Critical factors that appear to encourage vocal development in humans are altriciality and long immaturity. Hominid infants appear to have evolved a specific tendency to use elaborate vocalization as a means of soliciting long-term investment from caregivers. The development of such vocal capacity provides necessary infrastructure for language development across human life history.

From Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create ways of being, as individuals and as a society. Here, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning, and the shared practice of speech shapes human experience.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of fluent human-like conversations and are increasingly emulating the human trait of empathy. Consequently, people are turning to LLMs for companionship, with interest in friendships and even romantic relationships with AI on the rise. This paper assesses the goodness of users' relationships with these empathetic LLMs under an alternative framework that takes human flourishing as its main normative concern, combining perfectionism—an influential philosophical approach to human flourishing—with an analytic examination of LLM environments. While (...) Empathetic LLMs hold some promise, we argue that certain properties of LLMs and the way that these models are currently being used in the form of AI companions are likely to impoverish the users' social capacities conducive to human flourishing. Moreover, the proliferation of AI companions could lead to people further isolating themselves from people who could provide genuine friendships. We end by making some suggestions on the kinds of features empathetic LLMs should have to ensure these models are used as tools to practice social interactions and refine communication techniques that can ultimately be applied outside the virtual space. (shrink)

Based on neuropsychological evidence of nonverbal impairment accompanying aphasia, I propose that the neural prerequisites for language acquisition are shared with a range of nonverbal capacities. Their commonality concerns the ability to recognize a limited number of finite elements in manifold perceptual entities and to combine them for constructing manifold entities.

The claim that language is shaped by the brain is weakened by lack of clear specification of what necessary and sufficient properties the brain actually imposes. To account for human intellectual superiority, it is proposed that language did require special brain evolution (Deacon 1997), but that what evolved was a merely quantitative change rather than a radically new invention.

This paper explores the epistemological roots of AI-induced psychosis through the lens of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy – the contemporary phenomenon that occurs in the user’s experience during interaction with AI. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how the theory of symbolic reference and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness provide a robust diagnostic framework for cases where users mistake abstract language models for conscious entities. The author contends that AI-induced psychosis stems from a fundamental categorical mistake: (...) users attribute continuous subjective form and intentionality to discrete tokens, mistaking fluent text generation for genuine sentience. Within the Whiteheadian framework, the user’s proneness to delusions is linked to the fallibility of symbolic reference, specifically when grammatically flawless text on a screen is erroneously endowed with sentience and agency, which Large Language Models are devoid of. The analysis made it possible to identify the following important points: 1. The paper reveals that sycophancy in AI-models reinforces false causal links, transforming symbolic reference into a loop of self-confirming projections. 2. De-abstraction of AI technology through Whitehead’s theories and additional safeguards, proposed by other scholars in the field, will optimistically facilitate “epistemic immunity” development in the user against AI-induced psychosis. 3. By integrating philosophical approaches into digital literacy, a comprehensive model for instrumentalism restoration can be developed based on the distinction between the discrete and the continuous. This paradigm will encourage the user to perceive LLMs as discrete tools rather than continuous “companions”, thereby moderating the risks of AI-induced psychosis and reclaiming the autonomy of human experience in modern digital world. (shrink)

As John Deely has suggested in his Four ages of understanding, philosophia in practice is semiotic process, an engagement in the world through the action of signs. But this observation leads us to a point of contention with Deely's treatment of semiotic process itself and its connection with the more widely understood notions about language in our time. Specifically, there are major difficulties with the treacherous formal and popular nomenclature about the phenomenon of language and its philosophical connection (...) to the “semiology” of Saussure and sign theory of C. S. Peirce. Our issue is with the formal use of the term “language” centrally and often in its technical sense as an analytical system — a way of “seeing or looking at the world” that is prior to and removed from the communicative sense of “language” — while at the same time also informally employing the term in its common and practical sense as a system for information exchanges. In fact, Deely's comprehensive annotated index helps resolve some of the issue. But taken in the context of Deely's broader argument, the problem with the definition and use of the term “language” somewhat stifles the attempt to revise appreciation of our arrival at the “time of the sign” as a species-specific capacity. (shrink)

