The intrinsic nature of language is such that it permits languages to be acquired by both children and adults, to be represented in the brain/mind and also to be used by human beings who achieve linguistic competence within certain biological constraints that modulate or govern the learning and processing of language. Thus, the biological grounding of language makes it possible for the abstract system of language to be instantiated in human beings who then press into service the language capacity to accomplish various actions such as thinking, communicating, conceiving which partake of, exploit and interface with a host of cognitive capacities. From this perspective, it seems reasonable to believe that the biological basis of the language capacity offers insights into the nature of cognitive capacities such as reasoning, learning, memorization, sensory-perceptual conceptualization only insofar as the language capacity is supposed to make transparent many aspects of cognitive structures and mechanisms that constitute the cognitive substrate. The character of the human mind seems to be visible from the biological lens of language once we assume that the nature and form of cognitive structures and mechanisms can be deduced from the biologically grounded connection between the language capacity and other cognitive capacities. Neurological and genetic studies on the relations between the language capacity and other cognitive capacities such as vision, memory, non-visual sensory perception, learning, reasoning, motor abilities, emotion can thus be believed to shed light on the texture of our cognitive makeup. It may be noted that such studies are supported by the supposition that the biological basis of language itself meshes well with studies on the relationship between language and cognitive capacities and/or processes. From this, it appears that biology acts as a kind of bridge that relates language to cognition given the presupposition that the path from language to cognition cannot be traversed directly.
The aim of this book is to show that the transitions from biology to language and then from language to cognition are not only hard but also invalid on many grounds. This may eventually show that language is far more closely coupled to cognition than is usually thought. Thus the present book will argue that biology cannot be the bridge that relates language to cognition or connects cognition to language because language in itself constitutes the system that links to cognition directly without requiring any immediate grounding relation that biology may establish. That is, the purpose of this book is to demonstrate that cognition is not transparent to biology, contrary to mainstream thinking on the relationship between biology and cognition. If cognition is transparent to something, it must be language. This is not, however, to deny that cognitionâor language, for that matterâhas a grounding in biology, or that cognition is a biological function that modulates many physiological-chemical processes inside organisms (Lyon 2006; Tommasi et al. 2009). In fact, many interactions with the environment that constrain learning, perception, memory, reasoning, action, etc. are instantiated in the physiological and biochemical processes within our bodies. But the crucial point to be noted is that the physical instantiation of cognition in our biological substrate is not sufficient for an understanding of what cognition is, or of how it really works. In other words, just because we understand how X is instantiated in Y, we may not come to understand X. From the fact that we understand how X is instantiated in Y it does not follow that we also understand X. Plus the direction of explanation may not simply go from the physical instantiation of cognition in our biology to an understanding of cognition itself. The argument to be advanced in the present book is that the direction of explanation instead goes from cognition as revealed through language to biology. Thus, biology cannot be the appropriate medium that can give us a purchase on the problem of understanding the intrinsic nature and form of cognition with a special reference to natural language. Language being the sine qua non of cognitive capabilities or faculties can be the right link which can take us inside the interior space of our cognition. In this connection, it is also of particular concern to emphasize that the transition from biology to cognition is barely understood, while the path from language to cognition is in a much better shape for an exploration of the issue of how languageâcognition relations can help penetrate the realm of cognition by bypassing the instantiation relation with reference to biology.
1.1 On the Notions of Language vis-a-vis Biology
It is necessary to appreciate that language is a very tricky word: some people use it to mean the faculty of language (the system of grammar that is instantiated as a modular system as part of the human mind), or linguistic competence (the competence in language X, for instance), or as a collective term for languages (as in âBengali is my [first] languageâ). It is thus worthwhile to note that these different entities do not all relate to biology in the same way. When one thinks of language (in the sense of the language faculty) as a critical component of human cognition, language is conceived of as a mental organ instantiated in the cognitive substrate just as the stomach or liver is instantiated in the human digestive system (Chomsky 2000). This conception of language invariably inherits a relationship with biology in the sense that language is now a component of the neural architecture whose properties can be discovered and studied only by relating to the underlying principles governing the development, maturation, and functions of the neurobiological infrastructure. Hence a unification of the cognitive sciences with the biological sciences is often sought on the grounds that many questions about the grounding or implementation of language within the biological substrate can be faithfully answered as problems in the unification become more and more tractable. Needless to say, this conception of language presupposes an integral or inherent relationship between language and biology since language is itself a biological entity on this view. Now if we turn to another conception of language under which language is thought of as linguistic competence (in a given language), a full-blown linguistic system that has been internalized by a human being is what is at issue. Language on this conception can be a biological entity, but this implication is not necessary, for if language equates to linguistic competence, the competence is true of a given language and may well be internalized as a cultural knowledge base from the relevant linguistic community just like rituals are internalized as a system by a human being from the surrounding cultural milieu. Although it is certainly the case that the system that constitutes linguistic competence in a certain language is psychologically represented, it does not follow that the competence can itself be a biological entity. But, of course, if the mature stabilized system that constitutes linguistic competence is thought to have passed through stages of biological growth only to be in the current state, the linguistic competence under this condition can be a biological entity. In fact, this possibility is indeed one such case that is endorsed by Generative Grammar, as the final state of the developing language faculty is characterized as linguistic competence (Chomsky 2000). In short, language recognized as the linguistic competence does not necessarily import an inherent relationship with biology.
