The Meaning of Realism

The task of saying what realism is is not a trivial one. We need an account that generalizes across all areas in which philosophers have found it natural to speak of realism and anti-realism. So the account must be abstract and topic-neutral not restricted to one or two specific examples. A standard attempt invokes the notion of mind-independence: to be a realist about a certain subject matter is to hold that this subject matter is mind-independent. The trouble with that formulation is that it doesn’t apply to realism about the mind itself—it is not mind-independent! Also, why exactly is this thought to be the import of realism? How can mere independence from the mind constitute realism? It might be thought that we need to bring in the notion of existence explicitly: to be real is simply to exist. But that doesn’t work either because even an anti-realist believes that the subject matter in question has existence—for example, material objects exist for an anti-realist just because they are constructions from sense experiences, and they exist (similarly for behaviorist anti-realism about the mind). The intended meaning of realism in these cases is surely something like the following: material objects exist apart from sense experiences (as mental states exist apart from behavior). The mind-independence idea was not wrong for realism about material objects but only as a general rubric; instead, we can generalize by saying that realism about the mind takes it to be independent of something else, namely behavior. Schematically: to be a realist about X is to hold that X exists independently of Y, where Y is the thing an anti-realist identifies with X. Thus to be a realist about material objects is to hold that material objects exist independently of sense experiences, while to be a realist about mental states is to hold that mental states exist independently of behavior. The realist holds these things to exist separately, while the anti-realist denies this: separate existence is the crucial point. Common sense affirms such separate existence and philosophical realism endorses it—while anti-realism disputes the thesis of separate existence. Realism thus asserts ontological plurality while anti-realism denies plurality (e.g., material objects are not different in kind from sense experiences). A metaphysical realist is a metaphysical pluralist: she insists that there are two things at issue not just one.

            Here we glimpse an essential feature of the realist position: the world is conceived as laid out in separate compartments connected in various ways, where these compartments exist apart from other compartments. That is the pluralism characteristic of realism: objects are not experiences; minds are not bodies. The realist is a pluralist separatist. The same structure is at work in other areas: properties (universals) are not predicates; moral values are not empirical facts; numbers are not numerals; possible worlds are not mental constructions. The global realist thinks that the former categories exist separately from the latter categories, while the global anti-realist asserts unity and assimilation. The realist denies the assimilationist tendencies of the anti-realist—that is the essence of her position.  Similarly for realism with respect to time: to be a realist about the past or the future is to hold that the past and future exist separately from the present—that they are distinct compartments of reality. The anti-realist contends that past and future can be viewed as somehow aspects of the present—constructions from it (memories, expectations). Even in cases where there is ontological dependence, the realist will claim that there is ontological separation: the mind may depend upon the brain but it exists separately from the brain, i.e. it has its own mode of existence (its own irreducible properties). Thus a materialist cannot be a realist about the mind—not really. He thinks there is one thing not two, so he denies separation. This is why monism always turns out to be a form of anti-realism. Take a case where anti-realism looks plausible—say, about color or fictional characters. Here the realist would double the ontology: in addition to dispositions to appear and creative mental acts there are alsocolors and fictional characters—they exist separately. This strikes us as too much pluralism: colors are just projections from appearances and fictional characters are just another way to talk about an author’s imagination. It is the thesis of separation that makes the difference between a realist view and an anti-realist view: the idea of ontological division, or the lack of it. If you were to draw up a big map of Reality, you would find different continents located in different places, according to the realist; by contrast, the anti-realist contends that there are fewer landmasses than we tend to suppose—it might all be Greenland, say.