Language Turned on Itself examines what happens when language becomes self-reflexive; when language is used to talk about language. Those who think, talk, and write about language are habitual users of various metalinguistic devices, but reliance on these devices begins early: kids are told, 'That's called a "rabbit"'. It's not implausible that a primitive capacity for the meta-linguistic kicks in at the beginning stages of language acquisition. But no matter when or how frequently (...) these devices are invoked, one thing is clear: they present theorists of language with a complex data pattern. Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore show that the study of these devices and patterns not only represents an interesting and neglected project in the philosophy of language, but also carries important consequences for other parts of philosophy. Part I is devoted to presenting data about various aspects of our metalinguistic practices. In Part II, the authors examine and reject the four leading metalinguistic theories, and offer a new account of our use of quotation in a variety of different contexts. But the primary goal of this book is not to promote one theory over another. Rather, it is to present a deeply puzzling set of problems and explain their significance. (shrink)

Is the ability to speak a language an acquired skill? Leading proponents of the generative approach to human language—notably Chomsky (2000) and Pinker (2003)—have argued that the thesis that language capacities are skills is hopelessly confused and at odds with a range of empirical evidence, which suggests that human language capacities are grounded in a biologically inherited set of language instincts or a Universal Grammar (UG). In this paper, we argue that resistance to the claim (...) that human language capacities are skills has been fostered by naïve and implausible conceptions of the nature of skilled action. Correcting these misconceptions about the nature of skilled action breathes new life into the old idea that human language competences are particular kinds of skills and does so in a way that is fully consistent with appeals to the central importance of UG, broadly construed. More generally, we argue that by taking human language capacities to be skills, we capture what is right about the generative program while at the same time avoiding its most serious pitfalls. (shrink)

The turn of the century witnessed key developments in biological sciences with profound implications both for biological theory and for the sciences of language. The decoding of the human genome showed that humans share with their closest living relatives, chimpanzees, and bonobos, between 95% and 98% of their genes, depending on the methodology for establishing similarity. This finding threw doubt on the plausibility of the claim that the human language capacity is a consequence of a species-unique, genetically (...) determined neurobiological innovation. Around the same time, it was shown that cultural variation is not unique to the human species; this was initially demonstrated with reference to chimpanzees, but it has since been shown that cultural variation and cultural transmission occurs in a variety of mammalian and avian species. In theoretical biology, the ‘Central Dogma’ of Neo-Darwinism was challenged by the (re-)emergence of ‘Evo-Devo’ and niche construction approaches to evolutionary processes. These developments have led to an increasing acceptance of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis that goes beyond, and in some crucial respects contradicts, the Neo-Darwinian modern synthesis of the mid-twentieth century. This recasting of evolutionary theory cannot fail to impact the foundations of biolinguistics. Over a roughly contemporaneous period, in the language sciences, the autonomy both of language as a “faculty”, and of grammar from meaning, has been challenged by cognitive linguistics and its more recent companion, cultural linguistics. Together, these developments of recent decades compel the recognition that biology and culture cannot be seen, as they largely were in the last century, as competing ‘causes’ of language and human cognition. A 21st century biolinguistics needs to accommodate the new findings in biology, language sciences (and related disciplines such as archaeology) through the elaboration of a biocultural linguistics that is fundamentally interdisciplinary and is situated in contemporary accounts of both human evolution and linguistic diversity. This chapter will outline the main features of a biocultural science of language and address the complex and dynamical relationship between what all human languages have in common, in what ways they display variation, and how language variation is (and is not) situated in differences between cultures and societies. (shrink)

The main goal of the paper is to present a putative role of consciousness in language capacity. The paper contrasts the two approaches characteristic for cognitive semiotics and cognitive science. Language is treated as a mental phenomenon and a cognitive faculty. The analysis of language activity is based on the Chalmers’ distinction between the two forms of consciousness: phenomenal and psychological. The approach is seen as an alternative to phenomenological analyses typical for cognitive semiotics. Further, a (...) cognitive model of the language faculty is described. The model is implemented in SNePS/GLAIR architecture and based on GATN grammar and semantic networks as a representation formalism. The model - reflecting traditionally distinguished linguistic structures - consists of phonological, syntactic, and semantic modules. I claim that the most important role in the phenomenon of language is played by psychological consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness accompanies various stages of language functioning, but is not indispensable in explanations of the language faculty. (shrink)

