If language is inside our head how can it reach others and the world outside ?
Manuel Gatto
Dottorato di Ricerca in Filosofia del Linguaggio
Università del Piemonte Orientale «Amedeo Avogadro» - Vercelli
manuel.gatto@libero.it
In a certain sense it is obvious that «people find sentences meaningful because
of something going on in their brains» (J ACKENDOFF [2002 : 268]). But on the other
hand there are strong intuitions that something going on in our brains cannot be all
there is in relation to meaning—brain functions are at least a necessary condition for
meaning. For instance there are Putnam’s intuitions that there are many words
whose meanings we do not fully know but that are although assumed to have a
determinate meaning : therefore meanings are not in the heads of speakers. Then
there are other intuitions that go in the following direction : in order to guarantee the
success of communication and to assure that something objective, or at least
intersubjective, is conveyed by the same sentence in the mouth of different speakers
meanings should by either some sort of Platonic entity that is «grasped» by different
speakers, or something that has to do with the correct use of a sentence in a socially
articulated language-game. Again, against these views speaks the conviction that the
only way for treating meaning scientifically is to adopt a mentalistic stance that
investigates meanings from within the cognitive structures supported by our brains.
It seems to me that these are among the reasons why Ray Jackendoff sharply
distinguishes in his last book Foundations of Language (Oxford University Press,
2002) a «Realist Semantics» from a «Conceptualist Semantics». Whereas realist
semantics is the study of the connection of language to the world, conceptualist
semantics is devoted to discover how language users connect their linguistic system
to their individual concepts. Going through the argument in favour of conceptualist
semantics I will argue that in a conceptualist framework general problems—the
more striking ones are the possibility of a radical solipsism and of a private
language—arise. A semantic theory, to give a very rough definition, has to explain
the meaning conveyed by utterances in terms of their relation to something else. For
Jackendoff this relation holds between the phonological-syntactical structure of
lexical items and their semantic-conceptual structure : «semantic-conceptual
structure does not have a semantics, it is the semantics for language» (JACKENDOFF
[2002 : 279]). In this way the notions of «conceptual structure», «meaning» and
«reference» tend to collapses into one notion and so the meanings of our words just
are the conceptual structures encoded at the phonological-syntactical level. But it is
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clear that these sort of semantics establishes relations that remain completely inside
the head of a speaker and so it seems problematic how to reach others through
communication and to speak «about» the same «world». The problem I see in the
conceptualist framework is that it seems to account only for private representations
available only to the person how has them. In this way the conceptualist framework
parts company with Descartes’ representational scepticism as well as with its
methodological solipsism : there are no necessary, causal connections between the
representations one might have and the things in the external environment they are
supposed to represent (an external world could also be absent). Obviously
methodological solipsism doesn’t directly imply metaphysical solipsism but its
upholder should nevertheless account for how different persons can interact and
communicate in an environment that they are supposed to share with each other.
After a review of Jackendoff’s own solutions to this problems I will argue that the
alternative solutions proposed in a framework close to the realist one are, at least
philosophically, more convincing.
Another problem for Jackendoff’s internalistic stance seems me to emerge also
from inside his own naturalistic framework. Jackendoff, proposing a computationalfunctionalist theory of the mind, holds that states of the functional-mind are
supervenient on states of the brain. So meaning has to do with the mind. The
problem that, following Jackendoff, remains is : how to situate the study of meaning
in the study of the functional-mind ? Jackendoff’s parallel architecture should, and
maybe does, provide an answer to this question from within the metalistic stance and
its conceptualist semantics. But Jackendoff hopes also that his theory will provide us
the key for a better integration between linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. But
is it really possible to have a conceptualist semantic as a part of a more general
theory of the mind and, at the same time, to invoke notions like «attunement» ?
«Attunement» is needed to explain the possibility of communication inside an
internalistic framework that works with different conceptual structures for different
persons as «referring» nevertheless to something in common. But attunement
presupposes similarity in brain-structures which, again, presupposes evolutionary
theory. In this way I suspect that the promise to eliminate the gap between cognitive
neurosciences and linguistics is challenged from the fact that evolutionary theory
and neuroscience seem to presuppose some external and causal efficacious facts that
a conceptualist semantics can hardly account for.
So we have challenges from two sides : (a) from outside the conceptualist
framework through arguments in favour of an externalistic realist semantics, in
particular when realist semantics gives an more convincingly account of the success
of communication, and (b) from inside through an argument in favour, again, of an
externalistic position, that should be envisaged if some—for the plausibility of
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Jackendoff’s architecture necessary—achievements of neuroscience and
evolutionary theory should be put into work.
To put the points in the form of questions :
(1) Is it possible to solve the problems that may arise for communication in the
conceptualist framework from within this framework ?
(2) Can the hope for integration between linguistics and cognitive
neuroscience convincingly be satisfied into a conceptualist framework ?
(3) Also if we may give a positive answer to (1) can the notion of
«attunement» really be put to work in a strongly conceptualist framework ?
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