            I just used the idea of spatial separation to explain the meaning of realism, and indeed I think this is the root of the general notion. Spatial separation is the paradigm expression of realism: when things exist in separate places they cannot be assimilated and must be regarded as existing independently. Let me illustrate this idea with a model case designed to bring out the conceptual structure of realism and its opposite. Consider a fishpond with surface swimming fish and a chalky bottom. People like to gaze into the pond and follow the antics of the fish, a lively reddish species. But there is something curious about this pond: there are also fishlike shapes moving around at the bottom of the pond, though they are difficult to see clearly. What is odd is that their movements are synchronized with those of the surface fish, as if the two are joined invisibly together: there are correlations, predictable dependencies. There are two schools of thought about these bottom-dwellers: one school holds that we have here a second species of fish that mimics the behavior of the surface species, perhaps for reasons of camouflage; the other school believes that there is only one species in the pond and these fishlike shapes are merely shadows of that species (a third group maintains that they are actually after-images caused by looking at the brightly colored surface fish). That is, one school believes in a separate species of fish in addition to the species open to plain view, while the other holds that the flitting shapes are just shadows cast by the fish they can see (or after-images of them). According to the latter, there is just one species of fish in the pond not two (no fish pluralism) and a kind of natural error occurs as a result of how the light is cast onto the bottom of the pond. According to the former, we have a separately existing species that happens to lie somewhat out of sight, but is no less real for that. The two schools of thought label themselves “realists” and “anti-realists” about the shapes glimpsed in the depths. The realists believe in a duality of separately existing species, while the anti-realists insist that there is only one species of fish in the pond, though our perceptions lead us to postulate two (we mistake shadows for fish). Intuitively, the issue turns on whether the shapes on the bottom have an independent existence relative to the fish near the surface. Let’s suppose that they don’t and the shadow school is right: then anti-realism turns out to be true–fish monism, no separately existing species.

            The realist view has it that there is a spatially separated species of fish in the pond: that is what makes their view realist. The anti-realists deny that there is any such species existing in a separate region of space: that is what makes their view anti-realist. And surely it is sufficient for realism that entities of a certain kind exist separately in a certain region of space. But is it necessary? Does the issue always turn on the contents of regions of space? In the case of material objects we can certainly say that realism is the view that material objects exist in space separately from sense experiences (which may or may not be in space); but what about realism concerning the mind—should we say that mental states exist in space separately from behavior? That presupposes that the mind exists in space, and realism about the mind surely does not depend on making that assumption. However, it has been common to formulate the matter in terms of subjective space and objective space: does the mind exist in a subjective space separate from objective space? If so, we have mental realism; if not, we have mental anti-realism. The important point is that the mind is conceived as occupying a quasi-space that exists alongside physical space—and this is what qualifies the position as realist. There is some sort of realm or region in which the mind has its being, and this realm or region is not the same as the realm or region occupied by the body (compare the bottom of the pond and the surface of the pond). Thus the situation is analogous to the situation in the pond: regions of physical space form the paradigm, but we can extend the notion of spatial separation beyond the simplest kind of case. The mind does not occupy the same kind of space as the body, but it exists in something analogous to that space, something that allows the notion of separation to gain purchase. The heart of mental realism is the thesis that the mind exists in a part of reality separate from the part occupied by the body—in a separate space in the simplest formulation. It is not that the mind coincides with the body (as the external world does not coincide with sense experience): that would deliver anti-realism. Realism involves parallel existence not single existence.

            But there are more difficult cases to contend with. What about Platonic realism? The allegory of the cave fits the general idea nicely: the world of forms exists outside the cave and can be reached only by an arduous climb—here the idea of spatial separation is rendered explicit. An anti-realist about universals would hold that there is nothing more to so-called forms than the shadows cast on the walls of the cave, no separate realm existing at some remove. In the cave allegory Plato even supposes that we could travel to the region of space in which the forms exist. But this is just a metaphor—how does Plato literally conceive the existence of universals? Well, the idea of Platonic heaven is regularly invoked: not another region of physical space, as in the cave allegory, but an analogous quasi-space. Without some such conception it is hard to see how Platonic realism could be given cogent content: for how could we make sense of a separate realm populated by universals except by means of some quasi-spatial way of thinking? The anti-realist will certainly insist that such a conception is deeply mistaken (while accepting that it captures what the realist has in mind): there is nothing to talk of universals except the earthbound language in which we describe things (the familiar space of linguistic use). So we can accommodate realism and anti-realism about universals by adopting some natural extensions of the basic idea of spatial separation.