During the first two years of human life a common neural substrate underlies the hierarchical organization of elements in the development of speech as well as the capacity to combine objects manually, including tool use. Subsequent cortical differentiation, beginning at age two, creates distinct, relatively modularized capacities for linguistic grammar and more complex combination of objects. An evolutionary homologue of the neural substrate for language production and manual action is hypothesized to have provided a foundation for the evolution (...) of language before the divergence of the hominids and the great apes. Support comes from the discovery of a Broca's area homologue and related neural circuits in contemporary primates. In addition, chimpanzees have an identical constraint on hierarchical complexity in both tool use and symbol combination. Their performance matches that of the two-year-old child who has not yet developed the neural circuits for complex grammar and complex manual combination of objects. (shrink)

In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in early-modern philosophy, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of John Locke's critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in writers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Nicole, Pufendorf, Boyle, Malebranche and Locke. Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy demonstrates (...) that new developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors because it was seen as an obstacle to both knowledge and society. She thereby uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern epistemology, morality and politics. (shrink)

Notice that this paper has not claimed that all natural languages are CFL's. What it has shown is that every published argument purporting to demonstrate the non-context-freeness of some natural language is invalid, either formally or empirically or both.18 Whether non-context-free characteristics can be found in the stringset of some natural language remains an open question, just as it was a quarter century ago.Whether the question is ultimately answered in the negative or the affirmative, there will be interesting (...) further questions to ask. If it turns out that natural languages are indeed always CFL's, it will be reasonable to ask whether this helps to explain why speakers apparently recognize so quickly whether a presented utterance corresponds to a grammatical sentence or not, and to associate structural and semantic details with it. It might also be reasonable to speculate about the explanation for the universally context-free character of the languages used by humans, and to wonder whether evolutionary biological factors are implicated in some way (Sampson (1979) could be read in this light). And naturally, it will be reasonable to pursue the program put forward by Gazdar (1981, in press) to see to what extent CFL-inducing grammatical devices can be exploited to yield insightful descriptions of natural languages that capture generalizations in revealing ways.If a human language that is not a CFL is proved to exist, on the other hand, a different question will be raised: give the non-context-free character of human languages in general, why has this property been so hard to demonstrate that it has taken over twenty-five years to bring it to light since the issue was first explicitly posed? If human languages do not have to be CFL's, why do so many (most?) of them come so close to having the property of context-freeness? And, since the CFL's certainly constitute a very broad class of mathematically natural and computationally tractable languages, what property of human beings or their communicative or cognitive needs is it that has caused some linguistic communities to reach beyond the boundaries of this class in the course of evolving a linguistic system?Either way, we shall be interested to see our initial question resolved, and further questions raised. One cautionary word should be said, however, about the implications (or lack of them) that the answer will have for grammatical studies. Chomsky has repeatedly stated that he does not see weak generative capacity as a theme of central importance in the theory of grammar, and we agree. It is very far from being the case that the recent resurgence of interest in exploring the potential of CF-PSG or equivalent systems will, or should, be halted dead in its tracks by the discovery (if it is ever forthcoming) that some natural language is not a CFL. In the area of parsing, for instance, it seems possible that natural languages are not only parsed on the basis of constituent structure such as a CF-PSG would assign, but are parsed as if they were finite state languages (see Langendoen (1975) and Church (1980) for discussion along these lines). That is, precisely those construction-types that figure in the various proofs that English is not an FSL appear to cause massive difficulty in the human processing system; the sentences crucial to the proofs are for the most part unprocessable unless they are extremely short (yet the arguments for English not being and FSL only go through if length is not an issue). This means that in practice properties of finite state grammars are still of great potential importance to linguistic theory despite the fact that they do not provide the framework for defining the total class of grammatical sentences. The same would almost certannly be true of CF-PSG's if they were shown to be inadequate in a similar sense. It is highly unlikely that the advances made so far in far in phrase structure description could be nullified by a discovery about weak generative capacity. Moreover, there are known to be numerous ways in which the power of CF-PSG's can be marginally enhanced to permit, for example, xx languages to be generated without allowing anything like the full class of recursively enumerable or even context-sensitive languages (see Hopcroft and Ullmann (1979), Chapter 14) for an introduction to this topic, noting especially Figure 14.7 on p. 393. The obvious thing to do if natural languages were ever shown not to be CFL's in the general case would be to start exploring such minimal enhancements of expressive power to determine exactly what natural languages call for in this regard and how it could be effectively but parsimoniously provided in a way that closely modelled human linguistic capacities.In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume that the natural languages are a proper subset of the infinite-cardinality CFL's until such time as they are validly shown not to be. (shrink)

