What language is

Abstract

I am honoured by the thoughtful considerations that have gone into all of the commentaries in this issue. Their respective origins in psychology, linguistics and philosophy indicate the ramifications and implications that the present research program ismeant to have and the challenges it faces fromall of these directions. It is only in this broader frame that the fruitfulness of the central hypothesis of the present framework can be demonstrated: that sapiens-specific thought rests on a linguistic foundation and grammatical distinctions mediate cognitive ones. Ultimately, this hypothesis raises the question of what language is – how it functions as a system, and whether or how it transforms the cognition of which it is an aspect. The point of the hypothesis, however, is to motivate new empirical and experimental research questions. De Villiers pointedly formulates one of them within developmental psychology: Do ‘children with autism fail to automatically “see” the world through language’? I agree with her that, in psychology more generally, ‘the empirical research to date has not focused on the kinds of questions that Un-Cartesian linguistics poses’. Theoretical linguistics, too, is not at present pursued as targeting the integration of language with a particular cognitive type, and as Reboul discusses, it still tends to separate language as such from the type of species-specific communication that it supports, a separation that the present framework urges to resist. None of this even touches on the deeper philosophical issues thatWolfsdorf raises, from the nature ofmeaning to the connection between language and metaphysics. These are barely addressed in my work (though see Hinzen & Sheehan [henceforth HS], 2015, chapter 9) and a fascinating enterprise to embark on in the future.