Language as a Tool

[Daniel Everett]

Dear Mark,

These are all excellent points. Clearly there is some biology that must underwrite language, or plants could speak. The question is, how much. Less than eating. More than wearing a tie, perhaps.

I think that all of your points, however, are compatible with the idea that language is a tool, so long as we don't think that, as you say, this explains everything. It does, however, explain more than many have recognized.

My new book on this, Cognitive Fire: Language as a Cultural Tool, is due out from Pantheon (US) and Profile (UK) sometime in 2011.

Hopefully, I will have answered your questions.

-- Dan


On Sep 12, 2010, at 8:16 PM, Mark P. Line wrote:

> Aya --
> 
> You said: "Other tools can be studied separately from the people who use
> them or created them. Why not language?"
> 
> Although language can certainly be considered a tool, I think it's unlike
> other tools in several very significant respects.
> 
> 1. Although we're not born with language, we can't avoid (pathologies
> excluded) acquiring it unless we're not exposed to it. To that extent,
> language is a biological phenomenon. A prototypical tool is not a
> biological phenomenon, so I'm not sure how valid any conclusions might be
> that are drawn from a premise of language-as-tool.
> 
> 2. A tool is as a tool does: Anything is a tool that is being used as a
> tool, including dead wombats, broken screwdrivers or decks of playing
> cards. (Completing the imagined scenarios is left as an exercise for the
> reader...) So saying that language is a tool is only saying that language
> is used as a tool. Quite a few conclusions can be and have been drawn from
> the fact that language is used as a tool, but I would have to be convinced
> in detail that almost everything worth knowing about language is dependent
> on the premise of language-as-tool.
> 
> 3. If language is a "tool" for (say) communicating ideas, then eating is a
> "tool" for reducing hunger. In both cases, I worry about the tool metaphor
> being stretched so far from the prototype that we're left with an
> out-and-out category fallacy.
> 
> 4. More prototypical tools can be studied separately from those who use or
> create them because those tools are easily observed separately from those
> who use or create them. I don't think the same thing can be said of
> language -- very little about language can be observed apart from its use,
> so very little about language can be observed apart from its user(s).
> 
> 5. Any proposal to study something as complex as language separately from
> its embodiment is suspicious to me, smacking of reductionism -- something
> up with which linguistics has had to put a tad much. Anything that puts
> language back into its human context would be a step forward.
> 
> 
> -- Mark
> 
> Mark P. Line
> 
>