A Framework for Discussion

Reasons why language has been and will continue to be of particular significance for the study of human nature:

Intellectual tradition: no sharp distinction between philosophy and science.
A person who speaks a language has developed a certain system of knowledge, represented somehow in the mind and, ultimately, in the brain in some physical configuration. In pursuing an inquiry into these topics, then, we face a series of questions, among them:

The first q was the central topic of inquiry in the philosophical grammar of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The second q is a special and important case of what we might call Plato’s problem (B. Russell: How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are able to know as much as they do know?). Plato illustrated this problem with the first recorded psychological experiment. In The Meno Socrates demonstrates that an untutored slave boy knows the principles of geometry by leading him, through a series of questions, to the discovery of theorems of geometry. This experiment raises a problem that is still with us: How was the slave boy able to find truths of geometry without instruction or information?
Plato’s answer: The knowledge was remembered from an earlier existence and was reawakened in the slave boy’s mind through the questions that Socrates posed to him. Centuries later, Leibniz argued that Plato’s answer was essentially correct but that it must be “purged of the error of pre-existence.” How can we interpret this proposal in modern terms? A modern variant would be that certain aspects of our knowledge and understanding are innate, part of our biological endowment, genetically determined, on a par with the elements of our common nature that cause us to grow arms and legs rather than wings. This version of the classical doctrine is essentially correct. It is quite remote from the empiricist assumptions that have dominated much of Western thought for the past several centuries, though not entirely foreign to conceptions of major empiricist thinkers such as Hume, who spoke of those parts of our knowledge that are derived “from the original hand of nature” and that are “a species of instinct.”

The third q can be divided into two aspects: the perception problem and the production problem. The perception problem has to do with how we interpret what we hear. The production problem, which is considerably more obscure, has to do with what we say and why we say it. We might call this latter problem Descartes’s problem. At its heart lies the problem of accounting for what we might call “the creative aspect of language use.” Descartes observed that the normal use of language is constantly innovative, unbounded, apparently free from control by external stimuli or internal states, coherent and appropriate to situations; it evokes thoughts in the listener that he or she might have expressed in similar ways in the same situations.