Cladistic language concepts

[Stanley Goertzen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Michael Ghiselin (Friday, September 18, 1998 6:57 AM) wrote:
[...]
>It looks to me as if an idiolect is an 
>organism's disposition to behave in a certain way, 
>and a language a system of such dispositions that are 
>mutually coadapted.
[...]
 
Having just read (and still struggling to understand) Noam Chomsky's 
objection to attempts to define language in this way (as E-language 
rather than I-language), responses to his arguments would be helpful 
to me.  Chomsky wrote:  
 
"It is common among philosophers, particularly those influenced 
by Wittgenstein, to hold that 'knowledge of language is an ability', 
which can be exercised by speaking, understanding, reading, 
talking to oneself: 'to know a language just is to have the ability to 
do these and similar things.'  Some go further and hold that an 
ability is expressible in dispositional terms, so that language 
becomes, as Quine described it, 'a complex of present dispositions 
to verbal behavior.'  If we accept this further view, then two people 
who are disposed to say different things under given circumstances 
speak different languages, even if they are identical twins with exactly  
the same history, who speak the same language by any sensible criteria 
we might establish.  There are so many well-known problems with this 
conception that I will simply drop it, and consider the vaguer proposal 
that knowledge of language is a practical ability to speak and understand 
(Michael Dummet, Anthony Kenny, and others, in one or another form)."  
.... 
"A rather striking feature of the widespread conception of language 
as a system of abilities, or a habit system of some kind, or a complex 
of dispositions, is that it has been completely unproductive."  
-Noam Chomsky, "Language and Problems of Knowledge," in 
Martinich, ed., _The Philosophy of Language_ (2nd Ed., 1990). 
 
Sincerely
Stanley Goertzen