Putting it all together: the Relation between Language, Mind and Computation

Abstract

This chapter will investigate the relationship between language, mind and computation when they are put together in the broader context of the relation between language and cognition. We have observed that language when related to the mind or computation begets unusually damaging consequences for a linguistic theory that incorporates unexamined assumptions about this relationship between language, mind and computation. These assumptions have gradually hardened into axioms which are thought to form the conceptual basis of a theory that perpetuates the fallacy of extending these assumptions beyond a level necessary for justification. This has exactly happened in the case of modern linguistic theory. The endorsement of the relationship between language, mind and computation revealed a wide range of deep insights into the nature of natural language grammar, and the questions of adequacy for linguistic theory concomitantly became sharper and sharper, as is usual at a certain stage of scientific inquiry in any discipline. But apparently questions of adequacy concerning the empirical ramifications of theoretical tools in cross-linguistic contexts became a prime concern for theoretical linguists, and subsequently, the ontological foundations with regard to the relationship between language, mind and computation were rarely, or have not been, interrogated.