuitive material at every step, and therefore avoids being burdened by notional content. It is typical of formalized languages, but natural ones partake of it when necessary.

The projects for artificial languages were a much debated question in Leibniz’s time. Another issue was the one usually referred to with the German term Logosmystik, a philosophy of the Word as the matrix both of humans’ capacity for language and the power of words. They were two distinct but not necessarily separated directions of research. Both partook in the same utopian project of reconstructing the linguistic unity of humankind. In the artificial language projects, practical motivations — unifying the community of scholars fragmented by the advent of vernaculars, freeing learned communication from the ambiguity of ordinary language — were associated with religious ones, such as the conversion of non-Christian populations in the 13th and 14th centuries, as in the case of Ramón Lull’s Ars magna, or, later on, re-unifying the various Christian confessions, divided by wars of religion. As for the Logosmystik, theories on the divine origin of the symbolical universe, which had been fueled in the early decades of the 17th century by the popularity of German mystic Jacob Boehme, were not in contrast with current representations of nature as a discourse by God to his creatures. Finally, both the construction of perfect languages and the reconstruction of the original natural symbolism represented a response to linguistic skepticism.

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

From the early to the late Renaissance, intellectuals displayed an ambivalent attitude towards ordinary language. Great representatives of studia humanitatis such as Lorenzo Valla and philosophers such as Mario Nizolio presented it as the touchstone of reasonable discourse and opposed it as such to the jargon of the Schools. An echo of their position can be found in Leibniz. Others — including Francis Bacon — denounced it as an unreliable instrument, and contrasted it with ‘autopsy’, i.e., the direct approach to things, which was the guiding principle of the new scientific practices. In this case, too, the polemic revolved around the verbosity of the Schools. When we speak of universal language as conceived in the 17th and 18th centuries, we are not referring to a system based on natural languages and destined to replace them in ordinary international communication, like Esperanto in modern times. We intend rather two different types of artificial notation. One was the characteristica universalis, a form of writing in which each character directly denotes a thing. Such a capacity was attributed to Chinese characters, which had become known in Europe in the 17th century thanks to Jesuit missionaries, and which, along with Egyptian hieroglyphs, were cited as outstanding examples of symbolic writing. The other project, more interesting from a theoretical perspective, was the elaboration of a so-called philosophical language or universal language, a notational system grounded on a previous classification of concepts. Both projects were especially strong in England, where the knowledge of Latin was less widespread and problems of learned communication were widely debated, for example by the Royal Society of London. The need for a universal communication system had been voiced by Francis Bacon, the guiding star of English scientific philosophy. Works such as George Dalgarno’s Ars signorum (1661) or John Wilkins’s Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), explicitly admit Bacon’s influence. Universal language is presented as a remedy against the unreliability of natural languages, which Bacon had stressed in his doctrine of the idola fori, the false images of things nested in everyday speech, which we assimilate along with our mother-tongue. A recurring theme was the opposition between words and things, which came up in contemporary writings every time criticism was leveled against the verbosity of the Scholastic tradition and the sterility of the syllogistic method, to which the fecundity of direct observation was opposed. Various factors favored the spread of artificial language schemes: the Renaissance encyclopedic ideal, with its aspiration to a universal system of knowledge; the heritage of the ancient ‘arts of memory’, meant to facilitate the learning and memorization of data; Bacon’s insistence on

93

94

A History of Language Philosophies

the need for the progress of knowledge and reforming the methods for its transmission; various projects of pedagogic and religious reform. The opinion expressed by René Descartes as to the possibility of creating a universal language is marked by extreme prudence. A universal language could be realized only after a re-organization of the hierarchy of concepts, from the most complex to the simplest. To the simpler concepts, symbols should be assigned, whose combinations would express the combinations of concepts in a clear and univocal way. But, until a ‘true philosophy’ has ordered and numbered all notions, the best that can be hoped for is a polyglot dictionary, in which each primitive word has a corresponding character. The transformation of such a system into an actual language is something that can happen only in ‘the land of romances’ (Letter to Mersenne, 1629: see Descartes 1897). Leibniz, too, deals with this theme in his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (1666) and in later writings. This is not in contrast with his interest in natural languages, in spite of the clear-cut distinction he makes between these and artificial communication systems. In principle, there is no contradiction between an awareness of the empirical nature of historical formations such as languages and the planning of notational systems that would reduce their imperfections to a minimum, or possibly eliminate them. A preliminary classification of notions was the common prerequisite of 17th-century artificial language projects. An actual inventory of what was known, properly classified into genera and species, had to precede the choice of simple and composite signs and the construction of their morphology and syntax. So it is not surprising that with the gradual diffusion of Locke’s epistemological paradigm — founded, as we shall see, on the critique of the very possibility of ‘real’ classifications — these schemes soon became obsolete. Yet, they were not entirely abandoned, not even in the following century. Indeed, the same taxonomic criterion that inspired them was at the basis of the great zoological, botanical, and chemical tables that established modern scientific nomenclatures.

5.2 Philosophies of history, philosophies of language The origins of the ‘logomystical’ tradition can be traced back to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius (see 2.4 above) and to Judaeo-Christian syncretism, of which we have seen an example in Philo of Alexandria (see 3.2 above). Through the medieval Platonists, it had penetrated humanistic culture, as in the case of Pico della Mirandola, and had encountered the tradition of the Kabbala, the theosophic

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

system developed within European Jewish communities in the 12th and 13th centuries, with its mystical and symbolical interpretation of the Pentateuch. It had accompanied Christian theological thought, its foremost development being found in the writings of German theologian Johannes Eckhart in the late 13th century. It was re-elaborated by two other German philosophers, Nicholas of Kues and Jacob Boehme, and rediscovered during the vogue of the Rosicrucian sect, a confraternity whose manifestoes are dated to 1614–1615. The Rosicrucians took their name from Christian Rosenkreuz, a 15th-century German traveler who was said to have brought the ancient theurgic wisdom back from the East. The Neoplatonic theory of the ineffability of the divine principle interwove with the identification of God with the Logos, suggested by the Gospel of John. It combined with the idea, also Neoplatonic, of the sensible forms of the cosmos as a symbolic self-revelation of the Word; and with the theme of the inner word, which according to Augustine does not belong to any language but precedes them all as the spirit precedes the uttered word. Logosmystik permeated linguistic theory in various forms. Mathematical concepts, for example, were seen as a direct manifestation of the Logos, and mathematical knowledge was opposed to knowledge of natural forms, conditioned by the modalities of bodily experience and by common linguistic usage. The border between mystical and naturalistic explanations of the power of words was often as blurred as the one between magic and science. The efficacy of magical formulas and spells was seen as a particular case of the harmony that governs the whole natural universe. The power of words in exorcisms, evocations, and spells lies in the specific ‘configuration’ that voice and sound share with all that is measurable, and acts through attraction and aversion somewhat like a magnet or an antidote. Verbal magic is therefore an artificial boosting of the natural qualities of the sound, which explains why the power of words does not depend on meaning and is lost in translation. It also explains the therapeutic value of sounds, which act on imagination, generating psychosomatic phenomena (see Paschetto 1981). In etymological science, the search for the roots of words often became a search for the language revealed to Adam by God, in which each thing had its ‘true’ name, free of the accidents and contingencies of post-lapsarian human naming. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the doctrine of jus naturae, i.e., of a number of original natural rights belonging to mankind, had created a renewed interest in pre-institutional ways of life, the state of nature, and the genesis of institutions. Hypotheses on the origin of humanity were discussed in treatises of political and legal philosophy, such as the famous work on the law of nature and

95

96

A History of Language Philosophies

nations by Samuel Pufendorf (De iure naturae et gentium, 1672), and the naturalistic theory was resumed according to which language had developed spontaneously among early humans from interjections and onomatopoeic sounds, under the pressure of affections and emotions. An interesting case of intersection between legal and linguistic theories is Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova (The new Science, published in two versions, 1725, 1744: see Vico 1984, Vico 2002). Languages are an essential part of the study of natural law, because law itself is embodied in the forms of language, and language has accompanied all phases of the development of institutions. Secular history began with the Flood, which produced a progeny of animal-like men, deficient in reason, and driven by sensuality and fantasy. Since their knowledge was achieved through fantasy, it was a ‘poetic logic’, based on the personification of natural forces. This was the age of the gods; it was followed by the age of the heroes, i.e., the phase of patriarchal and aristocratic power, and finally, by the age of humans, with the advent of reason and the establishment of republics. Similarly, language goes from silent expression based on gestures and emblematic representations, to symbolical sensuous procedures typical of a primitive mentality, and finally to the expression of abstract notions. An example of this process is real estate law. The acquisition of a field in Greece was based on the interpretation of divine signs; in early Roman law, the Twelve Tables required the acquisition to be accompanied by ritual symbolical acts; in modern law it is sufficient to explicitly state the intention of transferring property rights. Within primitive communities, language, along with gods and laws, contributes to the identity of the group. Those who control them form the caste of the patres, who can speak to the gods through rituals. Thus, aristocratic right is founded on the monopoly of language and is gradually lost as language is extended to the lower classes. Laws can then be expressed in a common language, no longer sacred and arcane. The end of the monopoly over language marks the beginning of the reign of equality and of linguistic and juridical conventions. Primitive men were incapable of abstracting, distinguishing, and comparing concepts. Thus, they were bound to the materiality of the formulas in which the first juridical norms were cast, and scrupulously respected the letter of agreements, laws, and oaths. With the advent of rationality, words lost their materiality; they became conventional signs and attained the status of universal concepts. People were now the masters of words, because their meaning was negotiated through verbal exchanges within the community. Vico takes the analogy between language and other institutions even further. Just as there is a continuity between natural law and positive laws, so is

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

there a natural component in conventional languages, a ‘poetic’ nucleus, which continues to be active within modern languages and can be evidenced by etymology. Because of their inability to think in abstract terms, primitive men are more prone to perceive analogies between different things and therefore to invent metaphors. They gather the qualities that best characterize a given object into imaginative universals (universali fantastici), i.e., symbolic generalizations that concisely define the object on the basis of its prototypical traits. In modern languages too figurative devices act in the same way. In the language of primitive men, however, they are a necessity of nature. Indeed, in primitive mentality imagination alone works as a cognitive tool, isolating the quality of an object and using it as a type. The ‘imaginative universal’ can be expressed by a gesture; for example, when the year is defined through the gesture of mowing, in reference to the harvest, the most important moment of the year. Later on, Saturn, bearer of the scythe, becomes the god and likewise, the name of time. This example shows the transition from gestural definition (mowing) to divine characters, i.e., physical substances endowed with life and representing gods. Language, in this phase, is a repertory of divine names (thirty thousand, according to Varro, in the ‘encyclopedia’ of the ancient inhabitants of Latium), as many as there are natural phenomena, such as thundering heavens, sown earth, sprouting corn, and so on. This procedure of fantastic generalization does not completely disappear even in the third and final phase of language development, when convention prevails. Metaphor, the active principle in the birth of language, turns into a permanent feature of its production. All languages express abstract notions through material representations. Vico’ s theory of language is consistent with his metaphysics, divided between the primacy of the pure mind and the pressure of bodily drives. This tension leads Vico to evidence the indigence of human thought, i.e., the weakness of a mind whose powers “have their roots in the body and draw their strength from it” (Vico 1984: 313), and to view language as a laborious process of trial and error, which follows in the wake of each nascent thought. Language is a system of adaptive strategies. The materialist tradition of the classic age had highlighted the function of imagination and passion in the genesis of language. Epicurus’s theory had been rediscovered in the 17th century by experts in natural law, scholars of Bible philology, and philosophers like Gassendi and Hobbes. Vico, Epicurus’s great adversary, takes Epicurus’s theory even further; imagination and passion not only generate the first forms of expression but lie at the core of linguistic creativity even in the languages of civilized nations.

97

98

A History of Language Philosophies

5.3 The mutations of the trivium Augustine’s anti-rhetorical model (see 2.6 above) remained valid as a criterion for the practice of preachers and as a principle of their professional ethics. A very concise enunciation of that criterion is provided by the 12th-century French theologian Alain of Lille, in his Regulae (xxxiv). Preachers must follow usage, because the Church disapproves of mundane verbal innovations. Their speech must be easily understandable, because it is intended for everyone, and ‘suited to the things he talks about’. These unostentatious goals were in line with the subordinate position of rhetoric in contemporary educational curricula. In the classification of sciences proposed by theologian Robert Kilwardby, who taught grammar and logic in Paris, rhetoric is just one step above manual arts (De ortu scientiarium). Poetics had no less an uncertain status; it was often reduced to grammar or studied as a rhetorical genre along with the ars dictaminis (the art of prose-writing) and the ars praedicandi (the art of preaching [Murphy 1974: 135–193]). However, the prestige of rhetoric remained unquestioned in Italian universities, where the familiarity with Cicero’s works was widespread. Cicero was the greatest authority in rhetoric up to the 13th century, when Aristotle’s Rhetoric began to be known through Arabic commentaries and then to circulate in translation (Dahan 1998). For Cicero, rhetoric was the very culmination of civil intercourse. In Italy, this principle influenced the legal profession and the practice of chanceries, and was cultivated and divulged in the 13th and 14th century by men of letters such as Brunetto Latini and Francesco Petrarca. A chair of Rhetoric (and one of Poetics, on students’ demand) was instituted at the University of Bologna in 1321, a few decades after the University of Paris had abolished its own chair of Rhetoric. The primacy of rhetoric in Italian universities was a specific trait of the nascent Humanism, “the basic belief that human artistry is in some way superior to regula” (Murphy 1974: 111). The discovery of the integral version of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria in 1416 and, shortly thereafter, of Cicero’s De oratore and Tacitus’s De oratoribus, went hand in hand with the direct study of the Greek tradition, spread by Byzantine immigrants to the West. Through the writings of one of these, George of Trebizond, along with Lorenzo Valla, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Sperone Speroni and many others, a ‘new epiphany of truth’ (Lardet 1986: 92) was celebrated in Italian culture between the 15th and the 16th centuries; the immediacy of examples (monstrare) prevailed over the laborious slowness of demonstrare. This revolution had important repercussions in the rest of Europe too. Some of the

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

traditional duties of dialectics were assigned to rhetoric, and this ultimately had a liberating effect on logic, which ceased being the ars disputandi and acquired its modern role of a general theory of investigation. On the other hand, logic had already been developing as a formal science distinct from the sciences of language, through 14th-century English logicians first, and then in the Paris school, thanks to the elaboration of the notion of mental language and of its priority over voiced language (Biard 1989: 67–68). This increasing emancipation of linguistic studies should have led, in principle, to their independence from logic. In fact, however, this development was hampered for a long time by the the authority of Latin. It was common belief that, as Dante says in Convivio (The Banquet, I, v), Latin was, like logic, ‘perpetual and incorruptible’. This may seem strange, considering the transformations that Medieval Latin was undergoing, due to factors such as the influence of vernaculars, the new linguistic practices connected with the rebirth of towns, and the increasingly complex economic exchanges after the year 1000. This opinion probably depended on the fact that Latin grammar was subject to a rigorous and sophisticated description and often elevated to the role of universal grammar, and that in general it was associated with writing or with highly institutionalized oral practices in the Church, in universities or chanceries. Latin being thus located within a ‘synchronic vision’ (Giard 1984: 41), its actual developments were not acknowledged by theory. Paradoxically, the fact that Latin was subject to diachronic variations gained credit only in the 15th century, with the development of the Humanistic program of its ‘restoration’, while at the same time Humanism, setting up the Latin classics as the perfect and unattainable model, tended to establish a new meta-historical idea of language. Lorenzo Valla’s treatise on the ‘elegancies’ of Latin language (Elegantiae linguae latinae) was a canonical text from this perspective, which should be read alongside Dialecticae disputationes, where Valla attacks the procedures and technical language of Scholasticism and sets forth his own theory of argumentation, based on the cogency of examples and the efficacy of enthymemes. The ‘medieval fascination with logic’ (Giard 1984: 42–43), was dislodged by the idea of usage as the supreme criterion. Valla represented the secular opinions of the new intellectuals, their need for an effective civil communication. Some of his ideas were to become commonplaces in Italian culture. One of these, which lies at the core of the Humanists’ ‘rhetorical revolution’, is the aversion towards method, specifically towards the idea of a fixed procedure leading to incontrovertible conclusions. To this idea the Humanists opposed the liberty of demonstrations which could

99

100 A History of Language Philosophies

constantly be revised through the use of for-and-against arguments, and continuously adapted to circumstances. On the other hand, the elevation of rhetoric to ‘a symbol of the activity of the intelligence’ (Giard 1982: 15) encouraged a tendency to vigorously and systematically explore the resources of ordinary language. All sciences, said the humanist Mario Nizolio, must in the end comply with the criterion of common discourse. Thus philology was set up as the supreme critical art. Nizolio resorts to it to advocate a nominalist position in the debate on universals, a traditional subject of dialectics. Universals are names used figuratively to designate a plurality of individual entities. This is demonstrated by the practice of Greek and Latin classic authors who had no qualms about using plural inflections both for words indicating universals (“Quicquid patimur mortale genus…”), and those indicating actual pluralities (“Sic dixerunt multitudo…” [Nizolio 1956: 41–54]). The humanistic reform of dialectics was echoed all over Europe. The new art of argumentation did not depend so much on following rigorous rules of inference as on the relevance of adduced quotations and testimonies. A central role was thus taken by topics, i.e., the classification of commonplaces, and inventio, i.e., the determination of strategically appropriate arguments. These changes in the arts of the trivium evidently met the needs of a secular, mercantile society, in which rhetoric was seen as the theory of civil argumentation. Attacks on the sterility of syllogistic argumentation, the so-called ‘Philosophy of the Schools’, were commonplace, both for the proponents of humane litterae, after Valla, and the followers of the experimental method, such as Francis Bacon. In the case of the second group, however, traditional dialectics was not attacked in the name of rhetoric but in favor of a direct approach to natural phenomena. The true language of science, for Bacon and his followers, was neither the syllogism nor the enthymeme, but observation and experiment. Studies such as those on Thomas Hobbes by Skinner (1996) and Biletzki (1997), and by Carr (1990) on the Cartesian school, have brought to light an oscillation between two ideals, eloquence and rigorous science. Rhetoric had an ambivalent status in a culture split between the humanistic ideal of vir civilis and the new projects for a scientific philosophy. Furthermore, the rejection of the Scholastic method reflected the emergence, with Humanism, of a new type of philosophy, related more to civil professions and political-administrative functions than to academe. In all of Europe but Germany (even there with notable exceptions), from the 13th to the early 19th century, the main lines of philosophy developed outside academe. Dante was a politician, Valla a court secretary, Francis Bacon a lawyer and a

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

statesman, Descartes a rentier and occasionally a soldier, Hobbes was a private tutor relying on patronage of an aristocratic family, Leibniz was a librarian at court, Locke a doctor and political counselor, Abbot Condillac lived on his sinecure and the positions offered him by the aristocratic society to which he belonged, Vico was a teacher of rhetoric who never succeeded in getting the prestigious chair in law to which he aspired, Herder was a court preacher. They were all ‘free-lance’ writers. Only with the spread of universities based on the model established in the early 19th century in Germany did the figures of philosopher and university professor coincide once again (here, too, with notable exceptions). The first of the arts of discourse, grammar, was also involved in this epistemological change. The grammatical model of the Modistae had already been attacked in the 14th century and became obsolete in the following century. However, it is hard to say to what degree the most important Latin grammars of the Renaissance were influenced by Medieval models. The search for the ‘causes’ of language — a scientific problem echoed in the titles of some of the most famous 16th-century grammars such as Julius Caesar Scaliger’s De causis linguae latinae (1540), Francisco Sánchez’s Minerva: seu de causis linguae latinae (1587) — certainly evokes the goals of medieval speculative grammar. But although the terminology and the stated intents were similar, not much was left of the analysis of the Modistae (Percival 1982: 814; Covington 1984: 126–127). In the 17th century, the idea of a universal grammar was seized upon by Tommaso Campanella, among others, as a branch of ‘rational philosophy’ and set apart from civil grammar based on the authority of the classics. The continuity with speculative grammar (a strong continuity according to Seuren 1998: 30–48) can be argued more convincingly in the case of the socalled general grammar. The two founding texts in this tradition are the Grammaire générale et raisonnée by Arnauld and Lancelot (1660), and the Logic by Arnauld and Nicole, conceived as an ‘art of thinking’ (Logique ou art de penser, 1662), both written for the schools of the Abbey of Port-Royal near Paris. Their circulation helped spread the notion of grammar as something that deals with the general structures of discourse, independently of the particularities of specific languages. The two books — which for over a century represented a model both for general grammars and for grammars of specific languages — have met with conflicting reception in modern times: they have been accused of having perpetuated an obsolete, logical-linguistic tradition or, on the contrary, hailed as having given rise to modern grammar. (For a review of the different positions, see Dominicy 1984: 7–16.)

101

102 A History of Language Philosophies

Along with Bernard Lamy’s Rhétorique (1668), the above-mentioned Grammaire and Logique brought about a redistribution of roles among the ancient arts of the trivium. The Grammaire is a theory of the parts of speech, preceded by a chapter on the principles of phonetics. The Logique moves in a broader philosophical perspective. It takes into account the correspondence between the structure of judgment and the structure of proposition, and includes semantics, i.e., the domain of ‘conceiving’ as an act that precedes judging. Lamy’s Rhétorique goes well-beyond the traditional boundaries of the discipline. It amounts to a general theory of language, taking in the study of its origin and history, semiotics including sound symbolism, a classification of the parts of speech, a theory of tropes as a principle of semantic change, and, finally, a theory of persuasion based on Cartesian psychophysiology. The subtitle of the Grammaire declares that the work will deal with ‘the common ground of all languages and with the main differences between them’. In other words, it intends to describe different languages as ‘different solutions to similar problems’ (Pariente 1984: 59). Similar ideas are offered by Nicolas Beauzée, author of a Grammaire générale (1767) and of most of the entries on grammatical topics in the Encyclopédie
; and earlier by Du Marsais, author of a book on grammar’s ‘true principles’ (Véritables principes de la grammaire, 1730). The latter explains that universal grammar deals with articulated sounds, the ‘letters of which they are the signs’, and with the ‘nature of words and how they must be variously declined or inflected in order to have meaning’ (Du Marsais 1797: 274). The grammarians of Port-Royal had already introduced the notion of usage to account for deviations from general grammar rules. Usage was the sum of all the accidental and empirical factors connected to linguistic practice, and served to explain why languages differ and change over time. Notwithstanding continuity, a fundamental difference remains between 17th- and 18th-century general grammar and the former speculative grammar. In general grammar the representations of thought are not attributed to ‘any natural community with the world they represent’ (Auroux 1986: 106). In speculative grammar, instead, the ontological basis of grammar is ensured by the correspondence between modi essendi and modi intelligendi. In general grammar all that remains is the correlation between mental operations and the structure of language, as summarized in the title of a chapter of the Grammaire of Port-Royal (II, i): ‘To understand the bases of grammar it is necessary to know what happens in our minds’. For this reason Beauzée could claim that general grammar ‘is nothing but the rational exposition of the procedures [of] natural logic’ (Gramm., I, xxxii).

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment 103

These procedures are reconstructed through the study of empirical linguistic manifestations, following an inductive procedure not incompatible with the idea that grammar principles exist a priori. In his preface to his Grammaire (I, x–xi), Beauzée clearly outlines this question. Grammatical science precedes languages. Its principles — the same ones that govern the human mind in its operations — are the precondition for language. Grammatical art, on the contrary, follows language, because language usage must exist before it can be related to general principles. The systems of analogies created by technical grammar are nothing but the result of observations made on pre-existing usage. Universal grammar, as a theory of the principles governing the construction of sentences in any language, always presupposes the existence of language universals, i.e., common traits in all existing or imaginable languages. For this reason, Noam Chomsky (1966) suggested Port-Royal grammar and, in general, ‘Cartesian’ or rationalist linguistics, as a precedent for his own generative grammar (see 8.1 below). In fact, throughout the 17th century and beyond, the idea of a deep structure common to all languages was also widespread among the followers of Empiricism, such as Locke, Condillac, and others, discussed below. Language universals were generally thought of as the empirical result of the basic organic uniformity of human beings; representations are the same for everybody, because they rely on the senses and on mental operations common to all, though somewhat influenced by time, place, and other circumstances. As such, language universals are certainly a priori in regards to their empirical realization; they are linguistic potentialities that are actualized in different ways in various languages and are embodied in different expressive and communicative strategies. This, however, does not mean they can be inferred from mental structures, or studied independently of the observation and study of natural languages. In fact, in the 17th and 18th centuries, general grammar was universally seen as an inductive science. This will come out more clearly in the next few pages, where we will consider the theory of the parts of speech and the question of analytic order, two important themes of 18th-century linguistics and two examples of linguistic universals. At the roots of the theory of the parts of speech lies a theory of language as translation (Auroux 1986), the idea that a sequence of words is a reflection of a sequence of thoughts. According to this theory, units of speech in all languages correspond to units of thought and must be congruently used according to the criteria of grammaticality. This principle can be rightly defined as a linguistic universal. But while all languages have parts of speech, not all languages have all the parts of speech; in other words, not all languages actualize universals in the

104 A History of Language Philosophies

same way; indeed there are some languages where a given universal remains only potential. In other words, it is not the part of speech or the grammatical category, but the underlying function that is universal. A few examples are provided by Beauzée. Not all languages use articles, but all somehow actualize the function articles have in certain languages, i.e., that of indicating the individual entity to which the general name is applied. Temporality is essential to verbs, but is actualized in very different ways in different languages (Beauzée, Gramm., I, 423–424). As for number, what is essential is the (universal) usage of singular and plural. The dual is redundant, because plurality pertains to two as well as to a thousand. Otherwise, why not distinguish as many plurals as there are numbers? (ibid., II, 86–87). On the level of syntax, there are various actualizations “of the relations existing between the ideas expressed by words” (ibid., I, 3). Not all languages are inflected, but all actualize in some way the function of inflection, which is to express accessory ideas, using prepositions, cases, or a mixture of both. The same case does not necessarily have the same value in all languages (ibid., II, 97, 161–162). Different manifestations depend on different ways of apprehending the objects of thought, on different cognitive procedures, and classifications of a practical nature. And these empirical factors, summarized in the notion of usage, explain, for example, the anarchy surrounding the attribution of noun genders or the system of verbal tenses and modes in the various languages (II, 174–199). This tendency toward ‘psychologism’, already discernable in the works of the rationalist Beauzée, intensifies in Etienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Grammaire (1775; Condillac 1986), and in his theory of languages as analytical methods (see 5.6 below). Speech allows us to focus on mental contents, to section, distinguish, and organize them in sequence, and thus to proceed from the simultaneity of thought to the linearity of discourse. The mind’s eye works like the body’s eye. Thoughts are images whose parts we can distinguish only when we organize them in sequence: ‘This art was born with languages, and, like languages, it has been slowly perfected. Although absolutely necessary for us to understand our own thoughts, [languages] are also necessary to lead us to ideas that we would never have had without their help’ (Condillac 1986: 132–133). Parts of speech are the tools languages use to analyze thought. They arise and develop along with the development of needs and knowledge among individuals and populations. Although they differ from one language to the other, they are not arbitrary: ‘Since words are signs of our ideas, linguistic systems must be based on the system of our notions’. Languages ‘have the means to connect ideas only because we cannot think except by connecting

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment 105

ideas’ (Condillac 1986: 26). In other words, the formation of grammatical categories follows general psychological rules. The needs that lead us to organize the data of our experiences linguistically and the tools we use to do it can be crude or sophisticated, depending on the level of the speakers, but they remain basically the same, because they are founded on a common organic structure. Studying grammar means studying the methods humans use to analyze thought: ‘the system of language is incorporated in every man who speaks’ (p. 63). Linguistic historiography has long set Condillac’s position, branded as rationalistic, in contradiction to the inductive approach of comparative language research. Thus, a division has been established between the (prevalently French) tradition of general grammar and the (prevalently German) historical-comparative school that developed in the early 19th century. The beginnings of Sanskrit studies actually did represent a fundamental methodological break (see 6.2 below). Nevertheless the idea of a structure common to all languages and rooted in mental procedures does not exclude in principle the use of an inductive method in language research. Indeed, the inductive method is not at all foreign to the general grammar approach. The idea of reconstructing the natural logic underlying languages was based on induction; induction is the only procedure invoked by the empiricist Condillac, the rationalist Beauzée, and by J. H. Lambert, a philosopher of the Leibniz school. In his ‘new organon’ (Neues Organon, 1764), Lambert argues that, in the absence of an ideal metalanguage to be used as a touchstone, comparisons between languages are the only method to ascertain why parts of speech must exist in all languages (ibid. III, 127). They express the variations, determinations, and relations of real entities, but their actualization is contingent, as shown by the analysis of languages (German, in Lambert’s example, using Greek, Latin, and, occasionally, Hebrew, as metalanguages). Lambert’s observations on the psychological and pragmatic aspects that contribute to the morpho-syntactic structure of the various languages are a constant counterpoint to his description of general grammar. The gap between actual and ideal structure is viewed not only as inevitable, but as functional to the development and effectiveness of languages. The imperfection of natural languages, compared to the abstract morphosyntactic structure of ideal ones, makes them open to change and therefore ultimately enhances their use and value (ibid., III, 277–278). The close correspondence between the parts of speech and the fundamental categories of thought is argued also by another German author — even less vulnerable, incidentally, to the accusation of reducing language to logic — namely, J. G. Herder. In his Metakritik (1799), he maintains, against Kant, that

106 A History of Language Philosophies

fundamental mental structures arise empirically. Categories such as being, force, cause, etc. are universals connatural to language, like time and space. But they are also a product of pre-linguistic intelligence, which is to say bodily experience and the general tendencies of the human mind. Thanks to the integration between language forms and the general forms of experience, we can derive from the study of languages all we need to know about how the mind works. Herder’s position is another example of psychologism, the tendency to validate the general rules of language by comparing them to the representational procedures of the mind, and to trace the genesis of these rules and procedures back to preverbal cognitive processes. Semiotic analysis was an essential tool for a natural history of the mind. From this perspective, it is significant to note the extent to which, in the last decades of the 18th century, psychological literature focused on language disorders such as dumbness and aphasia, i.e., those cases in which the connection between prelinguistic representative functions and verbal articulation is severed. 18th-century theory of the parts of speech was based on the unquestioned assumption of an homology between natural logic and language structures. All theorists in the rationalist or empiricist camp agreed on the fact that grammatical categories are language universals. They differed instead over another prominent theme of the contemporary grammatical debate, the so-called analytical order: does the organization of the parts of speech in propositions follow the natural sequence of ideas, or does it depend on variable and empirically determined forms? The opposite positions can be summarized with reference to Beauzée and Condillac. For Beauzée, analytical order is the way in which ‘partial ideas belonging to the same thought are linked in a sequence based on the relations that connect them to one another and to the whole’ (Beauzée, Gramm. I, vii). The analysis of thought and the analysis of discourse both attest the existence of an ‘original and invariable prototype, […] the single and essential foundation of the laws of syntax in any possible language’ (ibid., II, 467–468). This prototype is reproduced in some languages through the use of direct construction, which closely follows the sequence of ideas; in others it is achieved through the use of inflection. Only in the latter case is the use of inversions legitimate, since the logical order of words has been determined by word endings. In the Latin sentence Diuturni silentii finem odiernus dies attulit (‘the present day brings about the end of a long silence’), the use of the genitive allows us to use an inverse construction without ambiguity, placing diuturni silentii (‘of a long silence’) before finem, though it is finem that precedes it in the analytical order

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment 107

(finem silentii diuturni), and so on (ibid., II, 468–471). But whatever procedures are adopted, direct construction is the universal prototype of all utterances for Beauzée (as for Du Marsais). Condillac (like Diderot) disagrees: ‘there is no direct nor inverse order in the mind, which perceives all ideas at once […]. It is only in speech that one idea follows another. Both orders are natural’ (1986: 306–307). No language can do without inversions and ‘if they are necessary, they must necessarily become natural as well’ (p. 310). As we shall see (5.6 below), languages for Condillac are methods for the analysis of thought; the legitimacy of all strategies, including inversion, depends on their analytical power, i.e., their capacity to organize mental representations in forms of thought suitable to being verbalized.

5.4 Mind, language, languages In 1660, Port-Royal Grammar inaugurated a tradition of studies in the philosophy of grammar. Thirty years later, in 1690, another text destined to become canonical was published, John Locke’s Essay concerning humane Understanding. Central themes in Locke’s philosophy of mind were the power of language to classify the knowable world, its relative independence from things, and the consequent arbitrariness of linguistic signs. In his definition of sign Locke includes not only words but also representations (ideas) of objects, events, and relations. Mental categorization is already a semiotic activity, and the processes of linguistic production reproduce — they mimic, so to speak — the processes through which we construct experience. Consider, says Locke, the genesis of words. All of them originate as marks of sensible ideas, and “those which are made use of to stand for actions and notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible ideas are transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses” (Essay, III/5). Thus the primary meaning of spirit is breath, angel means messenger. If we could only bring all words back to their origins, we would find out that all languages comply with the above principle: names designating objects that cannot be perceived through the senses are originally associated to sensible ideas. This metaphorical genesis provides an iconic foundation to words and reproduces the cognitive process, moving from sense data towards an increasing generalization. Most of our vocabulary is made up of general words, nor could it be otherwise. A language based only on proper names would exceed the limits of

108 A History of Language Philosophies

human memory. Furthermore, names are intelligible only because they are general, i.e., inter-subjective; they refer to collections of entities which are not necessarily the same for all interlocutors. Their origin can be explained by observing the way the abstracting function of the mind works. The essence of a species (or a class, or a sort) of individual things corresponds to an abstract idea, or nominal essence, which is designated by a name. Certainly, one must assume the existence of a real essence in natural substances from which the sensible qualities derive that serve to distinguish and classify them. But this essence is unknown to us and therefore has no part in meaning. Meaning includes the name, the thing, and the idea that mediates between the name and the thing. By creating abstract ideas and designating them through names, humans “do thereby enable themselves to consider things, and speak of them in bundles, as it were” (Essay, III/iii, 20), and this helps organizing representations and communicating them. For Locke, abstraction is reduced to a minimum in simple ideas, which refer directly to sense experiences (taste, color, etc.). Their names are indefinable; but they are also less ambiguous and controversial, because they refer directly to perception (this is red). Abstraction, instead, is typical of complex ideas, especially those lacking an objective referent or a natural model (for example, moral or legal terms). In this case, says Locke, the mind “unites and retains certain collections, as so many distinct species, whilst others, that as often occur in nature, and are as plainly suggested by outward things, pass neglected, without particular names or specifications” (Essay, III/v, 3). Ideas that do not spring from natural models can be conceptualized even in the absence of any actualization. For example, words such as resurrection have a meaning independently of the actual existence of the phenomena they designate. The same goes for homicide. In nature there is no more specific relation between the idea of killing and the idea of man than there is between the idea of killing and the idea of sheep; yet, only in the first case, do we have a specific term for that relation. Likewise, there is no particularly specific relation between the idea of killing and the idea of father, yet we have a specific word for it, parricide. In these cases, too, the mind “combines several scattered independent ideas into one complex one; and, by the common name it gives them, makes them the essence of a certain species, without regulating itself by any connection they have in nature” (ibid., III/v, 6). In all these cases, what counts is not a natural model, an actual connection between ideas, but rather, broadly speaking, a pertinence arising from the necessities of communication, shaped by custom, tradition, and habits. This is why some words exist only in certain languages;

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment 109

they correspond to complex ideas, i.e., collections of ideas that do not occur among other peoples. This is why languages evolve continually; old words become obsolete and new words are created, just as new customs and needs modify the mental repertoire of the community of speakers. There are cases where bilingual dictionaries indicate a correspondence between words whose meaning is actually different. For example, the Latin words hora, pes, libra relate to ideas that are substantially different from those indicated by their English equivalents hour, foot, pound. This discrepancy between apparently analogous words in different languages is a consequence of the complexity of the ideas to which they are associated. Many words are “assemblages of ideas put together at the pleasure of the mind pursuing its own ends of discourse”, joined “without any rule or pattern” (ibid., III/ix, 7). In such instances, names are the only guarantee of the persistence and unity of an idea. Even representations of substances are not dependent on real models. Like all other general words, the common names of things designate classes whose extension cannot be determined on the basis of some unknown real essence, and can have different connotations for different speakers. Let us consider the term man. If the essence to which it corresponds were not an uncertain and variable collection of ideas, there would be no discussion on whether fetuses or deformed children should be baptized, or whether one can consider as members of the human species the monsters mentioned by travelers. Those who use the name man to designate a complex idea based on ideas associated with sense, motion, a body with a certain form, etc., will adopt a nominal essence of man that is different from those who add to it the idea of rationality. Similarly, we use different names for water and ice, which are the same substance, but not for liquid gold in a furnace and solid gold in the hands of a goldsmith. This would not occur if the classes on the basis of which we distinguish and name things were not man made, but rather the reproduction of borders posited by nature. Certainly, the idea of an object includes characteristics that we assume occur in nature. But which characteristics and how many of them we choose is something contingent. Generally, we are satisfied with a few evident sensible qualities, mostly form and color. But this depends on the inclinations, practical needs, and capacities, of the observer. A bright yellow color is sufficient for a child to establish the idea of gold; others add weight, malleability, fusibility, and other people add still other characteristics. Thus, different people have different essences for gold, depending on the ideas they include in it. In brief, meanings are a result of current usage, the language adopted, and the practical necessities of communication, which make some aspects of the

110

A History of Language Philosophies

thing referred to relevant and others not relevant. This gives language a power over thought that it would not have if words were the simple translation of stable meanings based on real essences. Thought is thus partly determined by language; the various natural languages lead us to conceive reality, classify things, in certain ways rather than others. Locke’s belief that the constellation of ideas contained in a name vary from one speaker to another and from one language to another raises the problem of how communication is possible. Locke’s response is unequivocally pragmatic: we speak as if nominal essences were stable and identical in the minds of speaker and listener. This is the tacit condition for the communicative use of language. This is what made Locke, and his 18th-century followers, so sensitive to defects and especially to abuse of words. The excessive complexity of the ideas to which words refer, the uncertainty of reference, the use of empty words, the use of words that have lost the original referent without the interlocutors realizing it, deliberate obscurity, etc. are all cases of abuse of words. This trend can be countered through the critical use of language, i.e., by resorting to examples and definition and using words consistently. But only up to a point: “To require that men should use their words constantly in the same sense, and only for determined and uniform ideas, would be to think that all men should have the same notions, and should talk of nothing but what they have clear and distinct ideas of” (Essay, III/xi, 2). This observation was not unprecedented. Francis Bacon, in his doctrine of the idola had denounced a particular type of distorted images of things harbored in words. Hobbes had also described the errors and deceptions perpetrated in and by means of language. On account of ignorance or malice, natural meanings are attributed to words, as if they referred to substances. But wise men know that words are simply tokens used for calculation; only a fool takes them for good coins. The theme was taken up by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, who used it to attack Scholasticism and entrusted the analysis of ideas with the function of preventing the violence and deceptions which, in philosophy as in politics, arise from the faulty use of language. In Locke’s theory of general names we easily recognize the old question of the nature of genera and species (see 4.3 above). Locke’s contemporaries tended to interpret his theory as a form of radical nominalism. Indeed, he does dismiss the realist position by arguing for the unknowability of real essences, and he certainly does not deal with categorization procedures from an ontological perspective, but only from that of mental operations. Yet, the mind, as described by Locke, behaves differently depending on whether it has to classify

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

natural or artificial objects, i.e., real or abstract substances. It is a conceptualist mind, when it classifies natural substances: it performs a survey of qualities and, on this basis, according to its capabilities and practical purposes, constructs a class, whose borders, however, remain blurred and modifiable. It is a nominalist mind when it classifies entities that are thinkable but cannot be located empirically, therefore exist only thanks to a name. What Locke describes is, in other words, an opportunist mind, which adopts different strategies according to its goals. There is always some practical reason behind any re-emergence of a theory, its re-elaboration, re-application, and acceptance. In Locke’s case, the reason for his ‘anti-realism’ was political as well as epistemological. In the 17th century, the debates on natural and positive law had posited nature and institutions (contracts, agreements, etc.) as the two theoretical foundations of authority. In the realm of institutions, language is the highest criterion for value judgments; the only way to evaluate the justice of an action is by appealing to the positive norm that determines what words like just and unjust mean. Indeed, the distinctive feature of positive laws is that they are nominal definitions, i.e., stipulations of meanings. Nominalism in ethics had become, in some ways, the linguistic correlative of contractualism in politics. Hobbes, one of the leading representatives of contractualism, had consequently adopted a rigorous nominalism, at least for moral language. Locke’s contemporaries perceived a continuity between Locke’s doctrine of essences and Hobbes’s nominalism. This explains why his early adversaries accused him of moral skepticism and, potentially, of atheism. A second guiding principle behind Locke’s semiotics was the need to establish a theory of language adequate to the new epistemology. The problem was to explain what remains unchanged in natural substances when they undergo physical and chemical alteration. For Locke, the ground of permanence was not ‘substantial form’, i.e., the form which makes a thing what it is, as Scholastic philosophers had maintained. What allows us to keep ideas stable in our mind in spite of all the changes and transformations of things is the specific denominations of different states of matter (nominal essences). That which is grass to-day is to-morrow the flesh of a sheep; and, within a few days after, becomes part of a man: in all which and the like changes, it is evident the real essence — i.e., that constitution whereon the properties of these several things depended — is destroyed, and perishes with them. But essences being taken for ideas established in the mind, with names annexed to them, they are supposed to remain steadily the same, whatever mutations the particular substances are liable to. For whatever becomes of Alexander and

111

112

A History of Language Philosophies

Bucephalus, the ideas to which man and horse are annexed are supposed nevertheless to remain the same; and so the essences of those species are preserved whole and undestroyed, whatever changes happen to any or all of the individuals of those species. (Locke, Essay, III/iii, 19)

Thus, it is not real essences that make knowledge possible, but nominal ones, i.e., in the last analysis, our use of names. Of the many polemics sparked by Locke’s ‘nominalism’ I will mention only one which is particularly germane to our discussion: Leibniz’s critique, directed at limiting (not denying) the role of arbitrariness. In his Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (New Essays on Human Understanding, written between 1703 and 1705, posthumously published in 1765), Leibniz attacks Locke from above, so to speak, discussing his metaphysical premises, and from below, piling up empirical evidence in order to show that natural causes have more of a role in the production of language than arbitrary choices do. I shall start from Leibniz’s distinction between ideas and mental representations (cogitationes), to which Gensini (2000: 25) has called attention. For Leibniz, ideas (essences, genera, and species) are possibilities independent of our thoughts (Nouveaux essais, III/iii). If no one had ever committed parricide and no legislator had foreseen the possibility, still parricide would remain possible. Its idea would be real just as all ideas are real in God’s mind and present in us before we think them (ibid., III/iv, 17). Thus, beyond empirical representations, there is a structure of ideas that conditions and guides human categorizing processes. Representations, instead, are contingent, and constructed on the basis of human necessities and cognition. By contrast, according to Locke, ideas are one and the same thing as empirically conditioned representations; they are the only mental content available to us. This is the point at issue, together with Locke’s thesis (this one certainly nominalist) that the only objects of experience are individual entities and that only on the basis of these objects can any mental or linguistic categorizing process take place. The disagreement between Locke and Leibniz on natural languages is not a radical one. Both of them agree that natural psychological processes are active in their genesis. Among these processes, Locke holds the tendency to think metaphorically to be dominant, whereas for Leibniz phono-symbolic mechanisms prevail. According to both of them, these processes assure a degree of iconicity to linguistic signs. According to both, accidental factors are active: for Locke they are active in categorization processes, for Leibniz in the analogy between affectus (affection, emotion) and sounds. The latter aspect was of no interest to Locke, since he was not concerned with the mechanisms governing

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

the material production of languages. In short, they were talking of two different things. Locke was discussing the relation between linguistic categorization and the organization of experience; Leibniz was focussing on the elementary and instinctive characteristics of the mind that govern the genesis of languages. Locke deals with cognitive semantics, Leibniz with historical semantics. The two positions are not incompatible, in principle, and have to do with two different aspects of the question. Indeed, one may very well ask why Leibniz insisted on contrasting them. The answer is that Leibniz had a particular point in mind, i.e., Locke’s theory that there are no real essences on which empirical representations can be grounded. Having re-established the principles of realism by reintroducing essences, however, Leibniz has no difficulty in agreeing with Locke that words are arbitrary and, indeed, in supporting his adversary’s observations with new historical material. In other words, once Plato is safe (we categorize on the basis of real essences), Leibniz can readily accept Epicurus’s teachings (we vocalize on the basis of our emotions). For Leibniz, phonic symbolism is the foundation of the ‘similarity’ between a word and its referent. To the operations which produce language, besides sound symbolism, 18th-century naturalism also adds gesture, physiognomic and prosodic expression, sensorimotor behavior, and the instinct to think metaphorically. Metaphor — which Leibniz relegated among the tropes or figurative factors — was a key aspect in Locke’s semantics. In 18th-century naturalism, the idea of metaphor as a generator of meanings, and not simply as a factor of change, was to become commonplace. So little did 18th-century scholars perceive a contradiction between the historical, naturalistic, genetic approach and the semantic, cognitive, synchronic one that the two were never sundered. Philosophers developed historical semantics following the same naturalistic tradition that had inspired Leibniz, and cognitive semantics following Locke’s philosophy of mind. The two approaches went hand in hand, and together they served to explain the double origin of languages, natural and historical, institutional and mental.

