Languages & Linguistics
Essentialism
Essentialism in linguistics refers to the belief that languages have an underlying, essential structure that is independent of how they are used in everyday communication. This approach emphasizes the fixed, inherent properties of language, often focusing on grammatical rules and structures. Essentialist views have been critiqued for oversimplifying the complexity and variability of language use and for neglecting the social and cultural aspects of language.
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7 Key excerpts on "Essentialism"
- Gary W. Ladd(Author)
- 1998(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
4 The Essentialists' Method of Linguistic Analysis 13. Introduction Linguistic Essentialism emerged in the 1960$, reached full flower in the early 1970$, and remains one of the predominant philosophical movements in the 1990$. The emergence of linguistic Essentialism differed from that of logical positivism and ordinary language analysis; each of these two movements originally emerged as critical responses to the prior philosophical movement. The decline of the ordinary language analysis movement was due to criticisms coming not from Essentialism but from other movements that succeeded ordinary language analysis. One of these successor movements is sometimes called the school of Scottish criticism. Consisting of E. Gellner, C. Mundle, P. Heath, L. G. Cohen, and others, it produced mostly critical studies of the ordinary language philosophers, with few positive theses of its own. A second source of criticisms came from such philoso-phers as the later Carnap, Ayer, Russell, and Moore (and younger philosophers influenced by them, such as Roderick Chisholiti), who had contributed to the philo-sophical tendencies that ordinary language philosophers challenged or replaced. The third and most influential source of criticisms came from the dominant philosophical movement in America and Australia during the 1950$ and 1960$, which has no widely accepted name but which may be called postpositivist phys-icalism. This movement included W. V. O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, Adolf Griin-baum, Carl Hempel, J. J. C. Smart, D. M. Armstrong, and many others and is continued today by a younger generation of physicalists, among them David Lewis, 93 94 Linguistic Essentialism Paul Churchland, Patricia Churchland, Paul Humphreys, William Lycan, Hartry Field, Michael Devitt, John Post, James Fetzer, Eliot Sober, Alvin Goldman, Daniel Dennet, Wesley Salmon, and many others.
- Yoad Winter, James A. Hampton(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Springer Open(Publisher)
It is a matter of the cognitive systems that describe our beliefs about things in the world which would determine what meaning (and reference) is. Without using the term concept in any technical sense, it would seem that Chomsky endorses the claim made in Definition ( 3 ) above, about Emergentism, and denies only that this should have anything to do with linguistics. (Of course, when an Emergentist hears this they will be astonished to hear the ‘only’ in such a sentence, since they believe that this is the fundamental starting point for linguistic theory!) Nonetheless, we can see that this form of Evans’ “traditional linguistic theories” does not embody his “fool’s paradise of literalism”. Meanings and such are not at all a part of linguistic theory. However, not every Essentialist agrees with Chomsky on this point. Many believe that every theory should incorporate a linguistic component—semantics—that yields meanings, in much the same way that most philosophers of language believe there to A Perspective from Formal Semantics and Philosophy 49 be such a separate component of a theory of language. Often, although not always, this component amounts to a truth-theoretic account of the values of syntactically-characterized sentences. This typically involves a translation of the natural language sentence into some representation that is “intermediate” between natural language and a truth-theory—perhaps an augmented version of first-order logic, or perhaps a higher-order intensional language. And other times it involves a further level of syn-tax, LF (sometimes this is inaccurately called “logical form”), which itself is then interpreted by some truth-or information-theoretic method. The Essentialists who study semantics in such ways usually agree with Chomsky in seeing little role for pragmatics within linguistic theory.
eBook - PDF- James McElvenny(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Language Science Press(Publisher)
Te contradiction of allowing that some aspects of language could be le f to the discernment o f the ear, but that in other apparently similar cases the ear had to be ignored, seems not to have been noticed. 250 9 Linguistic form: A political epistemology ture, a grammar – and ofen then to claim that a single set o f theoretical cat-egories is capable of accounting for all languages (universal grammar, “the ba-sic blueprint that all languages follow”, as it is put by a well-known linguistics textbook, Fromkin et al. 2010: 18). Tis theoretical process frames the structure of language and languages, including the “structure” of meaning, as a unique and determinate object open to empirical methods of discovery, aspiring to the imagined epistemology of the natural sciences (see Zwicky 1973 for a striking example). 19 5 Western ethnocentrism Te frst o f the two ideological e fects o f linguistics pedagogy that we will dis-cuss lies in the implications of the metalanguage in which this kind of analysis is conducted. It is no doubt in semantics – a domain presupposed by a great deal of linguistic description and theory – that the relevant efects can be most clearly ob-served. Semantics depends on the proposition that the linguist’s native language is an adequate medium for the representation of meaning cross-linguistically. If, like most linguistic semanticists, I hold a mentalist theory of meaning, then I am justifed in using a minimally enriched version o f my own native language to reveal what others have in mind when they speak, regardless of what language they happen to be using. Semantic theory, as expressed in English, reveals both the content of others’ semantic representations, and the conceptual structures on which this content rests.