In recent years, it has become widely accepted that linguistic questions were much more central to the philosophical tradition of German idealism than had been previously thought. However, most of the key texts for this discussion remain largely unknown. The present work makes available, for the first time in English, what is the seminal work for this issue: Johann Gottlieb Fichte's monograph of 1795 entitled On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language, together with other closely related (...) essays. The translations are accompanied by a detailed interpretive essay that seeks to place these materials in their historical context, relate them to the systematic concerns of German idealism, and evaluate them in relation to later approaches to language, especially those of semiotics and poststructuralism. It also explores the role played by the linguistic thought of the German idealists in the emergance of modern "scientific linguistics" with wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as its connections with the origins of German romanticism. While the book draws upon state-of-the-art scholarship in these areas, it is written in such a way as to be accessible to any serious student of philosophy, intellectual and literary history, and linguistics. (shrink)

In this article, I examine and respond to Charles Taylor’s phenomenology of language. Taylor argues for the constitutive theory of language by refuting the designative theory of language. According to Taylor, designative theory fails to grasp the constitutive nature of language which opens up human meanings and values, shapes our emotions, and defines our social footings. Metaphors and symbols convey important insights about human reality through extending our language capacity. By comparing with Paul Ricoeur’s (...) and Avery Dulles’ analysis of symbols, we can also see the significance of figurative speech in religious life. Finally, the anticipated criticism of Taylor’s argument of moral felt intuition is also defended. (shrink)

Robin Dunbar's hypothesis that language capacity in response to the demands of maintaining large groups suggests a more specific hypothesis that language arose from a cognitive calculus by which animals could predict their status in complex dominance situations.

In paradigm exercises of agency, individuals guide their activities toward some goal. A central challenge for action theory is to explain how individuals guide. This challenge is an instance of the more general problem of how to accommodate individuals and their actions in the natural world, as explained by natural science. Two dominant traditions–primitivism and the causal theory–fail to address the challenge in a satisfying way. Causal theorists appeal to causation by an intention, through a feedback mechanism, in explaining guidance. (...) Primitivists postulate primitive agential capacities in their explanations. The latter neglect to explain how primitive capacities integrate with findings from natural science. The former do not explain why some feedback mechanism’s activity amounts to the agent’s guidance. In this paper I argue that both traditions should acknowledge a capacity to guide, as actually constituted by the executive system. I argue that appeals to this empirically discovered psychological system explain how individuals guide in a way that integrates with explanations from cognitive science. Individuals’ capacity to guide is embedded in the natural world through the activity of its constituent (mechanistic) components. (shrink)

I investigate the extent to which there might be, now or in the future, non-human animals that partake in the kind of fully human-style consciousness that has been taken by many philosophers to be the basis of normative personhood. I first sketch a conceptual framework for considering the question, based on a range of philosophical literature on relationships between consciousness, language and personhood. I then review the standard basis for largely a priori skepticism about the possibility that any non-human (...) animal could experience FHSC and be a person to any extent, and indicate empirically motivated grounds for rejecting such skepticism, at least with respect to a select group of hypersocial candidate species with communication systems we do not currently know are not languages: corvids, parrots, elephants, and toothed whales. Relevant facts about elephants are reviewed in some detail, as a mini case study. While it is suggested that elephants might partake in the sort of consciousness characteristic of personhood to some extent, grounds are given for expecting that this extent is sharply limited by comparison with normal humans. As these grounds are mainly aspects of elephants’ external niche, however, rather than known limitations in their inboard cognitive or representational capacities, the surprising conclusion emerges that elephants might acquire FHSC, and thereby become persons, if they can be brought into conversation with humans, a possibility opened by considerations canvassed in the paper. (shrink)

Ever since Chomsky, language has been considered primarily as an individual cognitive capacity. Even linguists who reject Chomsky's hypotheses accept this assumption. Daniel Dor proposes instead that language is a socially invented communication technology. It differs from all other animal communication systems, including human nonverbal communication, in that it can instruct the imaginations of others about things not shared with the speaker in the here and now. Dor's proposal solves the problem of the evolution of language, (...) assigns a key role to individual differences in language evolution, change, diversity, acquisition, and use, unifies the many divided branches of linguistics, and solves or points toward solutions in many central areas of the subject, from semantics and syntax to pragmatics and the relation between language and thought. It promises not only to change the face of the language sciences, but also to have profound implications for anthropology, biology, cultural studies, literary studies, philosophy, politics, and religion, and for our understanding of human experience. (shrink)

The claim of consistent hemispheric specialisations across classes of chordates is undermined by the absence of population-based directional asymmetry of paw/hand use in rodents and primates. No homologue of the cerebral torque from right frontal to left occipital has been established in a nonhuman species. The null hypothesis that the torque is the sapiens-specific neural basis of language has not been disproved.

