ABSTRACT
For about thirty years, the study of language – or more accurately, one substantial component of it – has been conducted within a framework that understands linguistics to be a part of psychology, ultimately human biology. This approach attempts to reintroduce into the study of language several concerns that have been central to Western thought for thousands of years, and that have deep roots in other traditions as well: questions about the nature and origin of knowledge in particular. This approach has also been concerned to assimilate the study of language to the main body of the natural sciences. This meant, in the first place, abandoning dogmas that are entirely foreign to the natural sciences and that have no place in rational inquiry, the dogmas of the several varieties of behaviorism, for example, which seek to impose a priori limits on possible theory construction, a conception that would properly be dismissed as entirely irrational in the natural sciences. It means a frank adherence to mentalism, where we understand talk about the mind to be talk about the brain at an abstract level at which, so we try to demonstrate, principles can be formulated that enter into successful and insightful explanation of linguistic (and other) phenomena that are provided by observation and experiment. Mentalism, in this sense, has no taint of mysticism and carries no dubious ontological burden. Rather, mentalism falls strictly within the standard practice of the natural sciences and, in fact, is nothing other than the approach of the natural sciences applied to this particular domain. This conclusion, which is the opposite of what is often assumed, becomes understandable and clear if we consider specific topics in the natural sciences; for example, nineteenth-century chemistry, which sought to explain phenomena in terms of such abstract notions as elements, the periodic table, valence, benzene rings, and so on – that is, in terms of abstract properties of then-unknown, perhaps still unknown, physical mechanisms. This abstract inquiry served as an essential preliminary and guide for the subsequent inquiry into physical mechanisms. Mentalistic inquiry in the brain sciences is quite similar in approach and character to the abstract inquiry into properties of the chemical elements, and we may expect that this abstract inquiry too will serve as an essential preliminary and guide for the emerging brain sciences today; the logic is quite similar.
