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This chapter argues that the view that conceptual competence is part of linguistic competence is not undermined by the well-known dissociation of cognitive impairment and linguistic impairment. In light of the evidence from brain impairment and the proposal that the structure rules of thought are similar to those of the language, the chapter proposes that there is little or nothing to the language faculty. A critical view is taken of Chomsky’s apparently very different views of thought and its relation to language, and of some puzzling claims he makes against linguistic conventions and in favor of an interest in idiolects. These criticisms lead to the conclusion that the primary concern in linguistics should be with linguistic expressions that share meanings in idiolects. These views are developed by contrasting them with Rey’s antirealism about linguistic entities.

Language is both cognitive and sociocultural, consisting in conventionally sanctioned patterns of communicative activity. These patterns take the form of schemas abstracted from usage events by the reinforcement of recurring commonalities. Conventional linguistic units are linked by relationships of composition and categorization (either elaboration or extension) and thus form intersecting networks of great complexity. Expressions are interpreted and assessed for well-formedness through categorization by linguistic units. Through a process of interactive activation, particular units are selected to categorize particular facets of an expression. The total set of categorizing relationships constitutes the expression's structural description, and whether the categorizations involve elaboration or extension determines its degree of conventionality. Despite the absence of explicit prohibitions, this model affords an account of distribution, restrictions, and judgments of ungrammaticality. One aspect of grammatical constructions is their characterization at different levels of specificity, including constructional subschemas incorporating specific lexical items. And since one aspect of lexical items is their occurrence in particular constructions, lexicon and grammar are overlapping rather than disjoint. The model accommodates degrees and kinds of regularity, which decomposes into generality, productivity, and compositionality. Regularities include higher-order generalizations, where sets of categorizations or lexical behaviors are themselves schematized to form productive patterns. Among the phenomena described in this manner are patterns of phonological extension (phonological rules), patterns of semantic extension (e.g. general metonymies), and patterns of morphological realization (like conjugation classes).

This chapter summarises the contributions to the volume The Normative Animal? On the Anthropological Significance of Social, Moral and Linguistic Norms. The contributions are divided into three sections in line with the tripartite division of the types of norms discussed in the volume. The key claims of the individual chapters are presented and set into relation to one another, and a number of issues raised by competition between the claims are highlighted. This prepares the ground for an assessment of the normative animal thesis in the light of the varying accounts both of specific deontic phenomena and of normativity in general. Central issues concern the concepts of social norms and conventions, the relative importance of coordination and cooperation, the nature and role of collective intentionality, the place of norms in evolutionary explanations, and the structure of normative action guidance. Decisive for the normative animal thesis are the questions as to whether moral principles and linguistic rules are correctly characterised as both real and deontic in the same senses in which these characterisations apply to social norms.

The words we call slurs are just plain vanilla descriptions. They don’t semantically convey any disparagement of their referents, whether as content, conventional implicature, presupposition, “coloring” or mode of presentation. To use a slur is to exploit the Maxim of Manner to assert one’s affiliation with a group that has a disparaging attitude towards the word’s referent. Kraut is simply the conventional description for Germans among Germanophobes when they are speaking in that capacity. This account explains the familiar properties of slurs, such as their speaker orientation and “nondetachability,” as well as a number of unexplored features, such as the variation in tone among the different slurs for a particular group, with no need of additional linguistic mechanisms.

An influential alternative account of context that likewise models context as a body of information that changes with an evolving discourse is Stalnakerian common ground model. On this model, however, the context is projected from a body of information mutually accepted by the interlocutors for the purposes of a conversation—a common ground. While the context constantly changes, these changes simply reflect the agents’ rational and cooperative response to manifest evidence. Might one attempt to assimilate the kinds of effects on prominence simply to such rational responses to manifest evidence? Might we then do without the rich discourse structure posited in this chapter? It is argued here that this account would be empirically inadequate, failing to capture the special status linguistic conventions have when weighed against our overall evidence.

This chapter talks about the contingent a priori and rigid designators. A rigid designator is a term that picks out the same thing in all possible worlds in which that thing exists. As a consequence of this, there is a possibility of knowing a priori contingent truths about the world. It states that if a truth is a contingent one, then it is made true by some actual state of affairs in the world that exists independently of language and linguistic conventions. It also suggests that the procedure for introducing a term as a rigid designator, which Saul Kripke describes, does not have the consequence claimed for it and does not yield the possibility of knowing a priori contingent truths.