It is widely agreed that language understanding has a distinctive phenomenology, as illustrated by phenomenal contrast cases. Yet it remains unclear how to account for the perceptual phenomenology of language experience. I advance a rhythmic account, which explains this phenomenology in terms of changes in rhythm of sensory capacities in both reading and speech perception. After presenting conceptual and empirical foundations for the account, I argue that it should be abductively preferred over competing views, especially the semantic perceptual (...) view, which holds that we literally perceive linguistic meaning. (shrink)

Democracy is shown to be a non-instrumental good-in-itself (as well as an instrument in securing other goods) by extrapolation from the Aristotelian premise that humans are political animals. Because humans are by nature language-using, as well as sociable and common-end-seeking beings, the capacity to associate in public decisions is constitutive of the human being-kind. Association in decision is necessary (although insufficient) for happiness in the sense of eudaimonia. A benevolent dictator who satisfied all other conditions of justice, harms (...) her subjects by denying them opportunity to associate in the decisions by which their community is governed. (shrink)

Language defines human existence. Yet defining language is a fraught project. I use the term "language" to refer to a specific mode of information transfer. First, it is a communicative mode. By communication I mean the information transfer serves a function, that is, an activity that occurs because it has increased the evolutionary fitness of ancestors. Secondly, while all communication is governed by norms, human communication, as opposed to biological communication, is governed by norms that have evolved (...) within the learned traditions of individual cultures. The meaning of an assertion in a culture’s language is the set of commitments to which that culture holds its speakers when they utter that assertion. Syntax has appeared in recent evolution to facilitate and enrich the communicative function, but it is a secondary aspect of language. The defining characteristic of human communication, of "language," -- is its capacity to constitute meaning. (shrink)

Language is central to political philosophy, yet until now there has been little in the way of a common framework capable of bridging disciplines that share an interest in language, power, and ethics. Studies are predominantly carried out in isolated disciplinary silos - notably linguistics, philosophy, political science, public administration, and education. This volume proposes a new vision for understanding the political ethics of language, particularly in linguistically diverse societies, and it establishes the necessary common framework for (...) this field of inquiry: language ethics. Through creative and constructive thinking, Language Ethics considers how to advance our understanding of the human commonalities of moral and linguistic capacities and the challenge of linguistic difference and societal interdependence. The book embraces the longstanding centrality of language to moral reasoning and reinterprets it in a manner that draws on the social and political life of real-world inter- and intralinguistic issues. Contributors to this collection are leading international experts from different disciplines and approaches whose voices add diverse insight to the discourse on ethics and language justice. Exploring social, political, and economic realities, Language Ethics illuminates the complex nexus between ethics and language and highlights the contemporary challenges facing multilingual societies, including the uncertainties, ambiguities, anxieties, and hopes that accompany them. (shrink)

Opinions have varied wildly as to whether the roots of language run extremely deep in the human lineage, or, alternatively, whether this unprecedented capacity is a recent acquisition. The question has been exacerbated by the fact that language itself does not preserve, so that its possession by earlier hominids has had to be inferred from indirect material proxies. Here I argue that while most technological putative proxies from the Paleolithic are certainly evidence of highly complex cognitive states (...) among our precursors, virtually none of them can reliably be taken as witness to the specific symbolic cognitive style that human beings share today—and with which language is intricately intertwined. Symbolic reasoning can only be confidently inferred from explicitly symbolic objects. These latter only became integral to hominid societies within the tenure of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, and their appearance marked an extreme inflection in the tempo of change as seen in the archaeological record. I thus suggest that the neural capacity for symbolic reasoning and language was acquired during the major developmental reorganization that gave rise to the highly anatomically distinctive H. sapiens some 200 thousand years ago, but that that the new potential was not exploited until about 100 thousand years later, when it was released by what was necessarily a cultural stimulus. Most probably, this stimulus was the spontaneous invention of externalized structured language. This brings the origin of language into the realm of exaptation and emergence—both of them familiar evolutionary phenomena requiring no special explanation—and excludes the long-term fine-tuning of language and human reasoning by natural selection. (shrink)

