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I have been perusing an old book by Simon Blackburn called Spreading the Word.  In it, Blackburn has a very helpful little section describing the relationship between mind, language, and the world in the form of a triangle the corners of which are connected to one another by theories. The mind corner is connect to the world by a theory of knowledge and connected to the language corner by a theory of meaning. The world corner is connected to the language corner by a theory of truth. The idea is that one chooses a corner from which to develop theories for the sides. The task then becomes ensuring that one's corner contains a sufficient factual basis for all the three theories involved (meaning, knowledge, truth). Say you pick the world. The question is: what facts about the world provide the materials for your theories of meaning, truth, and knowledge? Say you pick the human mind. One would have to explain how sentences in natural languages have meanings, how those meanings c...

"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 ...

"Why Latin? Why Logic? Why only 'great' books?"  Such are the questions levied at the classicist. They are good questions, but the best answers are not found in pragmatics, a list of the benefits of a classical education. Instead, the reason anyone ultimately prefers a classical approach to education is that she holds to a classical worldview. I say 'ultimately' because pragmatic answers don't count for nothing. One cannot help using them in class to garner support for Latin verb endings. "Throughout history, the best authors were great Latinists" I said the other day. I had in mind one student whose mother had told me that she would like to be a writer. Motivating a student to say 'amō, amās, amat..." thirty times a day is one thing, but adopting a clear reason for committing oneself to the classical project is quite another. To do that, one needs to off one's modern viewpoint and lean into the worldview of a classicist. One ...

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 ...

Jerold Katz According to Chomskian nativism, the necessary condition for language acquisition is the possession of an innate knowledge of the rules of grammar. His reasoning for thinking that human beings have an innate knowledge of grammar is that human beings are able to learn vastly complex natural languages from a relatively limited exposure to those languages. Thus, Chomsky suggests that there must be some innately possessed knowledge of grammar that is universally possessed by human beings. Such a grammar must also be sufficiently similar across the brains that possess it. Jerold Katz argues that Chomsky's  psychologism is insufficient to account for necessary truths: Chomsky's psychologism actually denies the possibility of genuine necessary truths in natural languages. Given Chomsky's treatment of grammars as theories of the psychological make up of speakers, the strongest notion of compulsion that is possible on Chomsky's conception of language is a n...

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...

According to Chomsky, nothing has happened to language in about 50,000 years. Take any child from any place from any time within the last 50,000 years and put him in a family in Boston in 2017 and he will grow up speaking like a Bostonian. Prior to 50,000 years ago, there was no such thing as language. Something happened in a small space of time that gave us language. Some rewiring of the brain occurred and gave rise to a mechanism. The mechanism is like a snowflake - it is the way it is because nature produces it that way. In the same way a snowflake is need of no further explanation, the mechanism that the brain needed for language is in need of no further explanation. The mechanism occurred in one person and that person then had a capacity to think internally - a proto-linguistic thought process. This proliferated over time and at some later point was externalized in utterances. In order externalize the functioning of the mechanism, the mechanism in the head began to match up w...

To varying degrees, I have learned Greek, Latin, German, French, and English, but dogish lies out of my reach. My grandmother spoke to her dog, but the snuffly little pug's responses never sounded anything like what my grandmother said to him. She said things like, "I do before to be a hudra hud," which meant "good dog." To request a photograph of the dog one would ask if it minded having its "wotytook." As a boy, I was sure it was a real language, but it wasn't - twas fun, but not dogish. Con Slobodchikoff says he has learnt the real thing, at least some of it, and only prairie dogish. According to an article in The New York Times Magazine, Slobodchikoff thinks there really is a language of prairie dogs: Prairie-dog communication is so complex, Slobodchikoff says — so expressive and rich in information — that it constitutes nothing less than language. So, what? Dogs talk? Apparently it's possible. The same might be true of whales ...

God speaks. The Bible records the first speech and God makes it. If the chronology of scripture is to be believed, God could speak prior to creation and, therefore, God can speak sans creation. He could use a language in eternity past. This seems clear: he is the first to utter a word (Gen 1); he determines the world and everything in it including all the languages, sentences, and what they mean prior to creation; and God, the Son, is identified as the “Word” that pre-exists creation (John 1). He doesn’t actually have to say anything, but he has to be able to express his thoughts in a language. On one attractive picture, God is able to speak in virtue of an intra-Trinitarian conversation. The Triune God is a linguistically capable community of persons. As McCall suggests, Father and Son are “distinct in speech and action…The Father and Son are (or have) distinct centers of consciousness.” [1] The Son talks to his Father from his perspective. In order to have a perspective one m...

In this paper I will argue that the apparently commonplace activity of referring to God depends on what we take to be the relationship between a given entity and the name of that entity. It is commonly held that reference depends on some definite description of the entity in question. I will argue that Saul Kripke’s criticisms of descriptivism are sufficient to reject the view. However, if we take Kripke’s causal theory or a Millian direct theory of reference we are confronted with the problem of worship. If people from a broad variety of religions can successfully refer to God, then can they be said to worship the same God? In the latter part of the paper I will propose a way to block this inference. There are several problems related to referring to God. Here are two: first, if we have no acquaintance with an entity can we refer to it successfully? Some believe that we experience God in something like a perceptual state. Perhaps we have a sixth sense in virtue of which we can c...