Call for Papers : Res per nomen 2

 

The first Res per nomen conference was held at Reims in May 2007. There were participants from a dozen countries and they explored the relationship between language and reality from a variety of standpoints, including classical, medieval and post-modern philosophy, as well as phenomenology, cognitivism, logicism, C.S. Peirce 's semiotics and L. Wittgenstein's philosophy. The papers on philosophy tended to explore the question of reference, especially from a non-logicist point of view. The papers on linguistics tended to deal with naming, particularly in relation to the understanding of phraseological problems and their occurrence in electronic corpora.

Res per nomen 2 intends to pursue these topics further. Most linguistic theories suppose reality can be described in terms of logic or psychology and language is then usually seen as the encoding and decoding of that reality. This produces an internalist and individual view on language where words makes sense because things are endowed with existence, either physical or mental. We understand each other because of the constraints that the world imposes on us, perhaps via genetical universals. Language as a social object is then clearly a secondary preoccupation and depends on arguably Platonic and metaphysical conjectures.

However, it is possible to think about language differently. Instead of concentrating on the relationship between language and concept or language and reality we could see names and the naming process (dénomination in French, from Latin denominatio) as the central object of linguistic study. According to this view, the existence of 'something is not available to our consciousness unless it is named. It follows that things are not named discursively at the end of a process of encoding: rather they are given to us from the start with the linguistic signs that name them. Reference and denomination, the topics of the first Res per nomen conference, are inextricably linked, and language is then quite naturally an externalist and communal object. Our mutual understanding can then be explained in anthropological terms in the same way as other features of our collective being, altogether avoiding dubious metaphysical hypotheses about how the mind constructs utterances from deeper levels, the existence of universals and the logical nature of the universe.

The aim on this occasion is to explore more fully the relations between denomination and reference, both from the point of view of philosophy and linguistics. The denomination of feelings and perception could for example be studied to see how languages name such entities,commonly thought-of as 'pre-existing', how they are made real for us through denominations. The discussion could rest on Wittgenstein's private language argument, comparative language study, text and corpus analysis, brain-imaging analysis, and so on.

It should also be possible to examine the extent of denominations in discourse, with phreaseological units as intermediate structures between the lexicon and the sentence. This distinction between denomination and discourse can lead us quite naturally to explore the possibility of a grammar without rules. How can we explain how sentences are put together if we refuse to acknowledge formal constraints? There again, philosophy, the neurosciences, comparative language studies and corpus analysis may help. Specialists in Natural Language Processing could also be interested: if NLP software is not very satisfying, it may be because the fundamental assumptions on which they rest are too metaphysical. It might be fruitful to explore other possiblities.

Any point of view is welcome, including critical ones, provided they address the topic of the conference.