What must linguistic knowledge be like if it is to explain our capacity to use language? All linguists and philosophers of language presuppose some answer to this critical question, but all too often the presupposition is tacit. In this collection of sixteen previously unpublished essays, a distinguished international line-up of philosophers and linguists address a variety of interconnected themes concerning our knowledge of language.

From the first months of life, human infants produce “protophones,” speech-like, non-cry sounds, presumed absent, or only minimally present in other apes. But there have been no direct quantitative comparisons to support this presumption. In addition, by 2 months, human infants show sustained face-to-face interaction using protophones, a pattern thought also absent or very limited in other apes, but again, without quantitative comparison. Such comparison should provide evidence relevant to determining foundations of language, since substantially flexible vocalization, the inclination (...) to explore vocalization, and the ability to interact socially by means of vocalization are foundations for language. Here we quantitatively compare data on vocalization rates in three captive bonobo (Pan paniscus) mother–infant pairs with various sources of data from our laboratories on human infant vocalization. Both humans and bonobos produced distress sounds (cries/screams) and laughter. The bonobo infants also produced sounds that were neither screams nor laughs and that showed acoustic similarities to the human protophones. These protophone-like sounds confirm that bonobo infants share with humans the capacity to produce vocalizations that appear foundational for language. Still, there were dramatic differences between the species in both quantity and function of the protophone and protophone-like sounds. The bonobo protophone-like sounds were far less frequent than the human protophones, and the human protophones were far less likely to be interpreted as complaints and more likely as vocal play. Moreover, we found extensive vocal interaction between human infants and mothers, but no vocal interaction in the bonobo mother–infant pairs—while bonobo mothers were physically responsive to their infants, we observed no case of a bonobo mother vocalization directed to her infant. Our cross-species comparison focuses on low- and moderate-arousal circumstances because we reason the roots of language entail vocalization not triggered by excitement, for example, during fighting or intense play. Language appears to be founded in flexible vocalization, used to regulate comfortable social interaction, to share variable affective states at various levels of arousal, and to explore vocalization itself. (shrink)

Philosophers are often beholden to a picture of language as a largely static, well-defined structure which is handed over from generation to generation by an arduous process of learning: language, on this view, is something that we are given, and that we can make use of, but which we play no significant role in creating ourselves. This picture is often maintained in conjunction with the idea that several distinctively human cognitive capacities could only develop via the language (...) acquisition process, as thus understood. This paper argues that the phenomenon of homesign, i.e., spontaneous gesture systems devised by deaf children for the purpose of communicating with their non-signing peers, can shed valuable empirical light on these convictions. Contrary to grounding assumptions of Wittgensteinian, Gricean, and Peircean approaches to language, homesign shows how core properties of language—including semantic properties—can be built from the ground up in idiosyncratic ways to serve the communicative needs of individuals. (shrink)

This chapter argues that human and animal minds indeed depend on a collection of domain-specific, task-specific, and encapsulated cognitive systems: on a set of cognitive ‘modules’ in Fodor's sense. It also argues that human and animal minds are endowed with domain-general, central systems that orchestrate the information delivered by core knowledge systems. The chapter begins by reviewing the literature on spatial reorientation in animals and in young children, arguing that spatial reorientation bears the hallmarks of core knowledge and of modularity. (...) It then considers studies of older children and adults, arguing that human spatial representations change qualitatively over development and show capacities not found in any other species. Finally, it presents two new experiments that investigate the role of emerging spatial language in uniquely human navigation performance. (shrink)

