Language and Psychology

Abstract

Miller (1964) wrote that “a logician is interested in discovering the rules for valid inference, but whether people actually use those rules or not does not concern him” (p. 93). We have here the crux of the issue. Does our study of linguistic analysis have any relevance to psychology? The issue is an epistemological concern that asks if the analysis of a text by logical or grammatical rules is actually mapped onto some variety of psychological structure or apparatus. Can we take rules derived from understanding grammatical form or syntax and the rules of reference and find both psychological and biological correlates that describe the substrate which subsumes that process? Unfortunately, at this time, there is as much sectarianism among linguists as there is among the various psychological schools. The question of whether or not linguistics is mapped onto psychological structures must be posed in this form: Linguistics according to whom? Mapped onto whose version of psychology?

Feeling is a verbal noun—a noun made out of a verb, but psychologically makes an entity out of a process.

—Susanne K. Langer, 1967, p. 20.