We now focus on the third conception of language on which language is taken to be an extra-biological entityâan entity that is collectively realized as a system that can be studied and analyzed. Notably, on this conception language is instantiated not in an individual, but located in the intersubjective collective space of a linguistic community, books, codifying resources, etc. Here language is a sociocultural property whose resources are distributed over a loosely connected range of entities some of which are even inanimate or inert entities. Taken in this sense, language is grounded in the outer world where the symbolic properties of language are shared among groups of human beings with a diverse ensemble of things serving to function as props for the codification, preservation, and entrenchment of linguistic forms. Language in this sense is remotely related to the biological substrate because the containment within the individual is no longer viable as language becomes a supra-individual entity. In simpler terms, when we say that English has the rule X but not the rule Y, we are making statements about an entity which is not an individual property per se. Biology has got nothing to do with this. But note that one may attempt to draw the biological substance into the ambit of the shared knowledge of language as it sits in the intersubjective realm, by maintaining that the individual knowledge of language is sharable or transmittable only if it is biologically instantiated in a human being (see Mondal 2012). That is, the property of being transmittable is inherited from the property of individual instantiation. Nevertheless, it does not follow that the shared system in itself is a biological property or entity even though the property of sharing obtains when language as a biological entity takes the grounding within the individual. Therefore, the connection between biological instantiation and language as a cultural resource remains tenuous.
Against this backdrop, the current book aims to state something different about the notion of language to be employed with reference to its relationship with biology. The conception of language to be employed in the present context will encompass the first two notions of language (excluding the third) in ways that make it possible to distinguish between the inherently biological conception of language on the one hand and the potential biological conception of language on the other. The idea to be advanced has been largely taken from Katz and Postal (1991), Postal (2003), Mondal (2014), and Levine (2018). It needs to be clarified that these works essentially advance the claim that biological relations are ultimately irrelevant to understanding the basic texture of human language. But it is worthwhile to note in this context that Katz and Postal (1991) and also Postal (2003) essentially support a realist view of language which holds that languages or linguistic objects are abstractions, whereas the present work favors a non-cognitivist1 conceptualist view of language on which linguistic structures are themselves cognitive structures. In this sense, it appears that this conception accords well with the central tenets of Cognitive Linguistics (Lakoff 1987; Langacker 1987, 1999), but the crucial difference here is that the present work adopts and refines a split ontology of language on which language can be situated in two dimensionsâthe dimension of psychological or neurobiological instantiation and the dimension of symbolic abstraction. In the case of the former dimension, language or the linguistic capacity is essentially an aspect of the mind/brain and hence a system with finite resources (words, rules, constraints, etc.). But, in terms of the latter dimension, language can be projected into the realm of abstractions where infinite levels of expansion of linguistic forms, abstractions that may have no anchoring in the physical world (such as logical properties and relations found in language), universal categories, etc. can exist. These two dimensions are independent of each other and yet are somehow connected because of the mindâs intentional projection of a finite system into a domain of abstractions where infinite extensions are always possible. In simpler terms, when we say that a language can have a sentence of length 1010, we are not, of course, making any claim about the actual working of language on the dimension of psychological or neurobiological instantiation. Rather, we are saying that the given language allows for such an abstract generalization if a different configuration of psychological or neurobiological instantiation were available to humans with far greater cognitive resources. But this leap to this level of abstraction obtains via the mental projection. An analogy from mathematics will be apt here. For instance, even though there are psychological/neurobiological constraints on the mental processing of numbers (the length of numbers factored in) and their calculations (the exact count of numbers manipulated at a time factored in), there is nothing that prevents the human mind equipped with the knowledge of mathematics from concluding, on the basis of the fact that 10 is a natural number, that 1010 is also a natural number. Thus, the realm of abstractions where language operates as a pure axiomatic system is distinct from the level of psychological or neurobiological instantiation of language. That this distinction is often confounded by many scholars at the cross section of linguistics and (neuro)biology can be shown by the following textual references. What the current book calls into question is eloquently described by Salvador E. Luria (1973), one of the earliest proponents of the study of biological foundations of natural language.
To the biologist, it makes eminent sense to think that, as for language structures, so also for logical structures, there exist in the brain network some patterns of connections that are genetically determined and have been selected by evolution as effective instruments for dealing with the events of life. (emphasis added, p. 141)
In a similar vein, Brown and Hagoort (2000) state the following by offering certain considerations that they think shou...