A Biolinguistic Approach to the Problem of the Relation of Language and Thinking in an Epistemological Perspective

The intensive development of science and technology challenges integrative and interdisciplinary research approaches. The hypothesis of NBIC convergence, which is gaining popularity, in the light of modern advances in the field of nano-, bio-, information and cognitive technologies seems more and more realistic. A special place among the interdisciplinary fields that have been actively developing in recent decades is occupied by neuro- and cognitive sciences. The biological uniqueness of the human mind imposes significant difficulties on the study of humans and society in the framework of the natural science paradigm. The most certainty in matters related to the interpretation of human cognitive abilities was achieved by the biolinguistic program, which states: linguistic competence is a species-specific dominant that determines the cognitive architecture of human identity. The approach to the study of language and thought that originated in the middle of the past century successfully fit into the neo-Darwinist trend, whose popularity grew along with the influence of evolutionary biology. Even then, the first attempts were made to create a theory of language as a theory of the evolution of a biological object, subject to the laws of heredity and variability. The history of this approach originates in the writings of Noam Chomsky and Eric Lenneberg, whose efforts contributed to the creation of an alternative to the functionalist views in cognitive sciences. The concept of Chomsky and his followers was based on the belief in the fundamental epistemological status of language competence inherent exclusively in the human species and realized through universal generative procedures. The principles of generative grammar were adopted not only by linguists and cognitive scientists, but also by neuroscientists, biologists, sociologists, IT specialists and philosophers. Once in the mainstream of around philosophical vanguard, the concept of a “universal language” quickly gained confidence and became the foundation of both cognitive research and research in the adjacent fields. However, the assumption underlying this concept, the sense of which in general reduces to the postulating of the mental neuro-linguistic factor mediating the combinatorial-symbolic and sensorimotor speech systems, cannot be accepted for a number of fundamental theoretical objections. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the impracticability of the theses of the biolinguistic program in the context of criticism of the generativistic model of cognition and to show that this view of the nature of language and thinking is epistemologically inconsistent and entails unsolvable logical and semantic contradictions, which, according to the authors, are critical for the concept of basic properties of language. The article also discusses alternative solutions to the problem of the relationship between language and thinking in the framework of generativistic epistemology.

Keywords

Authors

References