Language and Human Understanding

General Conclusion

745 General Conclusion We saw how language presents itself to us primarily in the activity of speech. Here, from the first acts of understanding speech, our own and that of others, we begin to learn the language spoken—for instance, to learn the meaning and use of particular words. Both language at the level of what is learned, langue, and language at the level of use, “speech”, are public things appreciated by a community of people using the same language. Thus speech and langue are both by nature public and shared. What belongs to the individual is the understanding of speech and knowledge of langue and the capacity for these. However, even these do not come first absolutely, since they are grounded in a more general understanding or intellectual capacity. And it is this underlying intellectual capacity which enables us to go further than mere signaling, to go beyond this to give conceptual expression to what is being communicated—actually to “express” the content being communicated, thereby making this thought-content available to be reflected upon. Moreover, as we saw in chapter IV, once thoughtcontents have been thus expressed and made open to reflection, we can reflect upon the ways in which we use the general concepts concerned in various different cases and reflect upon the rationale of this use in such a way as to avoid the contradictions resulting from falsely presuming that we use words in rigidly uniform ways. This underlying understanding includes the grasp of the structures of interpersonal relationship, causal action, motivation, time, possibility and necessity, reflection, argument, and other broad features underpinning the principles of the “general logic” outlined in the introduction. It is this which 746  General Conclusion sets the framework for the flexible and informal use of words characteristic of the human use of language and required by human thought. The possession of this underlying understanding and capacity for dialogue constitutes a kind of “non-biological nativism”.1 Such a nonbiological nativism ought to be conceived, not in rationalist terms as if our knowledge of the principles concerned was gained without reference to experience, but rather in such a way that our statement of the paradigms of speech and thought is refined in the course of reflection upon their use. The roots of our ability to express an infinite range of thought with a finite vocabulary Once we distinguish between knowledge of langue (a practical knowledge of the tools put to use in speech) and speech itself, the way is open to distinguish between the lexical meaning of any given word or lexical factor—that is, its meaning at the level of language-possession and language-acquisition and its varied discourse-significances or senses at the level of language-use. Words or lexical elements thus have a double situation, one in speech and the other as the learned vocabulary to be woven together in sentences in this speech. This allows a word or lexical factor with only a few focuses of meaning listed in dictionaries to have an indefinite number of discourse-significances, seen in the different types of implication of the utterances using the word or lexical factor concerned. I elaborated this distinction in chapters I and III, providing many illustrations in chapters II and V. This showed its importance for all the most general words in language, including those on which mathematical and scientific advance depend and without which literature would cease to exist. From the start I made it plain that it is principally in virtue of this double situation of words that language gives us the capacity, in Humboldt’s phrase, to “make an infinite use of finite means”. (Throughout I speak of “words” for ease of presentation, meaning “words or lexical factors”. For, since languages are in varying degrees inflected, or else agglutinative or polysynthetic, the “word” as such is not the universal vehicle of meaning.) This capacity for the infinite is quite wrongly attributed by Chomsky and others to our capacity to reiterate certain types of linguistic operation—for instance, in multiple uses of words such as “and”, “or”, and “if” and in forming 1. Mark Baker has a useful discussion of “non-biological nativism” in “Creative Aspect of Language Use”. In sec. 4 he argues that “there is no good evidence from aphasia that it is neurologically embodied, no good evidence from developmental disorders that it is genetically encoded”, and in sec. 5 observes the impotence of computational methods in searching for “the best overall explanation...