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A notion is immanent when defined for a particular language; transcendent when directed to languages generally. This chapter deals with Tarski’ theory of language. Truth, explicated Tarski-style, proves an immanent notion in just this sense. The reasons seem obvious: Tarski's approach starts with an interpreted language L already in place that we'd like to provide a truth predicate for. Tarski's full “theory of truth” contains much more than what's needed to fix the truth values of blind truth-endorsements: it contains a theory of the syntax of the language L it's a truth theory of, and it also contains the compositional truth conditions for L.

A defective word is defined by paradigm as incomplete compared with the major class it belongs to. Defectiveness signifies the unwanted intrusion of morphological idiosyncrasy into syntax. Although this phenomenon has been a constant subject of studies, it has been ill incorporated into the theories of language. This present volume brings together scholars from various theoretical schools for an overdue typological view of defectiveness. It concentrates on some samples of idiosyncratic gaps which are assumed as indicative of the phenomenon of defectiveness. Before delving into the specified topics of each chapter, this introductory chapter presents a typology of defective paradigms. It discusses terms used to describe defectiveness in synchronotic terms, and the possible diachrony of defective paradigms.

Insight is needed, in particular, into the variability of meaning and processes of meaning change. This chapter considers the ‘hermeneutic circle’. Together with the theory of knowledge and cognitive development set out in Chapter 6, this theory of meaning and meaning change provides the inspiration and the basis for a general theory of discovery, to be developed in Chapter 9.

Davidson asks what properties a language must have to be learnable. He criticizes a (then) popular response that models the order of language acquisition on the epistemological priority of the types of expressions learnt; he labels this position the ‘building‐block theory’ (see further Essay 16). He discusses Strawson's critique of Quine's elimination of singular terms and shows how it is likewise premissed on the questionable derivation of claims about language learning from purely a priori considerations. On the positive side, Davidson proposes that a language is learnable by a creature with finite means if the language's number of semantic primitives or undefinables is finite. Using this criterion, he demonstrates that various theories in the philosophy of language introduce an infinite number of semantic primitives into the language and thus make it unlearnable; theories he alleges of this error (1) model quotations on names of expressions (Tarski, Quine; cf Essay 6), (2) analyse belief attributions in terms of linguistic marks (Scheffler, Carnap) or distinct one‐place predicates for each attributed belief (Quine; cf Essay 7), or (3) postulate intensional entities into their overall semantic framework (Frege, Church).

This chapter focuses on the work of Jacques Lacan and his 1954–55 seminars. It proposes a new interpretation of Lacan's theory of language and the symbolic chain and his notion of the unconscious by investigating the intellectual provenance of French theory typically associated with this central figure. Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud must be significantly rethought in tandem with what he had learned about game theory, cybernetics, and information theory when these theories were systematically imported to France from the United States. The use of writing espoused by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern to generate strategic moves in game theory was taken up by Lacan to think about the function of the psychic machine of the unconscious. This psychoanalytical work provides some unusual insights about the cybernetic unconscious of the postwar Euro-American world order.

A Christian Theologia. This chapter considers Abelard’s Theologia Christiana, his revision and development of the treatise condemned at Soissons. In this work, Abelard deepens his understanding of the Holy Spirit, and starts to consider ethical insights, as communicated by pagan philosophy. Written while Abelard was teaching at the oratory he founded in honor of the Paraclete, the work reflects new ideas in the theory of language, and contains in embryo many of the theological ideas he would develop in the 1130s. The chapter also considers other writings, such as the Sic et Non, that Abelard composed during the 1120s, while teaching both philosophy and theology.

Schlegel’s critical response to Fichte, and especially to the metaphilosophical concerns of the 1796/1797 version of the Science of Knowledge, was central to the emergence of Schlegel’s striking statements about textual communication. Schlegel elaborates a dynamic model of interaction that affirms the indeterminacy of writing and moves between the extremes of transformative reception and free construction. In this model, the author aims at transforming his reader, who in her turn is invested with the freedom to understand the author better than he himself. Schlegel’s vision of critical reading turns on the imperative of characterizing and indeed “constructing” the form of confusion peculiar to an author. Developing Schlegel’s relevant remarks, the chapter argues that literary criticism must place the work before the empirical author even as it must remain sensitive to the author’s individuality. The relevant dimension of individuality is not a matter for psychologistic conjecture, let alone divination, but something accessible through its linguistic articulation.

Language beliefs and ideologies constitute a central component of a theory of language policy. The other interrelated but independent components are the language practices of the community being studied and language management. This chapter explores the relationship between beliefs and management, especially with reference to efforts to manage (preserve or restore) language varieties that are felt to be under threat. It also summarizes the evidence presented in the other chapters in this volume.

