Towards a critique of the dominant philosophies of language from a historical-materialist standpoint

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to offer a critique of some of the main authors of modern linguistics or other approaches to language in general: Ferdinand de Saussure, the “founder” of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky, one of the most prominent representatives of modern linguistics, and Jürgen Habermas, whose philosophy of language was an important part of his communication project. Critique here offered is based on an approach to language which considers its social character as equally as essential to it as its strictly linguistic or biological traits. It is argued that the dominant philosophies of language, analysed through the work of the three aforementioned authors, abstracted from this social characteristics of language in order to create a “science of language”, whereby language has become a static, synchronous structure with almost no connection to language as it exists in social reality. It is because language is inextricably connected to social, ideological, and political phenomena that Jürgen Habermas also criticised them for idealizing language and considering “speech acts” only those utterances whose goal is cooperation, but not those whose character is conflictual, as is so often the case in various forms of social dialogue.