Problematizing language

Abstract

The article is a follow-up on the previously raised issue of the lack of language awareness on the part of both the general public and professional linguists of various theoretical strands. The different senses of the terms “language” and “natural language” used in linguistics and everyday life are discussed from the point of view of their empirical adequacy. It is argued that the arbitrariness and inconsistency of these terms issue from failure on the part of orthodox linguistics to understand the nature of language as a biological adaptation and its evolutionary function as a manner of living of human organism-environment systems. Such an understanding becomes possible by using Humberto Maturana's systems approach to language and cognition in the framework of radical constructivist epistemology. Such an approach may, finally, rescue language from the “blind zone” of linguistics, laying the ground for a new comprehensive transdisciplinary paradigm in the language sciences.