Knowledge and Language
One of the ways in which we come to possess knowledge is
through our possession and use of language. This raises the
issues of why language is so central to our capacity to know
and of what limits or constraints language places upon our
knowledge. Is our knowledge exhausted by what can be said
or can something be known in a non-linguistic form?
What is language?
 Communication
 Syntax – rules of grammar
 Semantics – rules of meaning
 Natural Language - Any language actually spoken, as
opposed to artificial languages, whose syntax and rules are
laid down for theoretical purposes.
Knowledge
 What is the
knowledge?
relationship
between
language
 How does language influence what we can know?
 Attitudes
 Values
 Practices
 The challenge and possibility of translation
and
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Does language shape the world?
Here is a view that is probably quite widespread in some parts of social science and
language and literature departments. We’ll call this the strong relativity thesis (SR).
SR
The nature of the world depends on the concepts and language I possess (as a
member of a particular linguistic and cultural community).
This is a strong thesis because it claims that the (real) nature of the world is
determined by my concepts. This seems to invert the relationship between world and
mind. My claims to knowledge might be circumscribed in many ways and I may
regard truth as a feature of how we talk about the world rather than as determined by
the world. However, such considerations do not undermine the idea that the existence
and nature of the things in the world are independent of what I think of them. This
thesis of independence is a central feature of realism.
SR, though, is probably held because a more plausible thesis is sometimes given too
strong an interpretation. This thesis is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SW), a widely
used label for the linguistic relativity hypothesis.
SW
The particular language we speak shapes the way we think about the world.

Our language shapes the way we conceive of the world. It does not change in
any literal way the shape of that world.

Categories or concepts that may be very different between languages include
those of time, causation, and the self.

Note that some superficial examples of diversity that are frequently cited are
in fact spurious. It is not true, for example, that the Indo-Aleut languages
have a vast number of words for different varieties of snow.
Does thinking about the world in different ways mean that different
linguistic/ conceptual communities possess distinct kinds of
knowledge?
Does it mean that there are some things which are unknowable for
those who do not share the language?
What is the relationship between language and culture?
How is language possible? What must we know to be language users?
When you were born you were remarkably poor in your use of English or
any other language. Along with every other (non-impaired or isolated)
human infant you became a proficient user of a language(s) in a relatively
short time. By the age of about three you – all of us – display linguistic
understanding and the ability to produce a wide range of grammatical
sentences.
How can we be language users? What is it that we know?
One influential and widely accepted answer in the first half of the
twentieth century is essentially an empiricist claim. Developed by
behaviourists like the psychologist B. F. Skinner the claim was that we
acquire language through a process of stimulus response. That is, we
come to be language users through the experience of being immersed in a
world of language users. A child learns through imitation and repetition?
A word through repetition becomes associated with a particular stimulus
– a particular sensory experience.
Cake
The key to explaining our acquisition of language is the presentation of
appropriate sensory experiences at appropriate times and in appropriate
combinations. Knowledge of language is built up through our experience
(via the senses) of the world.
We can agree that experience is necessary for the development of our
knowledge of language. However, there are big problems with the view
that language is somehow just acquired by having the right kind of
experiences in the right kind of environment.
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky: the central figure in a major change in the study of linguistics
from the late 1950’s.
Big problems
with the
behaviourist view
The competence of an adult, or even a young child, is such that we must attribute to
him a knowledge of language that extends far beyond anything that he has learned.
Compared with the number of sentences that a child can produce or interpret with
ease, the number of seconds in a life is ridiculously small. Hence the data available as
input is only a minute sample of the linguistic material that has been thoroughly
mastered, as indicated by actual performance.
We should be struck by the meagreness of the available data or
experience in relation to the extent of rapidly acquired linguistic
competence.
We’re not going to get from our experience of associating words with
features of the world and practices to the kind of linguistic competence
we actually have.
Moreover, we should note the creativity and compositionality of
language. There seems no obvious limit on what we could say. From a
finite number of words and rules we can compose entirely new sentences.
Once we have even a modest competence in a language we can produce
and interpret (i.e. understand others) sentences we have never heard
before.
Badgers might howl when there is a danger in the environment or gibbons
gibber, and in this sense communicate something about the world to their
fellow beasts. Chomsky notes that full-blown language is not stimulus
dependent in this way. Human language can be produced independently
of environmental stimuli or the occurrence of certain internal states.
How to explain these facts about human language?
 Commonality of basic grammatical structures.
 Universal grammar
 Innate – hard-wired – knowledge or capacity to develop linguistic
competence in general (i.e. in any language).
 Languages share a common ‘deep structure’.
 The particular form of an individual language presents the infant
with a particular set of data. The innate capacity enables the child
to map the surface features of English, Japanese or whatever onto
the deep grammar.
 A child can thus manage to construct a grammatical model which
enables her to interpret and produce sentences in the language.