            What about moral realism? Here things take a murkier turn and even metaphors are in short supply. In what sense are moral values for a realist located in some other region or type of space? Could we travel to the place in which they independently reside? Is there some moral quasi-space that houses them? Maybe we could devise a “parable of the pearls” according to which moral values exist in a splendid museum of shiny baubles, but no such ideas have gained traction in the history of thinking on this topic. Maybe the quasi-space of the divine might be recruited to contain moral values, but the moral realist surely doesn’t want to be committed to anything like that. All we have is the rather thin idea of the fact-value distinction—but nothing to give substance to the idea of separate existence. There is no grand pond at the bottom of which values might languidly swim. The anti-realist is thus tilting at windmills to some extent, finding nothing to get his dismissive teeth into. By the same token the moral realist is left with a rather schematic thesis; all she can say is that values are not reducible to facts.  [1]Perhaps this is because we are dealing with metaphysical questions about values, unlike the other questions that attract realist and anti-realist rhetoric. My own imagery in this area tends towards depicting values as some sort of iridescent color unlike any color seen with the human eye—with a softly glowing quality. But this is fanciful stuff.

            Realism about modality requires yet further extensions of the spatial paradigm. The idea of logical space presents itself. The actual world exists in one part of logical space, but possible worlds extend out from there across logical space. To be a realist about necessity is to accept that necessity resides in the existence of the space of possible worlds—a space removed from that of the actual world. The modal anti-realist, by contrast, holds that talk of necessity adverts to nothing beyond the actual world—there is no separate logical space in which modality has its being. The enormous size of logical space is testament to the robustly separate reality occupied by necessity and possibility; it is a very large pond in which possible worlds swim. Or maybe we should compare modal realism to what might be called “galaxy realism”: the thesis that those patterns of light we observe in the night sky are not just local optical phenomena in our atmosphere but remote collections of stars and planets just like our sun and its planets. The astronomical anti-realist denies the separate existence in space of other stellar systems, while the realist asserts that space is replete with star systems every bit as vast as ours. Similarly, our talk of necessity and possibility indicates no world beyond the actual world for the anti-realist, while the realist insists that a vast totality of possible worlds extends far out into logical space. Modal reality, like astronomical reality, consists of enormous objects made up of innumerable parts, according to the realist; while the anti-realist insists that there is nothing beyond the local and observable—no other possible worlds but this one, and no galaxies apart from the one we live in. Again, it is the idea of separate existence that captures what is at issue.

            We should not expect the issue between realists and anti-realists to be capable of rigorous formulation. These are intuitive and impressionistic concepts deployed to correspond to metaphysical pictures. Still, we should at least try to elucidate what constellation of ideas underlies these labels, aiming to articulate what is driving philosophical thought. The idea of separate existence in space, suitably extended and qualified, seems to be at the heart of the dispute between the realist and the anti-realist.  [2]

  [1] Could this be why moral realism has comparatively few takers? We just don’t have a vivid picture of what it would be for it to be true. The case contrasts sharply in this respect to realism about material objects. (None of this refutes the claim that it is true.)

  [2] The background to this essay is Michael Dummett’s attempt to find a definition of realism adequate to the full range of metaphysical debates in which that notion has been employed. He tried to make bivalence into the touchstone of realism; I think we need a richer and more metaphysically substantive notion if we are to do justice to the intended meaning of the word “realism”. 

The Bundle Theory of Belief

We have a tendency to suppose that beliefs are discrete states of mind, cleanly separated from each other. They exist like so many peas in a pod or sentences printed on a page. But this is not a realistic picture: beliefs come in groups. The unit of belief is the bundle. Take my belief that the goldfish in my pond are thriving: that belief comes with a set of other beliefs about how I acquired the goldfish, how they are cohabiting with the frogs, how they look, the number of them, the fact that I have a pond in my garden, that I don’t live in an apartment any more, etc., etc. This collection of beliefs may not be endless, but it is certainly large; and one belief gains comfort and support from the others. Many of my beliefs don’t belong to this bundle, having their own bundles, but it is really not possible to have a single belief in isolation. Beliefs proceed from premises or assumptions and they have consequences as well as corollaries and associations; they nestle in among these ramifying beliefs. Psychologically speaking, a belief is a component of a belief package, not merely one belief set beside others. Just as properties of objects always coexist with other properties, so beliefs coexist with other beliefs. I don’t just believe, I co-believe—I harbor bristling bundles of organically connected beliefs. The idea of a single isolated belief is an artificial abstraction; the psychological reality is more holistic (if I may appropriate an overused term). Words make up sentences (word bundles) and have no existence independently of that; similarly, beliefs make up belief bundles and have no existence otherwise.     