5.5 The semantics of usage 18th-century debates on the relation of language and thought can be read as a commentary to Locke’s theory of general names. We have already seen an example of this in Leibniz’s attempt to set limits to Locke’s notion of the arbitrariness of the sign. At the opposite end, we have George Berkeley’s theory

113

114

A History of Language Philosophies

of radical arbitrariness, a consequence of his immaterialist metaphysics. Berkeley’s theory of language must be read against the background of his critique of Locke’s notion of general abstract ideas: for Berkeley there are no general ideas other than the ones used as names for classes of objects. In his Essay on a New Theory of Vision (1709) the relation among linguistic signs is reduced to a particular case of the relation existing among heterogeneous ideas (for example, ideas pertaining to different senses), which are never related through similarity or causality, but only through habitual co-occurrence. What we call objects are the customary co-occurrence of different perceptions (the carriage, for instance, which one heard arriving, saw entering the courtyard, and touched in getting into [Theory of Vision, § 47]). Similarly, words suggest to the imagination, through the mediation of sounds, ‘objects’ that are not perceived through hearing (ibid., §§ 9–10). Communication is ultimately granted by the intervention of the divine mind. The ‘language’ of perception functions even in the absence of any material referent, because a higher representational system is at work in perception. This system is God’s thought. Behind perceptions and their arbitrary clustering there is a Subject who thinks (and ‘speaks’ too through nature’s visible forms) and thus creates referents for a language that in itself is not anchored to any material world of objects. While Berkeley resorts to divine thought to explain how, in an immaterial world, signs could be used to speak of things and to give rise to beliefs and behaviors regarding things, David Hume resorts to habit and usage to explain the functioning of language. The function of names is not to present, or represent, all the individual entities belonging to a given class, or the ideas that are in the mind of the speaker. A word cannot call up the idea of all individuals belonging to one class, “but only touches the soul […] and revives that custom, which we have acquir’d by surveying them”. Individual objects are not really and in fact present to the mind, but only in power; nor do we draw them all out distinctly in the imagination, but keep ourselves in a readiness to survey any of them, as we may be prompted by a present design or necessity. The word raises up an individual idea, along with a certain custom; and that custom produces any other individual one, for which we may have occasion. (Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, I/vii)

A peculiarity of Hume’s position is the focus on the listener’s perspective rather than that of the speaker’s. What happens when we hear a name? How is it that it means something for us? For Hume, it is habit that leads us to apply that name, according to our purposes and needs, to one of the individual entities

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

that language has accustomed us to associate with it. Meaning, in short, is a potential of names, whose actualization is dependent on pragmatic factors. Significantly, Nerlich & Clarke (1996: 94–117) group language theories in Great Britain from Locke to the Scottish School (Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart) under the heading of ‘protopragmatics’. In the line traced by Berkeley and Hume one can actually see the transition from a representational semantics (which Locke’s semantics still was, signification being based on a one-to-one reference between sign and idea, no matter how constituted) to a semantics of custom or habit, i.e., of usage. This transition was made explicit in Thomas Reid’s essay On the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785). The positions of Reid as well as Stewart, as noted above, followed in the wake of Berkeley and Hume’s semantic theories but were polemically opposed to their ‘nominalism’ and the skeptical conclusions it implies. Reid attributes the origin of ideas partly to sensations and partly to another source, independent of experience, i.e., ‘common sense’, a series of common principles that govern the theoretical and practical behavior of humans and are reflected in the spontaneous use of language. Thus, the analysis of ordinary language offers the best access to mental states (thinking, learning, believing, desiring, etc.) which cannot be defined logically yet are clear to all who share a given language. Spontaneous common sense also guides the categorization of the data of experience, i.e., the construction of universals (a term which, in Reid’s time, had become obsolete and was replaced by ‘general ideas’). Common linguistic usage (i.e., the consensus on the meaning of words) is the criterion for judging the correctness of the combinations from which general ideas are derived. Aristotle and the logicians, writes Reid in a brief essay of 1787, analyzed only one type of proposition, that is, assertive propositions expressing judgments; but a true theory of language must take all kinds of expressions into consideration, such as promise, prayer, order, contract, etc. (Reid 1983: 70–72). I shall offer two other examples of the transition from a semantics of ideas to a semantics of usage. One is the brief section on language in Edmund Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). The other one is the second part of Cesare Beccaria’s essay on the nature of style (posthumously published in 1809, but probably written in the early 1770s). Linguistic theories were neither Burke’s nor Beccaria’s main interest (Burke was to become famous as a political writer and Beccaria was already known throughout Europe as a philosopher of law). Both books deal with aesthetics, an area in which any referential, or even simply representational view of language proves easily inadequate.

115

116

A History of Language Philosophies

For Burke, representation may be one of the secondary effects of words, but it is not the most important; entire classes of words have no representational value, and there are ideas (eternity, infinity, etc.) that are among the least representable and yet the most evocative of all. Even the power of words to evoke representations “does not arise from their forming pictures of the several things they would represent in the imagination” (Burke 1958: 167). There is an inevitable discrepancy between the simultaneity of representations in thought and the succession of sounds in verbal language. As Burke (ibid.) explains: Indeed it is impossible, in the rapidity and quick succession of words in conversation, to have ideas both of the sound of the word, and of the thing represented: besides, some words, expressing real essences, are so mixed with others of a general and nominal import, that it is impracticable to jump from sense to thought, from particulars to generals, from things to words, in such a manner as to answer the purposes of life; nor is it necessary that we should.

This is to say that we can understand words without having the least idea of the things they represent; we can understand them so well as to re-use them, in a perfectly adequate way, in other contexts. Burke draws examples from pathology: the case of Thomas Blacklock, a sophisticated nature poet although born blind, and Nicholas Saunderson, also born blind, and a renowned professor of optics and color theory. Pathology serves as the touchstone of normality. In speaking of phenomena such as refrangibility and color, which he had never perceived, Saunderson did no more than what we do every day in common discourse. When we use or hear a sentence such as this — what we do every day in common discourse — we have no images in our minds of any succession of time, nor of men talking with each other. To understand a phrase such as I shall go to Italy next summer, we do not need to paint in our imagination the figure of the speaker travelling by land or water, sometimes on horseback, sometimes in a carriage. Still less have we any idea of Italy, and of Italy in summer — the greenness of the fields, the ripening of the fruits, and the warmth of the air. Least of all can we get any image from the word next — that is, the idea of many summers, with the exclusion of all but one. All these ideas can indeed be called to mind artificially through an act of will, but they are not at all intrinsic to the meaning of the respective words. Cesare Beccaria also stressed the autonomy of words from representations. With time, increasingly complex syntactic links allow words to evoke one another more easily, while the perception of the one-to-one correspondence between words and ideas becomes fainter. The series of words and ideas, in

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

advanced languages, are no longer symmetrical. Indeed, the use of ‘many words, and very familiar words, which very easily suggest one another, saves us from paying a lot of attention to the ideas they represent’. We only linger over some, ‘to form a certain meaning or to the extent that our curiosity is attracted by the novelty or the nature of the impression that the word is liable to arouse, or according to the present disposition of the mind of the person who speaks or listens’ (Beccaria 1984: 192). The most extreme example of this way of proceeding is arithmetic, in which ‘losing completely sight of the things numbered, we apply ourselves solely to the simple connection amongst numeric signs’. There is a difference, however, since the signs of natural languages, unlike arithmetic signs, are subject to variables that depend on the ‘disposition and different circumstances’ (pp. 197–198) of the speakers, something which clearly does not hold for arithmetical signs.

5.6 Languages as analytical methods We already met with Condillac as a theorist of general grammar. No less important is the way in which he developed the theoretical potentialities of Locke’s semiotics. Condillac starts off by questioning the dualism of sensation and reflection, which was the twofold source of mental activity according to Locke. For Condillac too reflection is indispensable to mental life, but he conceives of it as ‘transformed sensation’. It consists in elaborating the primary sensory data and connecting ideas in thought processes, which is evidently possible only through the use of signs. Gestures, sounds, numerals, letters: “it is instruments so foreign to our ideas that we put to work to raise ourselves to the most sublime knowledge” (Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, I, iv, 11 [Essay on the origin of human knowledge
; see Condillac 2001]). The richer our repertoire of arbitrary signs, the greater the combinatory capacity of the mind in any operation that goes beyond instinct and habit. The transition from the simultaneity of thought to the serial structure of discourse is already an analytical procedure by means of which — he says in Grammaire — ‘we can observe what we do when we think’. The analysis of thought is ‘found ready-made in discourse. It is this that leads me to view languages as so many analytical tools’. Thinking becomes an art, ‘and this art is the art of speaking’ (1986: 403). The first part of Grammaire, which deals with the analysis of discourse, summarizes the theory Condillac had gradually elaborated, starting from his Essai (1746). There is an important innovation, however. In his first work, he

117

118

A History of Language Philosophies

had made a sweeping philosophical-historical survey, in which the language of natural signs (gestures, postures, inarticulate sounds, i.e., the ‘language of action’) was conceived as an actual chronological stage in the history of humanity. In the Grammaire, however, this is not described as an actual historical stage but as a theoretical precondition of communication. Communicative signs are artificial from the start. Artificial, but not arbitrary: in order to be comprehensible, they must maintain a close analogy to natural signs. Such is the case of pantomime and the language of deaf-mutes, where natural signs are, so to speak, ritualized and used knowingly for communicative purposes. The language of natural signs spontaneously arising in response to stimuli has, for the subjects that produce it, the same simultaneity of thoughts and feelings. This, however, is not the case for their interlocutors, who register and decode them in succession. Thus, the transition from merely symptomatic expression to communicative intention transforms natural language into discourse, intuitive thought into discursive thought. The need for mutual understanding leads us to learn analytical procedures. The speaker himself is led to subdivide the original gesture or cry into a succession of gestures or articulated voices. Speakers and interpreters learn to analyze their thoughts ‘because to analyze is nothing but to observe in succession, and in an orderly fashion’. To facilitate the analysis, they ‘imagine new signs, analogous to natural signs’ (1986: 15–16; see also 65–67). This, for Condillac, is the origin of language. The idea of languages as analytical methods is sometimes cited as proof of Condillac’s abstract rationalism, an inability to understand the spontaneity of linguistic processes. This criticism does not take into account the role Condillac attributes to analytical procedures at all levels of mental activity. This emerges clearly, for example, in his 1780 Logique (the last work published during his lifetime) where he dwells on analysis as ‘the only method to acquire knowledge’. This process of decomposition and recomposition is ‘taught by nature itself ’. It is ‘what nature makes us all do’ already starting with perception and the automatisms associated with the most basic vital functions. ‘Analysis, which is believed to be known solely to philosophers, is known by all’ (Logique, I/2). Mechanics disassemble and reassemble machines to understand how they work, dress-makers, in order to reproduce a dress, imagine undoing and re-doing it. Analysis is active in the categorization procedures through which genera and species are formed by distributing individuals in different classes, which we distinguish through particular names. It is such a useful procedure that it seems guided by a willful purpose: ‘But it is not so. Nature enacts it without our knowledge’ (ibid., I/4).

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Categories resulting from such a spontaneous, and partly unconscious process — the grouping of the many into one under a name — have no stability and permanence, since we distinguish things in classes not on the basis of the nature of things, but on the basis of our way of conceiving them. Classes tend to multiply in direct relation to needs or, on the contrary, to merge into one another, since they lack clearly defined and stable borders (a plant can be a tree or bush, or it can be both things at once). Categorization is not an inventory of the real universe. It is instead a practice whose purpose is to make thought and communication possible, a sort of divination done through words. Thus, far from implying a separation between higher and lower mental functions, the insistence on the analytical nature of verbal thoughts likens language to other mental operations, including the more elementary ones. One and the same force shapes our mental life in all its stages and degrees. The charge of intellectualism against Condillac was based on the stereotypical portrait of him as the one responsible for describing the invention of language as a deliberate act. The charge, which was extended during the Romantic period to all 18th-century theories on the origin of language, was hinted at in the few pages Rousseau devoted to the question of language in his discourse on the origin of inequality (Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, 1755). In order to construct a language, says Rousseau, we have to classify objects on the basis of common and generic denominations, and, in order to do this, we must know their properties and differences, on the basis of observations and definitions. In other words, we need a knowledge of natural history and metaphysics, which primitive humans certainly lacked. Condillac reacted (in a note to his Grammaire) by turning the charge of intellectualism back on Rousseau: not even civilized people like us speak on the basis of categorizations founded on definitions or on the actual knowledge of things. Our way of categorizing requires nothing but ‘that little metaphysics that is in us even before we learn to speak, and which necessity produces even in children’ (Condillac, 1986: 25). Based on spontaneous categorizing procedures, languages ‘developed, so to speak, without us’ (ibid., 22). And the language system is constantly adapted to the categorizing system, in phylogenesis as in ontogenesis, in the primitive man as well as in the civilized one, in the child as well as in the adult. With a charming metaphor Condillac clarifies this correspondence for his young disciple, the Prince of Parma, to whom the Grammar is addressed: ‘languages are proportioned to ideas, just as the little chair on which you are sitting is proportioned to you. In growing you will need a taller chair, and the same holds for humans: by acquiring knowledge they develop the need for a more extensive language’ (ibid., 26–27).

119

120 A History of Language Philosophies

Language is produced spontaneously, on the basis of human needs, and of natural preconditions which may be considered an inborn language. Its elements ‘were born with man, and these elements are organs that the Author of our nature has given us. Thus, there is an inborn language, although there are no inborn ideas’. For the elementary analytical procedures necessary to any vital activity to exist ‘it was necessary for the elements of language to exist, readymade, before our ideas’ (Logique II/2). The continuity of nature and artifice implies, among other things, a series of limitations on the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. It is a mistake to think that, in creating languages, ‘men were able to choose indifferently and arbitrarily one or the other as a sign of an idea. Since, with such a behavior, how could they have understood each other?’ (Condillac, 1986: 18–19). The continuity is first of all material. The voice that gradually learns to articulate is the same voice that previously burst out in cries in the language of action. The iconic power of gestures and cries is transmitted directly in onomatopoeia and, by analogy, in the phonic and prosodic quality of words. The philosopher and anthropologist Charles de Brosses had published on this issue a Traité de la formation mécanique des langues (A Treatise on the Mechanical Formation of Languages, 1765), which Condillac knew and appreciated. The treatise soon became the standard text for the study of the organic basis of language and phonic iconism. De Brosses sketched a sort of comparatist program centered on the reduction of the words of different languages to their primeval roots. The result was supposed to be a universal etymological system. Nothing of the sort in Condillac, who is quick to stress his own notion of iconism: simple subjective representation of things, shared by ‘those who co-operated in the formation of a language’ (1986: 22). Given these premises, what are the requirements of a language? There is only one basic requirement: that the language be suited to the needs of the speakers, that it make analytical procedures possible that are adequate to those needs. It becomes ill-suited to that task, when subtle, visionary minds impose a mystifying jargon and multiply linguistic forms beyond necessity. It is not by accident that the reform of scientific language began in disciplines in which the analytical method had become dominant, such as mathematics, chemistry, and physics. A langue bien faite is the precondition for the art of reasoning; sciences are ‘well-made languages’. A well-made language has nothing to do with artificial languages (Auroux 1981: X ii). An artificial language presupposes a complete ‘encyclopedia’ and is a fixed system. Natural languages are open and adapted to mutable needs, they resist formalization. The fact that language is an analytical method, which allows the disassembling and

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

reassembling of thought, does not in the least imply that it can be reduced to some form of computation. Rather, it is computation — algebra, for example, the subject of Condillac’s last and incomplete work La langue des calculs (The Language of Computation, 1798) — that can be reduced to language; ‘it is not mathematics that serves to represent language, it is grammar that serves to represent mathematics’ (Auroux 1993: 130). In scientific as well as in all other forms of communication, a well-made language is simply a language suited to the analysis of its object. From primary semiosis, which is active in perception and manifests itself in the language of action, up to the more complex syntactic articulation of advanced languages and the pure analytic quality of computation, some form of language accompanies all cognitive practices. This does not mean that thought and language are one and the same thing. Certainly, language influences thought, but in the same way in which a tool influences an operation, without for this identifying with it. Logic is not conceived by Condillac as a formal science aimed at establishing a priori truth criteria; it is rather a branch of psychology, a description of psycho-physical operations that produce and transform representations. Signs are indispensable tools of these operations but they are secondary; like all other tools, they exist only for a specific purpose. Logic is the art of thinking, i.e., of carrying out mental operations properly; grammar is its first and foremost part precisely because it serves, so to speak, to fine-tune the tool. Nothing is more remote from Condillac than the notion of experience being originally interpreted and mediated by language This thesis was to become common, instead, in philosophical idealism and its offspring hermeneutics (see 7.1 below), but is incompatible with an empiricist epistemology such as Condillac’s. He insists repeatedly on the genealogy needs-notionslanguage. However, once constituted as historical formations, languages undoubtedly influence the way thought and sciences are organized. Condillac shares with contemporary anthropology the idea that historical languages shape in some way the mentality of speakers. He insists on the diversity of languages, on their different morpho-syntactic potentialities, on the fact that they manipulate and combine the elements of thought in different ways. But the influence of language remains the influence of an instrument on the operation it is meant to serve, and does not imply co-essentiality.

121

122 A History of Language Philosophies

5.7 Talking animals: Origin and history The remote origin of languages, the signs time left on them and, even before that, the nascent state of the faculty of language were unavoidable theoretical issues for the philosophers of the early modern age such as Vico, Condillac, Rousseau, Herder, Maupertuis, and Condorcet. The origin of language was the subject of a competition launched in 1769 by the Berlin Academy of Sciences, won by Herder with an essay that we shall deal with further on in this section. Jean Itard, médecin-philosophe of Condillac’s school, had a chance to test his master’s theories when teaching language to a wild boy who had been abandoned or had got lost early in his life in the woods of the French department of Aveyron. Studying human origins means investigating the border between the animal and human worlds, and the possibility that humanity evolved from an original feral condition. The morphological kinship between humans and animals, upheld by the Aristotelian and Galenic traditions, had found supporting evidence in the results of 16th- and 17th-century comparative anatomy. The human voice (the only one capable of articulating words) marks the border between animals and humans and at the same time the point where the two areas overlap. The rhythmic and intonational aspects of human language bear traces of animal communication, such as physiognomic expressions, gestures, and cries. These topics were dealt with by famous anatomists, such as Girolamo Fabrici d’Aquapendente, and recurred in the most diverse fields: natural history, poetics, acoustic mechanics and the study of automatic sound production, musical aesthetics, the theory or preaching, the actor’s art, the art of conversation — all fields in which a sort of vocal physiognomy was elaborated (Salazar 1999). Once again, as in ancient philosophy, we find skeptics aligned on animalist positions, and dogmatists in the opposite camp. Among the former was Michel de Montaigne, who, in one of his most famous essays, Apologie de Raymond Sebond (1576), described verbal and non-verbal communication codes common to both humans and animals. Non-verbal communications compete with languages in variety and are also practiced by humans, who use “finger-alphabets and grammars of gestures” (Montaigne 1991: 508). The role of the dogmatist can readily be assigned to Descartes. The soul of animals, he maintains, is capable only of impressions, and these stimulate purely symptomatic vocal responses, lacking the compositional capacity typical of linguistic signs. A human-looking automaton emitting words on command, says Descartes in Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method, 1637), would be easily found out; no machine can combine words in such a way as to adequately

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

respond in all circumstances. The argument is found repeatedly in Descartes’s letters, and always to stress the inability of animals to move from symptoms of passions to signs of ideas. Animal comprehension, too, follows a stimulus-response mechanism. This was a tenet held by all those who wanted to stress a cleavage between human and animal language. The dog perceives an order from his master as a sound (i.e., as a sensible impression) and not as a sign (i.e., a reference to an idea). The word acts on him as a seal on wax, as a hammer on iron (the metaphor comes from bishop Bossuet [Auroux 1979: 45–46]). The capacity to combine signs in discourse and make them pertinent to new situations is distinctive, instead, of human expression; even a child ‘organizes the words he has learned in new ways’ and produces ‘linked discourses that cannot be the effect of a bodily impression’ (Lamy 1969: 72). Descartes’s work gave rise to two apparently contradictory currents. On the one hand, the tradition of iatromechanics, or medical mechanics, which describes the body through the metaphor of the machine. Séris (1995) has documented its application to the study of voice, not only in the first Cartesian generation (Mersenne, Cordemoy, and Lamy), but throughout the following century. The metaphor was used in various fields: the study of articulatory and acoustic phonetics, the construction of ‘speaking machines’, the rehabilitation of mutes, and orthography studies. Even the ancient science of etymology was resumed through the search for a ‘mechanics of languages’ (de Brosses, Turgot, Court de Gébelin): ‘the physical explanation, which is fully valid for the phenomenon of sound emissions, [was] inflated to the point of including the early formation of words’ (Séris 1995: 269). On the other hand, the Cartesian dualism of soul and body legitimated a distinction between automatic operations rigidly governed by the laws of physics and free operations, regulated by an incorporeal principle. Gerauld de Cordemoy in Discours physique de la parole (Physical Discourse concerning Speech, 1668), and many others after him, resorted to this principle to explain the more free and creative aspects of language. Animals, like talking machines, will always emit the sounds and only those sounds they have been programmed to emit. They lack the dialogic principle that allows us to adapt our expressions to those of the interlocutor. Indeed, ‘those words which I hear utter’d by bodies made like mine, have almost never the same sequel […] and answer so perfectly to the sense of mine, that there appears not any more ground to doubt, but that a soul performs that in them, which mine doth in me’ (pp.6–7). The institutional character of signs is just one further aspect of the freedom that distinguishes the

123

124 A History of Language Philosophies

verbal behavior of humans from the natural necessity governing animal language. Human expression belongs to the sphere of liberty, choice, and adaptive creativity, because it is prevalently institutional. Starting from this question, Condillac, in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, outlined a phylogenetic theory of verbal thought. For decades this was the dominant model for the natural history of words. Articulated language develops from a previous stage of elementary pre-verbal expression (the ‘language of action’, made up of gestures and inarticulate cries) and still bears its traces. The use of institutionalized signs sets memory and imagination free from the contingency of sense experience, making it possible for humans to use them freely, unlike other animals, and to gain access to the so-called superior faculties, which go under the heading of ‘reflection’. For Condillac, this is not an original faculty, as Locke maintained, but a capacity acquired in the course of phylogenetic development and dependent on the development of articulated language. Herder, as we shall see, was to make instinct and reflection the marks of, respectively, the animal and human conditions, which is what inequivocally distinguishes them from the start. Condillac instead argues that reflection is a power derived from instinctive behavior. Under the guise of reason, humans rely very much on instincts, i.e. acquired habits, automatisms that take the place of conscious behavior. In a sense, every one of us has two minds. The first is guided by habit and governs our animal faculties, dealing with repetitive and non-creative tasks. The second is guided by reflection: it is the exploring mind, stimulated by desires and curiosities, excited by obstacles and errors, bent on acquiring new experiences and new knowledge. The two minds, however, always operate together. Thanks to this synergy, for example, the mathematician absorbed in the solution of a theorem is able to walk the streets of Paris shunning dangers and obstacles (Condillac 1947: 362–365). Condillac does not share Descartes’s view of animals as automatons; in fact, he does not even deny them the faculty of reflection. Even in instinct, he argues, there is nothing mechanical; it is a beginning of knowledge, a feeling that compares and evaluates things; it is, even in animals, a sort of reflection. The difference is one of degree. The richer and more complex the senses and needs of a species, the more its instincts will resemble reflection. Animal species live in a limited environment and have few needs, which leads them to repeat the same acts, and their reflection is therefore limited. In humans instead reflection, constantly stimulated by new challenges, is continuously exercised and generates reason, which is nothing but ‘that little reflection we have that goes beyond our habits’ (Condillac 1947: 363). Our instinct is more fallible than that of

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

animals since it has to deal continuously with novel circumstances. But unlike animal instinct, which is used solely for practical purposes, the instinct of humans ‘embraces practice and theory’; it often leads us to ‘have a premonition of truth, before having grasped its demonstration’ (ibid., 364). Herder had no difficulty in explaining the peculiarities of human language in reference to the faculty of reflection, because from the outset he clearly distinguished reflection from instinct. For Condillac, instead, the difference between humans and animals is one of degree and not of essence. Human and animal codes are certainly distinct and separate. A common language arises only among individuals of a species sharing the same organic constitution and the same needs and experiences. But if animals think, ‘if they communicate some of their feelings, if there are some that understand a little of our language, in what do they differ from man?’ If the kinship between humans and animals is denied, this is only because of the stubbornness of those who ‘are terrified at seeing nature as it is’ (Condillac 1947: 361–362). This kinship is demonstrated also by the role instinct plays within memory, and consequently in linguistic practice (see Logique I, ix). Memory, like instinct, is an aggregate of automatisms. It is not like a big warehouse where ideas are stored, but rather a power acquired by the mind ‘to move on its own in the same way it moves when an object strikes the senses’. In other words, memory is the totality of mental automatisms. ‘We would not call to mind the objects we have seen, heard, touched if the movement did not follow the contours of what we see, hear, touch’ (ibid.). To explain this motor function of the mind, which reproduces, when stimulated by instinctive habit, the movement occasioned by ideas or sensations, Condillac repeatedly resorts to the metaphor of the harpsichord and the habitual movements with which a practiced musician races his fingers over the keyboard. As the fingers ‘preserve the habit of a succession of movements and can, with little effort, move as they have moved’, so does the mind maintain its habits: ‘having been once excited by the action of the senses, it goes on its own through familiar movements and remembers ideas’ (ibid.). This motor theory of intelligence becomes a model of linguistic practice: The memory of an air performed on an instrument resides in the fingers, the ear and the mind: in the fingers because they got used to a succession of movements; in the ear, because it evaluates the fingers and directs them, when necessary, only insofar as it in turn has become used to another succession of movements; in the brain, because it has become accustomed to going through forms that correspond exactly to the habit of the fingers and the ears […]. Could one know a language if the mind did not acquire habits that correspond

125

126 A History of Language Philosophies

to those of the ears in order to hear it, to those of the mouth in order to speak it, to those of eyes in order to read it? The memory of a language is not then exclusively in the habits of the mind, but also in the habits of the organs of hearing, speech and sight. (ibid.)

Another influential work on the origin of language was Johann Gottfried Herder’s essay on the origin of language (Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, 1772). When compared to Condillac’s works examined above, it reveals the presence, beneath the apparent similarities, of a quite different interpretative model. For instance, both authors argue that humans have the same passions animals do, and express them in the same way. Herder’s essay opens with the peremptory statement that man, insofar as he is an animal, already has a language. But it is on the nature of this similarity that the two authors diverge. In all historical languages, we find echoes of natural accents, but the structure of language for Herder is not based on these; the roots of language are elsewhere. The immediate sounds of sensation are indeed a language, but there is no continuity between this form of animal expression (which belongs to man, too, as animal) and languages. From the occasional sounds of sensation a human language could never have developed. For Condillac, intelligence and its operations (including verbal thought) result from the synergy of instinct and reflection; human instinct is reflection in its embryonic stage, being endowed with a proleptic function that offers us a premonition of what reflection will consciously articulate. For Herder, instead, instinct and reflection are separate from the very start. Instincts are technical capabilities that integrate each animal into its habitat, making them infallible in their own sphere; the smaller the sphere, the more infallible they are. The bee is unbeatable in forming cells, the spider in weaving its web, but they cannot do anything else. Much closer than Condillac to Descartes’s positions, Herder reduces animal language to a collection of mechanical sounds, used as signals within each species. In the case of humans, who are short on instinct and infinitely adaptable to the most diverse habitats and activities, the situation is radically different. Animal language is innate; not so the language of humans. Humans are separated from animals by differences of nature and not of degree. This is the central thesis in Herder’s anthropology. In all the operations of the human soul a single force manifests itself, i.e., reflection (Besonnenheit). From the activity of reflection arises language, which allows humans to recognize the objects that appear marked by one or more distinctive traits. The genesis of internal language is the very act whereby we identify or recognize a representation through a sign. We move from internal language to expressed language

Language and philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment 127

when we choose a sound as a mnemonic sign and use it to recognize the object. Naming and recognizing are one and the same thing. The capacity to identify and re-identify things through signs is man’s proper instrument for appropriating the world. Cognition is a semiotic operation, a re-cognition through signs. According to whether one shared Condillac’s hypothesis of a continuum or Herder’s hypothesis of a breach between animals and humans, between instinct and conscience, human language appeared as either a refinement of the symbolical and communicative capacity of animals or, alternatively, an exclusive and original human trait. Early 19th-century Restoration philosophy adopted the hypothesis of a radical separation. Condillac became a favorite target for the adversaries to the Enlightenment, and he has been little studied and much criticized until recently. Yet, his hypothesis remained an implicit model in theories on the origin of language and the relation between human language and animal language, especially when, in the second half of the 19th century, biological theories of evolution re-proposed the paradigm of gradualness and continuity in a new form. As for Herder, there has been some debate on whether his position too can be assimilated to the evolutionist model (see Zimmerli 1990). In my view, Herder’s theory on the origin of language, as found in his 1772 essay, offers a radical version of the discontinuity paradigm and, as such, is hardly compatible with any evolutionary theory. At most, it can be related to the ancient cosmological model, still widespread in 18th-century philosophy, of the Chain of Being, in which all creatures are distributed once and for all according to their closeness to perfection, from the lowest life-forms to superior animals, and on to man, angels, and God. While Herder does not mention this model, his theory does suggest a series of contiguous but separate ecological niches, in which each species evolves by developing its original genetic endowment. By contrast, the theory Herder presented thirty years later in his Metakritik (see 5.3 above) is unquestionably co-evolutionary. There is a co-adaptation between inborn predispositions and experience, which begets man’s integration with nature. The correspondence between language forms and the forms of experience is a particular case of this adaptation process. Herder’s new position was not incompatible, at least in theory, with one of his original tenets: the heterogeneity of human and animal language. As we shall see later on (8.3 below), evolution is a theoretical framework that is well capable of containing different views of human language and its origin. While the continuity model seems to fit more easily with classic Darwinism, in recent neoevolutionist debate the notion of an absolute break between human symbolic



128 A History of Language Philosophies

language and animal communication sometimes coexists with the thesis of an evolution or co-evolution of cultural and biological processes.

Suggestions for further reading Renaissance linguistic theories
: Nuchelmans 1980: 3–140; Clérico & Rosier, eds. 1982; Jardine 1982; Percival 1986; Jardine 1988; Vickers 1988; Demonet 1992; Breva Claramonte, ed. 2000. Rhetorics
: Fumaroli 1980; Dahan & Rosier-Catach, eds. 1998; Fumaroli, ed. 1999; Moss & Wallace, 2003. Grammar
: Chevalier 1968; Padley 1976–1985; Auroux 1994; Breva Claramonte, ed. 2000. Etymology and language comparison
: Buridant 1998; Buridant, ed. 1998; Demonet 1998, 1998a; Rosier 1998. Translation theories
: Buridant 1983; Copeland 1991. Dante Alighieri
: Scaglione 1990; Eco 1995, Chap. 3. ‘Questione della lingua’: Marazzini 1999. Missionary linguistics
: Hovdhaugen, ed. 1996; Cram et al., eds. 1999: 71–172; Nowak 1999. ‘Characteristica’ and universal language
: Hüllen 1989; Subbiondo, ed. 1992; Eco 1995; Séris 1995: 165–224; Wilding 1999; Cram 2000. See Formigari 1988 for previous bibliography. Animal language
: Eco & Marmo, eds. 1989: 3–41. Logosmystik
: Eco 1995; Schmidt-Biggemann 1999. Descartes and the Cartesian tradition
: Chomsky 1966; Séris 1995. General Grammar
: Dominicy 1984; Pariente 1984, 1985; Pécharman 1995; Tsiapera & Wheeler 1995. Hobbes
: Skinner 1996; Biletzki 1997. Leibniz
: Dascal 1987, 1990; Séris 1995: 149–161; Droixhe 1996; Dutz & Gensini, eds., 1996; Gensini 2000; Dascal 2003. Vico
: Trabant, ed. 1995; Trabant 2003. Enlightenment linguistics
: Ricken 1978; Aarsleff 1982; Hassler 1984; Droixhe 1987; Ricken, ed. 1990; Formigari 1993; Gessinger 1994; Ricken 1994; Séris 1995; Schlieben-Lange 1996; Hassler 1999; Rosenfeld 2001. Locke
: Ashworth 1985: 59–68, 299–326, 45–73; Formigari 1988; Ott 2003. Berkeley
: Creery, ed. 1991. Condillac
: Ricken 1986; Rousseau 1986. Herder
: Koepke, ed. 1990; Trabant 1990a; Formigari 1994: 31–70; Tani 2000.



Chapter 6

Languages, peoples, and nations

6.1 Language and communal thinking Words have a dual nature. So claimed Johann Georg Hamann, master of the first generation of Romantics in Germany. Words are the evidence of an inescapable division between intuition and thought, between the concreteness of sensibilia and the abstraction of signs. They are an essential instrument in the search for objective truth, yet they obfuscate the more profound ‘truths’ achieved by intuition. Many followers of the Gefühlsphilosophie, or philosophy of feeling, echoed his position. Among them was Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. We appropriate the universe only by breaking it up into images, ideas, and words. Reason conquers and rules through the word, but the deeper levels of truth escape reason. On the other hand, language allows the singularity of individual experience to coexist with a world of shared representations, i.e., shared feelings and meanings. Languages are historical formations in which the thoughts and feelings of generations precipitate and are transformed into a common heritage. In turn, languages influence the whole experience or worldview of the speakers. Hamann provided his own version of the notion of the ‘genius of language’ (see 5.1 above) as a natural trait of each population, perfectly analogous to its ethnic characteristics. Herder related the synergy of thought and language to the political question of turning German into a cultural language. Through language we learn to think, so that our wet nurses are also our first logic teachers. Our mother language — the sensuous abode of thought, in which it becomes visible and audible — shapes communities into historically and culturally defined entities. The spread of national language had been a crucial element in the cultural policy of the French revolution. It had become a dramatically urgent question with the Napoleonic wars and the rise of nationalisms in Europe. In the conscience of the ruling classes, the idea of a linguistic community merged with that of the nation to the point of identifying with it. In 1808, Fichte delivered

130 A History of Language Philosophies

his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation), a manifesto of an idea of the nation as the common motherland of all social classes. In this context he insisted on the moral primacy of the German people and their language and expressed a fully developed version of the romantic idea of language as an entity that transcends the individuals who speak it. Humans do not shape their language; language shapes them. A living language is original and native, springing from the people as a spontaneous force. Its words are alive and give life. It produces a culture that is not mere erudition but ensures a creative exchange among social classes. A dead language is a language of a culture different from that of the people. Its native core has been suffocated by a foreign language and therefore contains thoughts and feelings foreign to those of the speakers. These languages — French among them — can produce erudition but can never bridge the gap between aristocratic and popular culture. For those who learn a foreign language, what remains foreign is not its matter, i.e., its sounds, which are indifferent and mechanically apprehended, but rather the collection of symbols and images expressed by those sounds, which is its spiritual substance. For those who speak a foreign language, words always yield opaque images. Shorn of any contact with its living roots, a language can be ‘superficially rippled by the wind of life and simulate life, but at the bottom something dead remains’ (Fichte 1845: 321). The political context of Fichte’s 1808 Addresses — the city of Berlin occupied by French troops — explains why the author stresses this particular aspect of his theory so strongly. The relation between language and thought is part of a philosophy of history that raises the idea of nation to the status of a metaempirical formation, which determines the life of individuals. Language is a spontaneous emanation of the nation. The individual is allowed no linguistic creativity; he must just let himself be permeated and moved by the vital principle intrinsic to the idiom to which he belongs. Ethnolinguistic determinism, the absolute identification of language communities with ethnic groups, was a widespread attitude in 19th-century culture. Even the notion of the primacy of Sanskrit, in its presumed perfection, which marks the beginning of comparative linguistics, was often related to the idea of language as an ideal essence endowed with an autonomous creative principle. This holds particularly for Friedrich Schlegel. Humboldt combines the notion of a close reciprocal relation between individuals and their national language with a passionate celebration of the diversity of languages. Language is not a neutral instrument of communication but an intermediate world between individual and nation. So he wrote in 1806:

Languages, peoples, and nations

The sum of all words, language, is a world that lies in between what we see outside of us and what is active within us. Language is certainly based on convention […] but individual words initially developed from the natural feeling of the speaker and were understood through the corresponding natural feeling of the listener. Therefore […] the study of language also reveals the analogy of man with the world in general and specifically with the nation that expresses itself in that language. (Humboldt 1961: 60)

This intermediate world shapes experience: “By the same act whereby [man] spins language out of himself, he spins himself into it, and every language draws about the people who possess it a circle whence it is possible to exit only by stepping over at once into the circle of another one”. Thus writes Humboldt in the last and most important of his works on language, an essay on the diversity of human language-structures (Humboldt 1988 [1836]: 60). This is only one aspect of the relation between man and the world. Another one is the analogy between the laws that govern the mind and those that govern the world, with the final reconciliation between human creativity and the tyranny of language. Language belongs to me, because I bring it forth as I do; and since the ground of this lies at once in the speaking and having-spoken of every generation of men, so far as speech-communication may have prevailed unbroken among them, it is language itself which restrains me when I speak. But that in it which limits and determines me has arrived there from a human nature intimately allied to my own, and its alien element is therefore alien only for my transitory individual nature, not for my original and true one. (Humboldt 1988: 63)

In language “the individualization within a general conformity is so wonderful, that we may say […] that the whole of mankind has but one language, and that every man has one of his own” (p. 53). Humboldt’s theory is strongly influenced by the idealist notion of development as self-production of the spirit. This allows him to hold the notion of the diversity of actual languages together with the notion of their basic unity. The division of mankind into nations is not enough to explain the diversity of languages. Humboldt looks for a deeper cause, an “intimate need of the human spirit to produce a multiplicity of intellectual forms” just as nature engenders an infinite multiplicity of living forms (Humboldt 1968: 621). The idea of language as infinite productive activity is expressed by Humboldt in one of his most famous passages:

131

132

A History of Language Philosophies

Language, regarded in its real nature, is an enduring thing, and at every moment a transitory one. […] In itself it is no product (Ergon), but an activity (Energeia). Its true definition can therefore only be a genetic one. For it is the ever-repeated mental labour of making the articulated sound capable of expressing thought. In a direct and strict sense, this is the definition of speech on any occasion; in its true and essential meaning, however, we can also regard, as it were, only the totality of this speaking as the language. For in the scattered chaos of words and rules that we are, indeed, accustomed to call a language, there is present only the particular brought forth by this speaking, and this never completely, and calling for new work, so as to detect from it the nature of the living speech and to provide a true image of the living language. It is precisely the highest and most refined aspect that cannot be discerned from these disparate elements, and can only be perceived or divined in connected discourse
; which is all the more proof that language proper lies in the act of its real production. […] The break-up into words and rules is only a dead makeshift of scientific analysis. (Humboldt 1988: 49)

With a certain historiographical simplification, the forms of linguistic determinism that developed within ethnolinguistic studies in the following century have been classified as ‘neo-Humboldtian’. Humboldt’s notion of an ‘internal speech form’ (innere Sprachform) — the specific semantic and morphosyntactic organization which, along with the phonic, external form, contributes to the diversification of languages — was often interpreted deterministically. It is certainly true that, in the second half of the 19th century, the Humboldtian program of empirical research, along with his notion of language as an essential symbolic form, was central to the studies of Völkerpsychologie (folk psychology or comparative psychology), a forerunner of modern cultural anthropology. But in the 20th century, aside from some forms of explicit ‘neo-Humboldtianism’ circulating in German linguistics, the new, sometimes extreme forms of linguistic relativism sprang from completely different sources (see Joseph 2002: 71–105) and were prepared by the progressive expansion of the comparative horizon, especially the study of Amerindian languages. Such is the case of the inappropriately termed ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, from the name of two ethnolinguists active in the United States in the early decades of the 20th century. Sapir defined language as something which, on the one hand, limits experience and, on the other hand, serves to transcend it, projecting potential meanings onto the brute matter of experience. If one, without having ever seen more than a single elephant in his life, can speak of generations, millions, or herds of elephants, “it is obvious that language has the power to analyze experience into theoretical dissociable elements and to create that world of the

Languages, peoples, and nations

potential intergrading with the actual which enables human beings to transcend the immediately given in their individual experience and to join in a larger common understanding” (Sapir 1966: 7). Linguistic form predetermines certain modes of observation and interpretation. “Language is at one and the same time helping and retarding us in our exploration of experience, and the details of this process of help and hindrance are deposited in the subtler meanings of different cultures” (p. 8). It is a symbolic guide to social reality, and the ‘real world’ is to a large extent “unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group […]. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached” (p. 69). Through his association with Whorf, who held a much more radical version of linguistic determinism, Sapir became caught up in a cliché that obscured substantial differences existing between the two. Notwithstanding his attention to semantic variability, Sapir insists on the persistence and relative autonomy of the formal structures of languages: “linguistic organization tends […] to maintain itself indefinitely and does not allow its fundamental formal categories to be seriously influenced by changing cultural needs” (p. 35). Thus, the cultural relativity of the vocabulary is balanced by the stability of grammatical structure. By contrast, Whorf ’s relativism concerns first and foremost the grammar of languages, seen as a natural logic that corresponds in each case to the mentality of the speakers. Linguistic knowledge “entails understanding many different beautiful systems of logical analysis” (Whorf 1956: 264). Every language is “a vast pattern-system, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices and neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels its reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness” (p. 252). The comparison between different languages is presented as a necessary therapy for Western culture, which tends to consider the analysis of reality dictated by the structure of European languages as a set of universal principles. Western scientific thought is nothing but a “specialization of the Western Indo-European type of language” (p. 247). This theory was debated and also confuted by experimental data in the 1950–70 period, especially in the United States. After that — occasional revivals apart (see Koerner 1999a: 77–79) — the attention of linguists, stimulated among other things by the emergence of Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar (see 8.1 below), focused instead on the search for similarities among languages, and especially on grammatical universals and language typology. The privileged theme of relativists — the relation between language and mentality

133

134 A History of Language Philosophies

— was expelled from general linguistics and reserved for disciplines such as ethnolinguistics and sociolinguistics.

