Prospective Social Psychological Contributions To a Truly Interdisciplinary Understanding of Ordinary Language

Abstract

Formal truth-conditional semantics and a definite 'written language bias' within traditional linguistics have lent academic respectability to naive and pervasive pre-theoretical conceptions of language as some sort of a conduit transmitting meaning. The Cartesian variant of the myth of literal meaning reifies meaning in terms of linguistically mediated mental representations, and main stream multidisciplinary research on ordinary language is indeed dominated by models in which hypothetical constructs from idealisations of language as a super-individual system are assigned 'psychological reality' as intervening vari ables in theoretical accounts of real-life discourse. A constructive alternative to such a paradigm may be developed by careful philosophical and social psycho logical analyses of human options with respect to categorisation of states of affairs in a pluralistic social world, the subtle circularity inherent in acts of speech, and the orderly 'trade on one another's truths' entailed in our intuitive mastery of dialogue roles. Significant contributions to such a novel, social-psychologically oriented general paradigm can be found in the works of Volosinov, Wittgenstein, Goodman, Putnam, Mead, James, Heider, Wertheimer and Vygotsky. The most significant prospective contribution of social psychology to interdisciplinary studies of ordinary language, it is argued, is a radical re-conceptualisation of truly social and collective aspects of language by means of dynamic-interactional rather than static Cartesian concepts.

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