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Natural human language-use entails moral obligations, specifically objective obligations between persons. All of these obligations are routinely broken (see Twitter). These obligations are both objective and social. They depend on being objective and not merely an expression of a particular preference or culture. They also depend on the existence of a social context composed of more than one person.  As Nicholas Wolterstorff claims, “speaking is, through and through, a normative engagement.” Wolterstorff suggests three norms and provides examples: (i) speech should be related rightly to the mental state of the speaker. If the speaker asserts something he ought to believe it. If the speaker promises something, he ought to intend to fulfill the promise. If the speaker requests something, he ought to want it. (ii) speech should be rightly related to the facts. A speaker ought not to assert what is false or proclaim someone guilty who is innocent. (iii) speech should ...

Children acquire natural languages. How they are capable of doing so is mysterious. A child appears to go from learning a few words and sentences to knowing how to construct infinite sentences in her learned language. Such a mystery provoked a long-lasting debate between empiricists and nativists.  Empiricists about language acquisition hold that there is no innate knowledge 'in the mind' of a language learner without which the learner could not acquire a natural language. Nativists, by contrast, hold that there must be some innate feature of human minds (beyond the mere dispositional power to learn) that makes language acquisition possible for human beings. In order to explain the phenomena of human language acquisition, one must show how a theory can answer a number of questions. Here are four:  (i) How is it that human beings acquire knowledge from a limited set of experiences? If it turns out that the set of experiences are insufficient to explain the resultant ...

A capacity is kind of power, but it is not the same as an ability. An ability is a power that an agent has to perform some action. In contrast, a capacity is “a causal power…an invariable disposition to react to certain determinate changes in the environment in certain determinate ways.” (Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will, 10-11). However, an ability is “a power to originate changes in the environment.” For example, Van Inwagen distinguishes between the capacity to understand and the ability to speak.  The distinction lies in the fact that though someone who can understand French has no choice over whether or not to understand French sentences when he hears them. In contrast, his ability to speak French does not entail that he utter a word in French. Sentences in French uttered or inscribed cause a person with the capacity to understand French to grasp the correct meanings of the sentences. But a person who can speak French is not caused to do so merely by having such...

Relationships only work when we generally impute good motives to the speakers of sentences. Due to the nature of natural human languages, vagueness and ambiguity are inevitable in speech. Every-day talk is not supposed to be precise. But it works well because we assume the best of other people . At least in public discourse in America, this assumption is no longer true. It seems we assume the worst motives in other people (at least of those whose political opinions are not the same as our own). Even when we agree with them, we appear unable to impute good motives to our opponents (let alone when we disagree). One's policy in hermeneutics--the interpretation of text--is always to assume the best in the writer - that he or she intends to tell the truth, that there are clear distinctions in the mind even if not necessarily in speech . The job of a listener is rather like a court of law - to assume the innocence of the speaker until proven otherwise. Sometimes this takes hard...

"Aphasia, the loss of language following a brain injury, is devastating, and in severe cases family members may feel that the whole person is lost forever." (Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct, 2). Is fellowship possible without language? I don't mean without the constant presence of language. Two people might not talk for a while but feel close to one another, but what if they never spoke to one another. What if, in the very nature of things, no one spoke? I suppose we could not know what our fellowship would be like. Would we be able to communicate in some way - by looking at each other? Perhaps we really can see each other's souls in each other's eyes. Intuitively, however, such a situation presupposes the possibility of speech. Special looks across a table are special precisely because they are unusual. What is normal about fellowship is some form of communication between people. Consider the ultimate fellowship - the fellowship between the three ...

In a recent interview , linguist, Noam Chomsky, repeated his claim that there must be some innate feature of human beings that makes it possible for them to acquire natural languages: “No one holds that the rules of language are innate. Rather, the faculty of language has a crucial genetic component. If that were not true, it would be a miracle that children acquire a language. That is obvious from the first moment of birth, when the child begins to pick out linguistically relevant information from the noisy environment, then following a predictable course of acquisition which, demonstrably, goes far beyond the evidence available, from the simplest words on to complex constructions and their interpretations. An ape with essentially the same auditory system, placed in the same environment, would detect nothing but noise. Either this is magic, or there is an innate component to the language faculty, as in the case of all other aspects of growth and development.” Chomsky is...

