Language and Nature

I would like to discuss an approach to the mind that considers language and similar phenomena to be elements of the natural world, to be studied by ordinary methods of empirical inquiry. I will be using the terms "mind" and "mental" here with no metaphysical import. Thus I understand "mental" to be on a par with "chemical", "optical", or "electrical". Certain phenomena, events, processes and states are informally called "chemical" etc., but no metaphysical divide is suggested thereby. The terms are used to select certain aspects of the world as a focus of inquiry. We do not seek to determine the true criterion of the chemical, or the mark of the electrical, or the boundaries of the optical. I will use "mental" the same way, with something like ordinary coverage, but no deeper implications. By "mind" I just mean the mental aspects of the world, with no more interest in sharpening the boundaries or finding a criterion than in other cases. I'll use the terms "linguistic" and "language" in much the same way. We focus attention on aspects of the world that fall under this informal rubric, and try to understand them better. In the course of doing so we may-and apparently do-develop a concept that more or less resembles the informal notion of "language", and. postulate that such objects are among the things in the world, alongside of complex molecules, electrical fields, the human visual system, and so on. A naturalistic approach to linguistic and mental aspects of the world seeks to construct intelligible explanatory theories, taking as "real" what we are led to posit in this quest, and hoping for eventual unification with the "core" natural sciences: unification, not necessarily reduction. Largescale reduction is rare in the history of the sciences. Commonly the more "fundamental" science has had to undergo radical revision for unification to proceed. The case of chemistry and physics is a recent example;