6.2 Philosophies of comparativism The discovery of the genealogy of languages derived from Sanskrit lies at the intersection of early 19th-century historical linguistics with the philosophical study of language. The relation between European languages and the ancient language of the Hindus was an hypothesis that had been circulating even before 1786, when William Jones delivered a speech to the Royal Asiatic Society of Calcutta, that may be considered the manifesto of protocomparativism. Jones was a functionary of the East India Company and the author of a Persian grammar. He described Sanskrit as a language characterized by a ‘wonderful structure’, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. (Jones 1967: 15)

Historical linguistics of the first half of the 19th century can be viewed as an application of Jones’s hypothesis to the majority of European languages, as well as those of India and Iran. In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel, in his essay on the language and wisdom of the Indians (Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier), made German culture a party to the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit and outlined its philosophy (see Koerner 1987). The success of his essay was helped by the Romantic interest in the origin of humankind, located, like Sanskrit, in the Eastern world. It was fostered by a philosophy of nature, which, starting with Goethe, viewed organisms as subject to a process of development and decay, already inscribed in their structure from the start and largely independent of historical and empirical circumstances. This is also the model on which language was conceived in early 19th-century German philosophy from Schlegel to Humboldt. Finally, Schlegel’s thesis was boosted by the tendency of the new linguistics to conceive languages as substances whose development was not the

Languages, peoples, and nations

result of successive additions or aggregations but was determined by an immutable inner form that is active from the start. In 1816 Franz Bopp published his essay on the conjugation system of Sanskrit as compared to that of Greek, Latin, Persian, and Germanic, later followed by his major work, a comparative grammar, of which three different editions were published between 1833 and 1870. Such studies led to the classification and grouping of world languages into a limited number of families, i.e., of groups having a known or reasonably inferable common ‘protolanguage.’ Such an approach promoted, among other things, an interest in languages lacking a literary tradition, which traditional philology had largely ignored, focusing on the reconstruction and interpretation of written texts. It also promoted an interest in myth and primitive cultural forms. Finally, it favored the construction of a typology of languages based on their structure. A value judgment often tended to be associated to that typology, as we shall see. The new science found a model in scientific paleontology, which had also recently been established. The problem was the same: how could a whole organism be reconstructed from a fragment? In Schlegel’s essay the celebration of Sanskrit as a ‘sacred’ idiom is linked with his rejection of 18th-century theories on the origin of language, one of the privileged arguments of the opponents of anthropological naturalism. Philosophical anthropology, in the 18th century, had tried to describe the process of humanization and the development of its primary instrument, language, in secular terms. But a decisive turning point had been Fichte’s essay on the faculty and origin of language (1795). Fichte had attacked the naturalist aspect of those descriptions; they were limited to empirical history and advanced hypotheses that were also empirical and therefore unverifiable, possible at best. What was to be done, instead, was to ‘infer the necessity of this invention from the nature of human reason’ (Fichte 1966: 97), to replace empirical description with ‘an a priori history of language’ (p. 99), to identify a basis of language ‘inherent in the essence of man’. From the perspective of ‘empirical’ history, Fichte’s description is no different from those found in the philosophical anthropology of the Enlightenment: language arises from social interaction, i.e., from the community of purposes and feelings. But for Fichte empirical history is determined by an a priori history, an ideal principle by virtue of which the invention of language is a moment in the realization of the ethical duty assigned to humans among all living creatures. The idea of a double history (an empirical history and an ideal history, a possible history and a necessary one) is also at the basis of Schlegel’s above-

135

136 A History of Language Philosophies

mentioned essay, where it combines with the theme of the classification of languages, or language typology. The distinction between two separate and irreducible language classes brought Schlegel to propose the thesis of a twofold origin according to which inflectional languages were radically different from all others. In inflectional languages, every root is truly somewhat like a living germ. Conceptual relations are expressed by an inner change. All the words that derive from one root retain a mark of their kinship; they refer to one another, and hold and support one another. From this comes the richness and at the same time the stability and durability of these languages, of which one can rightly say that they were born organically and constitute an organic tissue (Schlegel 1977: 50–51). These are eminent characteristics of Sanskrit, the inflectional language par excellence. For Schlegel its roots have the power of all that is living and organic, the power of productivity. Sanskrit is the common source of most European languages, which arose from its contamination with native languages. This is what Schlegel maintains. By contrast, later comparative philologists considered Sanskrit itself as a derived language, not the mother, but the sister of the other Indo-European languages. The binary classification (inflectional vs. non-inflectional) was later replaced by a three-part classification. In one category there were the so-called isolating languages such as Chinese, where every word is a unit of meaning, constituted by an unchanging root. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich’s elder brother, first expounded his tripartite division in 1818 (see Koerner 1995, Chap. 8). In an 1827 essay on etymology, he described isolating languages as lacking a grammatical and syntactical structure, being ‘made up of monosyllables that we cannot even call roots’, since they lack any fecundity and are ‘set one next to the other without anything to bind them’ (Schlegel 1846: 131). A second category included the so-called agglutinative languages, such as Turkish, which string together successive bits, each with a separate grammatical function, into the body of single words. In them, grammatical markers do not affect the form of the root in any way. Finally, there was the category of inflected languages, such as Indo-European languages, in which roots are bound to grammatical markers and every word includes a certain number of units of meaning, which, however, merge completely with one another. These languages are eminently capable of expressing complex ideas through a single word: the root contains the main idea, the syllables that serve to form derived words express accessory modifications, and the inflections express variable relations. When one knows the substance of these languages, i.e., their

Languages, peoples, and nations

roots and grammatical forms, all this variety of combinations — even when one hears them for the first time — are perfectly intelligible, even though the syllables, in themselves, are not words and do not have any meaning […] Only these languages bear in themselves a principle of fecundity, of progressive development, and can guide the way in any improvement of the human spirit. (ibid., 131–132)

It was a commonplace in the literature of the period to compare languages to living organisms, linguistic roots to living germs, language development to the organic growth of living things, and inflection to a spontaneous vegetation growing from that germ. This aggregation of metaphors had its precedents in Herder’s philosophy of history. It had been further stimulated, in the culture of Romanticism, by Kant’s fusion of aesthetics and natural philosophy in his Critik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment, 1790). Their locus classicus is Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s philosophy, which affirmed the principle of the primacy of the whole over the parts, and the consequent need to start from the notion of totality to explain phenomena. These metaphors also became a commonplace in comparative philology. Bopp describes languages as natural organisms that arise according to laws and develop according to an indwelling vital principle. The famous philologist August Friedrich Pott, a former student of Bopp’s, refers to gestation periods, precocious or delayed growth, and the maturity and decadence of languages. The existence of a deep-set vital principle in languages entailed their relative autonomy from the material condition of the speakers. Like organisms, languages have their own evolutionary laws that can only partly be altered by empirical circumstances, just as in the natural world, the inner form of a species resists the changes imposed by environment. In A. W. Schlegel’s view, only inflectional languages were true organisms (basically, only European languages, since he wrongly classified Semitic languages as agglutinative). Non-inflectional languages were, for him, mechanical constructs, lacking any vital germ. They grew by superimposing new forms over primitive roots in an atomistic fashion. They varied in complexity from elementary monosyllabic and morphologically non-structured languages, such as Chinese, to fairly articulated and complex languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. But no kinship existed among them, nor could anything transform them into inflectional languages. What was possible instead was a process of decadence from an original purity and perfection. Consequently, Schlegel rejected the possibility that the endings of contemporary inflectional languages could have originally been autonomous words that were later added to the root and finally merged with it. This hypothesis had been proposed by Franz Bopp,

137

138

A History of Language Philosophies

whose work on the system of conjugation of Sanskrit (1816) is considered the founding text of scientific comparativism. According to Schlegel, different formation processes must be postulated for inflectional and non-inflectional languages respectively. The idea of the monogenesis of languages, if not exclusive, had always been dominant. Only few scholars, one of whom was Voltaire, had advanced polygenetic hypotheses. For A. W. Schlegel, instead, polygenesis is an explicative principle endowed with an ideal necessity. In his view, it was possible to advance naturalistic explanations of the origin of language in the case of noninflectional languages; one could legitimately hypothesize that they were initially crude languages, dominated by fantasy, riddled with metaphorical expressions, onomatopoeia, concrete terms, and lacking in abstraction. The case of Sanskrit (or an even purer proto-Sanskrit) was different. From the start it had to be complete and perfect in its structure, the bearer of an original patrimony of philosophical and religious knowledge. Schelling, in his 1826 Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie [Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1959b)], proposed a similar monogenetic theory. His attack on linguistic naturalism dated back to his lessons on the Philosophy of Art of 1802 (Philosophie der Kunst [Schelling 1959a]), in which he had described language as the outer shell of the ideal, the body it needs to manifest itself. As an expression of the ideal, language is a work of art, whereas, as a spontaneous production, it is closer to the works of nature. In 1850, in a lecture on the origin of language (1959c), Schelling praised the achievements of historical linguistics: by choosing empirical research, it had left the problem of the origin of language to philosophers, who had finally transformed it into a purely ‘ideal’ (i.e., speculative) problem. In his lectures on the philosophy of mythology, Schelling explains that language does not develop atomistically but organically, as a perfect and complete totality. In producing it, the spirit does not reflect on its relations and functions any more than nature, in forming the skull, reflects on the nerve that will go through it. There is no thought without language, therefore language cannot have developed from thought. There are no populations without a language, therefore languages cannot have developed from the life of communities. Like mythology, language does not arise from the people but with the people: it is the self-awareness of the people, thanks to which the community detaches itself from universal consciousness and becomes a people. In Schelling’s theory, this happens with the transition from the original monotheism to polytheism, which generates the separation of tribes. In his view, this also

Languages, peoples, and nations 139

explains the concordances still existing among languages with different structures. It also explains the fact that there are languages (such as the Amerindian tongues) that resist any effort to study them comparatively; they belong to groups that have lost all memory of the original unity of humankind. They are linguistic spasms, misbegotten attempts at language. Monogenetism and polygenetism are both present in this description of the origin of languages, thanks to the double description (ideal and empirical). The (ideal) monogenetic explanation refers the entire process back to the original unity of conscience; the (empirical) polygenetic explanation sees the origin of the process in the fragmentation of the unitary conscience and the emergence of a multiplicity of populations and idioms. This is the model also adopted by Friedrich Schlegel in the last phase of his philosophical career, specifically in the lectures on the philosophy of language and the philosophy of history of the 1828–1829 period (Schlegel 1969, 1971). At the beginning of history, according to Schlegel, lies the loss of the revealed word. The multiplicity of languages and races is one of its manifestations. The original unity of idioms explains the correspondence between distant languages. The separation from the divine order produces the fragmentation of consciousness into different faculties (reason, imagination, will, intellect), and this is reflected in the very structure of languages, whose harmonious recomposition can only be produced by artistic genius. The idea that languages can decay in the course of history was widespread in the Romantic period, and Schelling and Schlegel were simply expressing it in a paradoxical form. Primitive languages were celebrated as endowed with greater spontaneity and vitality. They were the languages in which the meaning of words was most readily perceived, since they were the ones most capable of bearing witness to the immediate, naïve relation between man and the world. Their expressions had not yet been obscured by the artificiality that marked later stages of development. Franz Bopp took for granted that ‘grammatical forms and the entire organism of languages are produced in the first period of their existence, when, in the prime of youth, they spring like flowers and fruits from a novel trunk’ (1836: 1). Bopp, however, did not share Schlegel’s belief that Indo-European languages were inflectional from the start. In his theory, agglutination always precedes inflection. But for him, too, the primacy of IndoEuropean languages was unquestionable. Once again, in the scenario I am outlining, a special place must be accorded to Wilhelm von Humboldt. It is hard to assign him a clear-cut position in 19thcentury linguistics. Significantly, Anna Morpurgo Davies (1998: 98) begins her chapter on Humboldt with a series of a dozen or so questions. Does he count as an

140 A History of Language Philosophies

amateur or a professional in linguistics? What is the true meaning of his most famous ideas, such as innere Sprachform or language as energeia? Was he a follower of the French Enlightenment or of German philosophy? of Kant, Herder, or Fichte? Was he more influential in the 19th or the 20th century? and so on. Perhaps, one of the reasons Humboldt is such an elusive author is that his writings are formidable engines for collecting and elaborating current ideas. Thus we have scholars who place him in the line that goes from Leibniz to Herder all the way to the Romantik, while others detect the presence of Enlightenment linguistic themes under the mannerisms of Romantic organicism; still others stress the Kantian, or hermeneutic, aspects of his thought; and finally, there are those who support an image of Humboldt as the precursor of 20thcentury generativism. “To whom does Humboldt belong” (thus the title of an article by W. Oesterreicher of 1981) is still an unresolved question. Things are made more complicated by Humboldt’s peculiar style, where we hardly find univocal description of linguistic phenomena, which are usually explained by negation or through metaphors. Finally, his work (still partially unpublished) as a describer of languages as far-ranging as Basque, Chinese, Polynesian and American Indian languages, raises the question of the extent to which this intense empirical research can actually be interpreted as the realization of the program set forth in his theoretical writings. Here too Morpurgo Davies puts us on the right track, when she says that the effort to reconcile the variety of historical languages with the universality of language is the core problem in Humboldt’s theory (1998: 104). His massive labors of description and even the choice of languages so very different among themselves can be seen as a program for an inductive research-in-progress, aimed on the one hand at a typological description of languages and, on the other, at demonstrating their initial unity. Certainly, both aspects are equally present and active in all his work, to the point of suggesting an incapability or unwillingness to choose between them. Section 22 of his essay on the diversity of human language-structure (Humboldt 1988: 214–219) is the most eloquent testimony of this wavering. Certainly, he says, the three major typological classes can be isolated in theory, but in reality they coexist to varying degrees in every language. Therefore, it is a mistake to celebrate only some languages as legitimate and brand others as imperfect. Yet, that the inflectional form “can alone be called correct, is not easily to be disputed” (p.217). A condemnation of a language, even the one spoken by the most primitive savages, would be dishonorable, yet to deviant languages “we simply deny […] the capacity to act, of themselves, in so ordered, so versatile and so harmonious a fashion upon the mind”

Languages, peoples, and nations

(p. 218). The form of languages should be essentially the same, given the universality of language disposition, but in reality that is not how matters stand, partly owing to the retroactive effect of sound, partly because of the individuality of the inner sense, as manifested in appearance. It is a matter, that is, of the energy of the force whereby it acts upon sound, and transforms it in every nuance, even the finest, into a living expression of thought. But this energy cannot everywhere be the same, cannot everywhere display a like intensity, vivacity and regularity. Nor is it always supported by a similar inclination to treat the thought symbolically, or a similar aesthetic pleasure in sonic abundance and euphony. Yet the striving of the inner linguistic sense remains always directed to uniformity in languages, and its authority seeks always to lead even deviant forms back, in some way, to the right course. (Humboldt 1988: 215)

In contrast to the reciprocal impermeability of linguistic types supported by authors such as Schlegel or Schelling, Humboldt’s position allows for a mixture of ideal types in every language and a difference that is only of degree in their respective realization. But he too holds that Indo-European languages remain the stable touchstone of all other languages. The great German linguist Jacob Grimm, though not immune to the cult of the primitive that characterized the Romantic generation, took a cautious position on the primacy of inflectional languages (of Sanskrit, in the last analysis). In his lecture on the origin of language (Grimm 1984 [1851]), he advanced the hypothesis that inflection may have arisen from previous agglutinative phenomena, as already suggested by Bopp, and argued along similar lines by August Schleicher, another famous comparatist, and Ernest Renan, a French Orientalist. Grimm also presented the three language types as successive moments in a universal history of language, but on this Renan demurred. He disagreed in general with the idea that the simplicity of a language was proof of its antiquity; a simple language like Chinese, he noted in his essay on the origin of language (1848; see Renan 1947), had been used by a complex society and culture, while — as already observed by Pott — Amerindian languages or the languages of central-southern Africa were distinguished by a surprising grammatical richness, out of proportion to the simplicity of the culture of its speakers. One more author needs to be mentioned, at the intersection of language typology and philosophy, August Schleicher, who explained the succession of the three types of language, mentioned above, as stages of a process begun in prehistorical times, towards an increasingly accomplished unity of phonic form and meaning (Schleicher 1848:6–11). The highest level of language development,

141

142 A History of Language Philosophies

which is the prerequisite for the emergence of self-conscious behavior and liberty, also marks the beginning of history. According to Schleicher, when a language enters history, its evolution ceases and we have to do with gradual dissolution, with Verfall. Far from being in itself an end of the spirit, language thus becomes a mere instrument for exchanging thoughts.

6.3 The science of language: Nature and history The main goal of the comparative study of languages was to explain the phonetic changes which, starting from a proto-language, had produced the languages of a given family. In 1822 Grimm had identified a series of regular phonetic correspondences between Germanic languages and other IndoEuropean languages, such as Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. On this basis he could posit a common Germanic proto-language derived from a Indo-European original language (Ursprache) through constant mechanisms of phonetic change. As he observed in his 1851 essay Über den Ursprung der Sprache (On the origin of language), Germanic philology had been completely renovated thanks to comparative techniques. These had the same effect on linguists as that produced on naturalists when they discover in the plants of their own country the same perfection of forms that had struck them in the plants of exotic places. In the past, philologists had pored over documents in ancient languages to find the rules for reconstructing texts, just as botanists looked for beneficial properties in plants, and anatomists dissected dead bodies to find cures for the living. In Grimm’s view, comparative philology, like comparative botany and anatomy, was going beyond merely empirical research. Grimm was following contemporary linguistic theories in their belief in the analogy between natural sciences and linguistics. But for him the analogy stopped at the idea of Creation. For the naturalist, Creation is the postulate beyond which he cannot go. Not so for the linguist, since language is the work of man, and therefore there is no limit to a complete reconstruction of its history other than the origins of humanity itself. A comparison with the natural sciences was also the starting point of Renan’s essay on the origin of language (1848). For Renan, historical linguistics was a sort of embryology of the mind. It had to adopt the inductive method in order to reconstruct formation processes which could only be studied indirectly, by analogy with present conditions. The two tenets of 19th-century philological studies were that processes of change take place in a regular way and phonetic laws are analogous to natural laws. Philologists used the inductive

Languages, peoples, and nations 143

method; they inferred the earlier stages of a language from observation of its present state, since they believed that language, like all spiritual productions, had to be entirely formed from the start. This is called ‘uniformitarianism’, and can be found in the work of Schleicher too. Renan, a great philologist and a reader of Schlegel and Humboldt, followed them in believing that reflection has no part in the development of language, just as it has no part in natural processes. The creation or learning of a language encounters no greater difficulty than is faced by a plant that germinates or an organism that completes its development. ‘Everywhere lies the hidden God, the universal force that, acting while the individual soul is asleep, produces amazing effects which transcend human artifice to the same extent that infinite power transcends limited forces’ (1947: 10). Philology confirms this spontaneity of developmental processes, insofar as it finds no evidence of languages that are incomplete or have developed gradually. Nothing suggests the existence of languages lacking the parts of speech, whatever their level of development. The essential form of a language can never be truly altered in the course of its history. Language types are unmovable boundaries between linguistic families that are separate from one another and do not communicate at all, while, on the contrary, inside them everything is fluent. The idea that language families are separate also influenced anthropology and was used in support of racial theories. The best known case is that of Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau. ‘Languages, in their diversity, perfectly correspond to the respective merits of races’. With this title assigned to Chapter XV of his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), written towards the middle of the 19th century, Gobineau explicitly translated into a theory the combination of description and value judgment typical of language typology in the Romantic period. We have already seen a first example of this in Friedrich Schlegel’s 1808 essay, which became a model for later scholars. It was massively applied in Schelling’s lessons on the philosophy of mythology. Even August Wilhelm Schlegel succumbed to them in his article on etymology, where he credited the tribes that had migrated into Europe from central Asia with the merit of having brought with them ‘an idiom belonging to that high and noble line, the confused memory of ancient knowledge and the germ of future developments’ (Schlegel 1846: 124). Romantic philosophy had borrowed the idea from biology, that all future developments of an organism are inscribed in its basic structure from the outset. It was practically inevitable for the potentialities of every language type to be identified with the potentialities of the people who had inherited that type.

144 A History of Language Philosophies

I shall not deal at length with the intersections of language theories and theories of race, though they represent an important aspect of the history of national ideologies (see Römer 1985). I return instead to the question of the analogy between linguistics and natural sciences, and more precisely to its consequences in Schleicher’s writings. In 1863, Schleicher wrote an open letter on Darwinism and linguistics (Schleicher 1983: 21–22), addressed to the famous German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, insisting on the Romantic analogy between languages and living organisms. Schleicher prefers to speak of the life rather than the history of languages. Languages do not act, therefore they do not have a history in any proper sense of the term. This led Cassirer (1945) to define Schleicher’s position quite rightly as a Romantic theory based on Darwinian principles. However, towards the mid-19th century the view of nature underlying the notion of organism had changed radically. Organisms were now thought of as being subject to evolution, which has laws but no inherent ends. The critique of finalism was not the only consequence of this epistemological perspective. Cassirer makes another important point in his comparison of Darwin with Goethe. Unlike Darwin’s evolutionary model, Goethe’s metamorphosis does not allow for changes of one organic type into another but is limited to the development of new formations within the same type. In support of Cassirer’s view, one can cite the fact that the organic metaphor figures prominently in Friedrich Schlegel’s theory, while the notion of any evolution of languages is completely absent. For Schlegel, the birth of Indo-European languages did not mean the creation of new ‘species’ but only a descent from Sanskrit (described, what is more, as a process of downward development). As noted by Timpanaro (1977: xxv–xxxvi), Schlegel is influenced by the idea of the fixity of species (hence the radical separation and incommunicability between inflectional and non-inflectional languages) more than by any of the evolutionary hypotheses circulating at that time in natural philosophy. In the later half of the 19th century, language sciences became involved in the debates stirred by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The bond between comparative linguistics and Darwin’s theory was consecrated by Schleicher (1983). In Darwin’s principle of natural selection, he found an idea he had already applied to languages to explain the extinction of ancient forms and the spread of variants of linguistic ‘species’. Cassirer reproached Schleicher for having interpreted organism in an “ontological”, rather than a “formal and methodological” sense, like other linguists such as Meillet, Saussure, and the structuralists. A similar point had been made by a contemporary of Schleicher’s, Michel Bréal: Schleicher provided an

Languages, peoples, and nations

ontological interpretation of roots, and his school ‘discusses Indo-European roots as if they were primitive elements, and [operates] on them as if they were dealing with a cell of the human language’ (Bréal 1884: V/iii). He perpetuated the tendency of Romantic linguistics to attribute the mother tongue with a regularity of forms, an etymological transparency, and a phonetic symmetry found in no other existing idiom. For Bréal, progress in the language sciences dated instead from the moment when linguists became convinced that ‘languages are more or less valuable depending on how one uses them, on the developments they are given, on the feeling or thought of which, in time, they become impregnated’, and not on whether they were originally agglutinative, incorporative, or inflectional (p. xii). Bréal attributed to the so-called neogrammarian school, established in Germany towards the end of the 1870s, the merit of having overcome the confusion between description and value judgment in language typologies. Neogrammarians no longer thought of language as an organism, subject to growth, maturity, and decadence. Rather they saw it as an aspect of cognitive life and human interaction, subject to universal regularities based on the physiological and psychological constitution of humans. Among these were phonetic laws and the psychological mechanism of analogy. One of the problems they faced was determining whether these laws were regular and without exceptions, like natural laws, or mere statistical regularities, empirically inferred. The debate had a bearing on the theoretical statute of linguistics (natural science vs. historical science) and on the explanations of language change (rigorously predictable or influenced by psychological and accidental factors). The German linguists Hermann Osthoff and Karl Brugmann prefaced the first volume of their Morphologische Untersuchungen (1878) with an exposition of their views which is considered the manifesto of the neogrammarian movement. They wrote that language never develops independently of man; it has no autonomous life separate from the individuals who speak it. Therefore, all language changes originate from its speakers. By now this critical position on organicism was shared by many, as witnessed by the American linguist William Dwight Whitney’s more or less contemporary attacks on Schleicher’s biologism. As against the lingering echoes of Romantic organicism, Whitney defended an instrumental view of language and its history as the result of communicative practices. One of the reasons why the theory of evolution could be used in support of Romantic positions and, sometimes, prejudices, was summarized by Whorf in an article of 1936, in which he looked back on the predilection for Indo-European languages and the evolutionary tendencies of 19th-century linguistics:

145

146 A History of Language Philosophies

the evolutionary concept having been dumped upon modern man while his notions of language were based on knowledge of only a few types out of the hundreds of very diverse linguistic types existing, has abetted his provincial linguistic prejudices and fostered the grandiose hokum that his type of thinking and the few European tongues on which it is based represent the culmination and flower of the evolution of language. (Whorf 1956: 84)

We have already encountered Whorf as the most radical and controversial supporter of linguistic relativism. In this passage, he is attacking the comparatist prejudice in favor of Sanskrit and derived languages, which were conceived as a group separated at the outset from any other linguistic branch and lacking any genetic relation to any other linguistic family. Comparatists, indeed, used to contrast the unity and uniqueness of the Indo-European family with the irreducible multiplicity of other languages, and cited Amerindian languages, with their taxonomically irreducible character, as a testimony of the inferiority of the savages who spoke them. This apparent irreducibility has long constituted a problem. Nowadays, their classification into three macro-families corresponding to three successive migrations of populations from Europe (proposed at the end of 1980s by the American linguist Joseph H. Greenberg) seems to be supported by genetic studies (Ruhlen 1994). The joint venture of linguistics and biology, which legitimizes the hypothesis of a basic similarity between linguistic evolution and genetic evolution, has recently brought about a renewed interest in the history of evolutionism in linguistics. The current debate (see 8.3 below), however, does not concern the genealogy or typology of languages so much as the emergence of the language faculty itself.

Suggestions for further reading Kant
: Dascal & Senderowitcz 1992; Formigari 1994: 15–30. Fr. Schlegel
: Timpanaro 1977; Koerner 1987, 1989: 269–290, 1990. Schleicher
: Koerner, 1989: 326–375. Romantic linguistics
: Esterhammer 2001. Humboldt
: Aarsleff 1982; Manchester 1985; Trabant 1986, 1990; Schmitter, ed. 1991; Gipper 1992; Müller-Vollmer 1993; Morpurgo Davies 1998: 98–123; Stubbs 2002. Comparativism
: Christy 1983; Koerner 1987, 1989; Auroux 1990a; De Mauro & Formigari, eds. 1990; Olender 1992; Naumann et al., eds. 1992; Schmitter 1992; Morpurgo Davies 1998; Alter 1999; Koerner 1999. Neogrammarians
: Jankowsky 1972; Wilbur 1977; Koerner 1989: 79–100; Morpurgo Davies 1998: 226–278; Robins 1998: 129–147.



Languages, peoples, and nations 147

Sapir, Whorf, and linguistic relativism
: Koerner, ed. 1984; Cowan et al., eds. 1986; Darnell 1990; Koerner 1990a, 1992; Lee 1996; Koerner 1999a: 61–89; Pütz & Verspoor, eds. 2000; Joseph 2002: 71–105; Koerner 2002: 39–62. Later developments of historical linguistics
: Fisiak, ed. 1990, 1997. Linguistic typology and linguistic universals
: Greenberg, ed. 1963; 1974; Greenberg, ed. 1978; Coseriu 1983; Haggblade 1983; Ramat 1987; Koerner 1995:150–170; Shibatani & Bynon, eds. 1995; Haspelmath et al., eds. 2001.



Chapter 7

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

7.1 Philosophical idealism and language theories In the preceding chapter, I mentioned one of the most famous definitions in Humboldt’s philosophy, that language is not an ergon, something produced, but energeia, a re-creative activity on the part of the speaker. In the 20th century, this notion was often a source of inspiration for those who rejected all programs for a scientific foundation of the study of language. According to this definition, language comes alive only in actual discourse and resists the dead artifice of scientific analysis. There is no general science or theory of language but only the specific study of individual languages. “Every language is by nature infinite and therefore can never be completely examined and even less described”. As clouds seen from afar have shapes that dissolve into an indistinct grayness when viewed close up, so does the character of single languages dissolve as soon as one tries to define it (Humboldt 1968: 623). Language is a totality in becoming, whose character can only be grasped through an act of immediate insight; furthermore, a plurality (of languages, of historical events) can be presented to intuition only in its ideal unity: these two ideas suffice to attest a kinship between Humboldt’s philosophy of language and the philosophical hermeneutics that developed in the same decades within German Romantic culture. From a technique for interpreting texts, hermeneutics was transformed into a general theory of comprehension. Philosophers and philologists began to stress the intuitive and artistic aspects of philology rather than the analytical ones. The individual elements of a text, as of any spiritual formation, were to be understood through a sort of premonition of the totality of which they partake, which in turn bears witness to the essential unity of the spirit. The same dialectics between original unity and its recomposition is found in one of the most elusive notions of Humboldt’s philosophy, viz., the notion of ‘language form’. He conceived of this as a formed form (the imprint of a given language) and at the same time a forming form (the energeia that manifests itself

150 A History of Language Philosophies

in all speech acts and marks all elements of a language but is not localized in any one of them). Like the expression on a face, it eludes any analysis of its parts but manifests itself in the whole. I shall not go into the history of hermeneutics, from its primitive version as the art of interpretation and a tool of philology to the philosophical version, where ‘interpretation-as-comprehension’ is viewed as the very essence of the human spirit. The essential steps in this transformation during the Romantic period are associated with the names of Friedrich Ast, a philologist and follower of Schelling, and Schleiermacher, a philosopher and theologian, and in the 20th century especially with Martin Heidegger and Hans Georg Gadamer. Heidegger’s philosophy of language is linked to the Romantic tradition in more than one way, foremost amongst them the critique of any instrumental view of language. By defining language as “the house of Being” (1982 [1959]: 63), Heidegger posits it as the unconditioned condition for any experience of the world. No science of language is ever possible or even needed. “We are […] within language and with language before all else. A way to language is not needed. Besides, the way to language is impossible if we indeed are already at that point to which the way is to take us” (p. 112). All we can do is enter “into the speaking of language in order to take up our stay with language, i.e., within its speaking, not with our own. Only in that way do we arrive at the region within which it may happen — or also fail to happen — that language will call to us from there and grant us its nature. We leave the speaking to language… […]” (Heidegger 2001 [1950]: 188). Gadamer is the last true heir to Humboldt’s philosophy, with which he shares (and takes to their ultimate consequences) certain crucial ideas: the belief that language cannot be transcended, that it exists prior to any other possible experience, and that the totality of a language and its associated world-view are contained in every word. The rejection of any science of language was a common trait of philosophical idealism. It was shared by two philosophers active at the beginning of the 20th century, Karl Vossler in Germany and Benedetto Croce in Italy. Their writings can only be understood within the framework of the idealist reaction against positive science that marked German culture towards the end of the 19th century. This anti-scientific trend also brought about a final showdown with the neogrammarian method. In reacting against the widespread speculative approach to the study of language, the Neogrammarians (see 6.3 above) had sought to reconcile historical linguistics with the procedures of empirical sciences. Vossler’s essay Positivismus und Idealismus in der Sprachwissenschaft

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

(Positivism and Idealism in Linguistics, 1904) rejected the analytical method they used to study empirical concepts such as sounds, inflectional forms, words, sentences, etc.; mere fictions, according to Vossler (or pseudo-concepts, as Croce called all notions created for purely practical reasons). Vossler’s criticism was a manifestation of a profound epistemological turn. The opposition between ‘idiographic sciences’ (which describe historical facts in their individual peculiarities) and ‘nomothetic sciences’ (which explain facts through general laws) was by now widespread. This opposition made the position of the Neogrammarians unacceptable, since they considered linguistics a science, albeit an historical science. In Vossler’s opinion, linguistics, being idiographic, had to give up any search for general laws. The notion of ‘scientific’ linguistics was a contradiction in terms; the history of languages could only be reconstructed through the study of individual linguistic creations. The last great representative of idealism, Ernst Cassirer, merged the lesson of Hegel (“that we must think of the human spirit as a concrete whole, that we must not stop at the simple concept but develop it in the totality of its manifestations” [Cassirer 1953: 83]) and that of Humboldt. Language is an actual ‘concrete universal’. It is a universal because it is capable of infinite realizations. It is concrete because it is always realized in an individual act. “The subjectivity of language no longer appears as a barrier that prevents us from apprehending objective being, but rather as a means of forming, of ‘objectifying’ sensory impressions” (p. 158). In the work I have just quoted, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 1923), language, like science, myth, art, and religion, is studied as a specific articulation of experience. Starting from the chaos of immediate perceptions, objects are constituted thanks to the names we give them. Linguistic signs give the world of impressions an entirely new ‘permanence’, a new intellectual articulation. The differentiating and fixing of certain contents by words is the starting point for the analyses and syntheses of scientific thought (Cassirer 1953: 87–88). This is the beginning of an epiphany of the spirit that Cassirer describes as a progressive, never ending process, moving away from the immediacy of perception. This is a Hegelian aspect of Cassirer’s description of linguistic functions. Each of these functions contains the germ of the final development of consciousness; the later forms are already implicit in the most elementary forms of symbolization. Pointing with one’s hand already “involves a factor of general spiritual significance. It is one of the first steps by which the perceiving and desiring I removes a perceived and desired content from himself and so

151

152

A History of Language Philosophies

forms it into an ‘object’, an objective content”. There is a continuous transition from physical to conceptual grasping, from grasping (German: greifen) to comprehending (begreifen). Sensory-physical grasping is the beginning of a higher function of signification, which leads from mere indication (weisen) to demonstration (beweisen), from deixis to apodeixis (Cassirer 1953: 181–182). A similar transition from a lower to a higher symbolic function is produced by imitative gestures. Imitation, or mimesis, belongs to the sphere of poiesis, that is, of creative and formative activity. The apparent reproduction (Nachbildung) conceals an inner production (Vorbildung). An imitative gesture is already a sort of schematic representation of the object. It is obtained by selecting a significant motif in the content and producing a characteristic ‘outline’ of its form. “With this, imitation itself is on its way to becoming representation, in which objects are no longer simply received in their finished structure, but built up by consciousness according to their constitutive traits” (p. 183). But the representative function acquires an entirely new freedom and depth only with articulated sounds (pp. 184–185): The articulation of sounds now becomes an instrument for the articulation of thoughts, while the latter creates for itself a more and more differentiated and sensitive organ in the elaboration and formation of sounds. […] On the objective side, it now becomes capable of serving, not only as an expression of contents and their qualities, but also and above all as an expression of formal relations; on the subjective side, the dynamic of feeling and the dynamic of thought are imprinted upon it.

Starting from an extraordinary wealth of empirical materials drawn from contemporary comparative linguistics, Cassirer traced the outline of a sort of implicit universal grammar, or at least a description of elementary linguistic ideas that show up in the most diverse languages. Foremost amongs them are spatial relations: “It would seem as though logical and ideal relations became accessible to the linguistic consciousness only when projected into space and there analogically ‘reproduced’” (p. 200). Language begins its construction of objective reality by making spatial differentiations and establishing distances. “The differentiation of places serves as a basis for the differentiation of contents, of the I, Thou, and He on the one hand and of physical objects on the other” (p. 203). To mention just a few examples, definite articles are an offshoot of demonstrative pronouns; they derive from the ‘that-deixis’ and designate the object as outside and there, spatially apart from the I and the here (pp. 204–205). Other examples are the connection that can almost universally be observed between adverbs expressing spatial relations (inside–outside, before–behind,

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

above–below) and concrete nouns designating parts of the human body (p. 207), and the spatial origin of expressions indicating causal relations or aims (the causal whereby develops from spatial whence
; the general idea of aim and purpose from whither, etc. [p. 208]). More complex is the representation of time. In spatial intuition, units are offered to consciousness simultaneously and combine into a whole; in temporal intuition they exclude one another. Spatial determinations are in a way equivalent (“a simple movement can transform ‘there’ into ‘here’, and ‘here’, after ceasing to be such, can be restored to its previous form by the reverse movement” [p. 217]). But time has a unique and irreversible direction; therefore it cannot be expressed by procedures as simple as those used to express spatial relations. “The simple distinction of separate points in time must be transformed into the concept of a mutual dynamic dependence between them” (p. 218). To the mere distinction of now and not-now, more subtle forms must be added, expressing complete and incomplete, continuous and momentary actions. The final stage “is characterized by the pure concept of time as an abstract concept of order, and the various stages of time stand out in their contrast and indetermination” (ibid.). It is clear that here Cassirer is describing the formation of verbs, “the only true vehicle of temporal specifications”, the Zeitwort par excellence (p. 219). In the formation of the idea of number, both the close connection between language and thought and the irreducibility of language to pure thought are disclosed. Language cannot take the decisive step necessary to become pure thought, i.e., to emancipate itself from the intuitive representation of things. “It clings to the designation of concrete objects and concrete processes and cannot free itself from them even when it seeks mediately to express pure relations” (p. 228). However, it never ceases to establish conditions for thought. “An absolute, ‘pure’, speechless thought would not know the opposition between true and false, which arises only in and through speech” (p. 278). Even logical concepts arise from a primary formation that is created by language and is the foundation of all subsequent achievements of logical thought. Such concepts are not formed by comparing representations and grouping them according to gender and species, but rather by transforming impressions into representations (pp. 283–284). Before language can proceed to the generalizing and subsuming form of the concept, it requires another, purely qualifying type of concept formation. Here a thing is not named from the standpoint of the genus to which it belongs, but on the basis of some particular property which is apprehended in a total

153

154

A History of Language Philosophies

intuitive content. The work of the spirit does not consist in subordinating the content to another content, but in distinguishing it as a concrete, undifferentiated whole by stressing a specific, characteristic factor in it and focusing attention on this factor. The possibility of ‘giving a name’ rests in this concentration of the mind’s eye.

Concept formation in language does not mean a static representation and comparison of contents but is “always infused with specific dynamic factors […]; its essential impulsions are not taken solely from the world of being but are always drawn at the same time from the world of action” (p. 285). Thus, languages are deeply rooted in the sphere of action and activity. Only what seems significant obtains the linguistic stamp of signification. A precursor of logical thought, language cannot be reduced to it: “Thought has developed with language but at the same time in opposition to it” (p. 315).

7.2 A critique of impure reason: Psychologism and the language sciences “What Kant has begun to investigate as a critique of pure reason must be continued as a critique of impure reason, objectified reason, or as a critique of language”. With these words, the German philosopher Gustav Gerber (see Vonk 1999: 289) was voicing a feeling widespread in German culture, in the 1870s. Herder had planned his Metakritik of 1799, in opposition to Kant’s transcendental logic, as a theory of the mind that ‘thinks in words’. Since early 19th century a number of philosophers, such as Karl Leonhard Reinhold, as well as psychologists, such as Johann Friedrich Herbart and Friedrich Eduard Beneke, had come to the conclusion that pure thoughts do not exist and that the mind can only be analyzed through language. Mid-century materialist philosophers, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels had objected to the idea of pure conscience, arguing that the spirit is ‘infected’ by language from the outset. I have mentioned Herbart above, and it is worthwhile saying a word about his role. Towards the end of the 19th century, when Wilhelm Wundt and others laid the foundations of psychology as an experimental science, the merit of having merged the study of language with the philosophy of the mind was unanimously ascribed to the Berlin philosopher Heymann Steinthal, a follower of Herbart. According to Herbart’s Introduction to philosophy [Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie, 1813–1837 [1964a]), the study of meaning and of morphosyntactic systems pertains to psychology, as both are rooted in the

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

procedures by which mental representations are formed and organized. In an essay on the science of psychology from 1824–1825 (Psychologie als Wissenschaft, 1964b), Herbart located the communicative action at the center of a process of appropriation of the world that he called apperception. Speaking is above all acting and interacting. Verbal sounds coalesce with representations that already exist in the mind; they form, and progressively reshape, representational aggregations that can be more or less dominant and active. In a series of letters on the application of psychology to the science of education (Briefe über die Anwendung der Psychologie auf die Pädagogik, 1964c [1831]), Herbart describes in detail the circuit sparked by the phonic sequence. When the circuit is activated, some representations emerge into consciousness, while others are rejected or blocked; the activation of these representations stimulates a new vocal-motor action, which in turn activates other representations. But the texture of mental representations does not follow the serial order imposed on it when transformed into words; one should never assume that in the mind ‘there are as few dents and ridges as there are in discourse […]: woe if the sequence of words that comes out of our mouths were the image of the way in which our thought is structured!’ (Herbart 1964c: 429). The unity of thought and language is not a given but a product of communicative action, of the goaloriented work that imposes order on discourse. As Herbart explains in his Psychologische Untersuchungen (Psychological Investigations, 1840 [1964d: 298]), language not only imposes names on the content of thoughts but presides over and regulates a procedure made of starts, stops, blocked routes, obstacles, and inhibitions that characterizes representational aggregations. Steinthal, author of a systematic Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft (or Outlines of Linguistics, 1882), was a follower of Herbart in cognitive psychology. In linguistics his description and classification of languages, considered in their irreducible individuality, was greatly influenced by Humboldt. The same eclecticism is found in his role as the founding editor of an important journal of social psychology (Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie, 1860–1890), where traces of Humboldt’s anthropology merge with the influence of Hegel’s philosophy of history, and both with a sort of methodological positivism in the collection and examination of data. Thus Steinthal’s work cannot easily be traced back to a true theoretical unity. I shall consider it from the perspective of the psychology of language. Steinthal outlines a representational theory of the mind, in which verbal thought appears as but one of the representational activities, along with many other non-verbal forms. Thought is not limited to words and does not coincide

155

156 A History of Language Philosophies

with them; on the contrary, only an intermediate range of mental activities is associated with linguistic practices. Steinthal cites evidence taken from studies of animal behavior, linguistic pathologies, and non-verbal inferences in humans (for example, the motor behavior by which we calculate or evaluate without using words). Extensive areas of intelligent behavior in humans work without verbal signs; indeed in the more abstract ones a conscious effort is made to get rid of them, while others rely prevalently on iconic and intuitive procedures. “Only in the median sphere of thought does the word habitually reign”, writes Steinthal in his 1855 book Grammatik, Logik und Psychologie [Grammar, Logic and Psychology, 1968: 155]. Representation in language is a ‘totally peculiar form of thought, which develops according to laws and categories that belong specifically to it’ (ibid., 224). But if thought is not from the start a verbal or verbalizable thought, what makes us at a certain point step over the ‘threshold of language’ (p. 246)? For the answer, Steinthal turns to contemporary neuropsychology, specifically to the theory of reflexes. Verbalization is not a purely mental activity; it is also a bodily activity and, as such, presupposes a “connection that feeling, sensation, and psychic activity in general have with movement” (ibid., 251–252). To pass the threshold of language, sound-reflexes must be systematically associated with the complex representational contents in which intuitions are organized. Thanks to this association a representation emerges from the immense repertory of representations that fluctuate below and above the threshold of consciousness. Intuition ‘is a combination, a complex of sensations, but not a unity. This unity constitutes itself only in language and thanks to this intuition becomes representation’ (p. 319). Semantic unity, thus constituted, becomes the instrument for identifying and reidentifying a thing through its modifications and transformations and setting up connections with other representational aggregations. The mind is a variable network of subordinate and coordinate representations. This process of aggregation, disaggregation, and re-aggregation is described by Steinthal in metaphorical terms. When we speak (p. 347), a heap of ruins of phonic material is formed in the mind which once had constituted a building of judgments connected among themselves. The building has fallen into ruins and only stones and beams remain, which lie without connection and order. Each piece bears the traces of its former connection, but the same stone shows different junctures, and the same type of combination is suggested by different stones and beams… In the act of speaking, the mind turns always to these ruins, and uses the material according to the junctures it finds.

