Project’s Abstract

The subject of my research is an exploration of the relationship between language and the concept of rule. Areas of thought, whose subject matter is language, have been dominated by the concept of rule, that is, by the idea that language is a rule-governed system. From the early grammarians in the Greek, Latin, Jewish and Islamic traditions to the present day, all sorts of approaches to language have been fascinated by the possibility of finding rules that account for linguistic phenomena be they phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic as well as diachronic or synchronic, paradigmatic or syntagmatic. Hardly anyone concerned with the study of language, the use of language and the philosophical foundations of language questioned the idea that on all levels mentioned above a proper account or satisfactory explanation must consist in identifying the underlying rules. But is this the case? Shouldn’t a philosophical approach to language at least raise this question, examine this universally accepted presupposition in order to find out whether it is justified and methodologically needed for an account of language? This is the question at the heart of the proposed research.

A claim is often made that in spite of the profusion of philosophical uses and mentions of rules and their assumed role in language, much confusion is tied to the notion as well. The idea behind this claim is that although the majority of theories of language relate ‘rule’ to ‘language’ a careful analysis will reveal great differences between ways of thinking of the relation between these concepts. Contrary to this widespread stance, I wish to establish that the concept of rule is deeply entrenched in the way philosophers perceive language. A careful analysis of discussions about rules, I suggest, will reveal a striking similarity between the arguments and positions in such discussions about rules. Moreover, I submit, a certain (complex) idea of the role rules have in language is shared by the majority of theories of language. The concept of rule is indeed ambiguous, as the many and diverse debates of it show, but this fact does not necessarily imply that the ultimate definition has not yet been reached. It might imply rather, that the notion of ‘rule’ is inherently resistant to definition. Thus my aim is not to arrive at a clearer definition of rules and their applications in language. I intend to consider the possibility that such a definition cannot in fact be stated and to expose the inherent immunity to analysis of the concept of rule itself.

In terms of scope and conceptual framework, the present work will focus on the concept of rules within the linguistic tradition taking the linguistic turn as its starting point.

The main question addressed by the research is: What, if any, is the role of rules in language and in linguistic communication? The way this question is presented is open to the possibility that rules might not have the significant role in language that most theories of language assign to them. The more basic question, whether language is a rule-governed system, has received an affirmative answer by almost all philosophers of language. Though varying in degrees of explicitness and readiness to admit this picture of language, philosophers have generally held that language is a rule-governed system. A part of the work will deal with different theories of language and the use of ‘rule’ within them while another part will expose the (sometimes hidden) motivations of the assumption that a sound theory of language should include rules as a necessary part.