            We fail to see this, or to grasp its implications, because we like to individuate beliefs by their content: distinct content, distinct belief. Thus an array of distinct propositions is supposed to generate an array of distinct beliefs—one for each proposition. But that is really a non sequitur, since an array of propositions might be the content of a single complex psychological state. Call such a state of belief a T-belief (“T” for “total”): then we can say that the subject T-believes the whole set of propositions (those that make up its bundle). The idea, then, is that from a cognitive point of view the basic unit of assent is T-belief—a pattern of assent. Talk of isolated beliefs is just so much abstraction. Assent is always to multiple propositions, so we may as well recognize that psychologically beliefs are members of a family—they travel as a team. They are parts of something larger—though parts that cannot be broken off and expected to survive intact.

            Let me illustrate the point with a well-worn example. Suppose someone knows well enough that Hesperus is Phosphorous, so that they will assent equally to “Hesperus is F” and “Phosphorous is F”. We can agree that the two propositions are not identical, but surely there is no difference in the belief the subject has in respect of those propositions. It is a matter of indifference whether they express their belief state using “Hesperus” or “Phosphorous”. They have a single state of belief that can take either proposition as its content—just as many sentences could be used to express this belief. The distinct propositions correspond to no psychological distinction for them. If you ask them whether a certain planet (Venus) is pretty, they will respond with either name, since they believe the names refer to the same thing. Maybe the beliefs were once different, before the subject discovered the identity, but now they have merged, despite the distinction in the propositions. Or consider the beliefs of animals: we needn’t fuss over the precise proposition that captures the belief state of a dog or orangutan because any of a range of propositions will do to capture their tendencies to assent—their psychology is just not that fine-grained. In the case of my belief bundles all that matters is the overall pattern of assent—I assent to all of them simultaneously. I T-believe in a certain set of propositions: that is the basic fact, not the many discrete beliefs beloved of philosophers. I certainly don’t introspect discrete belief states that make up one of my bundles, as if each belief is an isolable inscription.

            Compare desire. Suppose I desire to see a certain film: isn’t this really a whole bundle of desires? I want to see a particular star, I want to see a certain genre of film, I want to sit in the dark and be entertained, I want to sit next to my significant other, I want to forget my troubles, I want to pass the time, etc. I have a complex desire state in respect of seeing this film, a whole set of pro-attitudes. If you ask me why I want to see the film, I could cite any of a large number of desires that motivate me. There is never just one; I contain multitudes. Desires come in bundles not as isolated elements. When I desire one thing I desire many things. The unit of desire is the collection—that is what motivates me. It makes little sense to try to abstract a single desire unconnected to other desires—what would it mean to say that I desire to see a film but have no other desires that go with that? The proposition is distinct enough, but the psychological state is embedded in a larger totality. All desire is really T-desire. We mustn’t reify propositions into psychological realities.

            The ontology of belief-desire psychology should therefore follow the bundle conception: bundles are what dispose to action and have functional properties. It is never the case that an action is prompted by a single belief and a single desire; rather, the action results from an interconnected web of beliefs and desires. The model of an ordered pair of belief and desire causing an action is at best an oversimplification. This is not merely the point that individual beliefs and desires necessarily belong with other beliefs and desires; it is the further point that psychological reality is not well represented by the model of discrete beliefs and desires. Instead we are to think of the mind as operating in larger more inclusive units—what I have been calling bundles.

