So, I hate it when people do this… but here is a link to one of the best articles I have read in a long time, by a guy that I’ve never heard of before, Alex V. Kravchenko. He shoots the middle between Churchland and Wittgenstein. This article is damn interesting, if you have any interest in philosophy of language, epistemology or philosophy of mind, you need to read this article.
Basically, he takes all the cool stuff from the latter Wittgenstein and gives it a quantificational aperatus.
I like the general direction he is heading but he does not seem, to my taste, to apply autopoietic theory sufficiently enough to language. He makes a specific right turn in the beginning, where I would prefer a left turn:
" (1) Language is a sign system used to generate linguistic entities which constitute a sign system.
It does look like the very vicious circle from which traditional linguistic (and philosophical, for that matter) thought has been unable to break. But if we approach the issue holistically, accepting the two realities of language as an empirically unanalyzable unity, a different picture of language emerges when it is seen as a circularly organized system.
If we now remember[b] that language as a system does not exist autonomously [/b]in some kind of virtual reality independent of its users, but is a kind of human organisms' behavioural activity that makes humans so radically different from all other living organisms as far as intelligence goes, then the next step a conscientious linguist must take is to admit that language has a biological function. When we understand what biological function language serves, we will find ourselves very close to understanding what language actually is."
Here he is refusing to consider a language system as an autopoietic structure in its own right, apart from its human origin, but rather something only serving the human organism’s “behavioral activity”, despite defining language in an (autopoetic) circular sense earlier. This is a half-way step. While I am glad that some of his proposals could lead to the conception of language functioning as if something of a body-like extension of the human organism, the projection of a defining further boundary, within which multiple organisms share a space and replicate their structures, it does not follow the logic it lays the ground work for at the outset, that the circularity of language is autopoietic.
His primary stipulation regarding language:
" that language as a system does not exist autonomously "
is something that can be said of any and all autopoietic systems. It is not their autonomous existence, but their autonomous organization that distinguishes them as autopoietic.
Remember that he is argueing that we cannot analyze language apart from what it is and what it does. An analysis of just how it functions within a societal context doesn’t capture the entirety of what is language.
Its my belief that no reasonable theory of language can exist if it doesn’t make claims about philosophy of mind or evolutionary biology. At one point we have to say that language exsisted in our evolutionary history. If language is simply a matter of interaction within a linguistic group, then there would have been no such group for language to evolve. In other words, Wittgenstein will argue that language is impossible apart from a community (private language), if thats true, then he has to figure out how language evolved into being without such a community.
“Remember that he is arguing that we cannot analyze language apart from what it is and what it does. An analysis of just how it functions within a societal context doesn’t capture the entirety of what is language.”
The problem is that he does not analyze language sufficiently enough as an autopoietic entity in it own right, but only as function of the society which “uses” it. If language is autopoietically structured then its relationship to humans would be a symbiotic one.
“If language is simply a matter of interaction within a linguistic group, then there would have been no such group for language to evolve.”
As autopoietic structures were designed to examine living things, they specialize in structures that apparently arise in bootstrap fashion. The infinite regress into origins I do not believe is sufficient a criticism to examine the organizational structures of systems. If language is taken autopoietically, then the replication of its own structure would be its goal. The group and the language arise consubstantially.
“As autopoietic structures were designed to examine living things, they specialize in structures that apparently arise in bootstrap fashion. The infinite regress into origins I do not believe is sufficient a criticism to examine the organizational structures of systems. If language is taken autopoietically, then the replication of its own structure would be its goal. The group and the language arise consubstantially.”
That criticism appears to be very fair. It seems to me that I’ve misunderstood what he meant by an autopoietic structures. As this is the first time I’ve confronted such a theory, it doesn’t seem to be surprising. I think I’ll have to chase down a couple of the sources in his bibliography to nail this concept down in my mind a little better.