Large Language Models (LLMs) form a ground of convergence between computational capacity and language in unprecedented ways—a convergence that occupies a growing literature. Using OpenAI’s Chat GPT, I explore a somewhat counter-intuitive concern—rather than following the emerging dilemmas between human language, cognition, and humanist philosophical conundrums on one hand and on the other, ‘literate’ machines, I ask what language do machines indeed speak. By tracing the computational crafting of that language, my intention is to (...) undergird a social imaginary in LLMs that is coherent and systemic, amenable to being called a simulated social, where simulation is not false nor farcical, but rather a technological craft of meaning making that coheres a machinic reality around a machinic language. This intent begins to address what notion of the social begins to emerge in the ubiquitous universe of LLMs. Two perspectives so far underexplored in the emerging literature are privileged here. Recognizing language as both a social fact par excellence and as a sign system that is anchored in the social, the discussion proceeds, first, by aligning the linguistic sign with computing technique in granular detail. Second, it calibrates sign systems with meaning making by exploring how metaphoric and metonymic constructs in LLMs simulate a social. This, I expect, leads us to paying good heed to what language machines do indeed speak and what social they create. (shrink)

Language (śabda) occupied a central yet often unacknowledged place in classical Indian philosophical thought. Foundational thinkers considered topics such as the nature of language, its relationship to reality, the nature and existence of linguistic units and their capacity to convey meaning, and the role of language in the interpretation of sacred writings. The first reader on language in--and the language of--classical Indian philosophy, A Śabda Reader offers a comprehensive and pedagogically valuable treatment of this (...) topic and its importance to Indian philosophical thought. A Śabda Reader brings together newly translated passages by authors from a variety of traditions--Brahmin, Buddhist, Jaina--representing a number of schools of thought. It illuminates issues such as how Brahmanical thinkers understood the Veda and conceived of Sanskrit; how Buddhist thinkers came to assign importance to language's link to phenomenal reality; how Jains saw language as strictly material; the possibility of self-contradictory sentences; and how words affect thought. Throughout, the volume shows that linguistic presuppositions and implicit notions about language often play as significant a role as explicit ideas and formal theories. Including an introduction that places the texts and ideas in their historical and cultural context, A Śabda Reader sheds light on a crucial aspect of classical Indian thought and in so doing deepens our understanding of the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Today, large language models are very powerful, informational and analytical tools that significantly accelerate most of the existing methods and methodologies for processing informational processes. Scientific information is of particular importance in this capacity, which gradually involves the power of large language models. This interaction of science and qualitative new opportunities for working with information lead us to new, unique scientific discoveries, their great quantitative diversity. There is an acceleration of scientific research, a reduction in the time (...) spent on its implementation – the freed up time can be spent both on solving new scientific problems and on scientific creativity, which, although it may not necessarily lead to a specific solution to a particular scientific problem, but is able to demonstrate the beauty of science in various disciplinary areas. As a result, the interaction of large language models and scientific information is at the same time a research for solutions to scientific problems, scientific problems, and scientific creativity. Solving scientific problems requires the ability to efficiently process big data, which cannot be done without an effective method – one of the significant methods was the Transformer architecture, introduced in 2017 and comprehensively integrated into the GPT‑3 model, which, as of September 2020, was the largest and most advanced language model in the world. Therefore, GPT‑3 can be called the basis of most scientific developments carried out in the context of using large language models. The interaction of science and large language models has become a factor in the emergence of a large number of questions, among which are: «Is the result of data analysis new knowledge?», «What are the prospects for scientific creativity in the era of big computing?». Currently, these issues are extremely important, because they allow us to develop the foundations for effective human‑computer interaction. Therefore, this study analyzes the issues presented. (shrink)

The conventionality of natural language is captured in much simpler terms than David Lewis’s, displaying its continuity with more rudimentary conventions involving neither coordinations, regular conformity (either de facto or de jure) nor rational underpinnings. This “natural conventionality” is composed of two simple characteristics:(1) natural conventions are reproduced patterns, (2) they are proliferated due partly to weight of precedent, rather than due, for example, to their intrinsically superior capacity to perform certain functions. These two characteristics are discussed as (...) they characterize simple non-coordinating conventions, then simple coordination conventions, and finally language conventions. The paper argues that the conception of conventions universally adopted in speech act theory is mistaken, and points to a new way of understand the nature of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

The goal of this study is to reintegrate the theory of generative grammar into the cognitive sciences. Generative grammar was right to focus on the child's acquisition of language as its central problem, leading to the hypothesis of an innate Universal Grammar. However, generative grammar was mistaken in assuming that the syntactic component is the sole course of combinatoriality, and that everything else is “interpretive.” The proper approach is a parallel architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are autonomous (...) generative systems linked by interface components. The parallel architecture leads to an integration within linguistics, and to a far better integration with the rest of cognitive neuroscience. It fits naturally into the larger architecture of the mind/brain and permits a properly mentalistic theory of semantics. It results in a view of linguistic performance in which the rules of grammar are directly involved in processing. Finally, it leads to a natural account of the incremental evolution of the language capacity. Key Words: evolution of language; generative grammar; parallel architecture; semantics; syntax. (shrink)