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

General semantics is a general theory of representation. Historical semantics is the study of the matter and form proper to each language. This distinction reflects the dual condition of speech; speech is indeed the result of universal psychic processes but it manifests itself only in natural languages. The notion of a correlation between mental and motor events (the so-called psycho-physical parallelism) and the belief that language is the site where this correlation can be studied was also shared by Wilhelm Wundt, the acknowledged founder of experimental psychology. His work on Language (Die Sprache), first published in 1900 as the first part of an overall Völkerpsychologie (2nd ed. 1904), is a true encyclopedia of contemporary psycholinguistics. For Wundt too apperception is an essential mental function, an analytic operation that focuses on, selects, and re-organizes the elements of what initially appears as a total, undifferentiated representation, and translates this whole into syntactically ordered phonic segments. The same function allows the listener in turn to re-synthesize the original representation starting from the phonic sequence. He reconstructs the total impression on the basis of clues gathered while communication is taking place, with the help of patterns that allow him to anticipate the interpretation on the basis of few initial words or grammatical forms (Wundt 1904: II, Chap. 7). The epistemological alliance of psychology and linguistics at the end of the 19th century spurred a series of research projects aimed at providing a psychological explanation for semantic change, i.e., a description of the psychic conditions for language learning and for the procedures of signification, utterance, and understanding. Hermann Paul’s Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (Principles of Language History), first published in 1880 and subsequently revised and expanded over four successive editions, is a good survey of the debate on language in Germany during the years 1880–1920. Paul had attended Steinthal’s lectures in Berlin and had taken from him the notion of the connection between language systems and representational networks, while rejecting his focus on Völkerpsychologie. In regards to the latter, it was its very object that Paul rejected, that is the notion of a collective soul. Like the Neogrammarians, with whom he soon associated himself, Paul sought to explain linguistic phenomena on the basis of laws inherent in the language system and the actions of speakers as individuals. Thus, semantic change was explained as the cumulative effect of variations that originate in individual communicative practices (extensions or restrictions of the meaning of words, metaphorical and metonymical usage, etc.) and only at a later stage are gradually adopted by communities. In linguistic practice, ‘usual’ (i. e. lexical) meaning generates an ‘occasional’

157

158

A History of Language Philosophies

meaning that depends on the context and intentions of the speakers. The discrepancy between the two meanings is not only possible but necessary. The former is ‘the entire representational content associated with a word, which belongs to the language community’. The latter is ‘the representational content that the speaker associates with a word when uttering it, expecting the listener to do the same’ (Paul 1995 [1920]: 75). For this ‘specialization of meaning’ (p. 81) to be effectual, the word has to be part of a sentence; it must provide a reference, and — what is more — a context, without which the listener would not know which lexical meanings or figurative or periphrastic senses, to apply. Analogy is another criterion used to explain linguistic change. Neogrammarians considered analogy to be the most important principle in generating regular linguistic forms. For Paul too analogy is a psychological function that is always active in linguistic performance. It allows speakers to create new verbal forms on the basis of the limited repertory of the forms they have heard and memorized, or to choose among different competing forms. Furthermore, it is an aspect of the procedure by which not only mental representations (hence, the repertory of meanings) but also phonetic and syntactic representations are deposited in the unconscious. They remain there as traces of all that has passed through consciousness, even on single occasions, when speaking, or hearing others speak, or even simply thinking verbally, and they can be re-activated at any moment in speech acts. Explicitly grammatical and syntactical forms are inferred from unconscious morphosyntactic structures, which are present as stable structures in the mind of adult individuals. Paul turned to representational dynamics in his discussion on a traditional theme of syntactic theory, the definition of sentence. Steinthal had rejected the notion of a parallelism between grammar and logic. As a consequence, another idea had to be rejected as well, one that had gone unquestioned for centuries: that the form of the sentence, articulated in subject, predicate, and copula, corresponds to the logical form of judgment. For Paul sentences do not reflect judgments but psychological processes in the aggregation of representational clusters. Why cannot an exclamation, a vocative, a question, or an impersonal verb be qualified as sentences? There is no reason to assume that the ‘normal’ sentence is the declarative one (Paul 1995: 134). A sentence is any utterance that expresses a connection of representations in the mind of the speaker and generates an analogous connection in the mind of the listener. To this effect, not only syntactic devices contribute, but also prosodic ones, such as intonation, modulation, and the rhythms and pauses in utterance. These are the elements that another representative of late 19th-century psycholinguistics,

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century 159

Philip Wegener, in his Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens [Investigations on the main questions in the life of language, 1885], groups under actio, a term used in ancient rhetoric (Wegener 1991: 16). For him too the above elements are essential to all sentences. Philologist Georg von der Gabelentz, in an 1891 work on the goals and methods of linguistics (1901: 365), stresses the propositional nature of exclamations, vocatives, and ellipses. Sentences are not grammatical entities but communicative units. The old problem of word order resurfaces. No matter how free this order may be, it is never random. It is aimed at expressing a meaning. Thus, the ‘psychological subject’ (what the speaker tries to draw attention to) does not necessarily coincide with the logical subject; it is the theme, that which is placed, so to speak, before the interlocutor, ‘what the proposition is about.’ The psychological predicate is what is added, ‘what is said about something.’ On this distinction and on the primacy of the psychological over the logical function in sentences, Paul (1995: 124–125), Wegener (1991: 20, 50), and Gabelentz (1984: 365) all agree, with minor differences. The success of Paul’s Principles was certainly helped by the fact that he gave voice to commonly held beliefs in late 19th-century language philosophy: the “hidden insight into the fact that the history of language is only an epiphenomenon of synchronic language use, and the latent idea that the explanation of language use would provide an explanation for linguistic (semantic) change” (Nerlich 1992: 88). In the same period, similar notions were circulating among French scholars studying the psychological and cognitive motivations of semantic change and the sociological mechanisms that sanction it. The debate in France involved major linguists such as Arsène Darmesteter, Michel Bréal, Victor Henry, and, later, Antoine Meillet. One result was that semantics broke away from etymological research, to which it had always been tied; it was precisely when speakers lose awareness of the etymon that words acquire that elasticity and power to contract and extend meaning indefinitely that makes them effective tools for thought and communication. This notion of “elasticity, […] indefinite contractibility and extensibility of the meaning of words…” was shared by Whitney (1867: 105), and associated with the idea of the oblivion of the etymon (1875: 87). So did also Bréal, in his Essai de sémantique, of 1897 (1976: 177–183). Various factors contribute to semantic change, listed and analyzed in detail by Wegener (1991:47–50): the differences among the representations that different people associate with a given word, or that the same person associates with it in different circumstances; the mobility of the representational contents that hover above or below the threshold of consciousness; and the fact

160 A History of Language Philosophies

that understanding processes are not based on the mere knowledge of lexical meanings. ‘It is from the knowledge of actual relations, which we have not acquired through linguistic communication, but through experience, that we complete, filling it with content, what little a sentence contains’ (p. 114). If this were not the case, for instance, we could not interpret the actions expressed by the phrase veni, vidi, vici as consecutive, and the actions expressed by the phrase “I stayed at home and read a book” as simultaneous (p. 105). An interest in the pragmatic elements and psychological modalities of sentences was common in late 19th-century philosophical linguistics. From Semantics to Pragmatics is the formula coined by Nerlich (1992: 163–165) to describe Bréal’s case from this perspective. It can arguably be applied to all the theories that stemmed from the psychological approach to language at the turn of the 19th century.

7.3 The decline of psychologism The authors discussed in the previous section all agreed on at least one point: the study of linguistic competence, as a distinctive trait of the mind, pertains to psychology. Most of them also shared the idea that mental processes can be described in terms of physical processes. The decline of psychologism coincided with the rejection of this basic assumption (‘psycho-physical parallelism’, as it was termed). This rejection was based on a theory of the mind, or Self, as an entity, irreducible to its material substratum. A case that can be taken as paradigmatic is that of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. His epistemology implies a series of oppositions (intuition vs. analysis, unity vs. distinction, immediacy vs. mediation, internal experience vs. abstract experience) that have a direct bearing on the theory of language. Bergson sought for a confirmation of his metaphysical dualism in a peculiar evolutionary model, to which he dedicated a famous essay written in 1907, L’évolution créatrice [Creative Evolution
; see Bergson 1998]. According to Bergson, the evolutionary process that culminates in intelligence is qualitatively different from the process that produces natural forms. Vegetative life, instinct, and reason are not three successive steps along the same road but three distinct directions taken by the evolutionary process. Life forms are diversified and heterogeneous from the start, and there is a break between intelligence and other forms of life. The inadequacy of language is an aspect of this break. ‘We necessarily express ourselves by means of words and we usually think in terms

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

of space. That is to say, language requires us to establish between our ideas the same sharp and precise distinctions, the same discontinuity, as between material objects’. These are the very first words of Bergson’s earliest essay on the immediate data of consciousness [Essai sur les données immediates de la conscience, 1889 (Bergson 1959a: 3)]. Language entails a deep split in subjectivity; beyond the Self who immediately perceives the states of its inner life, including time, as a stream of qualitative states, there is a ‘refracted’ Self who perceives reality exclusively through symbols and whose conception of time is quantified, i.e., mediated through spatial images. Living in the sphere of language, the refracted Self cannot grasp reality without arresting its mobility and turning the stream of qualia into a spatial series of discrete ideas. These ideas are pauses in the free flow of thought, before which it halts, constrained by language. Such a break between qualia and language was hardly consistent with current theories of evolution. A model like Bergson’s implies the existence of two cognitive systems — one for the external world and another for the qualia (respectively, analysis and intuition) — and a dysfunction between them. In current evolutionary epistemology, instead, the evolution of the human biological system implies a corresponding evolution of the cognitive system. The transformation of thought is a single aspect of a larger process. The ‘ecological’ perspective of evolutionary theories admits of no breaks between thought and the world and, consequently, between abstract intelligence and inner experience. The question arises: How can the laws of our cognitive system, which developed through a continuous interaction with the laws of nature, have no relation with an external world regulated by those very laws? This is the main objection that could be raised against Bergson from the standpoint of an evolutionary theory of mind (see 8.3 below). Bergson’s theory of language is an essential part of his critique of philosophy and science. Words are essential tools in the everyday life of human communities (the ‘cities’ for which humans are organized, as ants are organized for their colonies [Bergson 1959b: 1320]) but never go beyond this practical role. They cannot express the new other than as a re-organization of the old. They are useful in conversation but not in science (which uses other signs); nor in philosophy, which does not pertain to the homo loquax, the man ‘whose thought, when he thinks, is only a reflection on his speech’ (Bergson 1959a:1325). They can serve at best for a conversational philosophy, an abstract philosophy that replaces percepts with concepts. Would it not be preferable to ‘return to perception, make it expand and extend?’ (p. 1369). This re-appropriation of consciousness, obtained by breaking the barriers of language, closely resembles the

161

162 A History of Language Philosophies

phenomenological method later proposed by another French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom I shall deal with in the next chapter. A rather widespread historiographical stereotype pictures the break with psychologism as the turning point from which sprang the currents that were to take over language theory in the first half of the 20th century and beyond. As with most stereotypes, there is something to it. Important trends derived directly or indirectly from the rejection of psychologism, such as formal semantics and structuralism. Behaviorism, which influenced much 20thcentury philosophy of language (see 7.6 below), also had an anti-psychologist aspect, its main principle being that mental procedures cannot be directly studied through access to conscious experience but only inferred from behavior. At the end of the 19th century, the refutation of psychologism focused initially on a very specific point, viz., the status of logic, and spread thence to the theory of natural languages. In some cases this coincided with the rediscovery of general grammar (Graffi 2001: 15–63). However, psychologism and linguistic universalism are not incompatible in principle. We have already seen evidence of this when dealing with Condillac, who considered general grammar to be a morphosyntactic manifestation of psychological functions (see above 5.3), and the same point can be made in relation to some recent works in cognitive semantics (see 8.3 below). In some cases — like that of Anton Marty — rather than anti-psychologism, we have a new model of psychology. The model proposed by authors such as Steinthal and Wundt was influenced by physiology and aimed at a genetic explanation of psychological phenomena; the one proposed by Franz Brentano, Marty’s teacher, was descriptive rather than genetic, a ‘pure’ psychology, which rejected any association with physiology and described mental experiences exclusively on the basis of internal perception. Anton Marty was one of the leading proponents of an anti-genetic approach to language. One of his polemical targets was the theory of reflex elaborated by Steinthal and Wundt, according to which verbal language genetically derives from instinctive motor behavior and there is a linkage between the spontaneous expression of feelings and emotions and the controlled use of language for communicative purposes. According to Marty, instead, speech is from the start a purposeful behavior, though not corresponding to any predetermined plan. It is not a natural product but an artifact produced by the need to communicate. This means that humans have acquired it by purposeful action (see Marty 1916: 304). The apparent contradiction between the absence of a plan and the deliberateness of the action is explained

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century 163

in terms of cooperative finalism. The harmony and design of language ‘do not depend on individual reason [but] are produced by needs, tendencies, habits […], without individuals ever having a comprehensive vision or an abstract knowledge of it’ (Marty 1908: 737). Speech aims, first of all, ‘at expressing the speaker’s psychic events and at exerting a corresponding control over the psychic content of others’ (p. 53). This is realized through the voluntary efforts and cooperation of the speakers. Diverse procedures are at play: the integration of information bits by the listener, anticipations, expectations, acts of partial understanding, enacted more or less completely while discourse develops, and merging with the final understanding of the complete utterance (pp. 144–146). For Marty, speech is a communicative action that develops by trial and error. Its rules are the codified form of habitual speech acts, chosen on account of their repeated success. Semantic change also develops out of individual actions, which the community chooses and adopts on account of their communicative effectiveness. This pragmatic explanation of glottogenesis is the background of many important aspects of Marty’s theory. One of these concerns the scope of vocabulary: why are some concepts and not others given corresponding words in our languages? In an 1879 essay on chromatic sensibility, Marty rejected the thesis, upheld by contemporary scholars, that the scarcity of terms for colors in ancient languages was proof of a less developed perception of colors. What interests us here is the rejection of the implicit principle that linguistic conceptualization has to go hand in hand with perceptual categorization and faithfully reflect it, as if the purpose of language were to represent monological thought. On the contrary, language is an instrument for communication; this is why it favors some perceptual categories over others. The indeterminacy of meaning allows thought to be reproduced only in the form and to the extent necessary for reciprocal understanding. Vocabulary can be redundant or lacking; its usage cannot be bound to hard rules; anomaly (i.e., the pragmatic recourse to exceptions) prevails over analogy (i.e., the regularity of grammatical forms). Thus Marty excludes any parallelism between logic and grammar. He also raises objections to the theory of the parts of speech. Even trying to ascertain their number and nature is a mistake. Compared to what ideal completeness? Based on what criterion? Language is an instrument, and the only criterion for an instrument is the extent to which it performs its function. Must parts of speech respond only to the requirement that they reproduce thought exactly, or also to criteria of conciseness and ease of expression? Is it the purpose of parts of speech merely to transmit messages, or must they also take aesthetic aspects into account? If the ends vary, so do the means;

164 A History of Language Philosophies

and so also do the answers to our questions (Marty 1950: 71). A language must be capable of expressing certain essential semantic functions, based on the invariable forms that structure experience. These functions must reproduce the intimate texture of our psychic life within the syntax of the expressive medium. Identifying these functions is the role of grammar (or semasiology, 1908: 53 ff.). This is not at odds with the belief in the variety of expressive means of the various languages: the latter are simply different ways of adapting an instrument to its purpose. One of the questions raised by psychologism concerned the mental functions that preside over language: are they specific and different from all other mental functions, or do they work as specializations of general cognitive systems? This is a problem that has been raised again in the last few decades by Chomsky’s postulation of a specific language organ (see 8.1 below). Since the 1920s, the specificity of language functions compared to general cognitive functions had been upheld by scholars such as Otto Jespersen and Karl Bühler. Their research, as noted by Graffi (2001: 65), was important in laying the ground for the idea of language as an autonomous system, an idea also present in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale and later developed by structuralism. In 1907, when Saussure began holding the Geneva lectures that were to become the basis for the Cours, the study of language was pursued in two different and separate fields — philosophy and linguistics — following different and separate methods: a psychological approach and a historical-descriptive one. Some of the best known aspects of Saussure’s theory must be set against this background; his purpose was to found a general linguistics, that is an autonomous epistemological discipline whose phenomena could not be reduced either to mere psychological or historical laws. For this reason, Saussure drew a distinction between synchronic linguistics (the study of languages considered in an abstract temporal moment) and diachronic linguistics (the study of languages considered in their development). The synchronic approach, characteristic of general linguistics, is the study of language systems independently of historical or psychological contexts and considerations. The same anti-psychologist tendency is evident in the famous Saussurean distinction between langue and parole. Langue is the language system shared by a community of speakers: “it is a storehouse filled by the members of a given community through their active use of speaking, a grammatical system that has a potential existence in each brain, or, more specifically, in the brain of a group of individuals. For language is not complete in every speaker; it exists perfectly only in a community”

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century 165

(Saussure 1966: 14–15). Parole denotes the acts of individual linguistic production in concrete situations. The distinction has become a scientific commonplace, along with the idea that the object of general linguistics is langue. Since the 1960s, Noam Chomsky has sometimes presented his distinction between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ as analogous to Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole. But Chomsky’s competence amounts to the individual’s internal knowledge of universal grammar rules, whereas Saussure’s langue is a supra-individual social construct. (For Chomsky’s complex relation to Saussure, see Joseph 2002: 133–155; Koerner 2002: 131–150.) Saussure’s thesis that the value of a linguistic element — i.e., its functional identity within a system of rules — depends on the entire network of associated elements was one of the foundations of the anti-psychologist, or anti-mentalist, approach of general linguistics that dominated the first half of the 20th century. All the currents that in one way or another can be defined as structuralist saw language as an autonomous system, and it was in this direction that they developed Saussure’s program for the constitution of a linguistic science independent of both the methodology of history and the humanities and the study of the mind. In late 19th century, semantics emerged as the meeting ground of the two different approaches to the study of languages, synchronic and diachronic. In Germany and France, various, and often hidden ties connected linguists and philosophers to the sources of pre-Kantian epistemology, which had been apparently forgotten after being expelled from the horizon of academic philosophy during the Romantic period. In Germany, this hidden connection had inspired Herbart’s reconversion of the philosophy of mind from an idealistic conception of the supra-individual spirit (Geist) to the psychologistic conception of the individual mind (Seele). In France, a scientific program, whose foremost representative was Bréal, aimed at studying the relation between language and representational mechanisms (to ‘enter the mode of thinking and feeling of people’ [Bréal 1877: 322]). For this purpose, Bréal had appealed to the tradition of Condillac (Aarsleff 1982: 349). In the English-speaking countries there had been greater continuity with the tradition of classic empiricism, which had been refurbished with the publication of John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843). Among other things, Mill distinguished between denotation and connotation as functions of names, and raised problems such as those relating to the semantics of proper names, which, after Mill, Frege and Russell, have been the subject of debate in 20th-century analytical philosophy. Mill’s semantics, explicitly influenced by the late-medieval tradition of terministic and proposi-

166 A History of Language Philosophies

tional logic (see 4.4), had no relation to the developments of historical linguistics and the study of the diachronic aspects of natural languages. Thus it took an entirely different approach from that of linguistic semantics, as defined in Bréal’s writings. Furthermore, Mill explicitly rejected the representational model of the mind common in classic empiricism and the assumption that utterances always refer back primarily to mental representations. From this perspective, his approach was also different from that of psychologistic semantics. Less clear is his position on the autonomy of logic from psychology, which earned him the accusation of psychologism from Husserl, among others (Skorupski 1998). In the second half of the 19th century, there was a flurry of semantic studies in the works of philosophically oriented linguists such as Steinthal, Wegener, Paul, and Bréal. Logicians, such as Frege, Russell, and Husserl, opposed logical semantics to the psychological theory of meaning. Frege rejected the reduction of logic to representational procedures and the identification of the meaning of statements with the mental contents of the speakers. His essay On Sense and Meaning (1892; Frege 1984) contains the now classic distinction between sense (Sinn, connotation, meaning) and reference (denotation, nominatum, depending on how one translates the German term Bedeutung). Denotation is irrelevant in some cases (in poetic discourse for example, where the fact that the name ‘Odysseus’ really corresponds to an object has little importance), and is essential in declarative discourse, where it coincides with the truth value (‘It is the striving for truth that drives us always to advance from the sense to the nominatum’ [1984: 163]). Sense is the ‘thought’ of an object, the cognitive content of a sentence. Its ‘tone’ (illumination or coloring: Beleuchtung, Färbung) includes all the aspects that are not relevant to the truth or falsity of the statement (for example, saying ‘stallion’ instead of ‘horse’, using a verb in the active or passive, etc.) — aspects we could call stylistic, though Frege does not use this term. The difference between sense and reference is illustrated by examples. Given three straight lines a, b, c, that intersect in a given point, the expressions ‘the meeting point of a and b’ and ‘the meeting point of b and c’ have the same denotation (or reference) but different senses. The morning star and the evening star are two expressions with different senses, two different ‘thoughts’ of one and the same object, the planet Venus, which is their common reference. Neither denotation nor sense coincides with representation. The latter is an internal image tied to individual experience, which differs essentially from the connotation of a sign, which ‘may be common property of many people and is so not a part or a mode of the individual mind’ (p. 160). At the

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century 167

most it accompanies meaning, but it does not constitute it. It cannot do so because, insofar as psychic content is individual, it is inaccessible to other people, while sense and denotation must be shareable. I have discussed Frege only in the context of the reaction to psychologism. He is also one of the acknowledged founding fathers of the later tradition of formal-semantic studies and, in general, of analytical currents in philosophy. In 1879 (Frege 1967), he proposed a formal language (Formelsprache) of ‘pure thought’, modeled on that of arithmetic, which had somehow to reveal the underlying structure of utterances. According to Dummett (1983: X, xi), one of the limits of Frege’s theory is that while it gives a clear description of how a language works when it works perfectly, it is not useful for understanding how a language that is imperfect is capable of working nevertheless (assuming that, as Frege maintains, natural languages work only imperfectly). In his Logical Investigations (1st ed., 1900–1901, final ed. 1922), Husserl reaffirmed one of the fundamental tenets of anti-psychologism, viz. the independence of logic from psychology. Logical Investigations also contains his most wide-ranging discussion of the theory of meaning. Husserl makes the notion of meaning independent of any pragmatic consideration, i.e., of any consideration that concerns the communicative aspect of expressions. Expressions do not simply indicate, like signals or marks (for example, brands on slaves), nor are they inferential signs (fossil bones as signs of the existence of prehistorical animals; mimicry and gestures that betray our mental states) or mnemonic signs (a knot in one’s handkerchief). The indicative function (designation or denotation) must be distinguished from signification: “All expressions in communicative speech function as indications. They serve the hearer as signs of the ‘thoughts’ of the speaker […] This function of verbal expression we shall call their intimating function” (Husserl 2001, I: 189). But “an expression’s meaning […] cannot coincide with its feats of intimation”, otherwise the expression would cease to be a meaningful expression in soliloquy and uncommunicated mental life (p. 190). Up to here it is clear what signification is not; it is not intimation, i.e., information on the inner states of the speaker. What it actually is can be better grasped in monological than in dialogical usage, where it inevitably gets mixed up with the above mentioned indicative and informative functions. Meaningful expressions are sense-giving and sense-fulfilling acts, that Husserl describes as follows (p. 192). If we leave aside the sensuous acts in which the expression, qua mere sound of words, makes its appearance, we shall have to distinguish between two acts or

168 A History of Language Philosophies

sets of acts. We shall, on the one hand, have acts essential to expression, if it is to be expression at all, i.e., a verbal sound infused with sense. These acts we shall call meaning-conferring acts or meaning-intentions. But we shall, on the other hand, have acts […] which stand to it in the logically basic relation of fulfilling […] it more or less adequately, and thus actualizing its relation to its object. These acts, […] we call meaning-fulfilling acts.

The distinction is much more evident when translated into traditional philosophical terminology, where meaning-intention and meaning-fulfilling are respectively the concept and the corresponding intuition. Intentional acts grasp phenomena from a universal perspective, as concepts. When the concept corresponds to a sensible intuition, we have the fulfilling (Erfüllung), or realization, of the concept itself. No sooner is the object presented to intuition, even if only indirectly (for example in the images conjured by fantasy), than the empty meaning-intention (i.e., the empty concept, to which no intuition corresponds) is filled with intuitive content and “the naming becomes an actual, conscious relation between name and object named” (p. 192). Each expression “not merely says something, but says it of something: it not only has a meaning, but refers to certain objects. […] But the object never coincides with the meaning” (p. 197). The expressions the victor at Jena and the vanquished at Waterloo have different meanings but refer both to Napoleon; a horse has the same meaning when referring to different objects as in Bucephalus is a horse or that cart-horse is a horse. Here we have again a distinction between meaning and reference, which gave rise to numerous discussions (Mohanty 1977, 1977a, 1982; Føllesdal 1994). Separating the sphere of meaning from the sphere of objectivity allowed Husserl, in Investigation IV, to postulate “a large number of a priori laws of meaning […] which abstract from the objective validity […] or objectivity of such meanings” (Husserl 2001, II: 49): they are purely logical-grammatical laws that determine the possible meaning-forms. This is what he calls ‘pure grammar’. Any reference to the classical model of general grammar is untenable, because the latter, as we have seen, was rather an inductive reconstruction of statistical universals on the basis of natural languages. The cogency of pure grammatical laws is an entirely different matter; to transgress against them is to generate formal nonsense (for example, as in the expression a man and is), to be distinguished from material nonsense (the square is round), which does not violate any rule of formal grammar. The fact that in every language only certain connections are allowed depends certainly on habit and accidental factors but also on “a priori laws of the combination and transformation of meanings, laws

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century 169

which must be more or less revealed in every developed language, both in its grammar of forms and in the related class of grammatical incompatibilities” (p. 68). These laws allow us to utter grammatically well-formed expressions independently of empirical reality; they constitute “an ideal framework which each actual language will fill up and clothe differently, in deference either to common human motives or to empirical motives that vary at random” (p 74). Theoretical research into this framework pertains to linguistics as “the final scientific clarification of all language as such” (ibid.). The main point to be kept in mind is this: all the semantic types set forth in pure, formal semantics and systematically explored in their articulations and structures — the basic forms of propositions, the categorical propositions with their many particular patterns and forms of members, the primitive types of complex propositions, e.g., the conjunctive, disjunctive, and hypothetical propositional unities, the differences of universality and particularity, on the one hand, and of singularity, on the other, the syntactical forms of plurality, negation, the modalities, etc. — all these matters are entirely a priori, rooted in the ideal essence of meaning as such. […] They hold prime place over against their empirical-grammatical expressions, and resemble an absolutely fixed ideal framework, more or less perfectly revealed in empirical disguises.

Grammarians cannot be satisfied with pre-scientific opinions on meaning or empirical ideas taken from historical grammar. They must keep the “scientifically fixed, theoretically coherent system of pure meaning-forms” in mind (ibid.), if they want to ask significantly how German, Latin, Chinese, etc. express existential or categorical propositions, the modalities of possibility and probability, the plural, the negative, and so on. It is not unlikely, according to Bar-Hillel (1977: 128), that Rudolf Carnap took a hint from Husserl’s notion of pure grammar for his logical syntax (see Carnap 1937), though Carnap did not deal with natural languages but with artificially constructed ideal languages.

7.4 Critique of language and philosophical epistemology The idea that the critique of language is an essential tool of philosophy has recurred throughout the modern era, at least since the Enlightenment. But only in the late 19th century, beginning with the project of a critique of ‘impure’ reason mentioned at the start of Section 7.2 above, it came to be considered as the foremost method for philosophy’s self-critique. The investigation of the limits of language, considered as the limits of reason, awakened strong interest

170 A History of Language Philosophies

in ordinary linguistic usage. Cloeren (1988) has traced the history of an analytical tradition rooted in 19th-century German thought, a ‘non-formal’ current, which, on account of its prevalent interest in ordinary language, was separate from the ‘formal’ current of logicians such as Frege, Russell, and Carnap. To Frege, however, the acknowledged founding father of formal semantics, we owe classic analyses of ordinary language. Moreover, the study of ordinary language can be considered as a condition for the construction of a rigorous, logical-mathematic language; in a note to his Logical Investigations, Frege says that he is forced to deal with language though this is not his role. In Ideography, he presents his notational system (Begriffsschrift) as a philosophical tool suited to “break the domination of the word over the human spirit by laying bare the misconceptions that often arise almost unavoidably through the use of language” (Frege 1967: 7). The belief that the analysis of language could have a ‘therapeutic’ function in philosophy has circulated widely in logical positivism and analytical philosophy. Cloeren, in the above mentioned book, retraced the antecedents of this belief through a long tradition of critique of language that developed in 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy. Though the echoes are undoubtedly numerous, we must not ignore the differences. Various authors, from the end of the 18th through the first decades of the 19th century, appealed to linguistic analysis, first against the Kantian ‘purity of reason’, then against Hegel’s speculative philosophy. But a project to overcome metaphysics by logical analysis was elaborated by Rudolph Carnap as late as the 1930s, and taken up by logical positivism first and then by British ordinary-language philosophy. One point marks Gottlob Frege as an exception among his German contemporaries; his criticism was not directed against post-Kantian idealism but against the idealist potential of representational psychology. Many of the questions raised by his analyses of ordinary and symbolic languages were to be at the center of analytical philosophy for decades. Still different is the case of another German speaking author, Fritz Mauthner. From Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a Critique of Language, 1901–1902; final ed. 1923) Wittgenstein probably took some of his most famous metaphors: language as a city built piece by piece (Mauthner 1923, I: 27; Wittgenstein, Phil. Inv., I/18), the critique of language as a ladder of which we must destroy the rungs as we climb (Mauthner 1923: I, 1–2; Wittgenstein, Tract.: 6.54). To Mauthner we also owe the notion of language games, nowadays considered as a ‘Wittgensteinian’ idea par excellence. Once again, we must keep the differences in mind. Mauthner was working in the context of a conversion of Kant’s

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

philosophy into linguistic terms, from which he derives skeptical conclusions. Language is both elusive and untrustworthy (Mauthner 1923, I: 94). Reflecting on language means demystifying our representation of the world, accepting it as mere representation. ‘Language is the self-criticism of philosophy’ (p. 713). Beyond language there is silence — mystic silence, which can be experienced but not theorized. The similarity with better known and more often quoted passages by Wittgenstein is singular; here too, however, there are differences. Foremost amongst these is Wittgenstein’s attitude towards skepsis: “For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed […]. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered” (Tract. 6.5). Skepticism is not so much impossible to confute as nonsensical: “doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said” (Tract. 6.51). Therefore skepticism does not concern the propositions of logic, mathematics, or science. Nor does it continue to exist beyond them; where all possible scientific questions end, silence begins. Even those who have grasped the meaning of life are unable to say what it is. “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical” (6.522). This borderline between what can and what cannot be said also determines the limits and method of philosophy, expressed in the famous closing statements of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Wittgenstein’s first work (and the only one published during his lifetime, in 1922): to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy; and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions […]. My propositions are elucidatory in this way; he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has mounted it.) He must surmount these positions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (6.53–7)

For Mauthner the destruction of the ladder leads to the dissolution of linguistic method itself. A mirror mirroring itself, language becomes delirious when it is applied to itself and to thought. Linguistic skepticism confutes the very possibility of linguistics as a science. Speaking of language is like opening one’s cranium to study the physiology of the brain (Mauthner 1923: III: 633). The reality of language lies in individual speech acts; language is nothing but a practice, an activity, or a form of behavior, like walking or breathing, with the same automatic mechanisms grounded in the unconscious. Unlike such behavior, however,

171

172 A History of Language Philosophies

language usage is socially regulated. It is a game subject to rules, ‘the more binding the more players there are […], and which yet does not pretend either to change or to understand the real world’. The norms of this massive social game are empirically stipulated in the course of linguistic action; they are not tied to any canonical linguistic usage nor are codifiable in any scientific grammar, let alone subject to a logical grammar common to all languages. Every language follows the most convenient routes, using its own means of transport, crossings, and tracks. As in any railway station, tracks have to be uniform and free of obstacles: this is grammaticality. Intersections and switches must be suited to the movement of trains: this is syntax (Mauthner 1923: III: 2–3). Mauthner shared with the critics of psychologism the notion that meanings, public and communicable par excellence, are distinguished from mental representations, which are private and incommunicable. Language is not a map of reality. Its understanding is tied to an always provisional agreement between speakers. There is no doubt that Mauthner was part of the current of antiscientism which had its remote origin in Humboldt’s notion of energeia (see 7.1 above). But in some ways he represents a point of no return in the Humboldtian tradition. The image of language as an organism, endowed as such with an autonomous productivity, was now obsolete. Indeed, all that language produces is the ‘empty walnut of tautology’ (I: 28). Mauthner deconstructed the very notion of Self, which he compares to a regiment that continues to be thought of as a single unit even when the soldiers are no longer the same (I: 653). In the past, mutual understanding had been founded either on the idea of an ultimate unity of human nature (Humboldt) or on psychophysical parallelism (psychologism). Mauthner rejects all correspondence in mental representations among different people and reduces communication to mere practice, i.e., behavior regulated by contingent laws. If Mauthner is a precursor to Wittgenstein, it is certainly not on account of a couple of metaphors the latter has borrowed from him. What Wittgenstein, and Mauthner before him, clearly saw was the dependence of past theories of language on the central notions of classical metaphysics, such as the Self, the representational mind, and the universality of the laws of thought. If these notions were undermined, neither intersubjectivity nor subservience to universal norms could be taken for granted in language. Indeed, if we are to name an author in whom the reflection on language is joined with a change in the style of philosophy, this is surely Wittgenstein. The job of philosophy is not to develop or verify theories, produce new experiences, or explain phenomena, but rather to understand how language works, giving order to something that we have long known (Phil. Inv. 109). Philosophy leaves

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

everything as it is (p. 124); it does not solve problems but only makes them perspicuous (pp. 125–126). “One difficulty in philosophy is that we lack a synoptic view. We encounter the kind of difficulty we should have with the geography of a country for which we had no map, or else a map of isolated bits. The country we are talking about is language, and the geography its grammar” (Wittgenstein 1979: 43). Through language we ‘see’ the status of phenomena. “A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. Our grammar lacks this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’” (p. 122) Working on language, not to establish its nature or rules, but to describe its usage and see things through it, means considering the various circumstances in which a statement is or can be used, as well as formulating mental experiments aimed at understanding how certain usages would work in certain communicative circumstances. In other words, it means performing tests and counter-tests of the ways statements work or may work in a given situation. “We are talking about the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language […] as we do about the pieces in chess when we are stating the rules of the game, not describing their physical properties” (Phil. Inv. 108). Our language-games “are not preparatory studies for a future regularization of language”; they are rather “objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language” (p. 130). They tend to introduce an order into language use; but it is “an order with a particular end in view, not the order” (p. 135). In his preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein expresses positions that differ from those expressed in his Tractatus. There is an extensive literature debating whether, and to what extent, and in regards to what, the Investigations are actually a piece of self-criticism. I shall confine myself to sketching out the difference between Wittgenstein’s perspectives on language in the two texts. As for the Tractatus, I shall rely on the help of Bertrand Russell, who, in introducing the first English edition, clearly and concisely summarizes the object of the book and its fundamental thesis. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein deals with the conditions for a perfect language, with rules of syntax that prevent nonsense and symbols with definite and univocal meanings. The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given the syntax of a language, the meaning of a sentence is determinate as soon as the meaning of the component words is known. In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure

173

174 A History of Language Philosophies

of the fact. This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of Mr Wittgenstein’s theory. That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact cannot, so he contends, be itself in turn said in language. It can, in his phraseology, only be shown, not said, for whatever we may say will still need to have the same structure. (Russell in Wittgenstein 1922: 8)

What we find in Tractatus is a theory of reference. It deals with the power of the declarative statement, specifically its capacity to represent a state of affairs to the extent that its elements (names) represent objects. The simple signs employed in the propositions are called names. The name means the object. The object is its meaning […]. To the configuration of simple signs in the propositional sign corresponds the configuration of the objects in the state of affairs. In the proposition the name represents the object. The proposition is a picture of reality. (Wittgenstein, Tract 3.202–3.22, 4.01)

A proposition is endowed with meaning if it performs this representational function, i.e., if it is true. “If a god creates a world in which certain propositions are true, he creates thereby also a world in which all propositions consequent on them are true. And similarly he could not create a world in which the proposition ‘p’ is true without creating all its objects” (Tract. 5.123). Propositions have a structure that can only be evidenced by logical analysis; one cannot infer the logic of language from ordinary speech. “Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized” (Tract. 4.002). By contrast, Philosophical Investigations is aimed precisely at that ‘quite another object’; this is evident from the beginning of the book, which sets out with a criticism of linguistic referentialism, as represented by Augustine. I shall not discuss whether Augustine is a straw man who stands for Wittgenstein himself as the author of the Tractatus, or for Frege and Russell. Augustine is taken here to represent the opinion that the meaning of a word “is the object for which the word stands” (Phil. Inv. 1), and propositions are associations of such denominations. Wittgenstein does not mean that what Augustine says is false, but simply that it does not include all the functions of language. Augustine describes a communication system: “only not everything that we call a language is this system” (Phil. Inv. 3). Wittgenstein excludes here the idea of meaning as reference, showing how language is intimately tied to non-linguistic activities. He introduces the central notion of meaning as usage. He imagines a community whose language is made up of names for building materials: bricks, beams,

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

slabs, etc. Children are instructed in how to perform building activities, i.e., how to use the words and how to react to other people’s words. In this process, a large part belongs to ostensive teaching, i.e., the teaching where the teacher utters a word while pointing at an object (not to its definition, since the child cannot yet ask the name of things). This ‘language game’ establishes an associative tie between the word and the object, and one can even go so far as to imagine that the sound of the word evokes an image of the object itself in the mind of the child. But its primary purpose is not to evoke representations, and the presence of a representation is not enough for us to say that the word has been understood. We understand a word when we act in a certain way upon hearing it. When the same ostensive act is associated with a different action, it would produce different behavior. Here is an example of the situational nature of understanding: “‘I set the brake up by connecting up rod and lever’ — yes, given the rest of the mechanism. Only in conjunction with that is it a brakelever; separated from its support it is not even a lever, for it may be anything, or nothing” (Phil. Inv. 6). The procedure described by Wittgenstein differs from that of Augustine in one aspect, which is, however, essential: the whole process of learning, understanding, and verification of that understanding is entrusted to the practices in which language is embedded; the criterion for saying whether a child has understood a word is whether he masters it in the context of those practices. A language embodied in practice is by definition a totality in becoming, complete in every moment but always liable to increase and development. Was our language complete or incomplete before the symbols of chemistry or infinitesimal calculus were incorporated into it? This is where Wittgenstein compares language to an old city, “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses” (Phil. Inv. 18). This is another difference from the Tractatus (4.26), where the totality of true elementary propositions was treated as a complete description of the world. I have used the term ‘language game’ to indicate the various modalities of the teacher-child linguistic interaction. But the term indicates any type of verbal activity, “the whole consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven” (Phil. Inv. 7). It is meant “to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Phil. Inv. 23). These expressions (language game, form of life) refer to language not as an abstract system but as part of humankind’s natural history, which includes

175

176 A History of Language Philosophies

commanding, asking, telling, and chatting, just as it includes walking, eating, drinking, and playing (Phil. Inv. 25). The number of possible language games is indefinite. Consider the countless question forms, such as asking to know, verify, obtain, express uncertainty, receive help, and also direct and indirect questions, etc. The same holds for all possible types of proposition. All this bears witness to the open nature of language. How many types of propositions are there? They are countless, is Wittgenstein’s answer; there is no limit to the ways in which signs, words, and sentences can be used. “And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all, since new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and other become obsolete and get forgotten” (Phil. Inv. 23). With the reduction of meaning to usage we are only at the beginning of the analysis, since, from another perspective meaning and usage are different: [W]e understand the meaning of a word when we hear or say it, we grasp it in a flash, and what we grasp in this way is surely something different from the ‘use’ which is extended in time! […] Can what we grasp in a flash accord with a use, i.e., can it fit or fail to fit it? And how can what is present to us in an instant, what comes before our mind in an instant, fit a use? (Phil. Inv. 138–139)

Wittgenstein is not questioning the criterion of usage; rather he wonders whether word usage can be governed by pre-established parameters. In fact, there are no normative criteria for the use of words. It is just that “if an individual passes enough tests, the community […] accept him as a rule follower, thus enabling him to engage in certain types of interactions that require community members’ reliance on his responses” (Kripke 1982: 108–109). Following a rule means playing the game, the success of which depends simply on the consistency of our answers. The above is a prelude to the discussion of the so-called problem of private language, where words “are to refer to what can be known only to the person speaking, to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language” (Phil. Inv. 243). Can a purely internal language exist devoid of any objective reference and directly connected to the psychic contents of the subject? Husserl too had addressed the problem of the communicability of internal experience. The listener perceives the mental contents of the speaker to some degree, but he or she has no direct perception of them, and no explicit conceptual formulation accompanies these contents. For the speaker, understanding means truly grasping an adequate intuition, while for the listener it means putatively grasping an inadequate presentation: “In the former case we

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century 177

have to do with an experienced, in the latter case with a presumed being, to which no truth corresponds at all” (Husserl 2001, I: 190). For Wittgenstein the meaning of psychological terms, not unlike the terms that designate external objects, must be investigated through a ‘grammar’ of the sentences that normally refer to them (note that by ‘grammar’ Wittgenstein often means the totality of the rules of semantic usage). For instance, if I have a pain, I can say that others doubt it is true, but not that I do. The apparent grammatical analogy between the two phrases actually hides two distinct language games. In the case of the subject, we are dealing with an object of which he has direct but private experience. Otherwise, we are dealing with an object of which we have indirect but public knowledge. Here too it is a question of differences in behavior that allow us to grasp a meaning, whether it relates to psychic states or external objects. How is the connection between the name and what is named established in the case of words that refer to sensations? The child learns to speak of his sensation of pain without adults being able to refer to his internal state. They do not suggest to him a description or an internal ostension of his psychic state; they teach him behavioral schemes. Every language act must partake in a shared ‘grammar’, which is a series of public criteria for the use of words. The question of private language can be read as the affirmation of an inescapable dissociation between language and internal experience (qualia, that is personal and subjective experiences, feelings, and sensations that accompany our consciousness; Erlebnis, as the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey called it). This is a question that philosophers tend to dramatize, while biologists tend to play it down. According to the biologist Gerald Edelman, internal experience offers the data best suited to a study of consciousness, since it allows us to establish connections between subjective accounts, actions, functions, and cerebral structures: “It is our ability to report and correlate while individually experiencing qualia, that opens up the possibility of a scientific investigation of consciousness” (Edelman 1992: 115). Why should there be a dissociation between the processes of perceptual categorization and the processes of communicable categorization, i.e., between pure perception and categorized perception? This is a crucial question for any study of the mind and therefore for any study of the preconditions of language. For a long time 20th-century philosophy did not challenge Wittgenstein’s antimentalist position, nor his idea that language should be described solely in terms of behavior and not in terms of theory. This position was reinforced by the fortune of an essay published a few years before Wittgenstein’s Philosophical

178 A History of Language Philosophies

Investigations, viz., The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle (1949), which brilliantly and aggressively attacked the idea of mind as deus ex machina of the philosophical tradition. Some have wondered to what extent a behaviorist interpretation actually corresponds to Wittgenstein’s intentions. It is true that Wittgenstein does not deny the existence of mental states but only the possibility of expressing them, and that he does not reject the ontology of the mind but only the possibility of speaking reasonably about it. However, the same holds for philosophical behaviorism; what is denied is not necessarily the existence of the mental sphere but the possibility of studying it scientifically. In general, Wittgenstein seems to stand aloof from both mentalism and behaviorism in philosophy, while accepting some sort of grammatical behaviorism. Why deny (for example, in the case of a recollection) the existence of a mental process? “What we deny is that the picture of the inner process gives us the correct idea of the use of the word ‘to remember’. We say that this picture […] stands in the way of our seeing the use of the word as it is”. Then you are a behaviorist in disguise, objects his imaginary interlocutor; what you are basically saying is that anything other than human behavior is a fiction. “If I do speak of a fiction”, is the answer, “then it is of a grammatical fiction” (Wittgenstein, Phil. Inv. 305–309).

7.5 Communication and its forms The idea that language practices entail cooperation among speakers and interaction with the situation is now standard in psycholinguistics. Emile Benveniste has highlighted the ways our subjectivity affects language structures. Pragmatic linguistics, i.e. the study of communicative interaction, has rejected any monological conception of language. The theory of speech acts has studied nondeclarative utterances and codified speakers’ behavior in conversational maxims (see 7.6 below). It is not easy to assess to what extent these approaches are a continuation of 19th-century psychologism (Knobloch 1991, pp. xxxvii–xlii; Elffers 1999). What they have in common is a functionalist approach. Karl Bühler, in his Sprachtheorie (Theory of Language, 1934 [Bühler 1990]), offers a classic definition of functionalism as a scientific program that favors the study of the functions of language rather than its formal aspects, and relates them to situational and dialogical conditions. Bühler’s project of a biologically based linguistics starts from the consideration that there is no animal community that does not have some form of sign exchange arising in the practical transactions of individuals

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century 179

and their environment. A sign system is the essential tool of anthropogenesis, on a par with material tools. It is “one of the implements used in life; it is an organon like material implements […], language is, like a tool, a formed intermediary” (Bühler 1990:liv). Sign exchange is a primary biological function: “indeed, a defining characteristic of the psychophysical system of animals is that it functions as a receiver and user of signals on a lower or on a higher level” (p.45). But this does not imply that sign exchange is the sole function of language. In appellative function signals are used to stimulate verbal or behavioral responses in the interlocutor. The expressive capacity is a subjective function in which signs serve as symptoms of the internal experience of the speaker. The objective function elicits representation through symbols. Functions are certainly distinguishable in the abstract, but in practice they partake jointly in every speech act, with one or the other emerging alternatively as dominant (p.39). Semantic functions are modalities of semiotic intercourse that originate from and are used only in dialogic interaction: Each of the two participants has his own position in the make-up of the speech situation, namely the sender as the agent of the act of speaking, as the subject of the speech action on one hand, and the receiver as the one spoken to, as the addressee of the speech action on the other hand. They are […] partners in an exchange, and ultimately this is the reason why it is possible that the sound as a medial product has a specific significative relationship to each, to the one and to the other severally. (Bühler 1990: 37–38)

Reducing the essence of language to the sole monological function of thought is the mistake of epistemologism, which undermines the linguistics of philosophers such as Cassirer and Husserl (p. 216). Two different cognitive modalities always coexist in language: deixis (the perceptual pointing and presenting) and abstraction (grasping the world conceptually by symbolization, categorization, and naming). Cassirer and others had considered the two modalities as distinct and successive phases in the development of human language. Bühler disagrees; they are both essential to language. This is the two-field theory, which Bühler (1990: lv) considers to be the quintessence of his position. Thanks to deixis “what is ‘made evident’ enters the realm of perception”; deixis eminently performs the function of the sign, “a showing (or a revealing) of things to the viewer, or the other way round, leading the viewer (the viewing gaze) to the things” (p. 44). Words such as ‘I’ or ‘here’ “expect their meaning to be made definite from case to case in the deictic field of language and in what the deictic field is able to provide for the senses” (p.105). Indeed, everyone who says ‘I’ indicates a different object from everyone else.

