William writes: "It seems to me that the game is over when a critique begins with disparaging remarks about a highly recognized scholar."
The game isn't over at that point; the next round has just begun. Philosophy has its unlovely aspects. In other subjects you triumph by adding something new. In philosophy, triumph entails slaying someone old, proving them wrong. In the history of philosophy, the arrival of a new, considerable voice almost always begins with the citation of a prior philosopher's position and an explanation of why it is inadequate - and then the new voice proclaims its own novel insights, which themselves will be superseded in due time. William writes: "For Harris, I think he means that language is indeed a faculty in that it exists as a language when it is being used and not independently." Your locution here comes closer than anything Harris says, but it's still unclear. When people of a decent education are talking about powers of the mind, the notion they usually have in mind when they say "faculty" is, roughly, of an "ability" at a certain kind of action - e.g. memorizing, recalling, recognizing, visualizing, speaking, improvising. It's frequently used synonymously with 'knack': "She has a knack for learning languages." "He has a faculty for improvising poetry with rhymes." I maintain that usefully clear thinking honors a distinction between the knack and the languages, the faculty and the poetry. Harris does not seem consistently to maintain such a distinction. And yet, in trying to ascribe the knack, I don't think he would say, "She has a language for learning languages." A similar obliviousness to distinctions recurs throughout his writings. William writes: "That resolves your possible assumption that language exists as something alone and something else in use." No, my position is something of the opposite. In my next posting I'll try to convey why I believe you can't "learn a language". Not just because it's too multiplex, but because there's no such entity as "a language", no integrated single thing in the mind-independent world that -- as the innocent would say -- "corresponds to" the phrase "the English language". Each of us has a blurry but often serviceable notion in mind when we say "language". We can stipulate a "definition" of 'language', but that's just a fiat about what notion I want you to entertain when I say "language". William writes: "As for the word faculty we probably should keep in mind the common uses of words in England versus the U.S." I think I do that, William. I've spent over three years of my life in England, and I doubt if a day went by without my musing explicitly or implicitly on Oscar Wilde's line, "We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language," or by the line attributed to many, "Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language." William writes: "Harris might be aggrandizing his contributions but if that's a flaw, it is not a fatal one." My gripe was not against bragging per se; it concerned what he was bragging about. Harris makes much of his claim that the "meaning" of an utterance depends on the context, the situation. He points out that what he calls "the meaning" of "Fire!" is different when said by the commander of a firing squad or said by someone in a theater who notices flames. (Put aside the blurriness of his use of 'meaning' there.) I say his insight there is so obvious and so common that it's all but truistic. And yet Harris hardly he seems aware of how hackneyed it is. He goes on to emphasize the the importance and profundity of his vision: 'That is why integrationism pays far more attention to contextualization than any other approach to language.' I do feel Harris should stick strictly to "linguistics", and leave philosophy to others who are more equipped for it.
