ABSTRACT
What can the grammatical structure of a sentence, its lexemes, morphemes, syntax, and so on, tell us about the conceptual structure that underlies that sentence? Historically, there have always been two distinct approaches to this question—the empiricist and the rationalist approach. According to the empiricist, conceptual information is derived directly from an individual’s experience of the world and as a result comes to inherit the idiosyncratic, indeterminate, analogue complexity of that experience. As such the empiricist is forced to deny that there can be any precise and comprehensive replication of conceptual information in the fixed, shared, digital structure of language. Instead, the empiricist envisions that grammatical structures constitute a recasting of conceptual structures into a simplified and impersonal form. In contrast, the rationalist argues that conceptual information has a transcendental origin and, consequently, an elegant structure which is impersonal, immutable, and universal in nature and which can be imposed on to the complex world around us thereby rendering it comprehensible. Consequently, the rationalist is able to argue that there is a natural affinity between conceptual and grammatical information with the digital structure of a sentence providing a faithful mirror of the order inherent in the concepts that underlie it.