This collection of articles and associated discussion papers focuses on a problem that has attracted increasing attention from linguists and psychologists throughout the world during the past several years. Reduced to essentials, the problem is that of discovering the character of the mental capacities that make it possible for human beings to attain knowledge of their language on the basis of fragmentary and haphazard early linguistic experience. A fundamental assumption running through all of these contributions is that people possess (...) strong innate predispositions that are critical for success in this task. (shrink)

In a diary entry from 1916 entitled “Über Klage und Klagelied” (On lament and dirge), originally written as a prologue to his translation of a collection of biblical lamentations, Gershom Scholem proposes a geographical metaphor to describe what he calls “all language.” The metaphor depicts two lands separated by a border: one land signifies the language of revelation, the other the language of silence; the border between them stands for what Scholem denotes as the language of (...) lament (Klage). This article offers a close reading of this enigmatic text in an attempt to interpret Scholem’s early linguistic theory of lament and its relation to revelation and silence. In order to illuminate Scholem’s insights, I turn to Benjamin’s early fragment on lament (1916) and to his correspondence with Scholem on the relationship of lament to Jewish thought (1918), as well as to Werner Hamacher’s remarks on the linguistic form of lament. I argue that both Scholem and Benjamin portray lament as “a language of the border,” emphasizing its singular capacity to mark the boundaries of language and its expressive limits, while pointing to the possibility of lament to manifest a purely linguistic expression, devoid of any propositional, communicative, or subjective content. In his ambitious attempts to formulate a “metaphysics of language,” Scholem demonstrates the productivity of the intersection between the theological and philosophical, the linguistic and the metaphysical, in early twentieth-century continental philosophy. (shrink)

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a kind of linguistic competence that theories of embodied and enactive cognition have long deemed impossible for systems lacking the meaningful perspective of a living being, i.e., the capacity for sense-making. Facing up to this unexpected technological development requires confronting what I propose to call the “AI dilemma”: either frontier LLMs are capable of sense-making despite lacking biological embodiment, or the kind of linguistic competence they exhibit does not necessarily require sense-making. In their (...) chapter on cognition, Frank, Thompson, and Gleiser (2024) maintain that no AI system comes close to realizing relevance, a position that derives much of its motivation from past practical failures. However, frontier LLMs have effectively overcome Dreyfus’ commonsense knowledge problem, such that their dismissal as categorically mindless risks undermining Frank et al.’s central claim that human cognition is deeply intertwined with lived experience. I therefore argue in favor of the alternative side of the AI dilemma: human-level linguistic competence of LLMs should be recognized as a novel non‑biological form of sense‑making, based on a technologically‑mediated embodiment whose enabling properties are in need of further theoretical analysis. This reorientation invites enactive theory to clarify which aspects of sense-making may be universal and which aspects are specifically contingent on organic life, thereby advancing its conceptual framework in dialogue with contemporary AI. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how language and linguistic membership might feature in luck egalitarianism, what a luck-egalitarian theory of linguistic justice would look like, and, finally, what the emphasis on language teaches us about the validity of standard luck-egalitarian assumptions. We show that belonging to one language group rather than another is a morally arbitrary feature and that where membership of a specific linguistic group affects individual chances, the effects of such bad brute luck ought to (...) be neutralized on the luck-egalitarian view. We assess two ways of redressing those kinds of unjustified inequalities: the ‘universal language’ option and the ‘linguistic advantages for all’ option. But we also argue, in the second part, that exploring luck egalitarianism through the lens of language exposes some difficulties intrinsic in many existent luck-egalitarian theories. We argue that treating circumstances one identifies with as choices is problematic. In addition, we argue that the linguistic preconditions of both the capacity to be responsible as well the exercise of responsibility complicate the idea of individual responsibility on which most luck-egalitarian theories rely. We conclude by suggesting the need to develop a luck-egalitarian theory of justice which is less reliant on causal features of the distinction between choice and circumstance and which is more sensitive to the idea of collective cooperation as opposed to individual responsibility. (shrink)