Beyond Explanatory Adequacy

Abstract I will assume here an approach to the study of language that takes the object of inquiry to be an internal property of persons, a subcomponent of (mostly) the brain that is dedicated specifically to language: the human “Faculty of Language” (FL), to adapt a traditional term to a new context. This “biolinguistic approach” was controversial when it took shape almost half a century ago, and remains so, but without warrant, in my opinion. A stronger thesis is that the biolinguistic approach has a kind of privileged status, in that every constructive approach to human language and its use presupposes it, or something similar, at least tacitly. That, too, seems to me tenable, but I will not pursue the issue…