180 A History of Language Philosophies

With a word such as ‘here’ the Viennese refer to Vienna and the Berliners to Berlin. Unlike deictic signs, a conceptual sign must be used as a symbol for the same object regardless of who says it, “and that is only the case […] if the word […] is attributed to the object and used for it under the condition that the object has such-and-such properties that in principle do not change from case to case of application” (p. 119). Bühler applies to semantics a notion of ‘field’ borrowed from the psychology of vision. As the perception of a color is influenced by its peripheral field, so the meaning of language signs is influenced by their situational field, even in the absence of a linguistic context (p. 203). Consider elliptical expressions (for instance, when a passenger in the bus says to the conductor: ‘single’ or ‘transfer’); in this case the situation contributes to the formation of meaning, having a “synsemantic” function. Ellipses emerge from the synsemantic field as islands of language […] from within the sea of silent but unequivocal communication at the places where a differentiation, […] a decision between several possibilities has to be made […] They emerge and are welcome just as names and arrows are welcome on signs at the crossing of paths that one takes. (p. 176)

Another example of synsemantic field is the gesture and mimicry generally associated to utterances in communication (p. 187). In the formation of names, a function is activated that Bühler calls abstractive relevance. A simple example is that of a sign system based on flags, where what is relevant for communication is not the shape or size of the flags but only their color: “The entire wealth of the properties of the sensual thing, this perceptual something here and now, need not enter into the semantic function. […] Only this or that abstract factor is relevant for its calling to function as a sign” (p. 52). Language phenomena are “many-sided and […] many-levelled significative structures” (p. 86). According to another functionalist, Roman Jakobson, the scope of linguistics “is not confined to grammar alone or uniquely to non-semantic questions of external form or to the inventory of denotative devices with no reference to free variations”. Language “must be investigated in all the variety of its functions” (Jakobson 1981 [1959]: 21). For Jakobson as for Bühler, functions arise from the dialogic situation. The emotive function expresses the attitude of the addresser. The conative function is oriented towards the addressee. The referential function refers to someone or something one is speaking about. The phatic function serves to establish, improve, or interrupt the contact (as in the

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

case of stereotypical forms common in oral communication: ‘now’, ‘so’, ‘here we are’, and so on). The metalinguistic function is used by the interlocutors to verify whether they are using the same code (‘got it?’, ‘What do you mean?’). All these functions are part of the linguistic competence of every individual. Finally, the poetic function is also considered as potentially part of everyday communication rather than only of poetry. For Jakobson, as for Bühler, these functions coexist in virtually every communicative situation. In 20th-century philosophy the notion of function became a formidable analytical tool for the study of linguistic practices. But language functions presuppose mental functions. Thus the notion of language functions was included in the theoretical stock of genetic psychology. Thought and Language is the title of the most representative work of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1934; Vygotsky 1986). Vygotsky’s starting point was a view of consciousness as an integrated system of different functions. Thus, he stands apart from those who took the absolute identity of thought and speech for granted, as well as from those who set them apart as distinct subjects of study. When mentioning the principle of the identity of thought and language, Vygotsky was certainly alluding to the Humboldtian tradition, which was mediated for him by the writings of the Ukrainian linguist A. A. Potebnija. Against identity, Vygotsky maintains the genetic difference between thought and language and the distinct developments of the two. This distinction was also central to the phenomenological School which had developed in Würzburg under the leadership of Oswald Külpe. But Vygotsky dissents from this position too: studying pure thought as independent of language on the one hand, and the properties of speech independently of thought, on the other, leads us to consider their connection as an extrinsic interdependency of two separate processes (Vygotsky 1986: 3). He also opposes (p. 254) behaviorism (the view of thought as “speech minus sound”) and the “extreme idealism” of Bergson (the idea “that thought could be ‘pure’, unrelated to language, and that it was distorted by words”). The Geneva psychologist Jean Piaget, whose theories dominated twentiethcentury genetical psychology for decades, describes a phase of ‘egocentric’ thought, unaffected by experience, in which the child thinks ‘for himself ’. A specific type of speech, egocentric, i.e., without interlocutors, in the form of unrelated utterances, characterizes the activity of the subject in this phase. Its sole function is to ‘chant’ one’s thoughts and actions. It atrophies around the age of six or seven and is replaced by socialized language, which serves to exchange ideas, ask questions, give orders, etc. According to Vygotsky (1986: 12–57),

181

182 A History of Language Philosophies

instead, egocentric speech, although introverted, is not useless; it is an instrument of thought in the proper sense, used in problem-solving and the planning of action. It does nor atrophy, but ‘goes underground’. It is an intermediate stage leading to endophasia, the inner speech that normally accompanies adult thought. The initial function of speech is already communicative, and the egocentric phase is the first multifunctional differentiation between forms of expression, endophasy and communication, both of which are “social, though their functions diverge” (p. 35). Thought and language, genetically distinct, mature independently and at a certain point intersect. Speech becomes rational and thought becomes verbal (p. 91). Various explanations of endophasia had been offered in psychology. It had been understood as verbal memory, or reduced to mere ‘speech minus sound’, a speech reflex inhibited in its motor part. Or else, ‘inner speech’ had been used to cover everything that precedes the motor act of speaking, the whole inner aspect of any speech act. In Vygotsky’s theory, on the contrary, inner speech is a specific formation, with complex relations to the other forms of speech activity, and a syntax of its own. One of its traits is the tendency to ‘predication’, that is, a specific form of abbreviation where the subject of a sentence and all words connected with it are omitted, while the predicate is preserved. This tendency is shared by external speech only under particular conditions, such as when the subject of a sentence is known beforehand to all concerned. Imagine several people waiting for the bus. No one would say “The bus we are waiting for is coming” on seeing the bus approach. Quite probably, the sentence will be an abbreviated “It’s coming”. This phenomenon, which is a comparatively frequent circumstance in external speech and is practically absent in writing, is the rule in endophasic speech. Speech is not just sound-embodied thought; it is a radical syntactical and semantical re-organization of thought according to the rules of public language. Verbalized thought is “a complex, dynamic entity, and the relation of thought and word within it [is] a movement through a series of planes. […] An infinite variety of movements to and fro, in ways still unknown to us, is possible” (p. 253). The exploration of “an almost unknown territory” — the inward aspect of language, “the side turned toward the person, not toward the outer world” (p. 254) — was the experimental program that Vygotsky announced but was unable to carry out. The year of the publication of Thought and Language is also the year of his death.

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

7.6 Language as behavior Except for the cases mentioned above, interest in the relation between mind and language declined in the first half of the 20th century. This was due partly to the structuralist model dominant in European linguistics and partly to behaviorism, which was dominant in psychology in the United States. The behaviorist program, rigidly confined to the study of observable behavior, excluded any method that was even vaguely introspective; indeed, it shunned the very idea of mind as the source of motivations to act. I have mentioned above the fortune of Ryle’s book The Concept of Mind (1949), a manifesto of philosophical behaviorism; a few years later (1953), the publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations advanced a theory of meaning based on the analysis of communicative behavior. As already noted, there is a debate on whether Wittgenstein’s approach to the problems of language can be termed behaviorist. Whatever the answer, his semantic model, based on the use of language as a form of behavior conforming to social rules, certainly contributed to discouraging the study of the psychic preconditions of speech. It is usual to date the reaction against behaviorist trends and the beginning of the mentalist, or internalist, turn in language theories to the late 1950s, precisely to 1959, when Chomsky reviewed critically Verbal Behavior by the American psychologist B. F. Skinner, rejecting, among other things, the notion that linguistic competence is only a matter of behavioral dispositions responding to stimuli received through learning. Externalism and internalism, as will become clearer in the next chapter, indicate respectively two types of theories of language. Externalist theories describe language primarily or exclusively as a social practice, a capacity that is learned, like driving a car or riding a bicycle (in the behaviorist versions of externalism) or as an activity conditioned by rules developed through interaction with the environment (as in Piaget’s theory). By contrast, internalist theories stress the dependence of linguistic structures on pre-existing mental structures (or modules, or functions), and point to universal traits in natural languages as proof of such a dependence. Of course, the idea that 1959 is the year of the internalist turn may be useful but must not be taken literally, as if it actually marked a watershed between theoretical eras (something that never really happens in the history of ideas). Quine’s Word and Object, which can be considered a classic of semantic behaviorism, appeared in 1960, and the most important texts of linguistic externalism in analytical philosophy were published between 1960 and 1980. For Quine, words do not denote private, and therefore inscrutable mental

183

184 A History of Language Philosophies

states, nor can they be conceived of according to “the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels” (Quine 1969: 27). The view of semantics “as somehow determinate in [one’s] mind beyond what might be implicit in [one’s] disposition to overt behaviour” betrays a “pernicious mentalism” (ibid.). The nature of the relationship between Quine and Wittgenstein is controversial. In any case, Quine’s formation certainly also bears the influence of American pragmatism and specifically of John Dewey, who had already stated that meaning is a property of behavior and language is a special case of relational life. Quine’s linguistic behaviorism emerges fully in his theory of translation, as expressed in a well-known philosophical experiment, the translation of a phrase from a completely unknown language without a dictionary. Who can guarantee that the word, for example gavagai, uttered upon seeing a rabbit, actually means ‘rabbit’, and not a phase or state or part of a rabbit, the beingrabbit, or a phrase such as ‘look, there’s a rabbit’, etc.? The same stimulus (in this case the appearance of a rabbit) can generate different responses. To establish, even approximately, the meaning of an unknown word, the observer will have to verify a series of hypotheses on the structure of the original language, much as a child must do when it learns to speak. This indeterminacy of meaning applies not only to translation between languages but also to the intralinguistic translation we continuously do, choosing between alternative meanings of words we are familiar with. The interpretation of a specific utterance is conditioned by an indefinite series of hypotheses on the structure of language. Thus, no utterance will be meaningful in itself but only in relation to the totality of language. Quine does not deny the reality of mental states, but he says that they can be inferred only from observable behavior: “In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice” (Quine 1990: 36). We learn to speak thanks to the fact that we observe the verbal behavior of others and that others observe and sanction ours: “There is nothing in linguistic meaning beyond what is to be gleaned from overt behavior in observable circumstances” (p. 37). Communication is based on empathy; we try to guess our interlocutor’s feelings and thoughts, so that we may somehow infer what he means. In so doing, we continually readjust our hypotheses on the basis of communicative successes or failures (pp. 42, 46). We could object that this description might possibly fit the elementary phases of language learning, based on one-to-one stimulus-response reactions, but will not account for a mature use of language, which requires conceptual and syntactic operations that can hardly be explained by such a simplistic model.

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century

The point becomes even more important if we consider that one of the tenets of Chomsky’s philosophy of language is precisely the inadequacy of behaviorist explanations even in the case of language learning. Another author who must be mentioned is Donald Davidson, whose theory of interpretation is very close to Quine’s theory of translation (Ramberg 1989: 64–97). In a 1986 article (see Davidson 1994), Davidson presented the signification-comprehension procedure as a series of entirely contingent adaptive processes between interlocutors. Nothing exists that can be defined as language, if by language we mean a shared systematic formation, governed by rules that speakers know and apply, that one can learn and master. Nor is comprehension based on any such competence. It is based instead on a ‘prior theory’ of the interpreter (where theory means a method of interpretation, a collection of presumptive criteria used to determine the best linguistic strategies). Such a theory is derived from data observable on the spot, such as disposition, outer aspect, role, the sex of the interlocutor, and all else that can be gathered by observing his or her linguistic and non-linguistic behavior (Davidson 1994: 167). The set of new criteria acquired later constitute a ‘passing theory’ through which an utterance is factually interpreted. Neither ‘prior’ nor ‘passing theory’ resemble linguistic competence, the mastering of a language, the control of rules, whether learned or innate. What is shared among speakers (if communication is successful) is not a pre-existing system of norms and usages that must be applied but a transitory strategy. Saying that two people speak the same language, Davidson explains, is like saying that they tend to converge on a passing theory, and the more convergence there is, the more one can say that they belong to a language community. As a consequence, not only does Davidson do away with any notion of linguistic competence, but “the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally” is done away with as well (p. 173). Language is a form of behavior, and communication is a chance meeting of idiolects; so his theory might be restated. Davidson himself speaks of private vocabulary and grammar as what constitutes, along with expectations regarding the behavior of the interlocutors, the so-called ‘prior theory’. Not surprisingly, Chomsky (2000: 67–70) objects that Davidson fails to prove the impossibility of conceiving a prior theory as a set of procedures incorporated in a more mature stage of the language faculty. One of the most significant manifestations of the pragmatic approach in linguistic philosophy was the theory of speech acts. Its acknowledged initiator, John Austin, is both one of the early fathers of non-formal analytical currents

185

186 A History of Language Philosophies

of the mid-20th century and the heir to the British tradition of common sense philosophy (see 5.5 above). It is from this current, via G. E. Moore, that Austin inherited, among other things, the notion of the analysis of ordinary language as the most fruitful strategy for philosophy along with the belief that a true theory of language cannot be limited to the analysis of declarative sentences but must also deal with clauses such as promises, prayers, orders, contracts, etc. The book to which Austin owes his fame (How to do Things with Words, 1962) contains a detailed analysis of utterances that do not describe an event but rather perform an action: such as “I give you…”, “I promise you that…”, etc. Pragmalinguistics was further developed by Paul Grice. In a 1957 article, and then repeatedly in later studies, Grice devised an interactive and dialogical notion of meaning, more dependent on the conversational situation than on the speaker’s meaning. Only in a dialogic situation do the interlocutors grasp contents that exceed the mere logical structure of the sentence or its literal meaning (for example, the question “Can you shut the door?” does not refer to the physical power of shutting the door but to the speaker’s desire that the door be shut). In every dialogic exchange, there is an aspect that Grice calls ‘implicature’, by means of which interlocutors infer implicit meanings from abstract meanings and context. For an exchange of information to occur, the interlocutors must enact a cooperative behavior: “Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks […] They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction” (Grice 1989: 26). Cooperation is expressed in ‘conversational maxims’ (providing all the requested information and nothing but that; not saying things one believes to be false or for which one does not have adequate proof; being to the point; being clear, i.e., avoiding obscurity, ambiguity, redundance, or confusion): a sort of recipe for successful communication. In 1969, John Searle’s Speech Acts was published, another classic of pragmalinguistics. To establish a typology, or advance a general theory, of speech acts already went against Wittgenstein’s thesis of the typological and theoretical irreducibility of language games. Furthermore, the reintroduction of psychological factors, such as the intention of the speaker, prefigured the cognitive reconversion that affected large areas of analytical philosophy in the 1980s, with Searle himself as one of its foremost representatives. Searle confronted cognitivism and theories of artificial intelligence, rejecting extreme positions such as the metaphor of the brain as a computer and the thesis of the computational nature of mental processes. On the other hand, he turned the spotlight once again on

Language and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century 187

the mental functions underlying linguistic practice, rejecting the pure exteriority of speech acts conceived (in Saussure’s terminology) as pertaining to parole. Speech, instead, is founded on the competence of the speakers, and the theory of speech acts is therefore part of the general study of langue. I shall briefly reconstruct Searle’s philosophy using a more recent book of his, Mind, Language and Society (1998), an attack on the a-theoretical or antitheoretical outcomes of what we might call ‘postmodernism’, that is, a fragmented view of the mind and its manifest expressions, language among them. Wittgenstein, for Searle, is a good example of linguistic postmodernism, thanks to his opinion that “we are not engaged in one big language game, in which there are universal standards of rationality and everything is intelligible to everybody, but in a series of smaller language games, each with its own inner standards of intelligibility” (Searle 1998: 4). To this regionalization of the criteria of intelligibility Searle opposes a vision based on the fundamental presuppositions of common sense, default positions that serve as a background for our thought and language, such as the existence of an independent and sensibly accessible reality, and the fact that words usually have reasonably clear meanings thanks to which “they can be used to refer to and talk about real objects in the world” (p. 10). Far from analyzing linguistic usage to find a key to a description of the mind, Searle bases his theory of meaning on a theory of the mind. Speech acts theory is revisited from this perspective; it is the mind that gives meaning to what, from a material perspective, is simply the emission of sounds; the mind takes the step “from physics to semantics” (p. 136). The traditional questions of philosophy of language (what is the relation between language and reality? what is meaning? etc.) can be reformulated in terms of questions such as: how do we go from sound to an illocutionary act? How does the mind give meaning to sounds and written signs? The first requisite for this transition is intentionality. Units of meaning are necessarily intentional, and intention serves to explain the relationship between langue and parole. The meaning of an utterance — words i.e. parts of speech set into syntactic relations — is one thing; the meaning of the speaker, which depends to a certain extent on his intention, is something else. “The original and intrinsic intentionality of a speaker’s thought is transferred to words, sentences, marks, symbols and so on […] When a speaker performs a speech act, he imposes his intentionality on those symbols” (p. 141). Understanding is achieved when the listener perceives this intention. This does not mean that speaking is a mere translation of thoughts. The psycholinguistic development of children attests the transition from more primitive forms to forms increasingly rich in intentionality; through



188 A History of Language Philosophies

a circular effect these richer forms enhance understanding, which in turn increases intentionality. It is not a case of the mind on the one side and language on the other, but a process of reciprocal increase, until the mind becomes “linguistically structured” (p. 152). Through this ‘psychologistic’ outcome of analytical philosophy, a classical question of modern philosophy of language (see 5.6 above) regains respectability: the retroaction of language on thought.

Suggestions for further reading Hermeneutics
: Müller-Vollmer, ed. 1986; Lafont 2000. Psychologism
: Picardi 1987; Knobloch 1988; Nerlich 1992; Graffi 2001: 15–163. Herbart
: Formigari 1994: 179–189. Steinthal
: Nerlich 1992: 55–62. Paul
: Koerner 1988a; Arens 1996. Wegener
: Nerlich 1990; Knobloch 1991. Mauthner
: Arens, K. 1984; Albertazzi 1990; Bredeck 1992. Marty
: Mulligan, ed. 1990. Mill
: Jong 1982. Frege
: Dummett 1981; Haaparanta & Hintikka, eds. 1986; Haaparanta, ed. 1994; Kenny 2000. Saussure
: De Mauro 1972; Koerner 1973; Harris 1987; Koerner 1988; De Mauro 1992; Bouquet 1997; Harris 2001; Bouquet, ed. 2003; Joseph, 2004. Husserl
: Mohanty 1964; Bar-Hillel 1977; Edie 1977; Mohanty, ed. 1977; Mohanty 1977, 1977a, 1982; Cosenza 1990; Haaparanta, ed. 1994; Smith 1994; Simons 1998. Bühler
: Innis 1982; Eschbach, ed. 1984, 1988; Innis 1988; Mulligan 1988; Eschbach 1990. Vygotsky
: Wertsch, ed. 1985; Bruner 1997; Frawley 1997; Moro, ed. 1997; Robbins 2001. Piaget
: Bronckart 1977: 43–64. Bloomfield
: Hall, ed. 1987; Fought, 1999; Hall 2000; Koerner 2002, Chap. 4. Structural linguistics
: Bronckart 1977: 83–166; Sériot 1999. Wittgenstein
: Egidi, ed. 1995; McGinn 1997; Cook 2000; Proops 2000; Hacker 2001; Travis 2001; Williams 2002. Davidson
: Ramberg 1989; Preyer et al., eds. 1994. Dummett
: McGuinness & Oliveri, eds. 1994. Speech acts
: Tsohatzidis, ed. 1994; Kasher, ed. 1996. Grice
: Avramides 1989. Searle
: Christensen 1991; Grewendorf & Meggle, eds. 2002.



Chapter 8

Conclusion A glance at on-going work

8.1 Mind, body, language Two fairly distinct, though closely related, approaches will be examined in this chapter: one deals with language as an instrument of cognitive interaction, whereas the other studies it from a biological perspective as a peculiarity of humans within the animal sphere. Both perspectives have been polarized in the last few decades in the debate for and against mentalism, sparked by Noam Chomsky’s writings in the early 1960s. When Chomsky reviewed Skinner (see 7.6 above), thus laying the foundations of his own philosophical program, he had already published an important book, Syntactic Structures. This was the beginning of a work that is still in progress — transformational-generative grammar, i.e., the analysis of natural languages as systems of highly complex and stratified rules that should explain the production of sentences. I shall not deal, however, with this technical aspect of Chomsky’s linguistic research. I shall try instead to summarize the development of Chomsky’s research program. It is a cognitive program “concerned with mental aspects of the world, which stand alongside its mechanical, chemical, optical and other aspects” (Chomsky 2000: 5–6). Behind linguistic competence lies a particular component of the human mind/brain, the language faculty. It has an initial state, genetically determined. In the normal course of development it passes through a series of states in early childhood, reaching a relatively stable state that undergoes little subsequent change, apart from an increase of lexicon. In a good first approximation, the initial state appears to be uniform for the species. Adapting traditional terms to a special usage, Chomsky (1995:14) calls grammar the theory of the state attained, and universal grammar the theory of the initial state. The study of the states of the mind/brain, including the study of the biologically necessary properties of language, pertains indisputably to the natural sciences. Its goal is “to determine one aspect of human genetics, namely, the nature of the language faculty”

190 A History of Language Philosophies

(Chomsky 1980: 29; see 185–216). Such a program entails an opposition to classic behaviorism, but also to the behaviorist tendencies in analytical philosophy; in short, to all theories that view language as “essentially an adventitious construct, taught by ‘conditioning’ (as would be maintained, for example, by Skinner or Quine) or by drill and explicit explanation (as was claimed by Wittgenstein)” (Chomsky 1965: 51). The central tenet of Chomsky’s program revolves around the apparent contradiction between the complexity of grammatical structures and the facility with which they are used by any normal speaker. The apparent speed and ease with which children learn to produce sentences in their language cannot be explained as an inductive procedure, based on trial and error, nor by the principle of analogy. Instead, according to Chomsky, there is a genetic program that is spontaneously enacted by all children at a biologically predetermined age. Only within the boundaries of this genetic program can experience be a factor in variation. Thus, Chomsky posits the existence of an innate linguistic competence, i.e., an a priori cognitive system (an expression that Chomsky does not use, as far as I know, but which he could very well have used), a representational system different from all other systems of representation (arithmetic, vision, etc.), with its own principles and acquisition procedures. It develops independently of any other type of conceptual capability. It “provides the interpretation of linguistic expressions, including new ones that the child learning the language has never heard” (Chomsky 1988: 16). It makes it possible to ascertain the grammaticality of sentences or whether a sound does or does not belong to the possible phonological system of human languages. For Chomsky, even concepts are somehow available already before words are learnt. When children learn vocabulary, they basically learn labels for concepts that are already part of their mental apparatus (Chomsky 1988: 28). This statement goes beyond the rather obvious notion that other forms of learning precede the emergence of language in children; it affirms the existence of a priori patterns that condition the semantics of natural languages, “a rich and invariant conceptual system, which is prior to any experience” (p. 32). A crucial role in Chomsky’s theory is assigned to the idea of universal grammar, “a framework for any particular human language, the basis for the acquisition of language” (p.62). To the extent that languages differ, “there must be possibilities of variation permitted by the fixed biological endowment” (p.23). Being exposed to a specific language orients speakers towards certain grammatically prefixed options or “parameters”. In other words, language is the way it is, because that is the only way the brain could make it (cf. Bickerton 1995: 36).

Conclusion

The relation between the universality of grammar and the variety of languages is one of the crucial problems of Chomsky’s theory, as is shown by a comparison with the tradition of general grammar that Chomsky mentions as one of his models. For 17th- and 18th-century language philosophers it had not been difficult to reconcile the universality of language with the variety of languages. There was no theoretical contradiction in turning to reason (a universal mental structure) to explain the former, and to usage (arbitrariness and the mutability of idioms as historical formations) to explain the latter. Universal grammar was theorized as a place where the modalities of interaction between mind and world were deposited in the form of universal principles (or linguistic universals), and where the adaptive instruments of that interaction were elaborated. The presence of what are more or less the same parts of speech (names, adjectives, prepositions, etc.) in all languages was explained by the fact that language serves to manipulate certain universal mental contents (for example, the representation of substances, qualities, etc.), and to reproduce their inter-connections in mental discourse and then in speech. The transition from the hypothetical proto-language based on nominal syntagmas resembling animal signs to the syntax of human language was explained through the action of cognitive and communicative drives. An a-syntactic language, with no systematic dependence among elements, could not represent events as they are, in their interconnection and interdependency. Classic general grammar was built on the idea of language as an ad hoc external tool elaborated for cognition and communication. Grammar itself was an instrument constructed according to general learning mechanisms common to all humans. The correspondence between principles and their empirical realization reflected the nature of grammar as an adaptational instrument, and could be ascertained inductively. Thus, in spite of Chomsky’s early appeal to 17th- and 18th-century grammatical theory, his theoretical model is quite a different one. For Chomsky, language is not an adaptive instrument; indeed, it is not an instrument at all. It is something ‘that happens’ at one stage of development, just as it happens that one grows and matures in a pre-established way, which certainly owes something to the environment yet “does not reflect properties of the physical environment but rather our essential nature” (Chomsky 1988: 151). General learning mechanisms do not contribute in any way to its genesis. Finally, general grammar cannot be inferred inductively from natural languages. On the contrary, natural languages are inferred from general grammar. To explain the diversity of languages, Chomsky introduced the theory of parameters (if theory is the right word, considering that he presents it as “more

191

192 A History of Language Philosophies

a bold hypothesis than a specific theory” [Chomsky 2000: 122]). It is difficult to summarize it without resorting to Chomsky’s own metaphor. We can think of the initial state of the faculty of language as a fixed network connected to a switch box; the network is constituted of the principles of language, while the switches are the options to be determined by experience. Each possible human language is identified as a particular setting of the switches — a setting of parameters, in technical terminology. In principle, we should be able literally to infer Swahili from one choice of settings, Japanese from another, and so on through the languages that humans can acquire (Chomsky 2000: 8). The ‘innateness hypothesis’ is often represented as an essential trait of Chomskian rationalism. However, it is not truly distinctive trait of rationalism at all. Empiricists have never denied the existence of natural, mental functions, which concur in organizing experience. Rationalists, on the other hand, have never said that experience is not essential to the activation of functions. Proving that inborn structures or learning respectively were predominant made sense in the classic debate, because it took place in the context of what could be called metaphysical dualism. The point was to determine which of the two substances, soul or body, was the source of specifically human power and behavior. So the question had an ideological import that vanishes once we conceive the mind (as Chomsky does) as an array of various states of the brain, which are all one with the organic constitution of the subject. In this case, the point is how and under what circumstances exposal to the environment activates the organic structures of the subject, and this is a matter of study both for rationalists and empiricists. The peculiar aspect of Chomskyan rationalism is the fact that the language faculty is conceived as an independent module, whose development is not subject to general cognitive strategies. This point has aroused the objections of the so-called second-generation cognitivists (see 8.2 below), who stress the importance of perception on language and the way semantic procedures affect the configuration of syntactic structures. This aspect of Chomsky’s linguistics has also raised the objections of those who, like Hilary Putnam (1975), are willing to concede that we learn to speak by species-specific means and strategies, but do not accept the idea of a special faculty different from normal learning procedures. This was also the key difference between Chomsky and Piaget. Piaget and his school had elaborated a ‘constructivist’ theory according to which intelligence is formed through stages of increasingly organized mental content, going from the purely sensorimotor phase (0–24 months), through the phase of representational intelligence, up to the mature stage of formal operative

Conclusion 193

intelligence, achieved after the age of twelve (see Piaget 2001). Against empiricism, Piaget affirmed that perceptions can be organized only by specific cognitive structures (or ‘schemas’). In a public debate between Chomsky and Piaget in 1975 (see Piattelli-Palmarini 1981), the disagreement seemed initially to revolve around innatism, an unnecessary premise to Chomsky’s theory (and in any case, an undemonstrated one) according to Piaget, who traced the start of mental development back to a ‘fixed nucleus’ of functions of sensorimotor intelligence. But the disagreement between the two focused increasingly on the definition of what was innate (according to Chomsky) or fixed (according to Piaget); was it the capacity to recombine successive levels of an increasingly advanced cognitive organization, as Piaget maintained, or an organ of language, as maintained by Chomsky? The core of their disagreement was highlighted by Jean Mehler (1981), who summarized Piaget’s position as a form of modern empiricism that does not deny the existence of a stable innate nucleus of mental functions but rather the specificity of that nucleus. Empiricists (like Piaget, although he might not call himself that) maintain that specific activities such as language and logical thought derive from non-specific, poly-functional predispositions. Rationalists (like Chomsky) hold that none of those activities are explainable, unless we assume the existence of already specialized innate capacities. For Piaget it is only by describing them genetically that can we ascertain the continuity between non-linguistic or pre-linguistic forms of intelligence and language. For Chomsky genetic processes are irrelevant, and what counts is the specificity of linguistic mechanisms compared to general intelligence. Along with Piaget, another important representative of 20th-century psychology, Jerome Bruner, also theorized that there is a continuity between preverbal and verbal intelligence. Language interaction has its roots in practical interaction, starting from the ‘protoconversation’ of child and mother (or whoever the child’s adult interlocutor may be); this interaction includes the coorientation of the gaze and attention on a common object, the child’s discovery of the communicative value of behavior, the institutionalization of protosemantic behavior such as pointing; finally, the gradual development of decontextualization, thanks to which significant behavior can be abstracted from specific immediate situations and conventionalized or ritualized (for example, in games). Through these elementary forms of dialogue, the child learns to share the symbolic horizon of adults; he internalizes their modalities of representation. This is how the fundamental structures of language are imparted, including grammatical categorization, denotation and predication, deixis,

194 A History of Language Philosophies

intentionality, etc. Meanings are negotiated within a shared system of symbols. The child “does not enter the life of his or her group as if it were a private, autistic sport of primary processes, but rather as a participant in a larger public process in which public meanings are negotiated” (Bruner 1990: 12–13). Bruner does not object to the notion that a natural organization of the mind lies at the root of language, but he affirms that it is a generic social disposition to meaning that certainly does not have the cogency of Chomsky’s syntactic structures. The importance of Chomsky’s theory is borne out also by the reactions it has given rise to, of which we shall see other examples. His writings in later years are aimed at defining the peculiar nature of his ‘internalist naturalism’ and defending it against the most authoritative exponents of externalism, such as Quine, Putnam, Davidson, and Dummett. Chomsky’s theories have had a strong influence on the philosophical theories of the mind of the late 20th century. The rediscovery of the theory of faculties has been sanctioned by the so-called modular theory of the mind, according to which the brain is an elaborating system made up of various, genetically distinct elements. When applied to linguistics, this model presumes the existence of various systems assigned to the various functions of language (perception of speech; lexical, semantic, and syntactic competence, etc.). Fodor’s articulation of the theory is fairly standard. The various modalities of sense-perception, in his model, are limited in scope (it is impossible, for example, to perceive speech as mere noise) and are organized into elaborative systems that are also highly specialized [Fodor 1983:47–55]). Other Chomskyan scholars, such as Roy Jackendoff (1993) and Steven Pinker (1994) shared the modular theory. It has also received less rigid formulations, open to the acquisitions of evolutionary psychology, as in Karmiloff-Smith (1992), who speaks of modularization processes rather than genetically predetermined modules. Through this notion of plasticity, Karmiloff-Smith challenges one of the central tenets of Chomsky’s theory, viz., the notion of an innate universal grammar. To describe the procedures on which the production and understanding of meaning are based, the Western philosophical tradition elaborated a formidable theoretical apparatus, whence present-day cognitivism has appropriated a number of essential elements. Among these is the idea of mind as a set of distinct subsystems, i.e., specific and independent competences, each tied to a specific sensorial modality and integrated with a central symbolical representation system, which is linguistic thought. The rediscovery of the theory of faculties goes hand in hand with the rediscovery of the representational theory of the mind. According to cognitive psychologists (such as Johnson-Laird 1983, 1988),

Conclusion 195

thought is the manipulation of symbols produced as a final result of perception, and language is the instrument for communicating such symbols. Representations have two roles, cognitive and operational. They represent the world (more or less accurately) and determine decisions and actions; from this derives the general correspondence between behavior and reality (cf. Fodor 1994: 81–103). With the rediscovery of representationalism, linguistics becomes part of cognitive psychology. Mental representations are viewed as an inner code responsible for syntactically elaborating symbols. A ‘language of thought’, or ‘mentalese’ is thus produced, whose elements, like those of spoken language, denote, or refer to, objects and events of the world. Its meaning, like the meaning of spoken language, results from the interaction of the semantic properties of elements with syntactic rules. This is one of the best-known aspects of Fodor’s theory. Organisms possess a private language with which they perform the computations that govern their behavior. It is an internal code that is not learned but conditions the learning of natural languages (Fodor 1975: 68). The rehabilitation of the representational model makes it possible to produce descriptions of the mind accounting for non-verbal or pre-verbal procedures, both conscious and unconscious (see Jackendoff 1997: 179–180). These aspects had been ignored for decades. Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations had drastically severed the theory of meaning from the representational content of the mind; in linguistics, in the long era of post-Saussurean semiotics, meaning was explained in terms of structures rather than representational content. No need was felt to resort to mental entities — so went the theory — to explain linguistic practices; indeed, mental entities themselves could be explained on the basis of linguistic behavior. Fodor among others rejects this position. He rejects the claim “that an acceptable semantics must explicate linguistic content just by reference to the ‘practical’ capacities that users of a language have as users of that language” (Fodor 1998: 4). On the contrary, the intentionality of representations precedes and motivates the intentionality of natural languages.

8.2 The bodily basis of meaning Intentionality is the capacity of a mental state or proposition to mean, or refer to, objects: this is a theme we have already encountered in Husserl and Searle, among others. We run into it in different forms every time the problem of the relation of language and thought is raised. Does meaning primarily pertain to

196 A History of Language Philosophies

mental states and secondarily to sentences (as maintained, for example, by Fodor)? Or does it pertain to sentences (as Wittgenstein taught us)? Or, alternatively, does every speech act spring out of our mind suddenly in its complete form, bearing within itself an intrinsic necessity of signification? This is what the Romantics maintained, drawing inspiration from philosophy of nature. In a modern form, they were echoed by Merleau-Ponty: we do not speak of Being; Being speaks in us. In the silence of pure consciousness, wrote Merleau-Ponty in the preface to Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945: see Merleau-Ponty 2002), what is revealed is not just what words mean but what things mean. However, it is not for this idea that we read Merleau-Ponty today, nor for his occasional recourse to the terminology and methods of structuralism, which dominated linguistics in the years in which he was active. It is rather for his theory of speech as a fundamental bodily function. “Organized signs have their immanent meaning, which does not arise from the ‘I think’ but from the ‘I am able to’”. Primary psychological drives determine the signifying intentions or expressive ‘gesture’ of the subject, which fills the void with words (MerleauPonty 1964 [1960]: 88–89). Speaking has the same intentionality gesture does; it is a gesture of the body, and meaning is contained in it only as intention. Signs acquire their intentional power only because meaning is already immanent in the signifying action. Understanding occurs at once and resembles an act of recognition; once sense is given, signs acquire their full value. But before this can happen, sense must be given. It is not inferred through a series of inductions; it is rather “a germination of what will have been understood” (Merleau-Ponty, 2000 [1964]: 189) Merleau-Ponty posits the body as the original source of all signification. This is why second-generation cognitivists refer to him when, against the mentalism of the Chomskyan school, they propose a model of embodied philosophy, which relates consciousness and language to the primary forms of proprioception and bodily self-consciousness. Substantial differences remain, however. In a theory like that of Merleau-Ponty, the act of signifying has the same immediacy gestures do, and intentionality has its source and end in the force that drives the speaker to that gesture. Meaning is inherent in sign activity, and what remains to be explained — in fact, it remains unexplainable — is the external intentionality of signs, i.e., their capacity to be signs of something, aiming at something. Is a true germination of meaning what makes possible the production and understanding of words, as Merleau-Ponty suggested? Or does signification require various and complex categorization procedures? and, if so, how do these

Conclusion 197

occur and with what other mental and vital processes are they associated? It is in the latter direction that the second generation of cognitivists has moved. They reject the dualism of early cognitive science “in which the mind was characterized in terms of its formal functions, independent of the body” (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 76). They denounce the limits of the ‘formal-syntaxand-semantics paradigm’, which does not adequately account for the sensorimotor structuring, the Gestalt patterns, the metaphorical inferences, etc., that underlie conceptualization and reasoning processes. The new cognitive linguistics distances itself from Chomsky (ibid.: 469–512), as from analytical language philosophy (pp. 440–468), and from the model of the mind as computer advanced by theories of Artificial Intelligence (pp. 248–255). Meaning is not an abstract relation among symbols or among symbols and their referents, nor is reasoning a calculation; rather, it “has to do with the ways in which we function meaningfully in the world and make sense of it via bodily and imaginative structures” (p. 78). Language is not a module separate from other mental activities and operations. Meanings, in natural languages, derive from conceptualization procedures produced by minds integrated in their bodily condition. Lexicon, morphology and syntax are not autonomous systems; they form a continuum of symbolic structures. According to Langacker (2000: 31), a most authoritative scholar in the field of cognitive semantics, grammatical elements are thus “inherently meaningful (albeit schematic). Grammatical constructions incorporate patterns of semantic integration, as well as patterns of phonological integration which serve to symbolize it”. Grammatical relations largely depend on the cognitive salience of some semantic traits “for a human conceptualizer (in the role of speaker or addressee)” (p. 34). A grammar is “a constantly evolving set of cognitive routines that are shaped, maintained, and modified by language use” (Langacker 1987–1991. I: 57). In the procedures that determine contents and forms of natural languages, unconscious operations play an important role. The most elementary utterance implies an indefinite number of procedures (memorization, recognition, choice, organization, inference, imagination, etc.) that occur below the threshold of cognitive awareness. It requires the activation of implicit knowledge constitutive of our unreflective common sense (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 10–13). Cognitive unconscious is also the seat of the processes of primary metaphorization that translate into the innumerable body-centered expressions of our languages (in front of, at the back of
; similarity represented as closeness, understanding as grasping, quantity represented vertically as high and low, etc.). Primary metaphors “are anything but arbitrary social constructions, since they are highly

198 A History of Language Philosophies

constrained by the nature of our bodies and brains and by the reality of our daily interactions” (p. 96). Metaphors are not verbal constructs, they are primarily conceptual. Elementary metaphors combine to form complex metaphors, relatively stable and generally accepted; they are influenced by cultural models, theories of common sense, widespread notions and beliefs. They constitute an incommensurable part of our conceptual system, they influence our way of thinking and feeling in our conscious life and they even structure our dreams. Linguistic metaphors are nothing but the manifestation of these deep-seated cognitive metaphors. “If one somehow managed to eliminate metaphorical thought, the remaining skeletal concepts would be so impoverished that none of us could do any substantial everyday reasoning” (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 128). Conceptual universals are not innate; they originate from the fact that our bodies and brains are made in the same way and that we live in the same world; their existence “does not imply that reason transcends the body” (p. 5). There is no contradiction between the private nature of internal representations and the public nature of meanings; Frege was wrong about this, and so is analytical philosophy. Psychology is not purely subjective. The commonality of image schemas and basic-level concepts arises from the commonalities of our visual and motor systems, from our common capacities for Gestalt perception and our common capacity for metaphorical thought. “Our brains and minds do not operate using abstract formal systems that are given meaning by correlations to an allegedly mind-independent world that comes with categories and essences built in. The body and brain are where meanings arise in and through our interactions with the environment and other people” (p. 463). Consistent with this adaptive conception of universals, Lakoff and Johnson faced the key points of Chomsky’s linguistics head-on: the primacy and autonomy of syntax, the impossibility of reducing its innatism to an evolutionary theory, the identification of thought and language. The notion of embodied thought may help to explain why our concepts fit so well with the way we function in the world: “they have evolved from our sensorimotor systems, which have in turn evolved to allow us to function well in our physical environment” (pp. 43–44). This is a theme we will meet in the next paragraph where we will deal with co-evolution. Evolutionary theories have also become a testing ground for Chomsky’s theories. “Nothing in the biology of language makes sense except in the light of evolution”, writes Philip Lieberman (2000: 3). To the classic Darwinian notion of adaptation, Lieberman adds the idea of the plasticity of the human brain, i.e.,

Conclusion 199

its capacity to reorganize cortical circuits in response to stimuli. Children, and even adults, with severe damage to cortical areas normally responsible for language retain the ability to learn and use it. For Lieberman, the reason for this is the role played by learning in the formation of neural circuits involved in motor activity and in performing cognitive operations, including the acquisition of the phonetic, lexical, and syntactic systems. The neuroanatomical substrate of language is part of the human genotype; but “the particular neural circuits that code words, regulate syntax, control speech production, and perceive speech sounds are shaped in the course of development in particular linguistic environments” (p. 6). If this is true, then the existence of language does not imply the existence of a knowledge codified in an autonomous cortical linguistic organ; on the contrary, it implies the involvement, along with the areas traditionally associated with language (such as the areas of Broca and Wernicke), of areas generally associated with non-linguistic cognitive functions, and of the neural structures and systems that regulate behavior also in other animals. According to this view, then, the peculiarity of human language is rooted, on the one hand, in non-linguistic intelligence (in perception, sensorimotor, emotional systems, and in long- and short-term memory) and, on the other hand, in the general evolutionary development of the animal world. The notion of plasticity seems thus to go against the idea of an innate universal grammar codified in a specific organ. Still, a theory of evolution cannot do without this notion, if it wishes to explain adaptation. The incompatibility (or relative incompatibility) of the ideas of plasticity and innatism explains the attention given to linguistic evolutionary theories in recent years.

