Language and Human Understanding

IV. The Indivisibility of the Human Capacity for Language

219 IV The Indivisibility of the Human Capacity for Language The Interdependence of the Various Semantic Structures within Language The many meanings of the word “holism” The conception of a whole with an essential, not merely accidental, unity was first made explicit by Aristotle in his treatment of the relationships of the whole animal to its matter or material parts1 and of the spoken syllable to its phonetic elements.2 By an essential unity or whole is meant a whole in which the nature and behavior of the parts cannot be understood except by reference to the nature and behavior of the whole, and at the same time the nature and behavior of the whole cannot be understood except with reference to the nature and behavior of the parts. Within language we have already met the holism involved in the relationship of sentence-constituents to the sentences or utterances they make up, as well as that of the spoken syllable. The structuralist way of thinking mentioned in section 4 (b) of chapter III, instanced in differentiating the contrasts established by “mat”, “rug”, and “carpet” in English and those established by tapis, paillasson, and carpette in French, constitutes a third example of holism in the coordination of our speech, as seen not in sentences taken individually, but in the range of contrasts exhibited in families of sentences. This last holism, as a matter of the organic unity of each particular lan1 . See David Braine, Human Person, esp. chap. 8, sec. 2. 2. Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk. Zeta, 17, 1041b11–34; Aristotle made no phonemic/phonetic distinction. 220   Words and Their Dynamism guage as it exists at one time, considered synchronically, has become a datum in the thinking of linguists, one especially associated with Saussure. However, we need to move beyond this structuralism in phonetics and lexical relations to something much more far-reaching.3 We have to see languages as incorporating the key semantic structures embodied in the general logic outlined in the introduction, section 4 (b) (i). At the semantic level any language involves a unitary integrated logical structure in such a way that one could not have any parts of this structure at all if one did not have all of them, and which provides a framework for the rest of our thought and speech. Thus we could not, I contend, have the parts of the structure of language which relate to the senses, imagination, memory, the emotions, and the will without having the parts which relate to the distinctions between past, present , and future, causal action and causal explanation, knowledge and truth as they concern propositions, various kinds of possibility and necessity, and various kinds of evaluation—and one could not have any of these if one did not have all the others. Even the simplest of statements has sense at all only as an exercise of an underlying linguistic capacity which also allows us to express this whole ensemble of concepts. One cannot have the capacity for peripheral parts of language without having the capacity for this central core, and one could not have the capacity for parts of this core without having the capacity for the whole core. True, at particular stages of language development one might not yet have the vocabulary or linguistic means of making some of the core notions explicit. But if one has the capacity for language at all, this must include the capacity to acquire or develop the means of making all core notions explicit, and one’s earlier utterances have senses pregnant with kinds of significance which can only be made explicit in terms of core notions. This “framework holism” is quite different from what is called “semantic holism”, the doctrine whereby the sense or discourse-significance of a word depends upon its context in the whole language (not just its local discourse context), a language being taken to include all the sentences of the language concerned, treated as completely given each in their full sense, a definite totality even though their utterance may be in some cases future or merely possible.4 Yet any such conception of a language as a completed totality of potentially actual sentences and sentence-senses is quite misconceived and 3. See the introduction in this volume, Jackendoff’s semantic studies, and the essays of Uriel Weinreich , Roman Jakobson, and Stephen Ullmann in Universals of Language, ed. J. Greenberg. 4. This is the “holism” which Dummett rightly attacks. His concern is that language should not be...