The epistemological trap of language

Despite the focus of cognitivism on mental processes the concept of thought remains largely undetermined. Neuroscience can hardly lead to a major breakthrough until neuronal processes continue to be viewed as the property of the brain as their material substrate; understanding how the brain functions does not answer the question about the nature of thought. At the start, a much simpler question should be asked: How are humans as a biological species so radically different from any other species, and is it not this difference that accounts for the origin of human mind? The epistemology of external realism construes the function of mind as the representation of the world in terms of mental images which are stored in the mind (brain) as knowledge about the world and thus allow humans to cognize the world in the course of adaptively adequate human-world interactions. Operations on such mental images, so it seems, constitute the core of mental processes which are further externalized via linguistic representation. It follows that knowledge is represented in linguistic form as an object in external reality (the world), which tempts us to think that knowledge is a thing 'out there'. This is a naive world view woven into the very fabric of our everyday language, and because 'language is the house of being', we take it for granted that language is a system of signs used as a tool for the transfer of thought; such transfer is believed to be at the basis of linguistic communication. Thus we push ourselves into an epistemological trap which precludes further progress in understanding the nature of language and mind. Progress in this direction is possible with an understanding of the biosocial function of language as a cognitive domain of coordinated interactions in the course of which individual minds form and develop; mind does not exist and may not be viewed outside of languaging, nor can it be opposed to it. Leaning on the biology of language and cognition, researchers should focus on how the relational dynamics of linguistic interactions triggers changes in the nervous system and in the organism as a whole, and how their reciprocal causality is distinguished and described by the speaking observer in terms of mind, intelligence, consciousness, and self-consciousness. To that end, the agenda of language sciences must be radically revised, beginning with a scientific definition of their subject matter and an unbiased analysis of the metalanguage of traditional linguistics.

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