Reid on the priority of natural language

Abstract

Thomas Reid distinguished between natural and artificial language and argued that natural language has a very specific sort of priority over artificial language. This paper critically interprets Reid's discussion, extracts a Reidian explanatory argument for the priority of natural language, and places Reid's thought in the broad tradition of Cartesian linguistics.

Keywords::

• Thomas Reid
• Noam Chomsky
• artificial signs
• natural signs
• artificial language
• natural language

Notes

^1. As an indication of this, consider that the index to The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid doesn't even contain an entry for ‘language’ (though it does have one for Reid's interest in botany!), and contains only a meagre entry for ‘signs’. Compare that to the multiple entries for ‘language’ and extensive entry for ‘signs’ in The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley, and the extensive entry for ‘language’ in The Cambridge Companion to Locke's “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”. Moreover, the Berkeley Companion dedicates an entire chapter to Berkeley's theory of signs, and the Locke Companion dedicates a chapter to Locke's philosophy of language. (But compare Jensen [1979] and Castagnetto [1992].)

^2. Since Immerwahr (1978), some have accepted that Reid's views changed significantly between his early work in the Inquiry and his later work in the Essays. I reject this reading of Reid, but it isn't necessary to belabor the point here, because I am focused on Reid's interesting and neglected discussion in the Inquiry.

^3. Suppose this commitment to be well beyond the default commitment to truth-telling embodied in Reid's ‘principle of veracity.’ See Reid 1764, 6.24, 193–194.

^4. There is a close affinity between what Reid calls ‘natural signs’ and what Grice calls ‘natural meaning.’ To illustrate natural meaning, Grice used the example ‘those spots mean measles’ (1957). To illustrate natural signs, Reid used examples such as ‘smoke is a natural sign of fire’ and a certain countenance on a human face is ‘a natural sign of anger’ (1764, 177). Reid's ‘natural language of mankind’ might thus be regarded as a subset of Gricean natural meaning, where the signs in question are those features of human behavior and countenance that signify one's state of mind. But as I discuss in the main text, Reid might impose a further epistemic constraint on which natural signs are fit for inclusion in natural human language.

^5. Earlier we noted a similarity between Reidian natural signs and Gricean natural meaning. The present example highlights a further similarity, this time in terms of Reidian ‘artificial signs’ and Gricean ‘nonnatural meaning.’ Gricean nonnatural meaning can be glossed as follows: a speaker S's utterance U means that P because of S's intention that his audience infer, based on the fact that S uttered U, that S intends them to infer that S believes that P (and perhaps also that S intends them to infer that P in part because S believes that P). See Grice 1957 and 1969. Howie has a Gricean reflexive communicative intention.

^6. For helpful conversation and feedback, I thank Christian Hegele, Kevin Kuhl, Patrick Rysiew, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Special thanks go to Angelo Turri. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and an Ontario Early Researcher Award.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Turri

John Turri is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the University of Waterloo (Ontario). He is the author of Epistemology: A Guide (Wiley-Blackwell 2014) and holds an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation.