Cognitive Linguistics and Philosophy

Abstract

The cognitive claim that language is a reflection of our recognition of the world raises the two following issues: (i) What exactly do we recognize? (ii) Who exactly recognizes the world? Although cognitive linguistics assumes the dualism of outer and inner worlds, i.e. objective and mentally constructed worlds, their arguments fail to follow their assumption. What they claim to be the facts about the world often turns out to be nothing but reflections of our construal of the world. Their argument can then be reformulated in terms of monism. The claim that language is a reflection of our recognition of the world is also at odds with contrastive linguistics. In this framework, differences between languages should be accounted for in terms of differences of the native speakers’ recognition of the world, which often leads to the notion of “meaning independent of speakers’ recognition”, contrary to what is assumed by cognitive linguistics.