Abstract

Concerning the ontological nature of language, there are three different views: naturalism, platonism, and the view we here call humanism. The purpose of this work is to give rigorous philosophical foundations for this third view. ;The basic tenet of linguistic humanism is that language is different from both natural objects and abstract objects since it is a product of a human activity that is essential for our identity as human beings. This view has been a philosophically weak one, in that it usually expresses its ideas through such concepts as "society", "community", and "norm" without explaining what they are. An ontological analysis of language from a humanistic point of view that can serve as a foundation for the ontology of these entities is given in this work. ;We call an entity normative if its existence and knowledge of it cannot be separated. If an entity is normative, both naturalism and platonism are likely to be inadequate account of it since they usually assume that the existence of an object is independent of knowledge of it. If native speakers' knowledge of language is as genuinely knowledge as is scientific knowledge, then language is normative in this sense. A detailed investigation of the nature of knowledge as well as a criticism of the traditional view of knowledge is given to support this normativity thesis about language. ;Then, a new ontological analysis of language is given to show why language exhibits this normativity. In this analysis, we investigate how a language, its speech community, its native speakers, their knowledge of language, and their activity of speaking are interrelated. The difference between language and game is also clarified. ;A criticism of Chomsky's thought on language is offered as an application of our view of linguistics. It is shown that there is a internal conflict between his concept of language and his recent naturalism on the basis of the analysis of his concept of "knowledge of language"