From a very young age, we can recognize the quality of sentences. We evaluate sentences according to some standard, some criteria of good, bad, better, or worse. If God created the world then it is likely that he would endow human beings with some way to recognize good and bad sentences according to some standard. One might think that this would entail that human beings know what makes sentences good or bad. But recognition of the value of an entity does not entail knowing what makes it valuable. This is true of good and bad actions as much as it is true of good or bad sentences. One might not know why murder, theft, or deception are bad even though one can recognize them to be so. If so, then it is not necessary that humans know what makes those sentences good or bad. If God did not create the world, it is implausible to think (a) that sentences have good or bad making properties (b) that we would find bad sentences objectionable. One might reply that what we mean by 'ba...

In Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Williams and Bizup present several pairs of sentences and invite the reader to consider which of the two he prefers. Here is an example: A : Once upon a time, as a walk through the woods was taking place on the part of Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf’s jump out from behind a tree occurred, causing her fright. B : Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood was walking through the woods, when the wolf jumped out from behind a tree and frightened her. B is clearly better than A even though both sentences are, strictly speaking, grammatically correct. What is interesting is how we know this. What is it about us, the sentences, or the world that makes us prefer one over the other? One answer is that we have some dispositional faculty in the mind that has been trained to recognize good from poor sentences. Call it our sentence conscience. How might this go? Perhaps the sentence conscience is analogous to our moral consciences. The mo...

In Greek, Jesus is Ἰησοῦς (pronounced, ee-ay-sooce). In early Latin an i could be used either as a vowel (short or long) or as a consonant (as a y ). Thus, the Latin, Iēsus , was pronounced yay-sus. In medievil Latin, the letter j was used to replace i 's that where being used as consonants. The j was pronounced as a y . Hence, in modern Spanish, 'Jesus' is still pronounced Yay-sooce. In English, however, the j was hardened and, consequently, 'Jesus' is pronounced Gee-sus.

My paper can no more make an argument than my computer can hope for a Cubs win. People write papers and in those papers people express propositions in sentences that constitute arguments. 'I' is the first person pronoun and I use it to refer to myself, the person writing the paper. If I want to tell you something I am going to do in my paper, I will tell you that I will be the one doing it: "In this paper, I will argue..." 'One' is a personal pronoun referring to anyone to which some property or other might apply. If I say, 'one might argue ~ q',  I am referring to anyone who has the property of thinking that it is not the case that  q. It might be the case that no one has the property in question. When I say, 'the atheist believes that p', I am talking about a paradigmatic example of a person who denies that God exists. I am picking on a singular person to stand for a kind of person. This is not the same as 'one'. A paradigm ...

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In Chapter 2 of Gwynne's Grammar, Nevile Gwynne claims that happiness is partly dependent upon good grammar: "If we don't use words rightly, we shall not think rightly" "If we do not think rightly, we cannot reliably decide rightly, because good decisions depend on accurate thinking" "If we do not decide rightly, we shall make a mess of our lives and also of other people's lives to the extent that we have an influence on other people" "If we make a mess of our lives, we shall make ourselves and other people unhappy" Therefore, "Happiness depends at least partly on good grammar" Premise (1) suggests that good grammar is the necessary condition for right thinking. On Gwynne's view, thought and language have a necessary connection. He writes, "Without words...we cannot think. We cannot reason things out, not even the simplest things." In turn, Gwynne suggests that an understanding of vocabulary necess...

Today, my family were discussing the difference between which and that. I looked it up in Strictly English by Simon Heffer. We found it very helpful. This is what he says: Perhaps the most common mistake of all with pronominal usages is the misuse of which and that as relative pronouns. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that almost everyone believes they are in most contexts interchangeable. They are not. The two sentences “the dog that was run over belonged to Mrs Smith” and “the dog, which was run over, belonged to Mrs Smith” say different things in two quite different ways. The first suggests that there were a number of dogs, and the one that happened to be run over belonged to Mrs Smith. The second supposes that there was only one dog. It happened also to be run over, which (unfortunate though it may be) is not the point of the story. The point is that it belongs to Mrs Smith. That  defines; which is parenthetic, or non-defining. If one is having a conversati...