Page 81 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

either correctly or incorrectly, the yardstick of cor- rectness must lie outside the set of actual perform- ances. Norms governing proper use fix which competence a person has.
One lively area of late-twentieth-century work seeks to uncover the sources of the norms that regulate concept-use. The source of these norms affects the ontological status of concepts and the nature of the folk theory which is committed to them. If the norms are social, then concepts are socially constituted. If the norms are Platonic, then so are concepts; in which case they are presumably not in the domain of natural science. If the source of the norms lies within the individual, the theory of content can be indi- vidualistic. If the norms are biological in origin, then the theory of content can be naturalistic.
See also: Language of Thought; Representation, Mental.
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of age, use and understand the simpler structures of their native language fluently, without benefit of any special instruction and often despite quite unhelpful- looking regimes of child-rearing. In order to do so, it seems as if children must employ mental structures homologous to the linguists' concepts. But it is known
Language Acquisition: Categorization and Early Concepts
Language Acquisition: Categorization and Early Concepts R. N. Campbell
To characterize the structure of language adequately,
linguists require a considerable array of concepts,
many of them quite abstract, corresponding to classes
of the 'clause,' the 'phrase,' the 'word,' etc. To charac-
terize the content of linguistic expressions a further
array of concepts is required, corresponding to the
types of 'objects' and 'properties' denoted, of 'prop-
ositions' expressed, of 'modes of expression' and so
forth. Thus, in order to give an adequate account of
how any utterance functions, it is necessary to deploy
thisarmyofconcepts.Yetyoungchildren,4or5years thementalapparatusneededtospeakandunderstand
from other work that children's ability to construct concepts of arbitrary categories is initially very weak and develops slowly.
1. Approaches to the Problem
language is encapsulated and isolated from other cog- nitive resources, that it constitutes a 'mental module.' This module has several parameters, initially set to default values. In the course of development, exposure to the language around them 'triggers' the values of these parameters to appropriate settings, perhaps
This paradoxical observation has one well-known res- olution, namely that the necessary concepts do not have to be constructed by children; instead, they are innately specified. In addition it is often proposed that
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