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Language: A Biological Model (Paperback, New)
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Discovery Miles 14 320
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Language: A Biological Model (Paperback, New)
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Total price: R1,452
Discovery Miles: 14 520
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Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language
today is the assumption that language is governed by prescriptive
normative rules. Many believe that it is of the essence of thought
itself to follow rules, rules of inference determining the
intentional contents of our concepts, and that these rules
originate as internalized rules of language. However, exactly what
it is for there to be such things as normative rules of language
remains distressingly unclear. From what source do these norms
flow? What sanctions enforce them? What happens, exactly, if you
don't follow the rules? How do children learn the rules? Ruth
Millikan presents a radicallly different way of viewing the partial
regularities that language displays, the norms and conventions of
language. The central norms applying to language, like those norms
of function and behavior that account for the survival and
proliferation of biological traits, are non-evaluative norms.
Specific linguistic forms survive and are reproduced together with
co-operative hearer responses because, in a critical mass of cases,
these patterns of production and response benefit both speakers and
hearers. Conformity is needed only often enough to ensure that the
co-operative use constituting the norm - the convention - continues
to be copied and hence continues to characterize some interactions
of some speaker-hearer pairs. What needs to be reproduced for
discursive language forms to survive, it turns out, is not specific
conceptual roles but only satisfaction conditions coupled to
essential elements of hearer responses. An uncompromising rejection
of conceptual analysis as a tool in philosophy results. At the same
time the distinction between the propositional content and the
force of a linguistic utterance comes into very sharp focus, force
emerging as essential to the creation of content rather than as
something added to content. The distinction between illocutionary
and perlocutionary force, the distinction between linguistic
meaning and speaker meaning, and the semantics/pragmatics
distinction are each illuminated in new and crisper ways. On the
model proposed, neither the intentionality of thought nor the
intentionality of language is derived from the other. Processes
involved in understanding language are not Gricean but more like
direct perception of the world as mediated, for example, through
the natural signs contained in the structured light that allows
vision. There are also startling implications for pragmatics, and
for how children learn language.
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