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Conventions and Their Role in Language

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Abstract

Two of the most fundamental questions about language are these: what are languages?; and, what is it to know a given language? Many philosophers who have reflected on these questions have presented answers that attribute a central role to conventions. In one of its boldest forms such a view runs as follows. Languages are either social entities constituted by networks of social conventions or abstract objects where when a particular community speaks a given language they do so in virtue of the conventions operative within that community. Consequently, for an individual to know a given language is for them to be party to the relevant conventions. Call this view conventionalism. In this article my aim is to evaluate conventionalism. I will argue that although there are linguistic conventions and that they do play an important role in language development and communication conventionalism should be rejected in favour of a more psychologistically orientated position.

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Notes

  1. Laurence (2003) further develops this account of the basis of syntactic properties in his discussion of Devitt’s (2003) account of the nature of linguistics.

  2. Devitt (2006) makes a similar point in discussing Laurence’s account of convention.

  3. Bloom (2000) counts as a good example here.

  4. For discussion of poverty of the stimulus considerations in favour of linguistic nativism see Crain and Pietroski (2002) and Boeckx (2010).

  5. The advantage of speaking in a code is explored by Baker (2005) whose article provided the inspiration for the above point.

  6. See Bloom (2004) for a helpful survey.

  7. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for bringing this work to my attention.

  8. Here are two examples of syntactic rules that are taken to govern English within minimalism, the current version of Chomskyan generative grammar. (a) The extended projection principle according to which a finite tense constituent must be extended into a Tense Phrase projection containing a subject. (b) The relativised minimality constraint according to which a constituent can only be affected by the minimal constituent of the relevant type c-commanding it. See Radford (2009) for further details.

  9. In his discussion of the role of conventions in language Devitt (2006, 2008) makes the same point.

  10. Linguistic creativity is the ability to produce and understand a potential infinity of previously unencountered sentences.

  11. For example, Kripke (1980), Jackson (1986), Chalmers (1996).

  12. See Davidson (1984b, part 1).

  13. See Elbourne (2011) and Murphy (2010) for an overview.

  14. Reimer (2004) criticises Davidson on the grounds that we can’t make sense of why speakers choose the words that they choose without an appeal to conventions. I sympathise with this point but it doesn’t really help to establish a Dummettian view of meaning as it is one thing to think that one’s understanding of a word lines up with that of one’s fellows and quite another to be correct in that thought.

  15. A familiar contemporary example relates to the widespread practice of inventing novel pet names for TV remote controls (Crystal 2010). In my household the term ‘dig’ (short for ‘digit’ and pronounced like ‘didge’) first coined by my wife has become the standard way of referring to remote controls. The word ‘dig’ meant remote control on my wife’s lips before any convention was established in my household of using that word to refer to remote controls.

  16. This aspect of Davidson’s thought is emphasised by LePore and Ludwig (2005, 2007).

  17. For an overview of such work see Radford (2009), Carnie (2007), or Adger (2003).

  18. The same objection can be directed at Wayne Davies’s (2005) attempt to develop a neo-Gricean account of compositional rules in conventionalist terms.

  19. In this connection also see Rey and Pietorski’s (1995) convincing invocation of an account of ceteris paribus laws to defeat Kripke’s (1982) objection to appeals to the competence-performance distinction to deal with the problem of rule-following.

  20. Collins (2008) comes close to expressing such a dismissive attitude.

  21. My discussion here draws upon Bloom’s (2004) account of psychological research into disgust reactions.

  22. Kasher (1984, 67) anticipates this thought when he writes ‘I am not sure that by taking rules of language to be tacit regularities one does not blur the important distinction between factual generalizations and norms’.

  23. This is not to deny that mental states are involved in parameter setting. Far from it as Chomsky conceives both the initial state of the language faculty and its mature state once all parameters are set as being mental states. However, such mental states are to be contrasted with beliefs and other familiar propositional attitudes despite the history of referring to them in terms that echoes talk of propositional attitudes. One important point of contrast relates to the fact that states of the language faculty are not free to interact with an individual’s beliefs and desires so as to cause further propositional attitudes and actions in the way that a belief typically can. In other words, states of the language faculty are not fully integrated into the individual’s system of propositional attitudes (Davies 1989).

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  1. Department of History, Religion and Philosophy, Oxford Brookes University, Harcourt Hill Campus, OX2 9AT, Oxford, UK

    M. J. Cain

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Cain, M.J. Conventions and Their Role in Language. Philosophia 41, 137–158 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9380-7

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