두 개의 탑: 형식과 개념

Abstract

People consider linguistics as one of the most prominent discipline in the 20th century, like physics in natural science. And the dominant approach to language research has been the structuralism, initiated by Saussure and flourished by Chomsky. Structuralism is the study of forms of language. By pursuing forms of the things we can attain the clarity, simplicity, generality abstraction, and testability of the statements. With the coming of computational technologies, the formalism flourished most in Chomskyan linguistics. Under the command of formalism they proliferated so many groundless, non-real formal categories excluding considerations on the real properties of the language or the real aspects of the world. Conceptualism which advocates the view that the meaning of a linguistic expression is not the thing referred to but the thought of the thing, the concept, flourished since the ancient times among the philosophers and scholars, because it was easy for them to think about things in the study than to toil outside meeting the real hardships. The concepts were in the mind, i.e., near, and available to them. So the concepts have taken the place of the things. Thus the meaning of a linguistic expression has become a concept instead of the thing originally associated with. The concept of a thing x is the thought of the thing x, which takes the form like “a thing with such and such properties”. The particular objects need much more properties to describe or characterize them with. But the concepts have fewer properties. That makes abstractions and generalizations easier which enables general statements that scholars wish to make. And the conceptualists tend to neglect the particularities that the individual things or events have. They tend to neglect the realities and they have concocted so many concepts isolated from the real things, and these concepts have made the ecological niche of their lives. Both formalism and conceptualism favoring simplicity, abstractness, generality, have separated themselves more and more from the realities. The linguistic realities are complex, ever changing, various, interacting with the environment, which is hard to approach. But we need to confront the reality while practicing hard discipline. We need to observe the on-time interactive workings of linguistic activities. And we need to find the patterns that connect across the fields and levels to have a deeper understanding of the world. We need to develop new perspectives, new methods of doing science. Ecology which comprises relativism and the evolutionary theory will do a lot in developing new perspectives and tools to study the language and the world.