Stephen K. Land

Land does something a little different than the historical survey or the deep study of one thinker. He gives us profiles of several "philosophers of language in Britain"--Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Adam Smith, Lord Monboddo, James Harris, and Thomas Reid--each in their own terms, with an attempt not only to consider their ideas as expressed explicitly in their writings, but also to derive the principles of characteristic systems on behalf of each of them (since these Enlightenment worthies by and large don't quite get around to systematizing themselves). This can be limiting--to take one instance, the Abbé de Condillac is mentioned more in this book than any figure not in the list above, but the clarification of why, which could have been done in an explicit way if influence relationships were part of the purview, only half happens.

But no, this is interesting. We see Hobbes's use perspective, in which language us a compact between people for their mutual protection, one arm of the Leviathan; we come to understand Locke's struggle to reconcile the dependence of language on ideas which his emergent empiricism rests upon and the clear dependence of cognition on language—in at least some cases and some ways—which you can’t really get around if you just think. We get Berkeley’s novel and strange, but completely philosophically consistent, solution, in which the only workable guarantor for the meanings of words in a world in which nothing is real is God, whose spirit fills us up and gives us a means or integument for reaching out to one another through words. We see Smith and Monboddo start to develop systems based on the need to overcome the problem of moving between natural language and language of art, or between concrete and abstract ideas—the four-part motion, perception, comparison, abstraction, generalization. The systems that come out are based on the priority of certain word classes to others—nouns come before adjectives, because you need a noun to be described by an adjective, that kind of thing—and they are about to be swept away by the comparative philology on sounder systematic principles that William Jones and some Germans are gonna drop on the world. And Harris and Reid, both moving toward reason-based accounts and focusing on the universal (as opposed to language-specific) elements of speech, the former because he wants to rehabilitate Aristotle and the syllogism, the latter for the sake of “common sense” and to repudiate the extreme empiricism of Hume—some things we just kinda know and who cares why—if it looks like a cat and you call it a cat, it’s a cat. They’re both backwardthinking in a way but also prescient, since we are about to drop all this ideas and what it means to be human stuff and move into a nineteenth century very much more concerned with describing language for its own sake. Really, much of what appears here comes to naught but might-have-beens in the end in terms of linguistics, and “historical background” in the context of language philosophy, but you have to understand where we’re not if you wanna understand where we are.… (mehr)