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Priorities and Diversities in Language and Thought

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Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective

Part of the book series: Philosophical Studies Series ((PSSP,volume 142))

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Abstract

Philosophers have long debated the relative priority of thought and language, both at the deepest level, in asking what makes us distinctively human, and more superficially, in explaining why we find it so natural to communicate with words. The “linguistic turn” in analytic philosophy accorded pride of place to language in the order of investigation, but only because it treated language as a window onto thought, which it took to be fundamental in the order of explanation. The Chomskian linguistic program tips the balance further toward language, by construing the language faculty as an independent, distinctively human biological mechanism. In Ignorance of Language, Devitt attempts to swing the pendulum back toward the other extreme, by proposing that thought itself is fundamentally sentential, and that there is little or nothing for language to do beyond reflecting the structure and content of thought. I argue that both thought and language involve a greater diversity of function and form than either the Chomskian model or Devitt’s antithesis acknowledge. Both thought and language are better seen as complex, mutually supporting suites of interacting abilities.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Elisabeth Camp

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  1. Elisabeth Camp
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Correspondence to Elisabeth Camp .

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  1. Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Industries, University of Parma, Parma, Italy

    Andrea Bianchi

Additional information

This article grew out of an Author Meets Critics session at the 2007 Pacific APA; thanks to audiences there, and especially to Michael Devitt. I also presented some of this material at the 2007 Workshop in Philosophy of Linguistics in Dubrovnik, addressing work by Peter Ludlow; thanks to audiences there, and especially to Peter Ludlow, Brian Epstein, and Gurpreet Rattan. Additional thanks to Josh Armstrong and Paul Pietroski, and to Carolina Flores for editorial work and advice.

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Camp, E. (2020). Priorities and Diversities in Language and Thought. In: Bianchi, A. (eds) Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 142. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47641-0_3

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