8.3 Fossils, brains, and languages In Chapter 6, we discussed the theoretical problems underlying the debate on the origin of language in the 18th and 19th centuries. A continuist model had emerged, eminently represented by Condillac, according to which language gradually grows from a common animal condition as a development of prelinguistic communicative capacities. A different, holistic model had been proposed by Herder and Humboldt: language belongs from the start to humanity as a distinctive quality, different from animal communication. It manifests itself all at once, it has no stages of development. Choosing one or the other alternative had very different doctrinal, ideological, and moral consequences. The first implied a continuity of development and a

200 A History of Language Philosophies

basic kinship between humans and other animals, a difference of degree and not of quality. The second alternative implied the original separation of humans from the rest of nature, along with their qualitative distinctiveness, language being proof of the impossibility to reduce human intelligence to animal intelligence. The first option implied (and implies) a view of speech as an instrument humans use to relate to the world and other humans, to organize and communicate their experience and that of others, to ensure the transmission of survival techniques, of norms and values — in a word, culture. Like all other techniques, speech arises from the specialization of previous techniques (in this case, the proto-languages of physiognomic expressions, gestures, and inarticulate voice); it develops from an already existing stage of intelligence and contributes to the emergence of further stages by providing the mind with an analytical power. This position acknowledges the existence of stages and forms of pre-linguistic and non-linguistic thought; indeed, it presupposes their existence as the necessary pre-condition for the development of speech. The second option, instead, sees language as a form of life in which humans have been immersed from the very dawn of humanity. It does not imply the bricolage necessary to the invention of instruments. If one can speak of a birth of language it is only in terms of an epiphany of potentialities already present in human nature; the characteristics peculiar to language are virtually present from the first manifestation of the word. And there is no form of thought that is not already formed by speech and is not made up of speech. This is the view of language that Romantic philosophy included in its anti-Enlightenment package in the early 19th century. In 1856, scientists discovered the fossils of a hominid we now know was present throughout Europe and the Middle-East up to thirty-five thousand years ago. Only in the second half of the 20th century was it established with reasonable certainty that Neanderthals (as these hominids were called from the place of their first discovery, near Düsseldorf), while similar to humans for their erect position and presumable brain size, their ability to use stone tools and fire, yet had a supralaryngeal vocal tract resembling that of other primates more than humans, something which must have strongly limited their articulatory capabilities. Already in the 19th century the identification of an intermediate stage attested by Neanderthal fossils marked the beginning of a new type of investigation of the anatomical and physiological conditions of evolution. In 1859, with The Origin of Species, and then with The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin sparked a still-ongoing dispute on the phylogenetic history of

Conclusion 201

humankind. Animals too, in Darwin’s opinion, have a mind and some sort of reflective consciousness and hence are capable of abstracting and using rudimentary concepts. It is not unlikely that some superior faculties developed out of these rudimentary capabilities. Articulate language still bears traces of animal phonic, physiognomic, and gestural expressive forms. It is not really instinctual, because all languages need to be learnt; yet it is not a technique like other characteristic human capabilities. Humans have an instinct for language, but not for bread baking, beer brewing, or — for that matter — writing. In anthropology, evolutionism gave rise to debates involving paleontology, primatology, the burgeoning study of African languages, the experience of deaf-mute reeducation, and the physiognomic tradition, the latter also thanks to the success of Darwin’s study The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). The origin of language had been investigated in neurology ever since the early stages of the discipline, which are now considered pre-scientific. Toward the end of the 18th century, the anatomist Franz Joseph Gall advanced a limited and prudent theory on the localization of certain motor and mental functions in the cerebral cortex. It was vulgarized under the name of phrenology by his follower J. C. Spurzheim in ways that branded it irredeemably as quackery. Beyond the later folkloric aspects of his theory, Gall had formulated the fundamental principle of a correspondence between structure and function. His contribution to the study of the functions associated with language was limited, and tainted by the influence of contemporary physiognomic notions (Clarke & Jacyna 1987, Chaps. 2 and 6). However, it marked the beginning of a program of clinical research. In the 1860s and 1870s, the Frenchman Paul Broca and the German Carl Wernicke established the primacy of the left cerebral hemisphere in controlling language, and described two syndromes that still constitute the typological basis for the study of aphasia, though the map of the correspondences between linguistic functions and cerebral structures is nowadays much more detailed than the primitive form of the theory of localization. This is also due to the fact that, until relatively recent times, our knowledge of the functions that preside over language were entirely derived from the observation of subjects whose speech had been impaired by cerebral damage, while nowadays neurosciences can study the function of the brain during its normal communicative activities or even create artificial models of neural procedures. Already around the mid-20th century, the origin of language had begun to turn from a speculative problem into an increasingly interdisciplinary one. Its study involved psychologists, primatologists, anthropologists, neurologists, anatomists, and experts on artificial intelligence. Experiments in language

202 A History of Language Philosophies

training with chimpanzees led some scientists to the conclusion, still challenged, that chimpanzees are capable of developing a sign language. Thus, the same can be hypothesized of hominids at a more or less corresponding stage of development. Direct observation has ascertained that some monkeys use different alarm cries depending on the danger (eagle, leopard, etc.), and this has led some to the similarly controversial conclusion that this “monkey dictionary” constitutes a sort of protosemantics (Hauser 2000). Every hypothesis on the continuity of the animal and human representational system also implies the notion of a continuity between pre-linguistic thought and language. Maynard Smith & Szathmáry, for example (1995: 284–285), describe how monkeys can group mental representations into categories that stimulate analogous behavioral responses (dangerous animal/non-dangerous animal, etc.) and hierarchically organize them, all of which implies that animal categories are already a non-verbal form of conceptualization. Language would simply have provided tags to concepts deriving from pre-linguistic experience, allowing complex patterns to be created, liable to being syntactically disassembled and reassembled. Our collections of human fossil remains has grown in the last few decades. The indications they provide, however, are indirect, since “neither languages nor the brains that produce them fossilize” (Deacon 1997: 24). True enough, but the crania that contained the brains do fossilize. This has made it possible to draw on paleoneurological data, from which some scholars have derived hypotheses, admittedly controversial, on the presumable emergence of the preconditions for a faculty of language (Wilkins & Wakefield 1995; Botha 2001). The question of the origins was revived in paleoanthropology by a conference sponsored by UNESCO in 1981 (Grolier 1983) and by the establishment of the Language Origins Society (1983). The continuist model was reaffirmed in philosophies of evolution, which, beginning in the 1970s, integrated Darwinist theory with the new discoveries of biology. The neo-evolutionist model represents a powerful epistemological framework for the continuist theory of language. It reinforces all its ingredients while re-organizing them in highly innovative form compared to traditional evolutionism. What happens in a hominid’s brain, what is the map of his ‘inner environment’, when words first enter it? It is certainly no tabula rasa. “Our newfound words must anchor themselves on the hills and valleys of a landscape of considerable complexity”, they “enhance and shape pre-existing structures, rather than generating entirely new architectures” (Dennett 1995: 378–379). In other words, language installs into slots prepared by previous stages in the evolution of preverbal intelligence.

Conclusion 203

The main referent, implicit or explicit, of the neo-evolutionist debate is again Chomsky, an illustrious example of discontinuism. The attraction of his theory lies in its great explicative power; along with the miracle of language acquisition, it explains the exclusive human peculiarity of language, the systematic nature of grammar rules, the universality of certain traits of languages, and their reciprocal translatability. In short, it answers many questions. It does leave unanswered, however, the mystery of the origin of language as something that emerged in a single species organically predisposed to it. Much of the most recent debate on the evolutionary basis of language has been aimed at solving this mystery. There is nothing to forbid us from explaining the language organ postulated by Chomsky as an adaptive product of evolution in its own right. Until recently, though, Chomsky has taken position only occasionally on this point, and always in negative terms. The notion that the adaptation of our cognitive structures to the reality of the world is the product of a Darwinian type of evolution is, according to Chomsky, an arbitrary assumption. At the most, the emergence of language in humans can be explained as a sudden genetic mutation due to chance rather than to adaptation. This is also the opinion of Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, who advanced a theory in which classical Darwinian notions of adaptation and gradualness are played down or put aside in the name of the random and sudden emergence of structures after a period of latency. This holds for language too: The universals of language are so different from anything else in nature, and so quirky in their structure, that origin as a side consequence of the brain’s enhanced capacity, rather than as a simple advance in continuity from ancestral grunts and gestures, seems indicated. […This] line of reasoning follows directly as the evolutionary reading of Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar. (Gould, quoted by Dennett 1995: 390)

The rise of linguistic universals would be a case of discontinuity; human language would be entirely new compared to previous forms of communication and expression. Its appearance is explained in non-adaptive terms. PiattelliPalmarini (1994), combining Chomsky’s theory with the discoveries of molecular biology, outlined a discontinuist model in which the adaptive teaching obtained from the environment has no weight in the emergence of language, and selection occurs from the inside within a pre-programmed chain of genetic combinations. Adaptation is a sort of evolutionary accident, where an organ is used for new functions; e.g., wings do not develop so that the insect can fly, but

204 A History of Language Philosophies

are used to fly; likewise, language does not develop so that humans can communicate, but is used to communicate. In a recent paper, which we can take as reflecting Chomsky’s present position (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch, 2002), an adaptational view of the evolution of language is envisaged as far as the sensorymotor and conceptual-intentional systems of language are concerned (the socalled faculty of language in the broad sense, or FLB). But the computational mechanism which allows the production of an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements (the faculty of language in the narrow sense, or FLN) is still considered a unique trait of the human mind which cannot be explained by adaptation. With the pieces provided by the evolutionist tradition, by paleontology and by neurological research, a biologist, Terrence Deacon, has proposed a different solution to the puzzle. There is an “unbroken continuity between human and non-human minds, and yet, at the same time, […] a singular discontinuity […] between brains that use this form of communication and brains that do not” (Deacon 1997: 13). Language indeed is “a unique anomaly”: Do animals’ vocalizations and gestures explain, describe, ask, or command? Do they argue, disagree, bargain, gossip, persuade, or entertain one another with their thoughts? […] Animal calls and displays have nothing that corresponds to noun parts or verb parts of sentences, no grammatical versus ungrammatical strings, no marking of singular and plural, no indication of tense, and not even any elements that easily map into words, except in the most basic sense of the beginning and ending of a sound. […] Though highly complex and sophisticated, the communicative behaviours in other species tend to occur as isolated signals, in fixed sequences, or in relatively unorganized combinations better described by summation than by formal rules. And their correspondences with events and behavioral outcomes, in the cases where this can be investigated, inevitably turn out to be of a one-to-one correlational nature. (ibid.: 31–33)

Non-verbal communication, made up of vocalizations, mimicry, and gestures, while constituting an essential part of human communication, is not a language of gestures instead of words, as witnessed by the fact that it is difficult to verbally translate it, nor does it make any sense to ask ourselves to what verbal category a laugh belongs, whether a sob is in the present or in the past, or whether a sequence of facial expressions has been correctly produced. The difficulty, in short, is not that of finding an interface between human and non-human language, but between language and any other form of communication, whether human or not. In the same way there are highly complex and sophisticated forms of animal communicative behavior that have no linguistic equivalent.

Conclusion 205

The emergence of language as “unique anomaly” can only be explained in terms of a specifically human process of co-evolution of language and brain, a reciprocal adaptation between respective structures. “Language universals are […] only statistical universals, but supported by the astronomical statistics of millions of speakers over tens of thousands of years. They are, despite their almost epiphenomenal origin, for all practical purposes, categorically universal” (Deacon 1997: 121). However, what remains relatively unvaried in the different languages (the deep structure) has only a weak influence on the extremely variable superficial structures they realize. Thus, for Deacon, the theory of a grammar instinct or a genetic predisposition to specific syntactic structures represented in the brain by invariant neural processes is not very plausible. Deacon’s book, a problematic and provisional but nevertheless important summary of the natural history of speech, ends significantly with a few pages on the philosophy of mind. The idea of co-evolution is a possible key to the solution of the so-called grounding problem, i.e., the problem of “explaining how our thoughts and words are guaranteed a correspondence with reality” (p. 439). It is, in other words, the problem of the adequacy of the processes that allow us to name and know through symbols and apply those symbols, with reasonable success, to the multiplicity of experience. A pre-Darwinian philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder, had already appealed as best he could at the time, i.e., in speculative terms, to the notion of co-evolution to explain this adequacy of our mental structures to the world. In his Metakritik, he rejects the Kantian separation of sense and understanding: if these two branches of human knowing were originally separate, how could they ever be joined again in experience? The two cotyledons of a plant already reveal their common tendency to constitute a whole: one develops in the air, the other on the ground; two buds together form the plant and it is even possible to exchange them. In animals, all sensations and powers combine in a single instinct… Could man be such a patchy creature that only in him the two extremes do not fit one another? (Herder 1799: I, 161)

Suggestions for further reading Chomsky
: Koerner & Tajima 1986; Kasher 1991; Otero, ed. 1993; McGilvray 1999; Cowie 1999: 151–308; Joseph 2002: 133–155, et passim
; Koerner 2002, Chaps. 7–8. Fodor
: Lycan, ed. 1990: 275–337; Loewer & Rey, eds. 1991; Botterill & Carruthers 1999: 49–76; Cowie 1999: 71–147. Bruner
: Bakhurst & Shanker 2001.



206 A History of Language Philosophies

Cognitive linguistics
: Langacker 1987–1991; Rudzka-Ostyn 1988; Langacker 1990; Dirven & Verspoor, eds. 1999; Janssen & Redeker, eds. 1999; Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Langacker 1999; Albertazzi, ed. 2000; Langacker 2000; Lee 2002; Talmy 2003. Language origin and evolution
: Bickerton 1990, 1995; Dennett 1995; Maynard Smith & Szathmáry 1995: 279–309; Sampson 1997; Hurford et al. 1998; Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1998; Taylor & Shanker 1999; Calvin & Bickerton 2000; Lieberman 2000; Trabant & Ward, eds. 2001; Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002; Hauser & Konishi, eds. 2003.



Bibliography

A. Primary sources Abelard [1079–1142/44]. 1927–1933. Philosophische Schriften, ed. by Bernhard Geyer. 2 vols. Münster: Aschendorff. Abelard. 1927. Logica ingredientibus = Philosophische Schriften I. Abelard. 1933. Logica nostrorum petitioni sociorum. In Philosophische Schriften II. 505–580. Abelard. 1956. Dialectica, ed. by Lambert M. de Rijk. Assen: Van Gorcum. Alain de Lille [d.1203]. 1981. Regulae coelestis iuris, ed. by Nikolaus M. Häring. Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen-âge 48.97–226. Alighieri, Dante [1265–1321]. 1990. De vulgari eloquentia, ed. by Claudio Marazzini. Milano: Mondadori. Alighieri, Dante. 1989. The Banquet, transl. by C. Ryan. Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri [Convivio, ed. by Giorgio Inglese. Milano: Fabbri, 2001.] Anselm of Canterbury [1033–1109]. 1964. The De grammatico of St. Anselm: The theory of paronymy, transl. by D. P. Henry. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. Aristotle [384–322 B.C.]. 1968–1983. Works. 23 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Aristotle. 1973. On interpretation, transl. by H. P. Cooke. In Works I. 111–179. Aristotle. 1973a. The Categories, transl. by H. P. Cooke. In Works I. 1–108. Aristotle. 1975. On the Soul, transl. by W. S. Hett. In Works VIII. 1–203. Aristotle. 1976. Topics, transl. by E. S. Forster. In Works II. 265–739. Aristotle. 1978. Sophistical Refutations, transl. by E. S. Forster. In Works III. 1–155. Aristotle. 1980. Metaphysics, transl. by H. Tredennick = Works XVII–XVIII. Aristotle. 1982. The Art of Rhetoric, transl. by J. H. Freese = Works XXII. Aristotle. 1982a. The Poetics, transl. by W. H. Fyfe. In Works XXIII. 1–118. Arnauld, Antoine [1612–1694] & Claude Lancelot [1615?-1695]. 1966 [1660]. Grammaire générale et raisonnée, ed. by Herbert E. Brekle. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann. Arnauld, Antoine. & Pierre Nicole [1625–1695]. 1965–1967 [1662]. La logique ou art de penser, ed. by H. E. Brekle. 2 vols. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann. Augustine [Aurelius Augustinus, 354–430]. 1952. The first catechetical instruction [De catechizandis rudibus], transl. by J. P. Christopher. London: Longmans Green. Augustine. 1968. The Teacher [De Magistro], transl. by R. P. Russell. Washington: Catholic University of America. Augustine. 1975. De dialectica, transl. by B. Darrel Jackson. Dordrecht & Boston: Reidel. Augustine. 1977–1981. The City of God [De civitate dei], transl. by D. B. Zema & Gerald G. Walsh. Washington: Catholic University of America.

208 A History of Language Philosophies

Augustine. 1991ff. Works, ed. by Edmund Hill. New York: New City Press. Augustine. 1991. The Trinity [De trinitate], transl. by E. Hill = Works V. Augustine. 1996. Teaching Christianity [De doctrina christiana], transl. by E. Hill = Works XI. Augustine. 1996. Confessions [Confessiones], transl. by M. Boulding = Works I. Beauzée, Nicolas [1717–1789]. 1974 [1767]. Grammaire générale, ed. by B. E. Bartlett. 2 vols. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann. Beccaria, Cesare [1738–1794]. 1984 [1770–1809]. Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile. In Scritti filosofici e letterari, 65–232. Milano: Mediobanca. Benveniste, Émile [1902–1976]. 1966–1974. Problèmes de linguistique générale. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Bergson, Henri. [1859–1941]. 1959. Oeuvres. Paris: PUF. Bergson, Henri. 1959a [1889]. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. In Oeuvres, 1–156. Bergson, Henri. 1959b [1934]. La pensée et le mouvant. In Oeuvres, 1253–1330. [A collection of articles, 1903–1923.] Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution, transl. by A. Mitchell. New York: Dover. [L’évolution créatrice, 1907.] Berkeley, George [1685–1753]. 1963 [1709]. An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision. In Works on Vision, ed. by Colin Murray Turbayne, 7–97. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill. Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus [470/480–525]. 1860. Anicii Manlii Severini Boetii in Categorias Aristotelis libri IV. Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus. LXIV. 59–294. Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. 1877–1880. Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri Hermeneias, ed. by Carl Meiser. 2 vols. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. 1906. Anicii Manlii Severini Boetii in Isagogen Porphyrii comm., ed. by Samuel Brandt. Vienna: Tempsky. Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. 1973. De Trinitate. In The Theological Tractates, transl. by H. E. Stewart, 3–31. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Boethius of Denmark [fl.1270s]. 1969. Modi significandi sive Quaestiones super Priscianum, ed. by Jan Pinborg & Heinrich Roos. Boethii Daci Opera IV/1. Copenhagen: Bagge. Bopp, Franz [1791–1867]. 1836. Vocalismus, oder Sprachvergleichende Kritiken über J. Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik. Berlin: Nicolai. Bréal, Michel [1832–1915]. 1877 [1868]. Les idées latentes du langage. In Mélanges de mythologie et linguistique, 295–322. Paris: Hachette. Bréal, Michel. 1884. Introduction to A.-H. Sayce, Principes de philologie comparée, i–viii. Paris: Delgrave. Bréal, Michel. 1976 [1897]. Essai de sémantique. Genève: Slatkine. Bühler, Karl [1879–1963]. 1990. Theory of Language: The representational function of language, transl. by D. Fraser Goodwin. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. [Sprachtheorie, 1934.] Burke, Edmund [1729–1797]. 1958 [1757]. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. by James T. Boulton. London: Routledge. Carnap, Rudolf [1891–1970]. 1937. The Logical Syntax of Language, transl. by A. Smeaton. London: Kegan Paul. [Logische Syntax der Sprache, 1934.]

Bibliography 209

Cassirer, Ernest [1874–1945]. 1953. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. I. Language, transl. by R. Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. I. Die Sprache, 1923.] Cassirer, Ernest. 1945. “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics”. Word 1.99–120. Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de [1632–1704]. 1947 [1775]. Traité des animaux. In Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. by Georges Le Roy, I. 337–379. Paris: PUF. Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de. 1981 [1780]. La logique ou les premiers développements de l’art de penser. Paris: Vrin. Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de. 1986 [1775]. Cours d’étude pour l’instruction du Prince de Parme: Grammaire, ed. by Ulrich Ricken. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de. 2001. Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, transl. and ed. by Hans Aarsleff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, 1746.] Cordemoy, Gerauld de [1626–1694]. 1668. A Philosophicall Discourse concerning Speech. [Repr., Delmar, N.Y: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1970.] [Discours physique de la parole, 1668.] Davidson, Donald. 1994 [1917–2003]. “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality. Intentions, categories, ends, ed. by R. Grandy & R. Warner, 57–174. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Descartes, René [1596–1650]. 1897 [1629]. Letter to Mersenne. Oeuvres, ed. by Charles Adam & Paul Tannery, I. 76–92. Paris: Cerf. Die Fragmente zur Dialektik der Stoiker. 1987–1988, ed. by K. Hülser. 4 vols. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Diogenes Laertius [3rd cent.]. 1965. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, transl. by R. D. Hicks. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Dionysius the Areopagite [or Pseudo-Dionysius: fl. c.500]. 1987. The Divine Names. In The Complete Works, transl. by Colm Luibheid, 47–131. New York: Paulist Press. Du Marsais, César Chesneau [1676–1756]. 1987 [1730]. Les véritables principes de la grammaire, ed. by Françoise Douay-Soublin. Paris: Fayard. Epicurus [341–c.270 B.C.]. “Letter to Herodotus”. See Diogenes Laertius. 1965, 605–607. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb [1762–1814]. 1845 [delivered 1808]. Reden an die deutsche Nation. Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by Immanuel Hermann Fichte, VII. 257–499. Leipzig: Veit [Repr., Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1965.] Fichte, Johann Gottlieb [1762–1814]. 1966 [1795]. Von der Sprachfähigkeit und dem Ursprung der Sprache. In Werke, ed. by Reinhard Lauth & Hans Jacob, III. 81–127. Stuttgart & Bad Cannstatt: Frommann. Frédegis of Tour [fl. c.800]. 1956. De nihilo et tenebris, ed. by Francesco Corvino. Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 11/3–4. 280–285. Frege, Gottlob [1848–1925]. 1967. “‘Begriffsschrift’. A formula language, modeled upon that of arithmetic, for pure thought”. From Frege to Gödel, 1879–1931, ed. by Jean van Heijenoort, 1–82. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. [Begriffschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens, 1879.] Frege, Gottlob. 1984. On Sense and Meaning. In Collected Papers, ed. by Brian McGuinness, 157–177. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. [Über Sinn und Bedeutung, 1892.]

210 A History of Language Philosophies

Gabelentz, Georg von der [1840–1893]. 1901 [1891]. Die Sprachwissenschaft. Ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse. 2nd ed. Leipzig: C. H. Tauchnitz [Repr. with an Introd. by E. Coseriu, Tübingen: TBL Verlag, 1969.] Grice, Paul [1913–1988]. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Grimm, Jacob [1785–1836]. 1984. On the Origin of Language, transl. by R. A. Wiley. Leiden: E. J. Brill. [Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 1851.] Heidegger, Martin [1889–1976]. 1982. On the Way to Language, transl. by P. D. Hertz. New York: Harper Collins. [Unterwegs zur Sprache, 1959.] Heidegger, Martin. 2001. “Language”. Poetry, Language, Thought, transl. by A. Hofstadter, 187–208. New York: Harper Collins [Die Sprache, 1950.] Herbart, Johann Friedrich [1776–1841]. 1964. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. by K. Kehrbach & O. Flügel. Aalen: Scientia Verlag. Herbart, Johann Friedrich. 1964a [1813]. Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie. In Sämtliche Werke IV. 1–294. Herbart, Johann Friedrich. [1824–1825]. 1964b. Psychologie als Wissenschaft. In Sämtliche Werke V. 177–434; VI. 1–338. Herbart, Johann Friedrich. 1964c [1831]. Briefe über die Anwendung der Psychologie auf die Pädagogik. In Sämtliche Werke IX. 339–430. Herbart, Johann Friedrich. 1964d [1840]. Psychologische Untersuchungen. In Sämtliche Werke XI. 248–343. Herder, Johann Gottfried [1744–1803]. 1969 [1799]. Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Bruxelles: Culture et civilisation. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 2002. Essay on the Origin of Language. In Philosophical Writings, ed. by Michael N. Forster, 65–164. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, 1772.] HP 1987 = Long, Anthony A. & David N. Sedley, eds. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Humboldt, Wilhelm von [1767–1835]. 1961 [1806]. Latium und Hellas. In Werke, ed. by Andreas Flitner & Klaus Giel, II. 25–64. Stuttgart: Cotta. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1968 [1810–1811]. Einleitung in das gesammte Sprachstudium. In Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Albert Leitzmann, Bruno Gebhardt & Wilhelm Richter, VII/2. 619–628. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1988. On Language: The diversity of human language-structure and its influence on the mental development of mankind, trans. by Peter Heath, with an Introduction by Hans Aarsleff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [2nd ed. with an Introduction by Michael Losonsky, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.] [Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlischen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, 1836.] Hume, David [1711–1776]. 2003 [1739–1740]. Treatise of Human Nature. New York: Dover. Husserl, Edmund [1859–1938]. 2001. Logical Investigations, transl. by J. N. Findlay, ed. by Dermot Moran. London: Routledge. [Logische Untersuchungen, 1900–1901; final ed. 1922.] Iamblichus [IV–V c.]. 1821. On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, transl. by T. Taylor. Chiswick, n. p. [Repr. of the 1873 ed., Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilm International, 1977.]

Bibliography

Jakobson, Roman [1896–1982]. 1981. “Linguistics and Poetics” [1959]. Selected Writings III: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry, 18–51. The Hague: Mouton. John Scotus Erigena [810–877]. 1968–1995. Periphyseon [De divisione naturae], transl. by I. P. Sheldon-Williams & É. A. Jeauneau. 4 vols. Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Jones, William [1746–1794]. 1967. “The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus (1796)”. A Reader in Nineteenth-century Historical Indo-European Linguistics, ed. by Winfred P. Lehmann, 7–20. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lambert, Johann Heinrich [1728–1777]. 1965 [1764]. Neues Organon = Philosophische Schriften I–II, ed. by Hans Werner Arndt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Lamy, Bernard [1640–1715]. 1969 [1668]. La rhétorique ou l’art de parler. Brighton: University of Sussex. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm [1646–1716]. 1931. Dialogus [de connexione inter res et verba, et veritatis realitate]. In Philosophische Schriften, ed. by Carl I. Gerhardt, VII. 190–193. Leipzig: Lorentz. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1962 [1765]. Nouveaux Essais sur l’entendement humain = Sämtliche Schriften, VI. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Locke, John [1632–1704]. 2004 [1690]. An Essay concerning Humane Understanding. Bristol: Toemmes. Malinowsky, Bronislaw [1884–1942]. 1923. “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages”. Ogden, C. K. & Ivor A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism, 296–336. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marty, Anton [1847–1914]. 1879. Die Frage nach der geschichtlichen Entwicklung des Farbensinnes. Wien: Gerold. Marty, Anton. 1908. Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie. Halle: Max Niemeyer. Marty, Anton. 1916 [1884–1892]. “Über Sprachreflex, Nativismus und absichtliche Sprachbildung”. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Joseph Eisenmeyer, Alfred Kastil, Oskar Kraus, I/2.1–304. Halle: Max Niemeyer. Marty, Anton. 1950 [1925]. Satz und Wort. Bern: Francke. Mauthner, Fritz [1849–1923]. 1923. Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 vols. Leipzig: Felix Meiner. [Repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967–1969.] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice [1908–1961]. 1964. Signs, transl. by R. C. McCleary. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. [Signes, 1960.] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2000. The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by Claude Lefort, transl. by A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. [Le visible et l’invisible, 1964.] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception, transl. by C. Smith. London: Routledge. [Phénoménologie de la perception, 1945.] Mill, John Stuart [1806–1873]. 1996. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. London: Routledge. [= Collected Works, 7–8]. Montaigne, Michel de [1533–1592]. 1991. An Apology for Raymond Sebond. In The Complete Essays, transl. by M. A. Screech, 489–683. London: Penguin. [Apologie pour R. S., 1576.] Nizolio, Mario [1488–1567]. 1956 [1553]. De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra pseudophilosophos, ed. by Quirinus Breen. Roma: Bocca.

211

212 A History of Language Philosophies

Ockham, William [c.1285–c.1349]. 1974. Summa logicae, ed. by Philotheus Boehner = Opera philosophica, I. New York: Editiones Instituti Franciscani S. Bonaventurae. Paul, Hermann [1846–1921]. 1995 [final ed. 1920]. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle: Max Niemeyer. [Engl. transl. from the 2nd ed.: Principles of the history of language, by H. A. Strong, London, S. Sonnenschein & Co., 1890.] Perelman, Chaïm [1912–1984] & Lucie Olbrechts Tyteca. 1969. The New Rhetoric. A treatise in argumentation, transl. by J. Wilkinson & P. Weaver. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. [Traité de l’argumentation, 1958.] Petrus Hispanus [Pope John XXI, d. 1277]. 1972. Tractatus [Summulae logicales], ed. by Lambert M. de Rijk. Assen: Van Gorcum. Philo of Alexandria [1st c.]. 1929ff. Works. Transl. by F. H. Colson & George H. Whitaker. 10 vols. London & Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Philo of Alexandria. 1949. On the Confusion of Tongues [De Confusione linguarum]. In Works IV. 1–119. Philo of Alexandria. 1958. On Drunkenness [De ebrietate]. In Works III. 307–435. Philo of Alexandria. 1969. On the Change of Names [De mutatione nominum]. In Works V. 127–281. Philo of Alexandria. 1981. De animalibus, transl. by A. Terian. Ann Arbor: Scholars Press. Piaget, Jean [1896–1980]. 2001. Language and Thought of the Child. London: Routledge [Le langage et la pensée chez l’enfant, 1923.] Plato [427–347 B.C.]. 1961. The Sophist. In The Sophist and the Statesman, ed. by Raymond Klibansky & Elisabeth Anscombe, 1–186. London: Nelson. Plato. 1977. Cratylus, transl. by H. N. Fowler. In Works IV. 1–191. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Plotinus [205–270]. 1966–1988. Enneads, transl. by A. H. Armstrong. 7 vols. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Porphyry [234–305]. 1998. Isagoge, ed. by Alain de Libera. Paris: Vrin. Porphyry. 2000. On Abstinence from Killing Animals [De abstinentia], ed. by Gillian Clark. London: Duckworth. Proclus [c.410–485]. 1968–1997. Theologia platonica, ed. by Henri D. Saffrey & Leendert G. Westerink. 6 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Quine, Willard van Orman [1908–2001]. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Quine, Willard van Orman. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Quine, Willard van Orman. 1990. Pursuit of Truth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Reid, Thomas [1710–1796]. 2002 [1785]. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. by Derek R. Brookes & Knud Haakonssen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Reid, Thomas. 1983 [1787]. “On the Origin, Progress, and Theory of Language”. In Works, I. 70–72. Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Renan, Ernest [1823–1892]. 1947 [1848; 3rd rev. ed. 1859]. De l’origine du langage. In Oeuvres complètes, ed. by Henriette Psichari. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. VIII. 1–124. Richards, Ivor Armstrong [1893–1979]. 2001 [1936]. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Routledge. Roger Bacon [c.1210–1292/94]. 1859. Opus tertium, ed. by John S. Brewer. London: Longman. Roger Bacon. 1897–1900. Opus majus, ed. by J. Henry Bridges. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bibliography

Roger Bacon. 1902. The Greek Grammar of Roger Bacon and a Fragment of his Hebrew Grammar, ed. by Edmond Nolan & S. A. Hirsch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roger Bacon. 1978. An Unedited Part of Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus: “De Signis”, ed. by K. Margarete Fredborg. Traditio 34.75–136. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques [1712–1778]. 1999. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, transl. by F. Philip, ed. by Patrick Coleman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755.] Sapir, Edward [1884–1939]. 1966. Culture, Language, and Personality. Selected essays, ed. by David G. Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de [1857–1913]. 1966 [1959]. A Course in General Linguistics, transl. by W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. [Cours de linguistique générale, 1916.] Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph [1775–1854]. 1959. Werke, ed. by Manfred Schröter. München: C. H. Beck. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1959a [1802]. Philosophie der Kunst. In Werke III. 134–387. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1959b [1826]. Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie = Werke V. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1959c [1850]. Vorbemerkungen zu der Frage über den Ursprung der Sprache. In Werke IV. 502–510. Schlegel, August Wilhelm [1767–1845]. 1846 [1827]. De l’étymologie en général. In Oeuvres II, ed. by Édouard Böcking, 103–141. Leipzig: Weidmann. Schlegel, Friedrich [1772–1829]. 1958ff. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. by Ernst Behler. Paderborn-München: Schöningh. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1969 [1828–1829]. Philosophische Vorlesungen insbesondere über Philosophie der Sprache und des Wortes. In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. X. 309–556. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1971 [1828–1829]. Philosophie der Geschichte = Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe IX. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1977 [1808]. Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier: Ein Beitrag zur Begründung der Altertumskunde, ed. by Konrad Koerner with an Introduction by Sebastiano Timpanaro. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schleicher, August [1821–1868]. 1848. Sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen. I. Zur vergleichenden Sprachgeschichte. Bonn: König. [Repr., Frankfurt/Main: Miranda, 1983.] Schleicher, August. 1983 [1863, 1865]. “Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft”; “Über die Bedeutung der Sprache für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen”. Engl. transl. Linguistics and Evolutionary Theory. Three Essays by August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel, and Wilhelm Bleek, ed. by E. F. K. Koerner, 1–66, 75–82. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sextus Empiricus [I–II c.]. 1965–1976. Works, ed. by Robert G. Bury. 4 vols. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Sextus Empiricus. 1959. Against the Professors = Works IV. Sextus Empiricus. 1965. Outlines of Pyrrhonism = Works III. Sextus Empiricus. 1967. Against the Logicians = Works II. Steinthal, Heymann [1823–1899]. 1968 [1855]. Grammatik, Logik und Psychologie. Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Steinthal, Heymann. 1972 [1882]. Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft. Part I. Hildesheim: Georg Olms.

213

214 A History of Language Philosophies

Thomas Aquinas [c.1221–1274]. 1989. Summa theologiae, transl. by T. McDermott. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Thomas of Erfurt [c.1300]. 1971. Grammatica speculativa, ed. by Geoffrey L. Bursill-Hall. London: Longman. Varro [116–27 B.C.]. 1951. On the Latin Language [De lingua latina], transl. by R. G. Kent. 2 vols. London: Heinemann. Vico, Giambattista [1688–1744]. 1984 [1948]. The New Science, transl. by T. G. Bergin & M. H. Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press [Princípi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni, 1744.] Vico, Giambattista. 2002. The First New Science, transl. by L. Pompa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Princípi di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni, 1725.] Vossler, Karl. 1904. Positivismus und Idelismus in Sprachwissenschaft. Heidelberg: Carl Winters. Vygotsky, Lev S. [1896–1934] 1986. Thought and Language. Transl. by A. Kozulin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. [Myšlenie i recˇ’, 1934]. Wegener, Philipp [1848–1916]. 1991 [1885]. Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens, with an Engl. Introd. by Clemens Knobloch. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Whitney, William Dwight [1827–1894]. 1867. Language and the Study of Language: Twelfe lectures on the principles of linguistic science. New York: Scribner & Armstrong. [Repr., London: Routledge, 1997.] Whitney, William Dwight. 1875. The Life and Growth of Language: An outline of linguistic science. New York: Appleton. [Repr., London: Routledge, 1994.] Whorf, Benjamin Lee [1897–1941]. 1956. Language, Thought and Reality. Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig [1889–1951]. 1922. Tractatus logico-philosophicus, with an Introduction by Bertrand Russell. London: Kegan Paul. [see also Wittgenstein 2001.] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1979. Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge 1932–1935, ed. by Alice Ambrose. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001 [1961]. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, transl. by D. F. Pears & B. McGuinness. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001a [1953]. Philosophical Investigations. Philosophische Untersuchungen, transl. by G. E. M. Anscombe & R. Rhees. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wundt, Wilhelm [1832–1920]. 1900. Die Sprache [Völkerpsychologie, I]. 2 vols. Leipzig: Engelmann.

B. Secondary sources Aarsleff, Hans. 1982. From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the study of language and intellectual history. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Aarsleff, Hans. 1999. “The Rise and Decline of Adam and his Ursprache in SeventeenthCentury Thought”. Coudert, ed. 277–295. Aarsleff, Hans, L. G. Kelly & Hans-Joseph Niederehe, eds. 1987. Papers in the History of Linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Bibliography

Abraham, W. E. 1987. “The Strategy of Plato’s Philosophy of Language”. de Rijk & Braakhuis, eds. 1–26. Albertazzi, Liliana. 1990. “Brentano and Mauthner’s Critique of Language”. Brentano Studies 2.145–157. Albertazzi, Liliana, ed. 2000. Meaning and Cognition. A Multisciplinary Approach. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Alter, Stephen G. 1999. Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, race and natural theology in the nineteenth century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ammon, Ulrich, Norbert Dittmar, & Klaus J. Mattheier, eds. 1987–1988. Sociolinguistics. 2 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Amsler, Mark E. 1989. Etymology and Discourse in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Apel, Karl-Otto. 1963. Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico. Bonn: Bouvier. Arens, Hans. 1984. Aristotle’s Theory of Language and its Tradition: texts from 500 to 1750. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Arens, Hans. 1990. “‘De Magistro’. Analyse eines Dialogs von Augustinus”. Bursill-Hall et al., eds. 17–33. Arens, Katherine. 1984. Functionalism and Fin de siècle: Fritz Mauthner’s philosophy of language. Bern: Peter Lang. Arens, Katherine. 1996. On Rereading Hermann Paul’s Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. Jankowsky, ed. 105–114. Ashworth, E. J. 1985. Studies in Post-Medieval Semantics. London: Variorum Reprints. Ashworth, E. J. 1991. “Signification and Modes of Signifying in Thirteenth-Century Logic: A preface to Aquinas on analogy”. Medieval Philosophy and Theology 1. 39–67. Ashworth, E. J. 1992. “Analogy and Equivocation in Thirteenth-Century Logic: Aquinas in context”. Mediaeval Studies 64.94–135. Asmis, Elisabeth. 1996. “Epicurean Semiotics”. Manetti, ed. 155–186. Auroux, Sylvain. 1979. La sémiotique des Encyclopédistes. Paris: Payot. Auroux, Sylvain. 1981. Introduction to: Condillac, La langue des calculs. i–xxx. Lille: PUL. Auroux, Sylvain. 1986. “Actes de pensée et actes linguistiques dans la grammaire générale”. Delesalle, ed. 105–120. Auroux, Sylvain. 1990. Barbarie et philosophie. Paris: PUF. Auroux, Sylvain. 1990a. “Representation and Place of Linguistic Change before Comparative Grammar”. De Mauro & Formigari, eds. 213–238. Auroux, Sylvain. 1993. La logique des idées. Montréal: Bellarmin-Paris: Vrin. Auroux, Sylvain. 1994. La révolution technologique de la grammatisation. Liège: Pierre Mardaga. Auroux, Sylvain, ed. 1990–2000. Histoire des idées linguistiques. 3 vols. Liège: Pierre Mardaga. Auroux, Sylvain, Konrad E. F. Koerner, Hans-J. Niederhehe & Kees Versteegh, eds. 2000– 2004. History of the Language Sciences. 3 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Avramides, Anita. 1989. Meaning and Mind. An examination of a Gricean account of language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Baggioni, Daniel. 1997. Langues et nations en Europe. Paris: Payot. Baker, Mona, ed. 1998. Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies. London: Routledge.

215

216 A History of Language Philosophies

Bakhurst, David & Stuart G. Shanker. 2001. Jerome Bruner: Language, culture and self. London: Sage Publications. Baratin, Marc. 1982. “L’identité de la pensée et de la parole dans l’ancien stoïcisme”. Baratin & Desbordes, eds. 9–21. Baratin, Marc & Françoise Desbordes. 1981. L’analyse linguistique dans l’antiquité classique. I. Les théories. Paris: Klincksiek. Baratin, Marc & Françoise Desbordes. 1982. “Sémiologie et métalinguistique chez Saint Augustin”. Baratin & Desbordes, eds. 75–89. Baratin, Marc & Françoise Desbordes, eds. 1982. Signification et référence dans l’antiquité et au moyen âge [= Langage 65]. Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua. 1977. “Husserl’s Conception of a Purely Logical Grammar”. Mohanty, ed. 128–136 Barney, Rachel. 2001. Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus. New York: Garland. Beckmann, Jan Peter, ed. 1981. Sprache und Erkenntnis. 2 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bendjaballah, Sabrina. 2001. Morphology 2000. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Biard, Joël. 1981. “La redéfinition ockhamiste de la signification”. Beckmann, ed. I. 451–458. Biard, Joël. 1989. Logique et théorie du signe au XIVe siècle. Paris: Vrin. Biard, Joël. 1997. “Intention et signification chez Guillaume d’Ockham. La critique de l’être intentionnel”. Libera et al., eds. 201–220. Biard, Joël, ed. 1999. Langage, sciences, philosophie au XIIe siècle. Paris: Vrin. Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language and Species, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bickerton, Derek. 1995. Language and Human Behaviour. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Biletzki, Anat. 1997. Talking Wolves: Thomas Hobbes on the language of politics and the politics of language. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Blanken, Gerhard, Jürgen Dittmann, Hannelore Grimm, et al., eds. 1993. Linguistic Disorders and Pathologies. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Booij, Geert E., Christian Lehmann, & Joachim Mugdan. 2000. Morphologie. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Borst, Arno. 1995 [1957–1963]. Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprache und Völker. 6 vols. München: DTV. Botha, Rudolf P. 2001. “On the Role of Bridge Theories in Accounts of the Evolution of Human Language”. Language and Communication 21.61–71. Botterill, George & Peter Carruthers. 1999. The Philosophy of Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bouquet, Simon. 1997. Introduction à la lecture de Saussure. Paris: Payot. Bouquet, Simon, ed. 2003. Saussure. Paris: Herne. Braakhuis, Henricus Antonius Giovanni. 1987. “Signification, Appellation and Predication in the Ars Meliduna”. Jolivet & Libera, eds. 107–120. Braakhuis, Henricus Antonius Giovanni, Corneille H. Kneepkens & Lambert M. de Rijk, eds. 1981. English Logic and Semantics. From the end of the XIIth century to the time of Ockham and Burleigh. Nijmegen: Ingenium. Brancacci, Aldo. 1986. “Les mots et les choses: la philosophie du langage chez Démocrite”. Joly, ed. 9–28.

Bibliography 217

Bredeck, Elizabeth. 1992. Metaphors of Knowledge: Language and thought in Mauthner’s critique. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Breva Claramonte, Manuel, ed. 2000. Sanctius’ Theory of Language: A contribution to the history of Renaissance linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Brind’Amour, Lucie & Eugene Vance, eds. 1983. Archéologie du signe. Toronto: Institut pontifical d’études médiévales. Bronckart, J.P. 1977. Théories du langage. Une introduction critique. Bruxelles: Pierre Mardaga. Bruner, Jerome. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1997. “Celebrating Divergence: Piaget and Vygotsky”. Human Development 40. 63–73. Brunschwig, Jacques. 1977. “Epicure et le problème du langage privé”. Revue de sciences humaines 156. 157–177. Buridant, Claude. 1983. “Translatio medievalis. Théorie et pratique de la traduction médiévale”. Travaux de linguistique et de littérature 21/1.81–136. Buridant, Claude. 1998. “Les paramètres de l’étymologie médiévale”. Buridant, ed. 11–56. Buridant, Claude, ed. 1998. L’étymologie de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance. Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Bursill-Hall, Geoffrey L. 1971. Speculative Grammar in the Middle Ages. The doctrine of the partes orationis of the Modistae. The Hague: Mouton. Bursill-Hall, Geoffrey L. 1971a. Introduction to Thomas of Erfurt 1971, 1–126. Bursill-Hall, Geoffrey L. 1976. “Some Notes on the Grammatical Theory of Boethius of Dacia”. History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, ed. by Herman Parret, 164–188. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bursill-Hall, Geoffrey L. 1996. “More Notes on the Grammatical Theory of Boethius of Dacia: The partes orationis”. Linguists and their Diversions, ed. by Vivien Law & Werner Hüllen, 53–98. Münster: Nodus. Bursill-Hall, Geoffrey L., Sten Ebbesen & Konrad Koerner, eds. 1990. De ortu grammaticae: Studies in medieval grammar and linguistic theory. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Buzzetti, Dino & Maurizio Ferriani, eds. 1987. Speculative Grammar, Universal Grammar, and Philosophical Analysis of Language. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bynon, Theodora & F. R. Palmer, eds. 1986. Studies in the History of Western Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calvin, William H. & Derek Bickerton. 2000. Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the human brain. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Camargo, Martin. 1986. “Rhetoric”. The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages, ed. by David L. Wagner, 96–124. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Carr, Thomas M. 1990. Descartes and the Resilience of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1945. “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics”. Word 1.97–120. Charles, David. 2003. Aristotle on Meaning and Essence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chenu, M.-D. 1957. La théologie au douzième siècle. Paris: Vrin. Chevalier, Jean-Claude. 1968. Histoire de la syntaxe. Naissance de la notion de complément dans la grammaire française (1530–1750). Genève: Droz. Chiesa, Curzio. 1986. “Symbole et signe dans le De interpretatione”. Joly, ed. 202–218.

