Roy
Harris
Online
Integrationism: a very brief introduction:
Language and other faculties
7. Language and other faculties.
7a. Words are commonly said to be ‘stored’ in the memory, along with many other things. But this is little more than a picturesque metaphor. It seems self-evident, however, that language and memory are connected in some way, perhaps in many ways, since ordinary conversation would presumably be impossible if one speaker immediately forgot what the other speaker had just said.
7b. Not only memory but other faculties are obviously involved in activities such as speech and writing. It is sometimes said that a full understanding of our ‘linguistic knowledge’ (or, alternatively, a ‘scientific’ understanding of language) will be impossible until advances in the study of the brain reveal exactly how the language faculty and other faculties are related. This is held out as one of the hopes for future ‘cognitive science’.
7c. Thinking of language in this way, however, rests on a misunderstanding. The mistake is analogous to supposing that the explanation of why a clock keeps good time must be that inside it there is a set of instructions for time-keeping. Research into brain mechanisms is interesting in its own right. But the fact that linguistic communication has already come to play such a central role in civilization without relying so far on any such research suggests that whatever human beings already know about language from their own experience is quite adequate for an ‘understanding’ of the relevant phenomena. Integrational linguistics is primarily concerned with elucidating this lay knowledge, and is sometimes described for that reason as being ‘lay-oriented’.
