Language and Human Understanding

Contents

vii Contents Acknowledgments xiii Introduction and Overview 1 The Plan of This Book  1 The Inspiration and Background of This Study  2 Section 1. Words and Their Dynamism: How We Are Able to Make an “Infinite Use of Finite Means”  7 Section 2. Seeking a Perspective Appropriate to the Phenomena  11 Section 3. The Role of Pragmatics in Semantics at Every Layer of Meaning within Discourse  25 Section 4. Grammatical Structures as a Projection of Semantic Structures  36 Section 5. The Novelty of Chomsky’s Conception of Formal Grammar  47 Section 6. The Verbal or “Saying” Character of Speech as the Key to Grammar  59 Prospect 66 part one. Words and Their Dynamism in the Expression of Meaning Chapter I. Two Levels of Meaning: The Level of Language-Possession and the Level of Language-Use 71 The Notion of Linguistic Understanding: Preliminary Remarks  71 Section 1. The Two Levels of Linguistic Understanding  75 Section 2. Words and Sentences: The Relation of the Two Levels  81 Section 3. How “Expressing a Sense” Differs from Other Forms of “Expressing”  88 Section 4. Distinguishing Langue-Meaning and Parole-Meaning as the Key to Escaping Compositionalism  90 Section 5. How We Achieve an “Infinite Use of Finite Means”  105 viii  Contents Chapter II. The Salience of Words and Our Adventurousness in Using Them 113 Section 1. Words and Basic Lexical Factors  113 Section 2. Types of Relationship between Different Uses of the Same Word  120 Section 3. The Roots of Creative Analogy in Extending the Concept of Number  140 Summary: The Power of Examples in Demonstration   149 Appendix: Morphology and Its Bearing on Semantics  150 Chapter III. Sentences, Sense, and the Objects of Linguistic Science 158 The Concepts of Sentence and Sense Belong at the Speech-Act Level  158 Section 1. The Notions of Sentence and Sense—Sense Not Tied to Truth-Conditions  159 Section 2. The Speech-Act: Convergence of Philosophy and Psychology with an Older Linguistics  168 Section 3. The “Sense” of Subordinate Sentence-Constituents  176 Section 4. Two Opposite Conceptions of Linguistic Science: The Radical Novelty of Chomsky’s Approach  193 Summary  210 Chapter IV. The Indivisibility of the Human Capacity for Language 219 The Interdpendence of the Various Semantic Structures within Language 219 Section 1. The Unity and Integratedness of Linguistic Capacity: Structure and Self- Reflexivity  221 Section 2. The Importance of This Holism in Semantics: Scrutinizing “Ordinary Language”  227 Section 3. The Role of Language in the Theory of Human Nature  233 Section 4. This Semantic Structure as the Feature Specific to Language of the Human Type  241 Chapter V. Scientific Method and the Significance of Mathematics for Linguistics 243 Section 1. Mistaken Presumptions about What “Scientific Method” Requires  243 Section 2. The Informality of the Concept of Rule  250 Section 3. The Unformalizability of Natural Language and the Informality of Its Concepts  253 Section 4. The Concept of Effectiveness and the Place of Mechanical Procedures in Mathematics  260 Section 5. The Relevance of THis Consideration of Mathematical Method to Linguistics  279 Contents  ix PART TWO. The Shape of the Psychology Required for Explaining the Learning and Use of Language Chapter VI. Human and Animal Organisms as Systems Dynamically Geared to the Environment 295 Mechanisms in a Holistic and Teleological Framework 295 Section 1. Human Beings as Integrated Unities: Gibson’s Work as a Key to Escaping Physicalism  296 Section 2. Mechanical Processes in Living Organisms: “Mechanical” an Ambiguous Word  312 Section 3. Gibson’s Treatment of Perception as a Model for the Treatment of Language  322 Appendix: Being Misled by Anomalies in Our Experience of Time and of Sensory Qualia  336 Chapter VII. Extending the Dynamic and Environment-Geared Model of Human Functioning to the Psychology of Language 346 Section 1. Difficulties in Applying the Idea of Modularity to Language  346 Section 2. The Human Learning of Language Relies on Multi-Modal Perception  352 Section 3. The Shape of an Integrated View of the Language Faculty and Its “Tuning”  356 Chapter VIII. Understanding as Essential to Explaining Speech: Resisting the Drag towards Physicalism 366 Section 1. The Incoherence in Dividing the Inner from the Outer in Language  366 Section 2. Conceiving of Sentences or Thoughts as Representing Reality: A Mistake Revived  382 Section 3. Sentence-Meanings Cannot Be Isomorphic with Either External or Internal States  393 Conclusion  396 PART THREE. Rewriting the Philosophy of Grammar and Restoring Unity to the Theory of Language Chapter IX. Explaining...