Language and Human Understanding

Acknowledgments

xiii Acknowledgments This book has been over twenty-one years in the writing, the fruit of fifty years’ preoccupation with language. For the final result, I have to thank first the chief teachers and authors who led me to realize the necessity of achieving an integration of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy if any account of the meaning and structure of language was to carry conviction. Secondly, I have to thank those without whose encouragement or practical help the project would have been stillborn. In discussing my transition from physical science and history to academic philosophy in 1962, Gilbert Ryle described himself as “a sort of philosophical uncle”, and he proved himself a wise first mentor in philosophy. He was at heart an Aristotelian, and I inherited his Aristotelian instincts. He saw that one had to understand that man is an animal, and that animals are not machines , before one could properly grapple with the special character of human beings. Meantime, he had a never-resting concern with language and the nature of thinking. He also saw the need for what Aristotle and Aquinas called analogy in our use of words. Michael Dummett and Elizabeth Anscombe, the other main philosophical influences upon me in Oxford, stood before me as examples of discipline, terriers never content with a work left in rough sketch only without pursuing every difficulty. Dummett’s first impact upon me was through his seminars , first on the philosophy of mathematics from Frege to the intuitionists in 1964 and ’65, and then on the philosophy of language in 1971. However, in the latter, while I shared his sense that Davidson’s account of meaning in terms of truth-conditions failed to bring us to a grasp of the inner content of propositions, I felt that his substitution of verification conditions brought us no nearer. It was only after 1971 in Aberdeen that I came to engage with the linguists xiv  acknowledgments and linguistic theory. At an early stage Otto Jespersen’s The Philosophy of Grammar left an indelible mark. Dr. David Cram, Head of Linguistics at Aberdeen , introduced me to Chomsky, and later, as he left Aberdeen for Oxford, to the very different Simon Dik. Simon Dik was one with whose thought I felt an instant rapport, struck by his philosophical acumen, and it was through him that I first encountered functionalist approaches in linguistics. Joan Bresnan and Robert van Valin joined Dik in seeing the need to recognize functional as well as configurational parallels between languages. Thus it became evident that there has never been just one scientific linguistics, any more than there has ever been one unified scientific psychology. It was always clear that there is no one “analytic philosophy”— Ryle, Dummett, and Wittgenstein were poles apart from each other in their approaches, and all three poles apart from the transatlantic Quine and Davidson. Some of the central ideas of the book were presented in the second set of “Gifford Investigations”, which I presented in 1985 as a Gifford Fellow of the University of Aberdeen. In 1990, I turned to develop these. Then, as the very first drafts of early chapters took shape, my brother Martin, the psycholinguist , alerted me to key difficulties, while his wife Lila pointed me towards the work of the psychologist J. J. Gibson. Yet by 1998 I found myself compelled to delve far more deeply into linguistics and its different schools—finding myself rewarded in the lengthening task, not by scatter, but by a reinforcement of my conviction that one could attain a unified view of speech and language. This was a view to which linguistics, psychology, and philosophy each contributed in more than one way. I have to thank the University of Aberdeen Gifford Committee and the University of Notre Dame Center for Philosophy of Religion for their contribution towards secretarial expenses at an early stage. From 1989, as Honorary Lecturer in Philosophy and then Honorary Research Fellow, I have enjoyed the unfailing support of the computer services and library personnel of the University of Aberdeen. From the time of my motor accident in 1977 onwards Elizabeth Anscombe was a constant source of affection and a support to my spirit. Since I started on the project, David Burrell of Notre Dame and David Cram gave me frequent encouragement, and I was at different times emboldened by Roy Harris of Oxford and by the counsel of Mouton de Gruyter. My perseverance was particularly renewed over a difficult period by the keen help...