            Think of the way you form beliefs. You don’t form them one at a time, now this one, now another. There isn’t a sequence of isolated beliefs laid out in time, like a series of inner explosions. Rather, a package inserts itself in toto—as when you take in a scene perceptually. Hundreds of beliefs may be formed in a matter of seconds. Nor is this the case only in perception: even in testimony cases we form multiple beliefs—about the speaker’s appearance, his history and character, the consequences of what he is asserting, and so on. At every waking moment you are updating your set of beliefs in big chunks not seriatim. It is done by the bundle, and without effort. It is entirely natural to operate with belief ensembles, because beliefs like to work in groups; lonely isolation is not their preferred mode of existence. So let’s recognize the gregarious character of belief: it’s never merely the belief that pbut always the beliefs that p, q, r, etc. We don’t so much have individual beliefs as we have belief patterns. If we think of beliefs as dispositional, then it is the bundle that has the disposition not beliefs singly.  [1]

  [1] Wittgenstein would say that we are captivated by a picture of belief (and desire—knowledge too) according to which beliefs are laid own like exhibits in a glass case, each self-sufficient and separate. This picture has many sources, some deriving from the physical world, some from language, some from aspects of the mind itself; but we should resist the picture and accept that our talk of belief implies something like a holistic pattern of assent. I have tried to avoid putting the point in Wittgenstein’s terms, but it may be helpful from an expository point of view.

The Alleged Limits of Moral Philosophy

Bernard Williams wrote a book entitled Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.  [1] This title invites interrogation. What kind of limitation might be meant? We can all agree that philosophy is limited in some way: it cannot do what science does, for example, or history or geography or literature or painting. In that sense everything is limited: there is no point in using one’s philosophical faculties in order to answer non-philosophical problems. Someone could write a book called Ethics and the Limits of Science and we could be persuaded that science is not the answer to ethical questions, since it is not the answer to many questions, especially normative ones. But isn’t ethics precisely moral philosophy—so how could philosophy be limited in doing the philosophy of right and wrong? What if Williams had called his book Moral Philosophy and the Limits of Philosophy? Of course, real ethical questions involve factual matters, and hence are not properly part of philosophy, but what could be meant by saying that philosophy is limited in dealing with the philosophical aspects of ethics? And is philosophy limited in other areas traditionally designated philosophical too? As it turns out Williams doesn’t really mean that philosophy is limited with respect to ethics (or moral philosophy): he means a certain kind of philosophy is so limited. He doesn’t mean that a more historically rooted and humanistic philosophy is limited when it comes to ethics; he means the kind of philosophy exemplified by Kant and Bentham along with their successors. He means something theoretical, abstract, systematic, monistic, context-independent, non-psychological, ahistorical, absolute, and scientific-sounding. So his title is misleading: he thinks that a certain dominant strand of Western philosophy is limited when it comes to ethics. Not that this strand might not contain important truths and be valuable in its way, but that it has limits—it doesn’t cover the full territory of ethics. This is a less resounding thesis than that suggested by the title of his book. He might more accurately have called it Ethics and the Limits of a Certain Kind of Philosophy. The book would then have gone on to argue that the kind of philosophy in question omits certain important considerations, to be remedied by adopting a different kind of philosophical approach or style or method.

            The question I want to raise is whether Williams would wish to extend his thesis to other parts of philosophy. Is it just ethics in which a certain kind of philosophy has inherent limits? Let us call this kind theoretical philosophy, meaning thereby to sum up the list of features I cited in the last paragraph. Would he complain that epistemology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and so on, are not sufficiently historical or humanistic or contextualized? Is his critique of theoretical philosophy as too limited itself limited to ethics? Is it that the other areas traditionally covered by philosophy are perfectly well suited to the theoretical style, but that right and wrong are not? If so, what is it about this domain that makes it stand out so? It can’t be merely that it is a normative domain, because so are aesthetics and epistemology (which concerns what we oughtto believe and is shot through with normative notions), not to mention logic. And why exactly would the normative preclude theoretical treatment while everything else invites it? I don’t recall Williams ever addressing this question—though he certainly contrasted the “absolute conception” of science with philosophical investigations. My question is whether he would be prepared to extend his critique to all of philosophy or whether he intended it as restricted to the case of ethics.