218 A History of Language Philosophies

Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1966. Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper and Row. Chomsky, Noam. 1980. Rules and Representations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Chomsky, Noam. 1988. Language and the Problems of Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam. 2000. New Horizons in the Theory of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Christensen, Carleton B. 1991. Language and Intentionality. A critical examination of John Searle’s later theory of speech acts and intentionality. Würzburg: Königshausen & Naumann. Christy, T. Craig. 1983. Uniformitarianism in Linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Clark, John & Colin Yallop. 1995. Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Clarke, Edwin & L. S. Jacyna. 1987. Nineteenth-century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clérico, Geneviève & Irène Rosier, eds. 1982. Statut des langues et approches des langues à la Renaissance [= Histoire Epistémologie Langage 4/2]. Cloeren, Hermann J. 1988. Language and Thought. German approaches to analytical philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Cook, John W. 2000. Wittgenstein. Empiricism and language. New York: Oxford University Press. Copeland, Rita. 1991. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cosenza, Giovanna. 1990. “Husserl’s Semiotics: From psychology to phenomenology of signs”. Versus 57. 117–133. Coseriu, Eugenio. 1983. “Adam Smith and the Beginnings of Language Typology”. Historiographia Linguistica 10. 1/2: 1–12. Coudert, Allison P., ed. 1999. The Language of Adam. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Courtenay, William J. 1991. “Nominales and Nominalism in the Twelfth Century”. Jolivet et al., eds. 11–48. Courtenay, William J. 1991a. “In Search of Nominalism: Two centuries of Historical Debate”. Gli studi di filosofia medievale fra Otto e Novecento, ed. by Rüdi Imbach & Alfonso Maierù, 233–251. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura. Covington, Michael A. 1984. Syntactic Theory in the High Middle Ages. Modistic models of sentence structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Covington, Michael A. 1986. Grammatical Theory in the Middle Ages. Bynon & Palmer, eds. 23–42. Cowan, William, Michael K. Foster & Konrad Koerner, eds. 1986. New Perspectives in Language, Culture, and Personality. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Cowie, Fiona. 1999. What’s within? Nativism reconsidered. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cram, David. 2000. George Dalgarno on Universal Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cram, David, Andrew Linn, & Elke Nowak, eds. 1999. History of Linguistics 1996. 2 vols. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Creery, Walter E., ed. 1991. George Berkeley. Critical Assessments. I. Philosophy of Language and the Theory of Vision. London: Routledge.

Bibliography 219

Dahan, Gilbert. 1998. “L’entrée de la Rhetorique d’Aristote dans le monde latin entre 1240 et 1270”. Dahan & Rosier-Catach, eds. 65–86. Dahan, Gilbert, Irène Rosier & Luisa Valente. 1995. “L’arabe, le grec, l’hébreu et les vernaculaires”. Ebbesen, ed. 265–321. Dahan, Gilbert & Irène Rosier-Catach, eds. 1998. La rhétorique d’Aristote: traditions et commentaires de l’antiquité au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Vrin. Darnell, Regna. 1990. Edward Sapir: Linguist, anthropologist, humanist. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Dascal, Marcelo. 1983. Pragmatics and the Philosophy of Mind. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Dascal, Marcelo. 1987. Leibniz. Language, signs and thought. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, John Benjamins. Dascal, Marcelo. 1990. “Leibniz on Particles. Linguistic Form and Comparatism”. De Mauro & Formigari, eds. 31–60. Dascal, Marcelo. 2003. “On the Epistemological Role of Natural Languages according to Leibniz”. Historiographia linguistica 30/1–2.181–204. Dascal, Marcelo, ed. 1992–1996. Sprachphilosophie. 2 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Dascal, Marcelo & Yaron Senderowicz. 1992. “How Pure is Pure Reason? Language, empirical concepts and empirical laws in Kant’s theory of knowledge”. Histoire Epistémologie Langage 14/2.129–152. Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of language and the human brain. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Delesalle, Simone, ed. 1986. Histoire des conceptions de l’énonciation [= Histoire Epistémologie Langage 8/2]. De Mauro, Tullio. 1972. Introduction and Notes to F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. [Italian ed. 1967.] De Mauro, Tullio. 1992. “Ancora Saussure e la semantica”. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 46. 101–109. De Mauro, Tullio & Lia Formigari, eds. 1990. Leibniz, Humboldt, and the Origins of Comparativism. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Demonet, Marie-Luce. 1992. Les voix du signe. Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance 1480–1580. Paris: Champion. Demonet, Marie-Luce. 1998. “Renaissances étymologiques”. Buridant, ed. 57–67. Demonet, Marie-Luce. 1998a. “Les ‘incunables des langues’, ou la place de l’onomatopée dans l’étymologie à la Renaissance, de Jean Chéradame à Etienne Pasquier”. Buridant, ed. 201–241. Dennett, Daniel C. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Ideas. Evolution and the meanings of life. London: Penguin Books. Desbordes, Françoise. 1982. “Le langage sceptique. Notes sur le ‘Contre les grammairiens’ de Sextus Empiricus”. Baratin & Desbordes, eds. 47–74. Desbordes, Françoise. 1986. “L’énonciation dans la rhétorique antique: les ‘figures de pensée’”. Delesalle, ed. 25–38. Desbordes, Françoise. 1986a. “Elementa. Remarques sur le rôle de l’écriture dans la linguistique antique”. Joly, ed. 339–355.

220 A History of Language Philosophies

Dinneen, Francis P. 1987. “Supposition in Petrus Hispanus’ Summulae logicales”. Aarsleff et al., eds. 117–127. Dinneen, Francis P. 1990. “Suppositio in Petrus Hispanus. Linguistic Theories and Models”. Bursill-Hall et al. eds. 69–85. Dirven, René & Marjolijn Verspoor, eds. 1999. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Dominicy, Marc. 1984. La naissance de la grammaire moderne. Langage, logique et philosophie à Port-Royal. Liège: Pierre Mardaga. Droixhe, Daniel. 1978. La linguistique et l’appel à l’histoire (1600–1800). Rationalisme et révolutions positivistes. Genève: Droz. Droixhe, Daniel. 1987. De l’origine du langage aux langues du monde. Etudes sur le XVIIe et le XVIIIe siècles. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Droixhe, Daniel. 1996. “Adam ou Babel? Théorie du signe et linguistique biblique de Descartes à Leibniz”. Gambarara et al. eds. 115–128. Droixhe, Daniel. ed. 1984. Genèse du comparatisme indo-européen [= Histoire Epistémologie Langage 6/2.] Dronke, Peter, ed. 1988. A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duchez, Marie-Elisabeth. 1981. “Description grammaticale et description arithmétique des phénomènes musicaux: le tournant du IXe siècle”. Beckmann, ed. II. 561–579. Dummett, Michael. 1981. The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy. London: Duckworth. Dummett, Michael. 1983. Filosofia del linguaggio. Saggio su Frege. Casale Monferrato: Marietti. [Rev. and enl. ed. of Frege: Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth 1973.] Dummett, Michael. 1993. Origins of Analytical Philosophy. London: Duckworth. Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dutz, Klaus & Stefano Gensini, eds. 1996. Im Spiegel des Verstandes. Studien zu Leibniz. Münster: Nodus. Ebbesen, Sten. 1981. “Early Supposition Theory (12th–13th cent)”. Libera, ed. 35–48. Ebbesen, Sten. 1983. “The Odyssey of Semantics from the Stoa to Buridan”. History of Semiotics, ed. by Achim Eschbach, & Jürgen Trabant. 67–85. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ebbesen, Sten. ed. 1995. Sprachtheorien in Spätantike und Mittelalter (= Geschichte der Sprachtheorie, ed. by Peter Schmitter, III). Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Ebbesen, Sten & Russell L. Friedman, eds. 1999. Medieval Analysis in Language and Cognition. Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. Eco, Umberto. 1995. The Quest for the Perfect Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. [La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea. 1993.] Eco, Umberto. 2000. Kant and the Platypus. Essays on language and cognition. San Diego, Ca.: Harcourt Brace. [Kant e l’ornitorinco, 1997.] Eco, Umberto. 2001. Experiences in Translation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Eco, Umberto. 2003. Mouse or Rat? Translation as negotiation. London: Weidenfeld-Orion. Eco, Umberto & Costantino Marmo, eds. 1989. On the Medieval Theory of Signs. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Edelman, Gerald M. 1992. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the matter of the mind. New York: Basic Books.

Bibliography 221

Edie, James M. 1977. “Husserl’s Conception of ‘The Grammatical’ and Contemporary Linguistics”. Mohanty, ed. 137–196. Egidi, Rosaria, ed. 1995. Wittgenstein: Mind and Language. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Egli, Urs. 1986. “Stoic Syntax and Semantics”. Historiographia linguistica 13. 281–306. Elffers, Els. 1999. “Predecessors of Cognitive Semantics and Speech Act Theory?”. Cram et al., eds. II. 307–320. Eling, Paul. 1994. Reader in the History of Aphasia. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Eschbach, Achim. 1990. Introduction to Karl Bühler 1990, xiii–xlix. Eschbach, Achim, ed. 1984. Bühler Studien, 2 vols. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Eschbach, Achim, ed. 1988. Karl Bühler’s Theory of Language. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Esterhammer Angela. 2001. The Romantic Performative: Language and action in British and German Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fabbro, Franco & R. E. Asher, eds. 1999. The Concise Encyclopedia of Language Pathology. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Fava, Elisabetta, ed. 2002. Clinical Linguistics: Theory and applications in speech pathology and therapy. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fisiak, Jacek, ed. 1990. Historical Linguistics and Philology. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Fisiak, Jacek, ed. 1997. Linguistic Reconstruction and Typology. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Fodor, Jerry A. 1975. The Language of Thought, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. The Modularity of Mind: An essay on faculty psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Fodor, Jerry A. 1994. The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and its semantics. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press. Fodor, Jerry A. 1998. Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Foley, William A. 1997. Anthropological Linguistics: An introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Føllesdal, Dagfinn. 1994. “Husserl and Frege: A contribution to elucidating the origins of phenomenological philosophy”. Haaparanta, ed. 3–47. Formigari, Lia. 1988. Language and Experience in 17th-century British Philosophy. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins [Linguistica ed empirismo nel Seicento inglese, 1970.] Formigari, Lia. 1993. Signs, Science and Politics: Philosophy of language in Europe 1700–1830. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. [L’esperienza e il segno. Filosofie del linguaggio tra Illuminismo e Restaurazione, 1990.] Formigari, Lia. 1994. La linguistique empiriste face au kantisme. Liège: Pierre Mardaga. Fought, John G., ed. 1999. Leonard Bloomfield: Critical assessments of leading linguists. 3 vols. London: Routledge. Frank, Armin Paul, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, et al. eds. 2004–2005. Übersetzung. Ein Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung. 2 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Frawley, William. 1997. Vygotsky and Cognitive Science. Language and the unification of the social and the computational mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Fredborg, Karin Margareta. 1981. “Roger Bacon on ‘Impositio vocis ad significandum’”. Braakhuis et al., eds. 167–191. Fredborg, Karin Margareta. 1987. “The Scholastic Teaching of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages”. Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age grec et latin 55. 85–105. Fredborg, Karin Margareta. 1988. “Speculative Grammar”. Dronke, ed. 177–195.

222 A History of Language Philosophies

Fredborg, Karin Margareta. 1995. “The Unity of the Trivium”. Ebbesen, ed. 325–338. Fresina, Claudio. 1990. “L’historiographie linguistique à l’épreuve de l’étymologie ancienne”. Archives et documents de la Société d’histoire et d’épistémologie des sciences du langage 2/3.93–115. Fumaroli, Marc. 1980. L’Age de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et ‘res literaria’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique. Paris: Albin Michel. Fumaroli, Marc, ed. 1999. Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne, 1450–1950. Paris: PUF. Gambarara, Daniele, Stefano Gensini, & Antonino Pennisi, eds. 1996. Language Philosophies and the Language Sciences. Münster: Nodus. Garnham, Alan. 1994. Psycholinguistics: The central topics. London: Routledge. Gensini, Stefano. 1995. “Criticism of the Arbitrariness of Language in Leibniz and Vico”. Iconicity in Language, ed. by Raffaele Simone, 3–18. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gensini, Stefano. 2000. “De linguis in universum”: On Leibniz’s ideas on languages. Five essays, Münster: Nodus. Gessinger, Joachim. 1994. Auge und Ohr. Studien zur Erforschung der Sprache am Menschen, 1700–1850. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Giard, Luce. 1982. “Lorenzo Valla: la langue comme lieu du vrai”. Histoire Epistémologie Langage 4/2. 5–19. Giard, Luce. 1984. “Du latin médiéval au pluriel des langues. Le tournant de la Renaissance”. Histoire Epistémologie Langage 6/1. 35–55. Gipper, Helmut. 1992. Wilhelm von Humboldts Bedeutung für Theorie und Praxis moderner Sprachforschung. Münster: Nodus. Glidden, David K. 1994. “Parrots, Pyrrhonists and Native Speakers”. Language and Languages: Companions to ancient thought, ed. by Stephen Everson, III. 129–148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, Rudy. 2002. The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages. London: Routledge. Graffi, Giorgio. 2001. 200 Years of Syntax: Critical survey. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Greenberg, Joseph G. 1974. Language Typology: A historical and analytical overview. The Hague: Mouton. Greenberg, Joseph G., ed. 1963. Universals of Language. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Greenberg, Joseph G., ed. 1978. Universals of Human Language. 4 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Grewendorf, Gunther & Georg Meggle, eds. 2002. Speech Acts, Mind, and Social Reality. Discussions with John R. Searle. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Grolier, Eric de, ed. 1983. Glossogenetics: The origin and evolution of language. London: Routledge. Haaparanta, Leila, ed. 1994. Mind, Meaning and Mathematics. Essays on the philosophical views of Husserl and Frege. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Haaparanta, Leila & Jaakko Hintikka, eds. 1986. Frege synthetized. Dordrecht: Reidel. Hacker, Peter Michael Stephan. 2001. Wittgenstein: Connections and controversies. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bibliography 223

Haggblade, Elisabeth. 1983. “Contributors to the Beginnings of Language Typology”. Historiographia linguistica 10. 1/2.13–24. Hale, Bob & Crispin Wright, eds. 1997. A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hall, Robert A. Jr. 2000. Life for Language. A Biographical Memoir of Leonard Bloomfield. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hall, Robert A. Jr., ed. 1987. Leonard Bloomfield: Essays on his life and work. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Harris, Roy. 1987. Reading Saussure. A Critical commentary on the Cours de linguistique générale. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court. Harris, Roy. 2001. Saussure and his Interpreters. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Harris, Roy & Talbot J. Taylor. 1997. Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western tradition from Socrates to Saussure. London: Routledge. Haspelmath, Martin, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, & Wolfgang Raible, eds. 2001. Language Typology and Language Universals, 2 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hassler, Gerda. 1984. Sprachtheorien der Aufklärung. Zur Rolle der Sprache im Erkenntnissprozess. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Hassler, Gerda. 1999. “Diversity of Human Languages and Universals of Thought: An 18thcentury debate in the Berlin Academy” Cram et al. eds. II. 163–174. Hassler, Gerda & Peter Schmitter, eds. 1999. Sprachdiskussion und Beschreibung von Sprachen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Münster: Nodus. Hauser, Marc D. 2000. “A Primate Dictionary? Decoding the function and meaning of another species’s vocalization”. Cognitive Science 24. 445–475. Hauser, Marc D. N., Noam Chomsky & W. T. Fitch. 2002. “The Faculty of Language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve”. Science 298. 1569–1579. Hauser, Marc D. & Mark Konishi, eds. 2003. The Design of Animal Communication. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Henry, Desmond Paul. 1964: see Anselm of Canterbury 1964. Henry, Desmond Paul. 1967. The Logic of Saint Anselm. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Henry, Desmond Paul. 1974. The Commentary on De Grammatico. Dordrecht: Reidel. Hoenigswald, Henry M. 1990. “Descent, Perfection, and Comparative Method since Leibniz”. De Mauro & Formigari, eds. 119–132. Hoffmann, Philippe. 1987. “Catégories et langage selon Simplicius”. Simplicius: Sa vie, son oeuvres, sa survie, ed. by Ilsetraut Hadot, 61–90. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hovdhaugen, Even. 1990. “Una et eadem: Some observations on Roger Bacon’s Greek Grammar”. Bursill-Hall et al., eds. 117–131. Hovdhaugen, Even, ed. 1996. …and the Word was God: Missionary linguistics and missionary grammar. Münster. Nodus. Hüllen, Werner. 1989. Their Manner of Discourse. Nachdenken über Sprache im Umkreise der Royal Society. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Hunt, Richard W. 1980. The History of Grammar in the Middle Ages: Collected papers, ed. by G. L. Bursill-Hall. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hurford, James R., Michael Studdert-Kennedy & Chris Knight. 1998. Approaches to the Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Innis, Robert E. 1982. Karl Bühler: Semiotic foundations of language theory. New York: Plenum.

224 A History of Language Philosophies

Innis, Robert E. 1988. “The Thread of Subjectivity: Philosophical Remarks on Bühler’s Language Theory”. Eschbach, ed. 77–106. Isaac, Jules 1953. Le Peri Hermeneias en Occident de Boèce à Saint Thomas. Paris: Vrin. Itkonen, Esa. 1991. Universal History of Linguistics: India, China, Arabia, Europe. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jackendoff, Ray. 1993. Patterns in the Mind: Language and human mind. New York: Basic Books. Jackendoff, Ray. 1997. The Architecture of the Language Faculty. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Jacobi, Klaus. 1988. Logic: The later twelfth century. Dronke, ed. 227–251. Jacobs, Joachim, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld, & Theo Vennemann, eds. 1993–1995. Syntax. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Jankowsky, Kurt R. 1972. The Neogrammarians: A Re-evaluation of their place in the development of linguistic science. The Hague: Mouton. Jankowsky, Kurt R., ed. 1996. Multiple Perspectives on the Historical Dimensions of Language. Münster: Nodus. Janssen, Theo & Gisela Redeker, eds. 1999. Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, scope, and methodology. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Jardine, Lisa. 1982. “Humanism and the Teaching of Logic”. Kretzmann et al., eds. 797–807. Jardine, Lisa. 1988. “Humanistic Logic”. Schmitt, ed. 173–198. Johnson-Laird, Philip. 1983. Mental Models: Towards a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciuousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson-Laird, Philip. 1988. The Computer and the Mind. An introduction to cognitive science. London: Collins. Jolivet, Jean. 1958. Godiscalc d’Orbais et la Trinité. Paris: Vrin. Jolivet, Jean. 1969. Arts du langage et théologie chez Abélard. Paris: Vrin. Jolivet, Jean. 1974. “Comparaison des théories du langage chez Abélard et chez les nominalistes du XIVe siècle”. Peter Abelard, ed. by E. M. Buytaert, 163–178. The Hague: Nijhoff. Jolivet, Jean. 1987. Aspects de la pensée médiévale: Abélard. Doctrine du langage. Paris: Vrin. Jolivet, Jean. 1987a [1970]. “Grammaire et langage selon Boèce de Dacie”. Jolivet 1987, 93–109. Jolivet, Jean. 1987b [1975]. “Vues médiévales sur les paronymes”. Jolivet 1987, 138–158. Jolivet, Jean. 1987c [1981]. “Éléments pour une étude des rapports entre la grammaire et l’ontologie au Moyen Âge”. Jolivet 1987, 203–232. Jolivet, Jean. 1987d [1981]. “Non-réalisme et platonisme chez Abélard. Essai d’interprétation”. Jolivet 1987, 257–277. Jolivet, Jean. 1992. “Trois variations médiévales sur l’universel et l’individu: Roscelin, Abélard, Gilbert de la Porrée”. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 97.111–155. Jolivet, Jean. 1999. “Sur les prédicables et les catégories chez Abélard”. Biard, ed. 165–176. Jolivet, Jean & Alain de Libera, eds. 1987. Gilbert de Poitiers et ses contemporains. Napoli: Bibliopolis. Jolivet, Jean, Zenon Kaluza, & Alain de Libera., eds. 1991. Lectionum varietates. Hommage à Paul Vignaux (1904–1987). Paris: Vrin. Joly, André, ed. 1986. Philosophie du langage et grammaire dans l’antiquité. Bruxelles & Grenoble: Ousia. Jong, Willem de. 1982. The Semantics of John Stuart Mill. Dordrecht: Reidel. Joseph, John E. 2000. Limiting the Arbitrary: Linguistic naturalism and its opposites in Plato’s Cratylus and modern theories of language. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Bibliography 225

Joseph, John E. 2002. From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays in the History of American Linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Joseph, John E. 2004. “The Linguistic Sign”. The Cambridge Companion to Saussure. Ed. by C. Sanders, 139–175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joseph, John E., Nigel Love, & Talbot J. Taylor. 2001. Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western tradition in the twentieth century. London: Routledge. Kahn, Charles. 1986. “Les formes et les choses dans le Cratyle de Platon”. Joly, ed. 91–103. Karmiloff-Smith, Annette. 1992. Beyond Modularity: A developmental perspective on cognitive science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Kasher, Asa. 1991. The Chomskian Turn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kasher, Asa, ed. 1996. Pragmatics. Critical Concepts. 6 vols. London: Routledge. Kelly, Louis G. 2002. The Mirror of Grammar. Theology, Philosophy and the Modistae. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kenny, Anthony. 2000. Frege: An introduction to the founder of modern analytic philosophy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kneepkens, Corneille Henry. 1987. “‘Suppositio’ and ‘Supponere’ in 12th-century Grammar”. Jolivet & Libera, eds. 325–351. Kneepkens, Corneille Henry. 1990. “On Medieval Syntactic Thought with Special Reference to the Notion of Construction”. Rosier, ed. 139–176. Kneepkens, Corneille Henry. 1992. “Nominalism and Grammatical Theory in the Late Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries. An Explorative Study”. Vivarium 30. 34–50. Knobloch, Clemens. 1988. Geschichte der sprachphilosophische Sprachauffassung in Deutschland von 1850 bis 1920. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Knobloch, Clemens. 1991. Introduction to Wegener 1991: xi–li. Koepke, Wulf, ed. 1990. Johann Gottfried Herder. Language, history and the Enlightenment. Columbia: Camden House. Koerner, Konrad E. F. 1973. Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and development of his linguistic thought in Western studies of language, Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg. Koerner, Konrad E. F. 1987. “Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Historical-Comparative Grammar”. Lingua e stile 22.341–365. Koerner, Konrad E. F. 1988. Saussurean Studies/Etudes saussuriennes. Genève: Slatkine. Koerner, Konrad. 1988a. “Hermann Paul and Synchronic Linguistics”. Koerner 1988, 17–50. Koerner, Konrad E. F. 1989. Practicing Linguistic Historiography. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Koerner, Konrad E. F. 1990. “The Place of Friedrich Schlegel in the Development of Historical-Comparative Linguistics”. De Mauro & Formigari, eds. 239–261. Koerner, Konrad E. F. 1990a. “Wilhelm von Humboldt and American Ethnolinguistics. Boas (1894) to Hymes (1961)”. North American Contributions to the History of Linguistics, ed. by Francis P. Dinneen & K. Koerner, 111–128. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Koerner, Konrad E. F. 1992. “The Sapir-Whorf Hypohesis: A preliminary history and a bibliographical essay”. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2.173–198. Koerner, Konrad E. F. 1995. Professing Linguistic Historiography. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Koerner, Konrad E. F. 1999. “The Concept of Revolution in Linguistics: Historical, methodological and philosophical considerations”. Cram et al., eds. I. 3–14.

226 A History of Language Philosophies

Koerner, Konrad E. F. 1999a. Linguistic Historiography. Projects and prospects. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Koerner, Konrad E. F. 2002. Towards a History of American Linguistics. London: Routledge. Koerner, Konrad E. F., ed. 1980. Progress in Linguistic Historiography. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Koerner, Konrad E. F., ed. 1984. Edward Sapir: Appraisals of his life and work. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Koerner, Konrad E. F. & Matsuji Tajima, eds. 1986. Noam Chomsky. A Personal Bibliography 1951–1986. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Koerner, Konrad E. F. & R. E. Asher, eds. 1995. Concise History of the Language Sciences. From the Sumerians to the cognitivists. Oxford: Elsevier Science. Kretzmann, Norman. 1974. “Aristotle on Spoken Sounds”. Ancient Logic and its Modern Interpretations, ed. by George Corcoran, 1–21. Dordrecht: Reidel. Kretzmann, Norman, Anthony Kenny, & Jan Pinborg, eds. 1982. The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kretzmann, Norman., ed. 1988. Meaning and Inference in Medieval Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kripke, Saul. 1982. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Labarrière, Jean-Louis. 1997. “‘Logos endiathetos’ et ‘logos prophorikos’ dans la polémique entre le Portique et la Nouvelle Académie”. L’animal dans l’antiquité, ed. by Barbara Cassin & Jean-Luis Labarrière, 259–279. Paris: Vrin. Lafont, Cristina. 2000 [1999]. The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Lagarde, J.-P. 1988. “Les parties du discours dans la linguistique moderne et contemporaine”. Langages 92.93–108. Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books. Lallot, Jean. 1988. “Origines et développement de la théorie des parties du discours en Grèce”. Les parties du discours [= Langages 92], ed. by Bernard Colombat, 11–23. Lallot, Jean. 1997. Introduction to: Apollonius Dyscole. De la construction. I. 10–84. Paris: Vrin. Lallot, Jean. ed. 1985. Études sur les grammariens grecs [= Histoire Epistémologie Langage 7/1]. Lallot, Jean, ed. 2000. Horizons de la grammaire alexandrine [= Histoire Epistémologie Langage 22/1.] Langacker, Ronald W. 1987–1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. 2 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1990. Concept, Image and Symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. 1999. Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. 2000. “Why a Mind is Necessary: Concepualization, grammar and linguistic semantics”. Albertazzi, ed. 25–38. Lardet, Pierre. 1986. “Enonciation et redistribution des savoirs à la Renaissance”. Delesalle, ed. 81–104. Lardet, Pierre. 1986a. “La rhétorique dans le champ du savoir: Jules-César Scaliger et ses maîtres”. Rhetorica 4.375–394.

Bibliography 227

Law, Vivien. 1993. History of Linguistic Thought in the Early Middle Ages. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Law, Vivien. 1997. Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages. London: Longman. Lawler, John M. 1998. Using Computers in Linguistics. A practical guide. London: Routledge. Lee, David. 2002. Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, Penny. 1996. The Whorf Theory Complex. A critical reconstruction. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lepschy, Giulio C., ed. 1994–1998. History of Linguistics. 4 vols. London: Longman [Storia della linguistica. 3 vols. 1990–1994.] Libera, Alain de. 1981. “Roger Bacon et le problème de l’appellatio univoca”. Braakhuis et al., eds. 193–234. Libera, Alain de. 1981a. “Supposition naturelle et appellation: aspects de la sémantique parisienne au XIIIe siècle”. Libera, ed. 63–77. Libera, Alain de. 1986. “La logique du moyen âge comme logique naturelle (Sprachlogik). Vues médiévales sur l’ambiguité”. Sprachphilosophie in Antike und Mittelalter, ed. by Burkhard Mojsisch, 403–437. Amsterdam: Grüner. Libera, Alain de. 1991. “Roger Bacon et la référence vide. Sur quelques antécédents médiévaux du paradoxe de Meinong”. Jolivet et al., eds. 85–120. Libera, Alain de. 1996. La querelle des universaux de Platon à la fin du moyen-âge. Paris: Seuil. Libera, Alain de. 1999. L’art des généralités. Théories de l’abstraction. Aubier: Paris. Libera, Alain de, ed. 1981. Sémantiques médiévales [= Histoire Epistémologie Langage 3/1]. Libera, Alain de, Abdelali Elamrani-Jamal, & Alain Galonnier, eds. 1997. Langages et philosophie. Hommage à Jean Jolivet. Paris: Vrin. Libera, Alain de & Irène Rosier-Catach. 1997. “L’analyse scotiste de la formule de la consécration eucharistique”. Marmo, ed. 171–201. Lieberman, Philip. 1991. Uniquely Human. The evolution of speech, thought, and selfless behaviour. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Lieberman, Philip. 2000. Human Language and our Reptilian Brain: The subcortical bases of speech, syntax, and thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Loewer, Barry & Georges Rey, eds. 1991. Meaning in Mind. Fodor and his critics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Long, Anthony A. 1971. “Language and Thought in Stoicism”. Problems in Stoicism, 75–113. London: Athlone Press. Luhtala, Anneli. 1995. “On the Grammarian’s Self-image in the Early Middle Ages”. History of Linguistics 1993, ed. by K. Jankowsky, 115–126. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lycan, William G., ed. 1990. Mind and Cognition. A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Magee, John. 1989. Boethius on Signification and Mind. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Maierù, Alfonso. 1988. “Logic and Trinitarian Theology. ‘De modo praedicandi ac sylogizandi in divinis’”. Kretzmann, ed. 247–295. Maierù, Alfonso. 1994. University Training in Medieval Europe. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Maloney, Thomas. 1983. “The Semiotics of Roger Bacon”. Medieval Studies 45. 120–154. Maloney, Thomas. 1983a. “Roger Bacon on the Significatum of Words”. Brind’Amour & Vance, eds. 187–211.

228 A History of Language Philosophies

Manchester, Martin L. 1985. The Philosophical Foundations of Humboldt’s Linguistic Doctrines. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Manetti, Giovanni. 1993. Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [Le teorie del segno nell’antichità classica, 1987.] Manetti, Giovanni, ed. 1988. Signs of Antiquity & Antiquity of Signs. [= Versus 50–51]. Manetti, Giovanni, ed. 1996. Knowledge through Signs. Ancient Semiotic Theories and Practices. Turnhout: Brepols. Marazzini, Claudio. 1999. Da Dante alla lingua selvaggia. Sette secoli di dibattiti sull’italiano. Roma: Carocci. Marcondes, Danilo. 1999. “The Relevance of the Discussion of the Nature of Signs in Ancient Scepticism”. Cram et al., eds. II. 41–49. Marenbon, John. 1981. From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marenbon, John. 1983. Early Medieval Philosophy (480–1150): An introduction. London: Routledge. Marenbon, John. 1987. Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An introduction. London: Routledge. Marenbon, John. 1999. “Abélard, la prédication et le verbe être”. Biard, ed. 199–216. Marmo, Costantino. 1994. Semiotica e linguaggio nella Scolastica: Parigi, Bologna, Erfurt 1270–1330. La semiotica dei Modisti. Roma: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo. Marmo, Costantino, ed. 1997. Vestigia, Imagines, verba. Semiotics and logic in medieval theological texts (XIIth–XIVth century). Turnhout: Brepols. Maynard Smith, John & Eörs Szathmáry. 1995. The Major Transition in Evolution. Oxford & New York: Freeman. McEnvoy, James. 1981. “Language, Tongue and Thought in the Writings of Robert Grosseteste”. Beckmann, ed. II. 585–592. McGilvray, James. 1999. Chomsky: Language, mind, and politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. McGinn, Marie. 1997. Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations. London: Routledge. McGuinness, Brian & Gianluigi Oliveri, eds. 1994. The Philosophy of M. Dummett. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Mehler, Jacques. 1981. “Psychology and Psycholinguistics: The impact of Chomsky and Piaget”. Piattelli-Palmarini, ed. 331–343. Metcalf, George J. 1974. “The Indo-European Hypothesis in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”. Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and paradigms, ed. by Dell Hymes, 233–257. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mey, Jacob L. 2000. Pragmatics: An introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Mey, Jacob L. & R. E. Asher, eds. 1998. The Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Michon, Cyrille. 1994. Nominalisme. La théorie de la signification d’Occam. Paris: Vrin. Modrak, Deborah K. W. 2000. Aristotles’ Theory of Language and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mohanty, J. N. 1964. Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning. The Hague: Nijhoff. Mohanty, J.N. 1977. “Husserl and Frege: A new look on their relationship”. Mohanty, ed. 22–32. Mohanty, J. N. 1977a. “Husserl’s Thesis of the Ideality of Meanings”. Mohanty, ed. 76–82. Mohanty, J. N. 1982. Husserl and Frege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Bibliography 229

Mohanty, J. N., ed. 1977. Readings on Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations. The Hague: Nijhoff. Moro, Christiane, ed. 1997. Outil et signe: perspectives actuelles de la théorie de Vygotsky. Bern: Peter Lang. Morpurgo Davies, Anna. 1998. Nineteenth-century Linguistics. [= Lepschy, ed. IV.] Mortley, Raoul. 1986. From Word to Silence. I. The Rise and Fall of Logos
; II. The Way of Negation, Christian and Greek. Bonn: Hanstein. Moss, Jean Dietz & William A. Wallace. 2003. Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Time of Galileo, Washington: Catholic University of America Press. Muller, Jean-Claude. 1986. “Early Stages of Language Comparison, from Sassetti to Sir William Jones (1786)”. Kratylos 31.1–31. Müller-Vollmer, Kurt. 1993. Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachwissenschaft. Ein kommentiertes Verzeichnis des sprachwissenschaftlichen Nachlasses. Paderborn: Schöningh. Müller-Vollmer, Kurt, ed. 1986. The Hermeneutic Reader: Texts of the German tradition from the Enlightenment to the present. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Müller-Vollmer, Kurt, ed. 1990. Herder Today. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Mulligan, Kevin. 1988. On Structure: Bühler’s linguistic and philosophical examples. Eschbach, ed. 203–226. Mulligan, Kevin, ed. 1990. Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics. The philosophy and theory of language of Anton Marty. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Munteanu, Eugen. 1999. “On the Object-Language & Metalanguage Distinction in St. Augustine’s Works De dialectica and De Magistro”. Cram et al., eds. II. 65–78. Murphy, James J. 1974. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A history of rhetorical theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Murphy, James J. 1980. “The Teaching of Latin as a Second Laguage in the 12th Century”. Studies in Medieval Linguistic Thought, ed. by E. F. K. Koerner, Hans-Joseph Niederehe & Robert H. Robins, 159–175. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Murphy, James J., ed. 1978. Medieval Eloquence. Studies in the History and Practice of Medieval Rhetoric. Berkeley: University of California Press. Murphy, James J., ed. 2003. A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Naumann, Bernd, Frans Planck & Gottfried Hofbauer, eds. 1992. Language and Earth: Elective affinities between the emerging sciences of linguistics and geology. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nerlich, Brigitte. 1990. Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal and Wegener. London: Routledge. Nerlich, Brigitte. 1992. Semantic Theories in Europe. 1830–1930. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nerlich, Brigitte & David D. Clarke. 1996. Language, Action, and Context: The early history of pragmatics in Europe and America, 1780–1930. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Niedzielski, Nancy & Dennis R. Preston. 2003. Folk Linguistics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Nielsen, Lauge Olaf. 1982. Theology and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Normore, Calvin G. 1990. Ockham on Mental Language. Smith, ed. 53–70. Normore, Calvin G. 1992. “Abelard and the School of the Nominales”. Vivarium 30.80–96. Nowak, Elke, ed. 1999. Languages differ in all their Sounds… Descriptive approaches to indigenous languages in the Americas 1500–1850. Münster: Nodus.

230 A History of Language Philosophies

Nuchelmans, Gabriel. 1973. Theories of the Proposition: Ancient and medieval conceptions of the bearers of truth and falsity. Amsterdam: North Holland Publ. Co. Nuchelmans, Gabriel. 1980. Late Scholastic and Humanist Theories of the Proposition. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company. Nuchelmans, Gabriel. 1996. Studies in the History of Logic and Semantics: 12th–17th centuries. London: Variorum Reprints. Oesterreicher, Wulf. 1981. “Wem gehört Humboldt? Zum Einfluss der französischen Aufklärung auf die Sprachphilosophie der deutschen Romantik”. Logos Semantikos, ed. by Jurgen Trabant, I. 117–135. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Olender, Maurice. 1992. The Languages of Paradise. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. [Les langues du paradis: Aryens et Sémites, un couple providentielle, 1989.] Otero, Carlos P., ed. 1993. Noam Chomsky: Critical assessments. 4 vols. London: Routledge. Ott, Walter R. 2003. Locke’s Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Padley, George Arthur. 1976–1985. Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500–1700. I. The Latin Tradition. II/1–2. Trends in Vernacular Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panaccio, Claude. 1981. “Guillaume d’Occam et les pronoms démonstratifs”. Beckmann, ed. I. 465–470. Panaccio, Claude. 1983. “Guillaume d’Occam: Signification et supposition”. Brind’Amour & Vance, eds. 265–286. Panaccio, Claude. 1984. “Propositionalism and Atomism in Ockham’s Semantics”. Franciscan Studies XLIV. 61–70. Panaccio, Claude. 1990. “Supposition naturelle et signification occamiste”. Bursill-Hall et al., eds. 255–269. Panaccio, Claude. 1992. Les mots, les concepts et les choses. La sémantique de Guillaume de Ockham et le nominalisme d’aujourd’hui. Montréal: Bellarmin & Paris: Vrin. Panaccio, Claude. 1999. “Semantics and Mental Language”. The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, ed. by Paul Vincent Spade, 53–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panaccio, Claude. 2003. Ockham on Concepts. Burlington: Ashgate. Pariente, Jean-Claude. 1984. “Grammaire et logique à Port-Royal”. Histoire Epistémologie Langage 6/1.57–75. Pariente, Jean-Claude. 1985. L’analyse du langage à Port-Royal: Six études logico-grammaticales. Paris: Minuit. Paschetto, Eugenia. 1981. “Linguaggio e magia nel De configurationibus di N. Oresme”. Beckmann, ed. II. 648–656. Pécharman, Martine. 1995. “La signification dans la philosophie du langage d’Antoine Arnauld”. J.-C. Pariente, ed. Antoine Arnauld. Philosophie du langage et de la connaissance. Paris: Vrin. Percival, W. Keith. 1982. “Changes in the Approach to Language”. Kretzmann et al., eds. 808–817. Percival, W. Keith. 1986. “Renaissance Linguistics: The Old and the New”. Bynon & Palmer, eds. 56–68. Percival, W. Keith. 1999. “Understanding the Vernacular Turn”. Hassler & Schmitter, eds. 11–21.

Bibliography

Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo. 1994 [1987]. “Evolution, Selection and Cognition: From ‘learning’ to parameter setting in biology and the study of language”. Otero, ed. IV. 98–142. Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo, ed. 1981 [1979]. Language and Learning. The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge Mass. Harvard University Press. Picardi, Eva. 1987. “The Logics of Frege’s Contemporaries, or ‘Der verderbliche Einbruch der Psychologie in die Logik’”. Buzzetti & Ferriani, eds. 173–204. Pinborg, Jan. 1967. “Die Entwicklung der Sprachtheorie im Mittelalter”. Beitraege zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 62. Münster: Aschendorff. Pinborg, Jan. 1968. “Die Erfurter Tradition im Sprachdenken des Mittelalters”. Universalismus und Partikularismus im Mittelalter, ed. by Paul Wilpert, 173–185. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Pinborg, Jan. 1972. Logik und Semantik im Mittelalter. Ein Überblick. Stuttgart & Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Pinborg, Jan. 1981. “Roger Bacon on Signs: a newly recovered part of the Opus Maius”. Beckmann, ed. I. 403–412. Pinborg, Jan. 1982. “Speculative Grammar”. Kretzmann et al., eds. 254–269. Pinborg, Jan. 1984. “Zur Philosophie des Boethius de Dacia. Ein Überblick”. Medieval Semantics. Selected studies on Medieval logik and grammar, ed. by Sten Ebbesen. London: Variorum Reprints. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct. The new science of language and mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pinzani, Roberto. 2003. The Logical Grammar of Abelard. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Porter, Stanley E. 2001. Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C.–A.D. 400. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Posner, Roland, Klaus Robering, & Thomas A. Sebeok, eds. 2004–2005. Semiotik. 2 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Preyer, Gerhard, Frank Siebelt & Alexander Ulfi, eds. 1994. Language, Mind and Epistemology. On Donald Davidson’s philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Proops, Ian. 2000. Logic and Language in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. New York: Garland. Putnam, Hilary. 1975 [1967]. “The ‘Innateness Hypothesis’ and Explanatory Models in Linguistics”. Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical papers, 28–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pütz, Martin & Marjolijn H. Verspoor, eds. 2000. Explorations in Linguistic Relativity. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ramat, Paolo. 1987. Linguistic Typology. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Ramberg, Bjørn T. 1989. Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Read, S., ed. 1993. Sophisms in Medieval Logic and Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Ree, Jonathan. 2000. I see a voice. Deafness, language and the senses. A philosophical history. London: Harper Collins. Rees-Jones, Sarah, ed. 2003. Learning and Literacy. Turnhout: Brepols. Riché, Pierre & Guy Lobrichon, eds. 1984. Le Moyen Age et la Bible. Paris: Beauchesne. Ricken, Ulrich. 1978. Grammaire et philosophie au siècle des Lumières. Controverses sur l’ordre naturel et la clarté du français. Lille: PUL. Ricken, Ulrich. 1986. “Les deux grammaires de Condillac”. Histoire Epistémologie Langage 8/1.71–90.

231

232 A History of Language Philosophies

Ricken, Ulrich. 1994. Linguistics, Anthropology and Philosophy in the French Enlightenment. Language theory and Ideology. London: Routledge. [Sprache, Anthropologie, Philosophie in der französischen Aufklärung, 1984.] Ricken, Ulrich, ed. 1990. Sprachtheorie und Weltanschauung in der europäischen Aufklärung. Zur Geschichte der Sprachtheorien des 18. Jahrhunderts und ihrer europäischen Rezeption nach der Französischen Revolution. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Rickheit, Gert, Theo Herrmann, & Werner Deutsch, eds. 2003. Psycholinguistik. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1962–1967. Logica modernorum. A contribution to the history of early Terminist logic. 2 vols. Assen: Van Gorcum. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1970. “Die Bedeutungslehre der Logik im 13. Jahrhundert und ihr Gegenstück in der metaphysischen Spekulation”. Methoden in Wissenschaft und Kunst des Mittelalters, ed. by Albert Zimmermann, 1–22. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1971–1973. “The Development of ‘suppositio naturalis’ in Medieval Logic”. Vivarium 9.71–107; 11.43–79. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1977–1982. “On Ancient and Medieval Semantics and Metaphysics”. Vivarium 15.81–110; 16.81–107; 18.1–62; 19.1–46, 81–125. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1980. “The Semantical Impact of Abailard’s Solution of the Problem of Universals”. Petrus Abaelardus (1079–1142). Person, Werk und Wirkung, ed. by Rudolf Thomas, 139–151. Trier: Paulinus-Verlag. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1981. “Die Wirkung der neuplatonischen Semantik auf das mittelalterliche Denken über das Sein”. Beckmann, ed. I. 19–35. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1981a. “Abailard’s Semantic Views in the Light of Later Developments”. Braakhuis et al., eds. 1–58. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1981b. “Boèce logicien et philosophe: ses position sémantiques et sa métaphysique de l’être”. Atti del congresso internazionale di studi boeziani (1980), 141–156. Roma: Herder. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1982. “The Origins of the Theory of the Properties of Terms”. Kretzmann et al., eds. 161–173. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1985. “La supposition naturelle. Une pierre de touche pour les points de vue philosophiques”. La philosophie au moyen âge, ed. by L. M. de Rijk, 184–203. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1987. “Logos and Pragma in Plato and Aristotle”. De Rijk & Braakhuis, eds. 27–61. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 1988. “‘Categorization’ as a Key Notion in Ancient and Medieval Semantics”. Vivarium 26.1–18. Rijk, Lambert Marie de. 2002. Aristotle: Semantics and ontology. 2 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Rijk, Lambert Marie de & H. A. G. Braakhuis, eds. 1987. Logos and Pragma. Nijmegen: Ingenium Publishers. Robbins, Dorothy. 2001. Vygotsky’s Psychology-Philosophy: A metaphor for language theory and learning. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Robins, Robert H. 1990 [1967]. A Short History of Linguistics. London: Longman. Robins, Robert H. 1998. Texts and Contexts. Selected papers on the history of linguistics. Münster: Nodus. Römer, Ruth. 1985. Sprachwissenschaft und Rassenideologie in Deutschland. München: W. Fink.

