Abstract

The perennial question concerning the origins of language goes “Why is there language now when there wasn’t any before?” A bolder ambition, only recently formulable, is to understand why it’s this kind of language that exists. The design question now seems within reach owing to the last sixty-odd years of research in generative syntax which has laid bare some of the basic structuring principles of human language. The speculative face of contemporary generative linguistics—sometimes called biolinguistics—assumes an innate biological endowment, unique to human cognition, is at least partially responsible for the linguistic capacity of the human species. The biolinguistic perspective thus invites the conjecture of a nearing resolution to the origin and design questions in the form of an evolutionary explanation. The task of this thesis is to make clearer the logical structure of evolutionary explanations in relation to the boundary conditions placed on them by the demands of language design. Its first concern is that of determining the type of causes sufficient for explaining biological design generally. Epistemological, empirical, and—most significantly—metaphysical considerations lead us to the conclusion that a “proper causal analysis of language as a biological feature” can only be of a particular sort. Any satisfactory explanation of language design will be a developmental one involving causes internal to the organism. A practical next step is to evaluate the coherence of different kinds of developmental explanation. The subsequent question is: a change in what resulted in language? The “grain problem” posed in evolutionary psychology supposes the sui generis natural kinds of evolutionary explanation are genes. Contra the grain problem, I argue that the natural kinds in an explanation of language design ought to be the kind terms of linguistic science. Finally, I consider the inherently historical character of evolutionary explanation. As a historical science, the operative question is that of how we can recover information about the past. Assessing the “evolutionary plausibility” of the Minimalist Programme in generative linguistics as a heuristic for inferring past causes of design, I conclude that the desiderata of parsimony and simplicity are of appreciable value to a theory of language evolution.