Contrary to language-of-thought theory and in agreement with connectionism, there could not be causal laws relating types of particular conscious events to types of particular brain events, but only ones relating total conscious states to total brain states. Conscious events include events of innumerable different kinds (all totally different in nature from brain events) which cannot be measured on common scales; and no human at a given time has the same brain state as any human ever, or the same conscious state when considering difficult moral decisions. So no total determinisitic theory of which brain events cause and are caused by which conscious events could have enough evidence in its favour to be well justified. Hence we should believe that things are as they seem—that when we make difficult moral decisions we have free will. Neuroscience can show the influences on us, but cannot predict individual decisions.

This chapter contends that an important source of evidence that has been neglected in the study of language evolution is the language itself. Thus, in this chapter, some basic facts about the structure, psychology, neurology, and genetics of the human language faculty significant to its evolution are assessed. Based on the reviewed evidence, the chapter asserts that language is part of human biology, not human culture, and should be best thought of as a neural system, a computational module, and a mental organ. Also, language is complex computationally, neurologically, and genetically. Though the facts that are presented do not support anything like a full theory of language evolution, much less a phylogenetic sequence, the chapter asserts that they are adequate to refute popular assumptions, have strong implications about the relevant evolutionary forces, and offer suggestions about where to look further.

Martin Heidegger's poetics, especially its Hölderlinian elements, can be understood only within the context of a consideration of his theory of Being in its broader development. What is important here is that the trajectory of Heidegger's ontological concerns spans several stages, from his early treatments of facticity to his later theory of language, and at each stage the strategies of phenomenological engagement shift accordingly. At each stage, however, it can be said that a continuity with the whole of Heidegger's thought—despite the well-known notion of the “turn” and the suggestion of a radical break with his earlier work—is maintained by the persistence of a dual concern: a critique of the modern model of subjectivity, and the analysis of the subject's “forgetting” of Being. This chapter traces Heidegger's philosophy through the guiding motif of the subject's “forgetting” and its relationship on one hand to facticity and on the other to artistic-poetical creation. In order to outline the phenomenological and ontological movements in Heidegger's thought, a brief outline of what Heidegger calls phenomenological ontology is presented.

This chapter focuses on Friedrich Schlegel, the main founder of German Romanticism. Schlegel made groundbreaking contributions to the theory of language, hermeneutics, and general aesthetics. He was strongly influenced by the eighteenth-century philosopher J. G. Herder. The brilliance and the influence of Schlegel's ideas make him a thinker of great importance. His older brother, August Wilhelm, supported and mentored him in his youth, and was his main intellectual ally thereafter. The journal Athenaeum published many of his most important fragments on hermeneutic, literary, and philosophical themes, as well as several of his longer pieces on such themes, including the Dialogue on Poetry and On Incomprehensibility. The journal essentially established German Romanticism as a literary-philosophical movement. His main literary work, Lucinde, is notable for its feminist agenda and frank treatment of sexuality.

Interrogates Adams and Aizawa’s attempt to protect the intracraniality of “true cognition” by excluding the transcraniality of natural language from cognitive processing. This attempt is first traced back to Fodor’s (1975) language-of-thought hypothesis (LOTH), with a brief history of the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) in general and the LOTH as perhaps the most influential instantiation of the CTM; then a countermodel is offered based the actual emergence of thought out of embodied (affective-becoming-cognitive) communication with others. The chapter sticks to the verbal-labels model of language that Andy Clark shares with his internalist critics in order to show that a careful enough examination of even this extremely narrow conception of language uncovers far more transcranial connectivity than Clark argues for.

This chapter focuses not on literary objects as such but on the thought-worlds of two anthropologists (Ingold, Barber) and an archaeologist with strong anthropological leanings (Malafouris). It engages with some of their arguments on the nature of artefacts, in particular those made with language. It is highly selective, focusing on theories that are directly relevant to the concerns of the book, and it makes no attempt to cover the issues at length. It adds some proposals for a broad definition of the term ‘affordance’ as it is used in this study; and it also comments briefly on the notion of ‘construction’ and its theoretical constraints. These commentaries are designed to provide a conceptual perspective that complements the imaginative perspective of Chapter 1 and to prepare the ground for what follows.

This chapter offers an account of what the grammarian is saying of an expression when he says it is grammatical, or a noun phrase, or ambiguous, or the subject of a certain sentence. More generally, it gives an account of the nature of a generative grammatical theory of a language—of the data for such a theory, the relation between the theory and the data, and the relation between the theory and a speaker of the language. It addresses two questions: Of what interest is a grammar? If a grammar is not, in any exciting sense, a theory of a language, why bother constructing it?