- Piotr Stalmaszczyk(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
(understood for the purpose of these remarks as including also theoretical and empirical aspects) as the unifying element of the following general definitions of the four disciplines and approaches discussed throughout this chapter, and relevant for the whole Handbook: • Linguistics is the systematic study of human natural language. • Philosophy of language is the systematic study of foundational issues con- cerned with the nature and properties of language; an investigation of universal properties of language (natural human language and formal languages). It is the name of a discipline within philosophy. • Philosophy of linguistics is a systematic philosophical reflection on the status of linguistic theories and linguistic investigations. It is a branch of philosophy of science. • Linguistic philosophy is a systematic approach to philosophy. It is the name of a philosophical method. Thus understood, philosophy of language constitutes one of the (sub) disciplines of philosophy, together with metaphysics and epistemology (cf. Strawson, 1992), philosophy of science, philosophy of mind (cf. Burge, 1992; but see Searle, 1979, 1983, 2004 for an attempt at grounding philo- sophy of language within philosophy of mind), and philosophy of logic (on the status of logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophical logic, see Haack, 1978; Burgess, 2009; and Cohnitz and Estrada-Gonza ´lez, 2019). 8 Philosophy of linguistics could be viewed as “the meta-level proper of linguistic theories” (see Chapter 7 by Kasia Jaszczolt, this volume, espe- cially §7.2; see also Ludlow 2011, on philosophy of generative linguistics); linguistic philosophy in this perspective might be considered as the “meta- level” of philosophy of language. For further studies on the linguistics/ philosophy interface, see the contributions in Harre ´ and Harris (1993), Murasugi and Stainton (1999), and Altshuler (in press).
eBook - PDFThe Limits of Expression
Language, Literature, Mind
- Patricia Kolaiti(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Yet what really follows from the failure of the poetics of language is that if literature is essentially distinct, its distinctness is not down to its structure (or in other words, that if there is an essence of literature, it is not constituted by the literary text’s linguistic make-up). To put it differently: the collapse of structural Essentialism and the fact that we cannot defend the distinctness of literature at a structural (i.e. linguistic) level does not entail that literature is not distinct as an object in any other interesting sense. It only entails that if the essence of literature is to be found somewhere, this 54 After Structural Essentialism What? somewhere is not its language and structure. Structural Essentialism has col- lapsed, but an Essentialism of some other sort is still an open possibility. 6 Note, also, that the anxiety of literary people about how the collapse of structural Essentialism may leave literary study as a discipline without a domain does not really follow from the failure of structural Essentialism per se, but rather from a misinterpretation of its implications. The fact that ordinary and literary language turn out not to be essentially distinct does not entail that every aspect of literature can be as well accounted for in terms of the study of ordinary language. This would only be the case if literature were fully reducible to ‘literary language’. But literature is a global fact and literary language a local fact located within it. The equation of literature with literary language formed the nucleus of the formalist/structuralist venture, yet it is reductionist, arbitrary and inadequate as a theoretical assumption. And it is this precise equation that was the problem with the formalist/structuralist pro- gramme in the first place. Given the evidence available today, it is very easy to dismiss the claim that literature is a linguistically distinct object as naive or simplistic.
- Michael Devitt, Richard Hanley, Michael Devitt, Richard Hanley(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Since a standard lexical definition is the linguistic correlate of the concept associated with a term, we can say then that these truths are necessarily true by definition. They are purely analytic. This approach completely demystifies the notions of necessity and a prioricity. If we are concerned about ancient metaphysical notions, we are even justified in claiming that the concept associated with the general term is the essence of the kind; thus also demystifying the notion of essence. The concept in the mind is the essence of the kind because it is fitting the concept that makes something belong to the kind. The concept yellow, metal, malleable, ductile, shiny is the essence of gold because it is fitting this concept that makes something gold – according to this traditional view. Accordingly we learn the essences of things by examining our concepts. Ballubas are a kind of thing because I framed a concept to define them. We know the essence of ballubas – being red, round, and wooden. The essences of every kind of thing can be known in this way. The view that essence is linguistic in this way was central to the ordinary language philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s. Due to the work of Kripke and Putnam and their followers the tide has turned so completely that the traditional description theory has gone from being assumed Stephen P. Schwartz 276 and obvious (at least in some version or other) to almost universal rejection. True, there have been attempts to offer complex revisions of the traditional description theory (see e.g. Searle 1996 and for a more sophisticated attempt McKinsey 1991), but in view of the progress made by Kripke and Putnam this seems to be a futile and unrewarding path. (E.g. see Putnam 1996: xviii–xx; for a convincing dissection of Searle 1996.) Although saving the traditional description theory is a forlorn endeavor, we should not leave it unappreciated. It is the very ideal of a philosophical theory. As noted, it is simple, clear, and elegant.
eBook - PDF- Karol Janicki(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Chapter 1 On the forerunners of non-Essentialism in linguistics and philosophy Part I Introduction One of the striking features of non-essentialist linguistics (cognitive lin-guistics, or more broadly — prototype-oriented linguistics) writings 1 to date is their apparent lack of significant distant predecessors. In other words, while reading non-essentialist linguistics articles and books one gets the impression that the school has no distant linguistic ancestors to refer to, or, rather, to give credit to. I stress here distant because, for instance, Lakoff (1982) or (1987) does in fact refer to other linguists, but those references are either very general (for example, Sapir, Whorf) or do not go beyond contemporary authors and recent works (for example, Berlin, Kay, Fillmore, Ekman, etc.). A separate issue is that of tracing non-essentialist linguistics to the work of those authors who are com-monly conceived of as philosophers (I will deal with this question in Part II of this Chapter). Obviously, prototype-oriented linguists should not be blamed for not making each of their individual pieces of writing heavily historically oriented. Some linguists (not only prototype-oriented lin-guists) are known to have deliberately disregarded in their writings historical linkages. Contrary to most prototype-oriented linguists, who seem to be taking a primarily ahistorical approach, I would like to embark in Part I of the present Chapter on an account of some past linguistics events, with the intention of showing that many ideas present in contemporary non-essentialist linguistics may be traced back to the linguistics of at least as early a period as the 1930s and 1940s in general, and to the works of A. Korzybski and S.I. Hayakawa, in particular. The goal of the present Chapter will thus be to indicate that at least part of the core of prototype-oriented linguistics is not new.
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