Language and Mind

The first six chapters that follow are from the late 1960s, mostly based on talks

for general university audiences, hence relatively informal. The final chapter is

from 2004, based on a talk for a general audience. This recent essay reviews

the “biolinguistic approach” that has guided this work from its origins half a

century ago, some of the important developments of recent decades, and how

the general approach looks today – to me at least.

The dominant approach to questions of language and mind in the 1950s was

that of the behavioral sciences. As the term indicates, the object of inquiry was

taken to be behavior, or, for linguistics, the products of behavior: perhaps a

corpus obtained from informants by the elicitation techniques taught in field

methods courses. Linguistic theory consisted of procedures of analysis, primarily

segmentation and classification, designed to organize a body of linguistic

material, guided by limited assumptions about structural properties and their

arrangement. The prominent linguist Martin Joos hardly exaggerated in a 1955

exposition when he identified the “decisive direction” of contemporary structural

linguistics as the decision that language can be “described without any

preexistent scheme of what a language must be.”1 Prevailing approaches in

the behavioral sciences generally were not very different. Of course, no one

accepted the incoherent notion of a “blank slate.” But it was common to suppose

that beyond some initial delimitation of properties detected in the environment

(a “quality space,” in the framework of the highly influential philosopher

W. V. O. Quine), general learning mechanisms of some kind should suffice to

account for what organisms, including humans, know and do. Genetic endowment

in these domains would not be expected to reach much beyond something

like that.