The phrase ‘nat-ural language’ distinguishes languages used in actual communities from languages that individuals or committees invent to promote international harmony (e.g. Esperanto), or to serve a special population (e.g. the Paget–Gorman Sign Language, and numerous American sign systems for educating deaf children). Applied to language in general, however, the adjective ‘natural’ carries various connotations.
In the tradition of Descartes and Saussure, some language scholars think that so arbitrary a system as language cannot have evolved naturally from other animals’ communication (e.g. Chomsky 1957; Bickerton 1995). Others call language an instinct (e.g. Pinker 1994), implying its use is as natural as any other instinctive behaviour. But still others find evolutionary continuity by tracing language to gestures, the meaningful movements that higher primates make and humans interpret syntactically as well as semantically (Armstrong et al. 1995; Stokoe 2001b).
To the broad question ‘Does language happen naturally?’ the answer appears to be ‘Yes, but only under certain conditions’. Natural or normal language acquisition requires both social interaction and functioning human physiology. Infants deaf from birth do not acquire a spoken language, at least not in the usual way. A review of many longitudinal studies of hearing and deaf children, in various language environments, finds that all children communicate gesturally for some months before they use the language others around them use (Volterra and Iverson 1995). Gestural communication appears to be a normal stage in an individual’s acquisition of language – perhaps analogous to crawling before walking. (WCS)
See also MODELLING and SIGN LANGUAGES.
Armstrong, D. F., Stokoe, W. C. and Wilcox, S. E. (1995) Gesture and the Nature of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Neurosemiotics is the study of neuronal sign processes taking place in the central nervous system of organisms, especially the brain, where such processes are thought to enable and coordinate the semiotic accomplishments of perception, representation, categorization and the species-specific varieties of cognition that emerge therefrom. A still largely unrealized specialization within the larger project of endosemiotics, or the study of internal signalling processes in organisms, it shares with that project (and with the still larger umbrella project of biosemiotics) the conviction that such naturally occurring sign processes as neuronal signalling and communication must be examined in their fullness as signs qua signs, in addition to the in-depth examination of their chemical and electrical constitution that traditional neuroscience provides, but fails to examine in its semiotic aspects. Although an all but undeveloped undertaking as of this writing, a fully developed neurosemiotics would seek to empirically examine the ways in which individual and collective neuronal events ‘stand for’ something other than themselves, so as to engender the phenomena of understanding and thought. Given the inability of contemporary neuroscience to bridge the divide between the physical and the mental naturalistically, the future of development research projects such as neurosemiotics seems assured. (DF)
Chernigovskaya, T. (1999) ‘Neurosemiotic approach to cognitive functions’, Semiotica, 127(1/4): 227–239.
Favareau, D. (2002) ‘Constructing representema: On the neurosemiotics of self and vision’, Semiotics, Evolution, Energy and Development Journal, 2(4): 3–24.
Roepstorff, A. (2004) ‘Cellular neurosemiotics’, in J. Schult (ed.), Studien zur Theorie der Biologie, Vol. 6, Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, pp. 133–154.
The doctrine that whatever generality there is in the universe pertains to names and not to real things. Only particulars, or individuals, exist and universals, or generals, are merely creations of language for the purpose of referring to many things at once. In its most extreme form, nominalism takes the position that universals and abstract ideas do not exist in any sense except as empty names or words. This view does not necessarily imply that general terms are ineffectual or useless but only that they can always be reduced to expressions involving reference to nothing more than particulars or expressions that serve some logical purpose. On this view, universal terms of any kind are fictions. A more moderate form of nominalism, conceptualism, holds that while universals have no substantive existence they may have a subjective existence as mental concepts. Conceptualism is often regarded as a middle ground between nominalism and its principal opponent, Platonic realism.
The main arguments for nominalism emerged in the twelfth century with Roscellinus and Abelard and were further developed in the fourteenth century by William of Ockham in opposition to the realism of Duns Scotus. All of the main British empiricists were nominalists who, like Ockham, argued that general terms are in one way or another only linguistic contrivances for referring to many particulars at once. Following the widespread acceptance of evolutionary theory in biology, nominalism tended to merge with materialism to support a mechanistic physicalist reductionism of the sort advanced by Herbert Spencer in the latter part of the nineteenth century and, more recently, so successfully advocated by philosophers like Willard van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars. In continuing to guard against what they believe to be the unnecessary multiplication of entities, modern nominalists deny reality to all sorts of abstract entities from laws and possible states to properties, sets and natural kinds. The denial that intentions and qualia are real and general is typical of contemporary nominalism.
With so many different abstract entities and generals now in the mix, there are many degrees and varieties of nominalism. Quine, for example, admits sets into his ontology, but otherwise only particulars. Although the traditional enemy of nominalism has been realism, some forms of realism are in fact quite compatible with nominalism. For example, what is now called external realism, the view that real things exist independently of all thought about them, is held by many contemporary nominalists. When nominalism is combined with external realism there is a tendency toward a Kantian isolation of fundamental reality from thought about it and to suppose that the principal content of thought is of linguistic or psychological origin. According to Charles S. Peirce, Kant’s view that all unity of thought depends upon the nature of the human mind, and does not belong to the ‘thing in itself’, is a form of nominalism.
Nominalism has significant ramifications for ethics, semiotics and other disciplines. Nominalist ethics concerns itself exclusively with the interests of individuals and is built up without any reference to efficacious purposes or to universal goods or rights. Nominalist semiotics rejects any robust distinction between types and tokens, a core feature of Peirce’s semeiotic. (NH)
Armstrong, D. M. (1978) Universals and Scientific Realism, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Loux, M. J. (1998) ‘Nominalism’, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge.
Peirce, C. S. (1992) ‘Some consequences of four incapacities’ (1868), and ‘Review of Fraser’s The Works of George Berkeley’ (1871), in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 1, ed. N. Houser and C. Kloesel, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 83–105 and 28–55.
NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION see COMMUNICATION, GESTURE, GLOTTOCENTRISM, KINESICS, PROXEMICS, SIGN LANGUAGES and ZOOSEMIOTICS
Winfried Nöth (b. 1944), German semiotician operating out of Kassel and Saõ Paolo. Introduced the notion of ecosemiotics (1998, from his original 1996 article in German), as well as writing on the broad scope of semiotics, including biosemiotics and machine semiotics. He has also produced the most rigorous ‘hand-book’ of semiotic research and theory (Handbuch der Semiotik, 1985 [translated into English, 1991], 2000). (PC)