Folk-linguistic fictions and the explananda of the language sciences

For the past two millennia, the explananda of language theory have been inherited from the Western linguistic tradition. The legacy is what might be called “the Western linguistic imaginary”: An indeterminate but deeply mesmerizing inventory of entities, properties, and powers of language commonly a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:New ideas in psychology 2016-08, Vol.42, p.7-13
Main Author: Taylor, Talbot J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Folk metalinguistics
Hard problem of language
Language science
Linguistic ontology
Linguistic reflexivity
Naturalistic epistemology
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Summary:For the past two millennia, the explananda of language theory have been inherited from the Western linguistic tradition. The legacy is what might be called “the Western linguistic imaginary”: An indeterminate but deeply mesmerizing inventory of entities, properties, and powers of language commonly attributed to language and language-users and which therefore seem to stand in need of explanation. In recent years, naturalistic research programs in the cognitive sciences have provided illuminating explanations of basic (“lower-order”) cognitive phenomena. The challenge today for the science of language is whether, in transforming itself along the lines of epistemological naturalism, it can provide similarly illuminating explanations of any of its traditional explananda. In addressing this challenge, greater attention needs to be given to the source of such explananda in the everyday, culturally-diverse practices of folk metalinguistics.
ISSN:0732-118X
1873-3522
DOI:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.05.001