Bibliography 233

Rosenfeld, Sophia A. 2001. A Revolution in Language: The problem of signs in late 18thcentury France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rosier [Rosier-Catach], Irène. 1983. “Roger Bacon et le problème du sujet sous-entendu”. Histoire Epistémologie Langage 5/1.31–42. Rosier, Irène. 1983a. La grammaire spéculative des Modistes. Lille: PUL. Rosier, Irène. 1984. “Grammaire, logique, sémantique. Deux positions opposées au XIIIe siècle: Roger Bacon et les Modistes”. Histoire Epistémologie Langage 6/1.21–34. Rosier, Irène. 1990. “Signes et sacrements. Thomas d’Aquin et la grammaire spéculative”. Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 64.392–436. Rosier, Irène. 1994. La parole comme acte. Sur la grammaire et la sémantique du XIIIe siècle. Paris: Vrin. Rosier, Irène. 1995. “Res significata et modus significandi: les implications d’une distinction médiévale”. Ebbesen, ed. 135–168. Rosier, Irène. 1996. “Quelques controverses médiévales sur le conventionnalisme, la signification e la force du langage”. Gambarara et al., eds. 69–84. Rosier, Irène. 1997. “Prata rident”. Libera et al. eds. 155–176. Rosier, Irène. 1998. “Quelques textes sur l’étymologie au Moyen Age”. Buridant, ed. 221–229. Rosier, Irène. 1998a. “La Grammatica practica du ms. British Museum V A IV. Roger Bacon, les lexicographes et l’étymologie”. Buridant, ed. 97–125. Rosier, Irène. 1999. “La notion de translatio, le principe de compositionnalité et l’analyse de la prédication accidentelle chez Abélard”. Biard, ed. 125–164. Rosier, Irène. 2004. La parole efficace. Signe, rituel, sacré. Paris: Seuil Rosier, Irène & Alain de Libera. 1986. “Intention de signifier et engendrement du discours chez Roger Bacon”. Delesalle, ed. 63–79. Rosier, Irène, ed. 1990. “Grammaires médiévales” [= Histoire Epistémologie Langage 12/2]. Rousseau, Nicolas. 1986. Connaissance et langage chez Condillac. Genève: Droz. Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida. 1988. Topics in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ruhlen, Merritt. 1994. On the Origin of Languages. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ryosuke Inagaki, B. 1981. “Res and Signum. On the fundamental ontological presupposition of the philosophy of William Ockham”. Beckmann, ed. 301–311. Salazar, Philippe-Joseph. 1999. La voix au 16e siècle. Fumaroli, ed. 787–819. Sampson, Geoffrey. 1997. Educating Eve: The ‘language instinct’ debate. London: Cassell. Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue, Stuart G. Shanker, & Talbot J. Taylor. 1998. Apes, Language, and the Human Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Scaglione, Aldo. 1990. “Dante and the Ars Grammatica”. Bursill-Hall et al., eds. 305–319. Schenkeveld, Dirk M. & Jonathan Barnes. 1999. “Language”. The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. by Keimpe A. Algra, 177–225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte. 1996. Idéologie, révolution et uniformité de la langue. Liège: Pierre Mardaga. Schmidt-Biggeman, Wilhelm. 1999. “Christian Kabbala”. Coudert, ed. 81–121. Schmitt, Charles B., ed. 1988. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

234 A History of Language Philosophies

Schmitter, Peter. 1992. “Maschine vs. ‘Organismus’”. Diversions of Galway: Papers in the history of linguistics, ed. by Anders Ahlqvist, 291–307. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Schmitter, Peter, ed. 1987ff. Geschichte der Sprachtheorie. 9 vols. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Schmitter, Peter, ed. 1991. Multum-non multa? Studien zur ‘Einheit der Reflexion’ im Werk Wilhelm von Humboldts. Münster: Nodus. Schweickard, Wolfgang. 1985. “‘Etymologia est origo vocabulorum’. Zum Verständnis der Etymologiedefinition Isidors von Sevilla”. Historiographia linguistica 12.1–25. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. 1998. Mind, Language and Society. New York: Basic Books. Sebeok, Thomas A. 1994. An Introduction to Semiotics. London: Pinter. Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. 1994. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Sedley, David N. 1996. “Aristotle’s De interpretatione and Ancient Semantics”. Manetti, ed. 87–108. Sedley, David N. 2003. Plato’s Cratylus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sériot, Patrick. 1999. Structure et totalité: les origines intellectuelles du structuralisme en Europe centrale et orientale. Paris: PUF. Séris, Jean-Pierre. 1995. Langages et machines à l’âge classique. Paris: Hachette. Seuren, Peter A.M. 1998. Western Linguistics: An historical introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Shibatani, Masayoshi & Theodora Bynon, eds. 1995. Approaches to Language Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simons, Peter. 1998. “Meaning and Language”. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. by Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith, 106–137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sirridge, Mary. 1988. “Robert Kilwardby as ‘Scientific Grammarian’”. Historiographia linguistica 10.7–27. Sirridge, Mary. 1990. “Robert Kilwardby: Figurative Constructions and the Limits of Grammar”. Bursill-Hall et al. eds. 321–337. Sirridge, Mary. 1995. “The Science of Language and Linguistic Knowledge: John of Denmark and Robert Kilwardby”. Ebbesen, ed. 109–134. Skinner, Quentin. 1996. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skorupski, John. 1998. “Mill on Language and Logic”. The Cambridge Companion to Mill, ed. by J. Skorupski, 35–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sluiter, Ineke. 1990. Ancient Grammar in Context. Contribution to the study of ancient linguistic thought. Amsterdam: VU University Press. Sluiter, Ineke. 1997. “The Greek Tradition”. The Emergence of Semantics in Four Linguistic Traditions. Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic, ed. by Wout van Bekkum, Jan Houben, Ineke Sluiter & Kees Versteegh, 147–224. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Smith, Barry. 1994. “Husserl’s Theory of Meaning and Reference”. Haaparanta ed. 163–183. Somers, Harold. 2003. Computers and Translation. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Spade, Paul Vincent. 1982. The Semantics of Terms. Kretzmann et al. eds. 188–196. Spencer, Andrew & Arnold M. Zwicky. 2001. The Handbook of Morphology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Spinelli, Emidio. 1991. “Sceptics and Language: phonaí et lógoi in Sextus Empiricus”. Histoire Epistémologie Langage 13/2.57–70.

Bibliography 235

Stammerjohann, Harro, ed. 2004. Lexicon Grammaticorum: Who’s who in the history of world linguistics. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Stechov, Arnim von & Dieter Wunderlich, eds. 1991. Semantik. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Stemmer, Brigitte & Harry A. Whitaker, eds. 1998. Handbook of Neurolinguistics. San Diego: Academic Press. Stroll, Avram. 2000. Twentieth-Century Analytical Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Stubbs, Elsina. 2002. Wilhelm Von Humboldt’s Philosophy of Language. Its sources and influence. New York: Edwin Mellen. Subbiondo, Joseph L., ed. 1992. John Wilkins and 17th-century Linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tabarroni, Andrea. 1988. “On Articulation and Animal Language in Ancient Linguistic Theory”. Manetti, ed. 103–121. Tachau, K. H. 1988. Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham. Optics, epistemology and the foundations of semantics 1250–1345. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Talbot, Mary M. 1999. Language and Gender: An introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Talmy, Leonard. 2003. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Harvard: MIT Press. Tani, Ilaria. 2000. L’albero della mente: Sensi, linguaggio, pensiero in Herder. Roma: Carocci. Taylor, Daniel J. 1996. “Prolegomena” to Varro. De lingua latina X. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Taylor, Talbot J. & Stuart Shanker. 1999. Ape Linguistics (or: is Kanzi a Cartesian?). Cram et al., eds. I. 57–68. Terian, Abraham. 1981. Introduction to Philo 1981, 1–63. Timpanaro, Sebastiano. 1977. Introduction to Schlegel 1977: XI–LVII. Trabant, Jürgen. 1986. Apeliotes oder der Sinn der Sprache. Wilhelm von Humboldts SprachBild. München: W. Fink. Trabant, Jürgen. 1990. Traditionen Humboldts. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Trabant, Jürgen. 1990a. “Herder’s Discovery of the Ear”. Müller-Vollmer, ed. 345–366. Trabant, Jürgen. 2003. Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A study of sematology. London: Routledge. Trabant, Jürgen, ed. 1995. Vico und die Zeichen/Vico e i segni. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Trabant, Jürgen & Sean Ward, eds. 2001. New Essays on the Origins of Language. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Travis, Charles. 2001. The Uses of Sense: Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. New York: Oxford University Press. Trudgill, Peter. 2001. Sociolinguistics. An introduction to language and society. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Trudgill, Peter. 2003. A Glossary of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsiapera, Maria & Garon Wheeler. 1995. The Port Royal Grammar. Sources and Influences. Münster: Nodus. Tsohatzidis, Savas L., ed. 1994. Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and linguistic perspectives. London: Routledge. Tweedale, Martin M. 1976. Abailard on Universals. Amsterdam: North Holland Publ. Co. Tweedale, Martin M. 1982. “Abelard and the Culmination of the Old Logic”. Kretzmann et al., eds. 143–157.



236 A History of Language Philosophies

Tweedale, Martin M. 1988. “Logic: from the Late Eleventh Century to the Time of Abelard”. Dronke, ed. 196–226. Tweedale, Martin M. 1990. “Mental Representations in Later Medieval Scholasticism”. Smith, ed. 35–51. Valente, Luisa. 1995. “Langage et théologie pendant la seconde moitié du XIIe siècle”. Ebbesen, ed. 33–54. Valente, Luisa. 1997. “Iustus et misercors: L’usage théologique des notions de consignificatio et connotatio dans la seconde moitié du XIIe siècle”. Marmo, ed. 37–59. Venuti, Lawrence. 2000. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Verburg, Pieter A. 1998. Language and its Functions. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. [Taal an functionaliteit, 1951.] Verschueren, Jeff & Jan-Ola Ostman. 2003. Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vickers, Brian. 1988. “Rhetoric and Poetics”. Schmitt, ed. 715–745. Vonk, Frank. 1999. “Gustav Gerber and ‘Kantian Linguistics’. Presuppositions of thought and linguistic use”. Cram et al., eds. II. 289–295. Wardy, Robert. 1998 [1996]. The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and their successors. London: Routledge. Wertsch, James V. ed. 1985. Culture, Communication and Cognition: Vygotskian perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitman, Jon. 1987. Allegory: The dynamics of an ancient and medieval technique. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilbur, Terence H. 1977. The Lautgesetz-Controversy. A documentation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wilding, Nick. 1999. “‘An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language’ (1668): Text & Contexts”. Cram et al., eds. II. 153–159. Wilkins, W. K. & Wakefield, J. 1995. “Brain Evolution and neurolinguistic Preconditions”. Behavioral and Brain Science 18.161–182, 205–226. Williams, Meredith. 2002. Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning. London: Routledge. Wollock, Jeffrey. 1997. The Noblest Animate Motion: Speech, physiology and medicine in preCartesian linguistic thought. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Zimmerli, Walter Ch. 1990. “Evolution or Development? Questions concerning the systematic and historical position of Herder”. Müller-Vollmer, ed. 1–16.



Author index

A Aarsleff, Hans 128,146,165 Abelard, Pierre (1079–1142/44) 58, 31, 65–71, 82 Abraham, W. E. 24 Aeschines (390–314 B. C.) 52 Alain of Lille (c.1128–1202) 58, 59, 98 Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus, 1205–1280) 58, 61, 71 Alfarabi (Abu Nasr Muhammad alFarabi, c.870–c.950) 61 Alighieri, Dante (1265–1321) 87–88, 99, 100, 128 Ambrose (c.339–397) 37 Ammonius (180–242) 35, 48 Amsler, Mark E. 45, 46, 53, 55 Andronicus of Rhodes (1st cent. B. C.) 61 Anselm of Canterbury (1033/34–1109) 64, 71, 82 Apel, Karl Otto 5 Apollonius Dyscolus (2nd cent. B. C.) 20, 30 Arens, Hans 23, 38, 61 Arens, Katherine 188 Aristotle (384–322 B. C.) 15, 17, 19–20, 21–25, 26, 29, 30, 34, 38, 41, 51, 52, 61, 62–63, 64, 69,70, 73, 77, 98, 115 Arnauld, Antoine (1612–1694) 101 Ashworth, E. J. 80, 82, 128 Ast, Friedrich (1778–1841) 150 Augustine (354–430) 29, 34, 35–38, 42–43, 44, 45, 53, 58, 78, 83, 95, 98, 174, 175

Auroux, Sylvain 5, 10, 14, 89, 102, 103, 120, 121, 123, 128, 146 Austin, John Langshaw (1911–1960) 185, 186 Averroës (Muhammad ibn Ahmad, Muhammad ibn Rushd, 1126–1198) 61 Avicenna (Abu’Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, 980–1037) 61, 81 B Bacon, Francis (1561–1626) 93, 100, 110 Bacon, Roger (1220–1292) 60, 71, 82, 83–86 Baggioni, Daniel 89 Baratin, Marc 19, 30, 38 Bar-Hillel, Yehosua 169, 188 Barth, Karl (1886–1968) 59 Beauzée, Nicolas (1717–1789) 102–104, 105, 106–107 Beccaria, Cesare (1738–1794) 115, 116–117 Beneke, Friedrich Eduard (1798–1854) 154 Benveniste, Emile (1902–1976) 11, 21, 178 Bergson, Henri (1859–1941) 1, 161–162, 181 Berkeley, George (1685–1753) 113–114, 115, 128 Biard, Joël 78, 82, 99 Bickerton, Derek 190, 206 Biletzki, Anat 100, 128 Boehme, Jacob (1575–1624) 92, 95

238 A History of Language Philosophies

Boethius (470/480–525) 57, 62–63, 64, 78 Boethius of Denmark (Boethius Dacus, f. 1270) 72, 73–76, 82, 86–87 Bonaventure (c.1217–1274) 60 Bopp, Franz (1791–1867) 2, 135, 137, 139, 141 Borst, Arno 89 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne (1627–1704) 123 Botha, Rudolf P. 202 Braakhuis, Henricus Antonius Giovanni 87 Brancacci, Aldo 15 Bréal, Michel (1832–1915) 11, 145, 165 Brentano, Franz (1838–1917) 162 Broca, Paul (1824–1880) 199, 201 Brugmann, Karl (1849–1919) 145 Bruner, Jerome 188, 193–194, 205 Brunschwig, Jacques 141 Bühler, Karl (1879–1963) 164, 178–180, 181, 188 Bultmann, Rudolf (1884–1976) 59 Burke, Edmund (1729–1797) 115, 116 Burke, Kenneth (1897–1993) 13 Bursill-Hall, G. L. 60, 70, 70, 71, 73, 76, 82 C Campanella, Tommaso (1568–1639) 101 Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970) 169, 170 Carneades (219–129 B. C.) 48 Carr, Thomas M. 100 Cassiodorus (c.490-c.585) 54 Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945) 144, 151–154, 179 Castelvetro, Ludovico (1505–1571) 24 Chenu, M.-D. (1897–1990) 71 Chiesa, Curzio 25 Chomsky, Noam 4–5, 8–9, 13, 103, 128, 133, 164, 165, 183, 185, 189–194, 196, 197, 198, 203–204, 205, 206 Chrysippus (280–206 B. C.) 27 Cicero (106–43 B. C.) 29, 37, 44, 52, 98

Clarke, David D. 115 Clarke, Edwin 201 Cloeren, Herman J. 170 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de (1714–1780) 1, 101, 103, 104–105, 106, 107, 117–121, 122, 124–126, 127, 128, 162, 165, 199 Condorcet, Marie-Jean-AntoineNicolas Caritat de (1743–1794) Cordemoy, Gerauld de (1626–1694) 123 Court de Gébelin (1725/28–1784) 123 Courtenay, William J. 66, 82 Covington, Michael A. 82, 100 Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952) 150 D Dahan, Gilbert 83, 84, 98, 128 Dalgarno, George (c.1626–1687) 94 Damascius (c.480-c.550) 35 Darmesteter, Arsène (1846–1888) 159 Darwin, Charles (1809–1882) 144, 200–201 Davidson, Donald (1917–2003) 185, 188, 194 de Brosses, Charles (1709–1777) 120, 123 Deacon, Terrence 202, 204–205 Democritus (c.460-c.370) 15, 19 Demosthenes (384–322 B. C.) 52 Dennett, Daniel C. 202, 203, 206 Desbordes, Françoise 19, 25, 30, 37, 55 Descartes, René (1596–1650) 94, 101, 122, 123, 124, 126, 128 Dewey, John (1859–1952) 184 Diderot, Denis (1713–1784) 107 Diogenes Laertius (3rd cent.)19, 20, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 39, 41 Diogenes of Enoanda (2nd cent.) 41 Dionysius the Areopagite (see PseudoDionysius) Dionysius Thrax (c.170-c.90 B. C.) 19, 30 Dominicy, Marc 101, 128 Donatus, Aelius (4th cent.) 61, 70

Author index 239

Droixhe, Daniel 89, 128 Du Marsais, César Chesneau (1676–1756) 102, 107 Duchez, Marie-Elisabeth Dummett, Michael 14, 167, 188, 194 Duns Scotus, Johannes (c.1265–1308) 61, 78 Dutz, Klaus 90, 128 E Ebbesen, Sten 78, 82 Eckhart, Johannes (1260–1327) 95 Eco, Umberto 6, 11, 14, 82, 128 Edelman, Gerald M. 177 Elffers, Els 178 Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895) 154 Epicurus (c.341-c.270 B. C.) 29, 38, 41, 91 Erigena (see John Scotus Erigena) F Fabrici d’Aquapendente, Girolamo (c.1533–1619) 122 Feuerbach, Ludwig (1804–1872) 154 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814) 129–130, 135, 140 Fitch,W. T. 204, 206 Fodor, Jerry 4, 194–195, 205 Føllesdal, Dagfinn 168 Frédegis of Tours (fl. 800) 45, 55 Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925) 165, 166–167, 170, 174, 188, 198 Fresina, Claudio 43 G Gabelentz, Georg von der (1840–1893) 159 Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1900–2002) 150 Galen (129–200) 26, 122 Gall, Franz Joseph (1758–1828) 201 Gassendi, Pierre (1592–1655) 97 Gensini, Stefano 90, 91, 112, 128 George of Trebizond (1395–1484) 98 Gerber, Gustav (1820–1901) 154 Giard, Luce 99, 100

Gilbert of Poitiers (1080–1154) 58, 71 Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur de (1816–1882) 143 Godescalc (Gottschalk) of Orbais (c.803-c.868) 45, 59 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749–1832) 134, 144 Gould, Stephen Jay 203 Graffi, Giorgio 162,164, 188 Greenberg Joseph G. (1915–2001) 146 147 Gregory of Nyssa (c.335-c.395) 54, 146, 147 Grice, Paul (1913–1988) 186, 188 Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) 141–142 Grolier, Eric de 202 Grosseteste, Robert (Robert Greathead, c.1175–1253) 84 H Haeckel, Ernst (1834–1919) 144 Hamann, Johann Georg (1730–1788) 129 Hauser, Marc D. 202, 204, 206 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831) 151, 155, 170 Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976) 150 Henry, Victor (1850–1907) 159 Heraclitus (c.550-c.480 B. C.) 15 Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1776–1841) 154–155, 165, 188 Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803) 101, 105–106, 122, 124, 125, 126–128, 129, 137, 140, 154, 199, 205 Herodotus (484?-430/420 B. C.) 41, 54 Hippocrates (c.460-c.377 B. C.) 26 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679) 97, 100, 101, 110, 111, 128 Hoenigswald, Henry M. (1915–2003) 89, 90 Hoffmann, Philippe 35, 41 Horace (65–8 B. C.) 37 Hovdhaugen, Even 82, 84, 128

240 A History of Language Philosophies

Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1835) 5, 130–132, 134, 139–141, 143, 146, 147, 150, 151, 155, 172, 181, 199 Hume, David (1711–1776) 114–115 Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938) 166–169, 176–177, 179, 188, 195 Hieronymus (c.347-c.419/20) 45 I Iamblichus (4th-5th cent.) 54–55 Isaac, J. 61 Isidore of Sevilla (c.560–636) 54, 55, 85, 91 Isocrates (436–338 a.C.) 52 Itard, Jean Marc Gaspard (1775–1838) 122 J Jackendoff, Ray 194, 195 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743–1819) 129 Jacobi, K. 82 Jacyna, L. S. 201 Jakobson, Roman (1896–1982) 180–181 Jespersen, Otto (1860–1943) 164 John of Denmark (Johannes Dacus, c.1280) 87 John Scotus Erigena (810–877) 57, 58, 65 Johnson, Mark 197–198, 206 Johnson-Laird, Philip 194 Jolivet, Jean 45, 60, 63, 67, 68, 82 Jones,William (1746–1794) 134 Joseph, John E. 147, 165, 188, 205 K Kahn, Charles 17 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804) 5, 105, 137, 140, 146, 154, 170, 205 Karmiloff-Smith, Annette 194 Kilwardby, Robert (d. 1279) 60, 86, 98 Knobloch, Clemens 178, 188 Koerner, K. E. F. x, 14, 133, 134, 136, 146, 147, 165, 188

Kretzmann, Norman 25, 82 Kripke, Saul 176 Külpe, Oswald (1862–1815) 181 L Lagarde, J.-P. 19 Lakoff, George 197–198, 206 Lallot, Jean 19, 30, 37 Lambert of Auxerre (fl. c.1250–1260) 71 Lambert, Johann Heinrich (1728–1777) 10, 105 Lamy, Bernard (1640–1715) 102, 123 Lancelot, Claude (1615?-1695) 101 Langacker, Ronald W. 197, 206 Lardet, Pierre 98 Latini, Brunetto (1220–1294) 98 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716) 101, 105, 112–113, 128, 140 Lewontin, Richard C. 203 Libera, Alain de 46, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 72, 77, 78, 81, 82 Lieberman, Philip 198 Locke, John (1632–1704) 1, 10, 79, 80–81, 94, 101, 103, 107–113, 114, 115, 117, 124, 128 Long, Anthony A. 29 Lucretius (1st cent. B. C.) 41 Lull, Ramòn (c.1235–1316) 92 M Malinowsky, Bronislaw (1884–1942) 13 Maloney, Thomas 70, 82 Manzoni, Alessandro (1785–1873) 1 Martianus Capella (5th cent.) 54 Marty, Anton (1847–1914) 162–164 Marx, Karl (1818–1883) 154 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de (1698–1759) 123 Mauthner, Fritz (1849–1923) 1, 170–172, 188 Maynard Smith, John 202, 206 McEnvoy, James 84 Mehler, Jacques 193 Meillet, Antoine (1866–1936) 144, 159

Author index 241

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–1961) 162, 196 Mersenne, Marin (1588–1648) 94, 123 Metcalf, George J. 89 Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873) 165–166, 188 Mohanty, J. N. 168, 188 Montaigne, Michel de (1533–1592) 122 Moore, George Edward (1873–1958) 186 Morpurgo Davies, Anna 139–140, 146 Morris, Charles (1901–1979) 13 Muller, Jean-Claude 89 Murphy, James J. 37, 55, 82, 83, 98 N Nerlich, Brigitte 115, 159, 160, 188 Nicholas of Kues (Nicolaus Krebs, 1401–1464) 95 Nicole, Pierre (1625–1695) 101 Nielsen, Lauge Olaf 64 Nizolio, Mario (1498–1575) 80, 93, 100 Normore, Calvin G. 66, 82 Nuchelmans, Gabriel 23, 70, 82, 128 O Ockham,William of (c.1285-c.1349) 68, 77–81, 82 Oesterreicher,Wulf 140 Olbrechts Tyteca, Lucie 7 Osthoff, Hermann (1847–1909) 145 P Panaccio, Claude 78, 79, 82 Pariente, Jean-Claude 102, 128 Parmenides (5th cent. B. C.) 15 Paschetto, Eugenia 95 Paul, Herman (1846–1921) 157–158, 159, 166, 188 Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914) 10, 11 Percival,W. Keith 83, 101, 128 Perelman, Chaïm (1912–1984) 7, 12 Petrarca, Francesco (1304–1374) 98

Petrus Hispanus (= pope John XXI) 71–72, 82 Philo (1st cent.) 34, 45, 48–50, 94 Philoponus, Johannes (6th cent.) 35 Piaget, Jean (1896–1980) 181, 183, 188, 192, 193 Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo 193, 203 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1463–1494) 94 Pinker, Stephen 194 Plato (427–347 B. C.) 16–18, 24, 28, 48, 113 Plotinus (205–270) 33–34, 55 Plutarch (45–125) 29, 48 Porphyry (233/34–305) 50, 61–62, 64 Potebnija, Alexander A. (1835–1891) 181 Pott, August Friedrich (1802–1887) 137, 141 Priscian (6th cent.) 20, 69, 75 Proclus (410/12–485) 15, 19, 57 Prodicus (b. 470/460) 16 Protagoras (c.485-c.410 B. C.) 16, 19 Pseudo-Dionysius (5th cent.), 55, 59, 84, 94 Pufendorf, Samuel (1632–1694) 96 Putnam, Hilary 192, 194 Pythagoras (c.570–490 B. C.) 15 Q Quine,Willard van Orman (1908–2001) 8, 183–184, 185, 190, 194 Quintilian (c.35-c.96) 30 R Rabanus Maurus (776–856) 46 Ramberg, Björn T. 185–188 Read, S. 72 Reid, Thomas (1710–1796) 115 Reinhold, Karl Leonard (1758–1823) 154 Renan, Ernest (1823–1892) 141, 142, 143 Richards, Ivor Armstrong (1893–1979) 7, 13

242 A History of Language Philosophies

Rijk, Lambert Marie de 23, 37, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 82, 87 Roger Bacon (c.1210–1292/94) 83–86 Römer, Ruth 144 Rosier, Irène (see Rosier-Catach, Irène) Rosier-Catach, Irène 58, 59, 60, 73, 76, 82, 84, 85, 86, 128 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778) 119, 122, 128 Ruhlen, Merritt 146 Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970) 165, 166, 170, 173, 174 Ryle, Gilbert (1900–1976) 178, 183 S Salazar, Philippe-Joseph 122 Sánchez de las Brozas, Francisco (1523–1601) 101 Sapir, Edward (1884–1939) 123–133, 147 Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913) 2–3, 11, 144, 164–165, 187, 188 Scaliger, Julius Caesar (1484–1558) 98, 101 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1755–1854) 137, 138–139, 141, 143, 150 Schlegel, August Wilhelm (1767–1845) 137, 138, 143 Schlegel, Friedrich (1772–1829) 130, 134, 135–137, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 146 Schleicher, August (1821–1868) 141–142, 143, 144, 145, 146 Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1768–1834) 150 Searle, John R. 186–188, 195 Sedley, David N. 25, 37 Séris, Jean-Pierre 123, 128 Seuren, Pieter A. M. 14, 101 Sextus Empiricus (2nd-3rd cent.) 24, 28, 29–33, 35, 44, 47, 50 Simon, Richard (1638–1712) 90 Simplicius (4th cent.) 35 Sirridge, Mary 82, 87

Skinner, Burrhus Frederic (1904–1990) 183, 189, 190 Skinner, Quentin 100, 128 Skorupski, John 166 Speroni, Sperone (1500–1588) 98 Spinoza, Baruch (1632–1677) 90 Spurzheim, Johann Caspar (1776–1832) 201 Steinthal, Heymann (1823–1899) 1, 154–155, 157, 158, 162, 166, 188 Stewart, Dugald (1753–1828) 115 Szathmáry, Eörs 202, 206 T Tabarroni, Andrea 48, 57 Tacitus (c.56–120) 53 Taylor, Daniel J. 32, 37 Taylor, Talbot J. 14, 206 Terian, Abraham 48, 49 Thiérry of Chartres (XIIth cent.) 45, 58 Thomas Aquinas (c.1221–1274) 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 82 Thomas of Erfurt (13th-14th cent.) 73, 74, 75, 76, 82 Timpanaro, Sebastiano 144, 146 Trendelenburg, Adolf (1802–1872) 21 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques de (1727–1781) 123 Tweedale, Martin M. 66, 67, 68, 69, 82 V Valente, Luisa 59, 82 Valla, Lorenzo (1407–1457) 89, 93, 98, 99, 100 Varro (116–27 B. C.) 30, 31, 32, 43, 45, 97 Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744) 25, 96–97, 101, 122, 128 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) 138 Vonk, Frank 154 Vossler, Karl (1872–1949) 150–151 Vygotsky, Lev S. (1896–1934) 181–182



Author index 243

W Wakefield, J. 202 Wegener, Philipp (1848–1916) 159, 166, 188 Wernicke, Carl (1848–1905) 199, 201 Whitman, Jon 44, 46 Whitney,William Dwight (1827–1894) 145, 159 Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1897–1941) 132, 133–134, 145, 146, 147 Wilkins, John (1614–1672) 93 Wilkins,W. K. 202

William of Conches (1100–1154) 58, 75 William of Sherwood (fl. c.1250) 71 Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951) 1, 2, 5, 42, 170, 171, 172, 173–177, 178, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 195, 196 Wundt,Wilhelm (1832–1920) 154, 157, 162 Z Zimmerli,Walter Ch. 127



Subject index

A Abstraction 60, 62, 67, 108, 129, 179, 180 Abuse of language 110 (see also Critique of language) Accidents (see Morphology) Acoustics 9 (see also Voice) Aesthetics and the language sciences 10, 11, 115, 122, 137 Allegory 53 Analogy phonetic a. 44, 53, 54, 89, 120, 146, 158, 163 grammatical a. 32, 41, 44, 103, 177, 190 a. as a principle of semantic motivation 35, 44, 59, 90, 91, 97, 112–113, 118 Analysis analytical order; Languages as analytical metods 103, 104–105, 106, 107, 117–122, 132, 133, 160–161 analytic philosophy 5, 6, 13, 14, 165, 167, 170, 183, 185, 186, 188, 190, 197, 198 Animal language (see Language) Appellatio 71, 72 (see also Reference) Arbitrariness (see Sign) Argumentation (see Rhetorics) Artificial intelligence 3, 9, 10, 11, 14, 186, 197, 201 B Babel 46, 53, 83, 87, 88 Behaviorism 162, 178, 181, 183, 184, 185, 190

Biblical philology 12, 34, 37, 45, 53, 54, 90, 97 C Catachresis 59 Categories c. of grammar 9, 13, 18–21, 22, 26, 63, 74, 86, 104, 105, 106, 193, 196, 204 (see also Speech, parts of) c. of thought 18–21, 34, 58, 61, 64, 105–106, 133, 156, 198 Categorization 12, 16–17, 27, 31, 67, 68, 107, 110, 112–113, 115, 118–119, 163, 177, 179, 202 Characteristica 93 Cognitive science 11, 13, 196 (see also Psycholinguistics) Communication 1, 2, 9, 11, 12, 13, 23, 30–35, 37, 46–55, 51, 41–42, 86, 92, 93, 94, 99, 108, 109, 110, 114, 118, 119, 121, 122, 130, 131, 157, 159, 160, 163, 172, 174, 184, 185, 186, 191, 204, 178–183 animal c. 51, 122, 128, 178, 199, 204 (sse also Language) non verbal c. 122, 154, 156, 195, 204 Comparativism, 2, 3, 43, 45, 89, 90, 105, 130, 132, 134–142, 146, 152 Connotation 79, 109, 165, 166 Co-signification 69–70, 72, 76–77 (see also Syncategoremata) Critique of language 10, 35, 55, 169–178 D Darwinism (see Evolution) Definition 64–65, 79–80, 97

246 A History of Language Philosophies

Deixis 59, 60, 152, 179–180 Denomination 16, 34, 51, 65, 71, 111, 119, 174 (see also Categorization, Names, Prolepsis, Reference) Denotation, see Reference Dialectics 29–30, 44, 46, 52, 54, 61, 64, 66, 69, 70, 80, 88, 99–100 E Endophasy 182 Enthymeme 52, 80, 99, 100 Epicureanism 29, 37, 41, 43, 54, 91 Ethnolinguistics 9, 14, 134 Etymology 17, 39, 43–46, 55, 84, 89, 91, 95, 97, 120, 123, 128, 136, 143, 145, 159 Evolution, evolutionism 51, 127, 128, 137, 144, 145–146, 160, 161, 194, 198–199, 200–203 F Feminist linguistics 9, 14 Folk linguistics, or ‘protolinguistics’ 6, 14 G Genera, see Universals Gestures 10, 18, 36, 37, 42, 52, 96, 97, 113, 117, 118, 120, 122, 124, 152, 167, 180, 196, 200, 203, 204 Grammar ix, 6–7, 8, 18–21, 26–27, 30–33, 37, 43, 54, 75, 82, 86, 89, 98, 101, 103, 121, 128, 133, 134, 135, 164, 173, 177, 180 (see also Parts of speech) general, speculative, universal g. 4, 70, 72–76, 82, 84, 86, 99, 101–107, 128, 133, 152–153, 162, 165, 168–169, 172, 189–191, 194, 197, 199, 203, 205 generative g. 103, 189 sacred g. 53–54, 59–61 g. and logic/dialectics 46, 64, 66, 69–71, 80, 158, 163

H Hellenism 26, 27, 32 Hermeneutics juridical h. 92 philological h. 57 sacred h. 37, 46, 57, 89 h. and language philosophy 6, 12, 89, 121, 140, 149–150, 188 Homonymy 19, 23, 35 I Idealism and linguistics 121, 149–154, 170, 181 Indoeuropean (see Languages) Innatism ix, 40, 86, 126, 185, 190, 192, 193, 194, 198, 199 Instinct and learning ix, 38, 40–41, 113, 117, 124–127, 160, 162, 201, 205 Intentio, intentionality 81, 168, 187–188, 194, 195–196, 204 Interjection 20, 75 L Language adamic l. 39, 53, 54, 67, 91, 95 animal l., 20, 24, 25, 46–51, 55, 86–87, 122–128, 178–179, 191, 199–202, 204, 205 artificial, perfect, universal l. (see also Characteristica) 6, 85, 90, 92, 93, 94, 120, 169 arts of l. (see Dialectics, Hermeneutics, Translation, Poetics, Rhetoric) inner, mental l. (see Speech) l. faculty 3, 5–6, 122, 124, 136, 146, 185, 189, 192, 202, 204 l. games 2, 170, 172, 173, 175–177, 187 l. learning 3, 7, 10, 36, 39, 40, 42, 43, 49, 50, 52, 86, 88, 118, 119, 120, 123, 130, 143, 157, 177, 183, 184, 185, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 199, 201 (see also Instinct and learning) l. organ 164, 201

Subject index 247

l. origin 41, 113, 118, 119, 122–128, 135, 138–139, 141–143, 199, 201, 202, 203, 206 l. pathologies 3, 9, 10, 14, 26, 116, 156, 202 (see also Linguistics, clinical) l. sciences ix, 1–6, 8, 14, 24, 57, 60, 144, 145, 150, 154 (see also Ethnolinguistics, Philology, Psycolinguistics, Sociolinguistics, Neurolinguistics) ordinary l. 10, 32–33, 59, 61, 64, 85, 86, 92, 93, 100, 115, 170, 174, 186 original l. (see also Comparativism) 40, 43–44, 46, 50, 75, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95–96, 110, 130, 137, 138–139, 142, 145 private l. 41, 172, 176–177, 183–184, 185, 194, 195, 198 scientific l. 64, 85, 88, 89, 92, 120, 121 Language Learning, see Language Languages Confusion of l., see Babel diversity of l. 41, 53, 83–94, 122, 123, 130, 131, 140, 143, 164, 191 Genius of l. 88, 129 Indoeuropean l. 21, 90, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146 (see also Comparativism) l. and races 22, 27, 46, 139, 143–144 l. as analytical methods (see Analysis) monogenesis vs. polygenesis of l. 54, 138–139 national l., mothertongues, 46, 88, 89, 90, 129–134 vernaculars 60, 83, 87, 88, 89, 92, 99 Langue/parole 164–165, 187 Lektòn 28–29 Linearity of speech (see Speech) Linguistics 2–9, 44, 89, 151, 159, 160, 169, 171, 178, 179, 180, 183, 184, 196 clinical l. 9, 201

cognitive l. 3–4, 5, 9, 11, 12, 13, 162, 197, 206 comparative l. see Comparativism folk-l. or proto-l. 6, 14 general l. 2–9, 11, 134, 157, 164–165 historical l. (see also Comparativism) 11, 87, 134, 139, 142, 143–144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 155, 166 synchronic/diachronic l. 113, 164, 165 Logosmystik, see Theolinguistics M Meaning, theories of (see Semantics; Names; Modi significandi; Suppositio) m. and articulation 48–49 m. of general names (see Universals) m. and denotation 68, 166–167 (see also Reference) m. and intention 187–188 m. and truth 69 elasticity, indeterminacy of m. 157–158, 159, 163, 184 literal m. in interpretation 57 Mentalese 195 Mentalism 4, 165, 177, 178, 183, 184, 189, 196 Metaphor 7, 9, 10, 23–24, 44, 45, 53, 55, 58, 59, 92, 97, 107, 112, 113, 138, 141, 157, 197–198 (see also Tropes) use of m. to describe language 1–2, 119, 125, 137, 144, 158, 170, 172, 186, 192 Metonymy 59, 92, 157 Modi significandi, Modistae 71–77, 82, 84, 86, 101 Morphology 15, 75, 76, 79, 20–21, 27, 30, 43, 45, 46, 60, 63, 69, 74, 75, 76, 84, 94, 122, 137, 197 (see also Grammar; Speech, parts of)

248 A History of Language Philosophies

N Names divine, mystical n. 17, 54, 55, 59, 97 imposition of n. 15–18, 31, 44–45, 53, 54, 85, 91, 95, 153–154 semantics of n. 11, 15–18, 23, 25, 30, 31, 36–37, 39, 40–41, 42, 45, 61–68, 69, 76, 78, 79–80, 81, 97, 104, 107–108, 109, 110–111, 115, 118, 119, 151, 155, 165, 168, 174, 177, 180 (see also Etymology, Prolepsis, Universals) proper names 17, 20, 91, 107, 165 Naturalism 16–18, 39–43, 45, 91, 113, 125, 138, 194 Neogrammarians 145, 146, 150, 151, 157, 158 Neurolinguistics 4, 9, 14, 199, 201, 202, 204 Nominal essence, n. definition (see also Nominalism) 80, 108, 109, 110, 111 Nominales 66 Nominalism 65–68, 77, 80, 100, 110, 111, 112, 115 Noun (see Speech, parts of) O Onomatopoeia, see Phonic iconism Orthography (see Writing) P Paronymy 23, 63–64 Parts of speech (see Speech) Philology 2, 6, 8, 12, 19, 30, 46, 70, 89–90, 97, 108, 135, 137, 142, 143, 149, 150 (see also Biblical p.; Comparativism, Hermeneutics) Philosophy of language ix-x, 1–14 Phonetic, phonology (see Voice) Phonic iconism 44, 91, 96, 102, 113, 120, 138 Physiognomics 113, 122, 200, 201 Poetics 6, 10, 21, 24, 52, 98, 122

Port-Royal, grammar and logic 101, 102, 103, 107 Pragmatics 13, 14, 60, 115, 160 Prolepsis 28, 29 Prosody 9, 25, 42, 78, 84, 113, 120, 159 Psycholinguistics 8–9, 14, 157, 158, 178, 187 Psychologism 3, 13, 80, 104, 106, 154–160, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 172, 178, 188, 194 Q Qualia and language 161, 177 Questione della lingua 88, 128 R Reference 23, 29, 79, 110, 115, 123, 158, 166, 168, 174, 176, 180 Relativism, relativity 10, 132, 133–134, 145, 146, 147 Rhetoric ix, 6, 7, 8, 13, 16, 21, 23, 24, 26, 37, 51–53, 54, 55, 61, 80, 82, 86, 87, 98–100, 128, 159 S Semantics 11–13, 14, 24, 27, 37, 102, 157 bio-semantics 195–199 cognitive s., psychological s. 4, 5, 9, 13, 113, 154–155, 159–160, 162, 166, 180, 181 formal s. 5, 162, 169, 170 grammatical s. 69–70, 76–77 historical s. 113, 157, 159 logical vs psychological s. 166 medieval s. 43–46, 57–82, 86, 91 philosophical vs historical s. 165–166 pragmatical s. 113–117, 159–160, 186, 187, 193–194 semantic motivation and etymology 43–46 s. and semiotics 10–11 s. of names (see Categorization; Modi significandi) semantic change 85, 91

Subject index 249

Aristotle’s s. 21–24, 25, 29 Augustine’s s. 35–36, 42–43 Bühler’s two-fields s. 179–180 Epicurean s. 29–30 (see also Prolepsis) Frege’s s. 166–167 Husserl’s s. 167–169 Leibniz’s s.91–92 Locke’s s. 107–111 Plato’s s. 15–18 Stoic s. 26, 27–28, 29 Wittgenstein’s s. 172–177 Semiotics, semiology 6, 9–11, 12, 14, 47, 102, 111, 117, 178–180, 195 (see also Sign, Zoosemiotics) Sign (see also Semiotics, Gesture, Universals, Voice, Writing) divine s. 54–55, 96 natural, institutional s. 41, 47, 48, 51, 63, 77, 78, 81, 90, 112, 118, 120, 123–124 sacramental s. 37, 53, 60, 86 s. and symbols 22, 25, 48 arbitrariness of s. ix, 40, 45, 74, 90, 91, 104, 107, 112–113, 114, 118, 120, 191, 197 Aristotle on s. 22–25 Augustine on s. 35–37, 42–43 Silence 34–35, 171, 196 Sociolinguistics 7, 8, 9, 14, 134 Sophists 16, 18, 19, 24, 52 Speech arts of s. 7–8, 52, 54, 86 (see also Grammar, Dialectics, Rhetoric) expressed s. 24–29, 37, 47, 48, 62–63, 78–79, 99, 153, 182, 191, 200 (see also Voice) figures of s. (see Tropes) inner, mental s. 8, 28–29, 35, 37, 47, 48, 62–63, 78–79, 99, 181, 182, 191 (see also Endophasy, Lektòn, Mentalese) linearity, temporality of s. 33, 38, 107, 160–161 (see also Analytical order)

parts of s. 19–21, 22, 27, 31, 40, 41, 59, 60, 62, 63, 69, 74, 75, 76, 78–79, 102, 103–104, 105, 106, 143, 163, 187, 191 types of s. 21, 24, 49, 78, 181–182 s. acts 6, 60, 150, 158, 163, 171, 178–179, 182, 185–188, 196 (see also Pragmatics) Stoics 20, 24, 26–29, 30, 37, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 91 Structuralism 144, 162, 164, 165, 183, 188, 196 Style 19, 24, 26, 27, 52, 115, 166 Suppositio 71–73, 76, 78, 82 Syncategoremata 72, 76 (see also Cosignification) Synecdoche 59, 92 (see also Tropes) Synonymy 19, 23, 36, 60, 78 Synsemantic function 179–180 Syntax 7, 12, 13, 21, 22, 25, 26, 30, 39, 40, 47, 60, 69, 71, 76, 77, 78, 84, 85, 91, 105, 116, 121, 132, 136, 154, 157, 158, 162, 164, 169, 172, 173, 182, 184, 187, 189, 191, 192, 194, 195, 199, 202, 205 T Temporality of speech (see Speech) Terminist logic 11, 69–77, 79, 165–166 Theolinguistics 33–34, 35, 38, 54–55, 58–61, 63–64, 82, 90, 95 Theurgy, see Theolinguistics Translation 6–7, 8, 14, 53, 60, 84, 95, 103, 128, 184–185 Trivium (see Dialectics, Grammar, Rhetoric) Tropes 53, 92, 102, 113 (see also Allegory, Metaphor, Metonymy, Onomatopoeia, Synecdoche) Typology 136 U Universal grammar (see Grammar, general)



250 A History of Language Philosophies

Universal language (see Language, artificial) Universals language as ‘concrete universal’ 151 language u. 7, 27, 40, 75, 86, 103–104, 106–107, 120, 133, 140–141, 145, 149, 152, 162, 168, 183, 191, 198, 203, 205 u. names 17, 28, 61, 62, 64–68, 71, 77–81, 82, 100 phantastic u. 97 Usage 9, 15, 16, 17, 32, 40, 49, 60, 84–85, 86, 87, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 109, 113–117, 157, 163, 169–170, 171–172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 187, 191 (see also Language, ordinary) V Verb (see Speech, parts of) Verbal magic (see Theurgy, Theolinguistics)

Vernaculars (see Languages) Voice 23, 24–30, 38, 42, 48, 50, 52, 55, 63, 72, 75, 87, 90, 95, 118, 120, 122, 123, 200 (see also Phonetics) W Writing 9, 10, 22, 25–26, 30, 48, 52, 53, 62–63, 78, 99, 123 182, 187, 201 Chinese Characters 93, 94 hieroglyphs 93 simbolic w. 90, 93 (see also Characteristica) Z Zoosemiotics (see Animal language)