            It seems to me this is an uncomfortable dilemma for him. For it is hard to see on what grounds he could restrict it, and yet extending it surely proves too much. It proves too much because clearly theoretical philosophy is not limited in any non-trivial way when it comes to these other areas. How could it be argued that logic and philosophy of language are objectionably limited in their methods and results? Of course, they can be supplemented by other disciplines, but in what way are they just the wrong way to approach the subject? Similarly for epistemology and philosophy of mind: why do they fail to provide an adequate way to approach the questions that constitute their domain of interest? Would Williams be prepared to write a book entitled Knowledge and the Limits of Philosophy or The Mind-Body Problem and the Limits of Philosophy? What other approach to these questions would he favor over the one traditionally practiced by philosophers? Does he think logic should be more historically situated and psychologically realistic? What about the analysis of knowledge or the nature of intention? I myself see no reason to distinguish ethics from other branches of philosophy methodologically, and I also believe that there is no real alternative to the usual way of doing things. So I would see no point in a book paradoxically entitled Philosophy and the Limits of Philosophy, even when that last phrase is understood to mean “limits of a certain kind of philosophy”.

            In fact, Williams’ chief targets were Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. He found them too abstract and oversimplified as well as psychologically unrealistic. I can see a point to that critique, but it is an unwarranted leap to suppose that ethics in general has been blighted by the same failings. What about the work of W.D. Ross? What about Aristotle? These are theoretical thinkers in the sense intended—they purport to offer a systematic treatment of ethics valid for all times and places—but they are more pluralistic and realistic than the abstract monistic formulae of Kant or Bentham. True, philosophers are prone to defend oversimplified monistic theories, but it is no abnegation of theory as such to move in a more complex pluralistic direction. Is that all Williams is asking for? Evidently not, but I fail to see why ethics should be held to a different standard than other philosophical topics. In epistemology we can distinguish a rule-based from a consequentialist view of justification: either you follow the rules of induction, deduction and abduction, or justification is defined as simply what makes the best predictions (or has the best results for humans if you are a pragmatist). This is analogous to the distinction between deontology and consequentialism in ethics. We can certainly oppose either view as being partial or limited, but combining them is hardly a move away from the theoretical to something more historically grounded or humanistic. Similarly, we can oppose the monolithic systems of Kant and Bentham without thereby abandoning a broadly theoretical approach to ethics. Pluralism is not inherently anti-philosophical or an indication that philosophy has reached its limits. To reject bad theories, or theories that oversimplify, is not to reject theory altogether.

            And is it that Williams finds nothing of value in the theories he criticizes? No: for they crystalize important aspects of morality—moral rules and good consequences, respectively. They are idealizations intended to bring out what matters, much as other philosophical theories are idealizations. There is nothing wrong with that so long as we realize what we are doing. Maybe they are too idealized, but again that is not a point against theoretical philosophy as such. Nor do I see any real alternative to theoretical philosophy if we are going to keep on doing philosophy at all. Certainly, merely describing the moral attitudes and practices of societies present and past is not a kind of moral philosophy worthy of the name. So I don’t really see what Williams is getting at by accusing moral philosophy of failing to recognize its limits.  [2]

Colin McGinn

  [1] Harvard University Press: 1986.

  [2] I considered Bernard Williams a friend. I admired him as a philosopher. I enjoyed talking to him. We once appeared together on television discussing animals and ethics. I taught a seminar with Malcolm Budd on Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy when it came out. But I never felt I really understood his position in ethics—either what he objected to or what he favored. I got the flavor of it, if course, but the actual content of his views eluded me.

Speechless Language

Normally when a human being learns a language he or she learns to speak and be spoken to. Sounds are produced and understood. An acoustic ability is acquired. But this is not always so: some people learn language (e.g. the English language) without the aid of sound. They neither hear sound nor produce it. Instead they rely upon vision and gesture (or writing). Their language ability is not notably inferior to those that speak and hear. What does this tell us about human language? What, in particular, does it show about the initial state of the human language faculty?

