On the History of Language

January 27, 2024 timothywstanley@me.com

We start with a feeling, an ineffable je ne sais quoi, that our language shapes our world. But to assess the truth of this claim, the scientist wants a hypothesis – a rigorous, experimentally testable statement of precisely how language shapes our world. Quasi-mystical meditations on my life in language are not the stuff of modern scientific journals. But any properly formulated hypothesis will necessarily be reductive and deflationary – devising empirical tests of the supposed differences in our worldviews inevitably means transforming our innermost feelings into detached, foreign objects that we can observe and analyse from the outside. Such tests can arguably never capture the totality and primordiality of the original feeling. Does this mean that the scholarship of previous centuries has no place in today’s world or, alternatively, that modern science simply cannot fathom the philosophical depths explored by earlier work? Past and present scholarship are complementary. The writings of earlier scholars – however speculative they may seem to us now, and whatever problematic assumptions they may be built upon – undeniably capture something of our human experience and can inform the investigations of present-day researchers. In turn, the hypotheses and experiments of latter-day linguists and psychologists provide another perspective – shaped by the scientistic worldview of our own era – on these enduring questions of the connections between mind and language. In all these cases, we cannot even make sense of the questions without understanding something of the specific intellectual contexts in which they have arisen.

James McElvenny, “Our Language, Our World,” - https://aeon.co/essays/does-language-mirror-the-mind-an-intellectual-history. This is an interesting summary of the need for historical context in the philosophy of language. There is evidence that something as simple as left-right spatial distinctions turns out not to be universal in light of cross-cultural comparison. For instance, the Gurindji people speak of spatial relationships in east-west-north-south positions. Linguistic debate about such differences sometimes echoes to me, William James’ example of an argument about a squirrel circling a tree. To cite another example, while some linguists have cited the irrelevance of Kant’s early work as an example of left-right egoism, his later Critique of Pure Reason developed a broader notion of space and time relevant to hypothesizing about linguistic diversity. Such insights are fodder for McElvenny’s point that our questions about the relationship between language and the mind can often benefit from a deeper analysis of past debates. Relevant advice when considering the question of whether language can be understood as an extension of the mind, discussed briefly in a recent Philosophy Bites interview with David Chalmers here.