Epilogue: Evo-Devo-Perfo

Summary

This book started by reflecting on the relation between expression and meaning, in both words and sentences. Philosophers customarily take this to be a matter of representation, a relation between a subject and a theory of a formal language, an ‘intentional’ stance correlating a ‘symbol’ and ‘what it stands for’. It should now be clear that this must be heavily qualified.

First, formal languages, as chapter 7 discusses, are only very remotely related to natural language. The real issue in linguistics is not so much describing something like a well-formed formula of sequentially arranged words; at best a construct like that constitutes the phonetic support of what we're interested in. As important, though, is the nuanced hierarchical array that carries meaning – which, if this book is on track, is an extremely dynamic affair.

Second, when it comes to intentionality in the intuitive sense that we can take ‘book’ to refer to what the reader is holding (so ‘the reader is holding a book’ is true if and only if the reader is holding a book), present understanding tells us little as to how that wonderful act succeeds. This book has been, in part, about that relation; but one has to be both honest and humble here. All that has been definitively claimed is that the relation in point is mediated by an elaborate syntax (which chapter 3 introduced), and that its ‘scaffolding’ utilizes more basic topological notions (as discussed in the last two chapters).