            Presumably there is no analogous phenomenon in the case of other species that use language (or a communicative symbol system). A deaf and mute bird doesn’t cleverly exploit its eyes to substitute for hearing sounds, resorting to a sign language or the written word. Similarly for whales, dolphins, and bees. For these species if you can’t speak you don’t have a usable language (dance in the case of bees). The innate language faculty is specifically geared to speech—to a particular sensory-motor system. There is no flexibility in mode of expression and reception, unlike with humans. Does this mean that human language ability is intrinsically purely cognitive? Is speech just a learned add-on to innate linguistic competence? We learn to speak in a particular accent in a particular language, but this is not a matter of innate endowment—is it the same for the sense modality we adopt? Each of us could have learned to communicate by sight and gesture, and without much difficulty, so is the human language faculty neutral with respect to sense modality? Is it just a convention or accident that we end up speakinglanguage? Could it even be that our language faculty initially evolved as a visual-gestural system and only later became connected to our ears and vocal organs?  [1] What if most people used a non-auditory medium for language—wouldn’t we then suppose that this is the “natural” way to communicate? We have chosen the acoustic route, but we could have gone visual without loss or inconvenience. Is the language faculty inherently indifferent to its mode of externalization? It certainly isn’t indifferent to syntax and semantics, but phonetics seems like one option among others.

            It seems true to say that human language (unlike the language of other species) is more of a cognitive phenomenon than a sensory-motor one. For one thing, we use language in inner monologue not just in communication with others (I doubt this is true of bees and whales). The structure of language is a cognitive structure that can be present in a variety of sensory-motor contexts. But it would surely be wrong to suggest that we are not genetically disposed to speak: speech is biologically programmed in humans and it follows a fixed maturational schedule. Human speech organs are designed to aid speech; they are not just accidentally coopted for this purpose.  [2] We don’t need to use these organs in order to master language, but it is surely natural that we do—it is certainly not a conscious choice!  So is the human language faculty inherently acoustic or not? Neither alternative looks very plausible: it is possible (easy) to learn language without sounds and we are built to favor sounds. One might suppose that the case is somewhat like walking on the hands when born without functioning legs—an option of last resort. Do the deaf feel an inclination to speak and listen as infants, but find they cannot, and so resort to sign language? That doesn’t appear to be the case—they take quite naturally to the visual medium. There is certainly something modality-neutral about human language. On the other hand, we are clearly designed to speak—as we are not designed to play cricket.

            Here is a possible theory: humans have two language faculties, one cognitive, and the other sensory-motor. Call this the dual capacity theory. Both are innate and genetically coded, but they can be disassociated, as they are in the deaf. We are familiar with the idea of distinct components in language mastery—the semantic component, the syntactic component, and the phonetic component—well, there are actually two linguistic faculties coded into our genes. This idea will not surprise those who favor the notion of a language of thought: this language might exist separately from our language of communication in our mental economy. They might not even have the same grammar. What the dual capacity theory suggests is that the faculty we use when we speak is itself divided into two—and the deaf use one of them but not the other. They use the same innate grammar as the rest of us, but they don’t use the same sensory-motor system (though there is no reason to deny that it is programmed into their genes). The eliciting or triggering stimulus for normal language development isn’t operative in their case, but they use exactly the same internal schematism. This explains why their language skills are comparable to the sound dependent, while not denying that speech is the natural human condition (in a non-evaluative sense). That is, we are born to speak, but we don’t have to in order to master communicative language. There are two separate psychological modules. It would be possible in principle to retain the sensory-motor module while lacking the cognitive module, so that articulate speech is possible but there is no real understanding of the principles of grammar (this would be like those “talking” parrots).  [3] Thus there can be double dissociation. Quite possibly the two modules evolved separately: maybe the cognitive module initially evolved as an intrapersonal aid to thought, to be followed later by a communicative faculty that recruited the older faculty. We tend to speak of the language faculty, as if we are dealing with a unitary structure, but in fact there are two of them—there is more structure here than we thought. The cognitive faculty has nothing intrinsically to do with speech, though it obviously gets hooked up to speech during ontogenesis, while the sensory-motor faculty has everything to do with speech. No such duality obtains in the case of other linguistic species, which is evidenced by the fact that deafness spells an end to language ability for them. At its core, we might say, human language is not a sensory-motor capacity—though there is nothing wrong with saying that speech embodies linguistic competence. We really have two kinds of competence (and two kinds of performance): competence in the universal principles of grammar, possessed by the hearing and the non-hearing alike; and competence in the production and perception of speech. The former has nothing intrinsically to do with the ears and vocal organs, while the latter is dedicated to that sensory-motor system. When it is said that a language is a pairing of sound and meaning that is strictly speaking inaccurate (witness sign language), but it is true enough that the understanding of speech is such a pairing. Clarity is served by firmly distinguishing language and speech, but there is no need to deny that speech is the operation of a language faculty. To put it crudely, “language” is ambiguous.

