Language and Human Understanding: The Roots of Creativity in Speech and Thought

by David Braine

Human speech and writing reveal our powers both to generalize and to criticize our own procedures. For this we must use words non-mechanically and with a freedom without definite limits, but still allowing mutual intelligibility. Such powers cannot be simulated by any possible physical mechanism, and this shows that human beings in our acts of judgment and understanding transcend the body.

Philosopher, psychologist and linguist are all concerned with natural language. Accordingly, in seeking a unified view, Braine draws on insights from all these fields, sifting through the discordant schools of linguists. He concludes that one extended logic or "integrated semantic syntax" shapes grammar, but without constricting languages to being of one grammatical type.

Language as learnt and speech are both essentially public, geared to a community of language-users. Therefore, psycholinguists should imitate Gibson's treatment of our perceptual system and treat learning and use of language as arising by adaptation to our social and natural environment. Through taking the malleability of the functioning of the brain and its parts to an extreme, grammar has become unrestricted by neurology, limited only by logical and pragmatic constraints.

For Braine, a language is a living thing, both in the development of thought and in conversation. Chomsky has entrenched a static, building-block, model of a language as a code, each lexical item with just one meaning. Yet in our learning and use of language each word develops an indefinite spread of uses or senses adapted to the realities and questions which we have to confront. The idea "one lexical item, one meaning" applies only to formal languages, not to the natural language which extends beyond social life to embrace mathematics, physics and all the sciences, religion and literature.

In rewriting the philosophy of grammar, Braine restores the dynamic conception of language, reuniting structure and communicative function. Grammar, typically through the verb, gives the sentence its "saying" function, the verb being what brings the sentence to life, giving the sentence's other elements their role and force.

Genres: Philosophy

796 pages, Hardcover

First published February 19, 2014

About the author

David Braine was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he held a Demyship in Natural Science from 1958-62, obtaining Hon. Mods (Physics) in 1959 and then graduated B.A. Hon. (History) in 1962 (M.A., 1965). From 1962-3 he studied philosophy under C.C.W. Taylor, Geoffrey Warnock and Patrick Gardiner, and as B.Phil. student under Gilbert Ryle, 1963-65, with some study under Elizabeth Anscombe, graduating B Phil. (Oxon) in 1965.

From 1965-89 he was a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He was awarded a Gifford Fellowship from 1982-1988. Following complications after his spinal injury of 1977, he took medical retirement in 1989, becoming Honorary Lecturer 1989-2002, and Honorary Research Fellow from 2002. He taught Honours options in Aquinas until 2004.

From 1964 he developed considerable interest in the theory of types and philosophy of mathematics with their implications for the use of language. His studies in the nature of knowledge and the varieties of the ways in which we speak of possibility and necessity (seen in his papers of 1971 and 1972) made him see some consistencies of direction in the apparent vagaries in our use of language. In 1971 and 1975, his encounter with the teaching of Dummett, McDowell and Davidson on language and truth, together with his earlier encounters with Grice, made him increasingly doubtful of the tendencies prevalent in the philosophy of language since the late 1960s. From the mid-1970s he developed a continuing interest in the varied accounts of analogy and of models, alongside his concern with linguistics. These interests together with those in the theory of types and philosophy of mathematics were of particular importance to his books of 1988 and 1992.

From 1991, his chief engagement was with language, including a deeper study of Chomsky’s theories of grammar and their functionalist and other rivals. From 2005, this work came together in Language and Human Understanding, a book setting linguistics and psycholinguistics in their proper context in philosophy and logic.

In the meantime, he continued work on the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas, on the Incarnation, and on apologetics, with excursions into the philosophy of mathematics.

Obituary: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/comme...