            The case might be compared to memory. We speak loosely of “the faculty of memory” but enquiry reveals that different things might be meant—there is not a single faculty of memory. There is long-term memory and short-term memory (and maybe others): these memory systems operate differently, permit of double dissociation, and no doubt have different genetic bases. Both are rightly designated “memory” and they have clear connections, with neither deserving the name more than the other, but they are distinct psychological faculties. Similarly, “language” applies to two psychological faculties, which can be dissociated, and which recruit different kinds of apparatus. When someone makes a general statement about “language”, we do well to ask him what human faculty he is referring to–speech or the more general capacity possessed by the deaf. Indeed, even that is too parochial, since we can conceive of language users who don’t have sight either but communicate by means of touch: they too have mastery of the grammar of human language (both universal and particular), but they don’t hear or see the words of language—they feel words (and cause others to feel them too). Their underlying linguistic competence is more “abstract” than any particular sense modality: but so is ours, despite our saturation in the acoustic. What is truly universal in human language is this abstract faculty that exists in people with different modes of expressing it—universals of speech are relatively confined.

            Once we have made this distinction we can distinguish different domains of study: are we studying the universal abstract language faculty or are we studying its expression in specific peripheral sensory-motor systems? What is called “psycholinguistics” could be about either of these. Which properties of language belong to which faculty? No doubt the type of externalization will impose specific conditions on the form of what is expressed, but there will probably be universal patterns found across all modes of externalization (subject-predicate structure, say).  [4] The temporal dimension of speech will affect its structure, along with the memory limits that accompany this, while the recursive property is likely to stem from the internal universal language. Combining phonemes is not the same as combining the lexical elements that constitute the common human language. Particularly intriguing is the question of maturation: do the two language faculties develop in the same way and at the same time? It could be that the internal language develops more rapidly and serves as the foundation for the development of speech (or sign language). It is not constrained by motor maturation and may be more “adult” than its external counterpart. If we think of language development as a process of differentiation, it may differentiate at a different rate from external speech—and proceed from a different basis. It may permit inner speech before the onset of outer speech. We certainly can’t infer its maturational schedule just by observing the growth of outer speech. With respect to evolution, it may be that the cognitive language faculty evolved much earlier than the vocal language faculty, which is thought to be relatively recent (about 200,000 years ago). We might have been using language for much longer than we have been speaking it. The larynx is a late accretion to language use, and a dispensable one.  [5]

  [1] I consider this hypothesis in Prehension (2015).

  [2] Caution: not originally so designed—vocalization long preceded speech in humans—but refined in the direction of speech since speech began (compare hands and tools).

  [3] It is a question how language-like the sensory-motor system would be without the backing of the cognitive system. Subtracting speech from the human subject leaves language intact, as shown by the deaf, but what if we subtract the internal language faculty from the activity of speech?  Would we still have full productivity? Would grammar really exist for the sounds that emanate? This is an empirical question and not an easy one to answer. My suspicion is that we would get substantial degradation, but it may be that humans have evolved a good deal of autonomy in the speech centers of the brain, so that speech might exhibit many of the properties of the internal modality-neutral language faculty. Just as language ability is largely independent of general intelligence, so speech ability might be largely independent of cognitive-language ability. Certainly it is logically possible for there to be an autonomous faculty of productive grammatical speech in addition to a similar faculty for the inward employment of language—that is, one faculty for speaking and another for thinking in words.  The question is like the question of how much of perception would survive without cognition.

  [4] Chomsky makes this point. The internal language could be a lot simpler, structurally, than external speech, because of the constraints imposed by the sensory-motor system. There might be no gap between deep and surface structure in the internal language, with no transformations linking them.

  [5] To simplify somewhat, there are three possible positions: language is only speech (traditional linguistics); language isn’t speech at all (Chomsky today); language is both speech and something else (an internal cognitive structure) (me). These questions remain murky and it is helpful to open up the theoretical options, though the speech-centric position is surely indefensible. (I’m grateful to Noam Chomsky for helpful comments.)