Self-awareness, Language, and Empirical Knowledge

Abstract

I argue that the evolution of language had a huge influence on human knowledge and that much of our experiential knowledge evolved into empirical knowledge. This transformation happened because our resources of pre-linguistic concepts that structured our sensory beliefs were largely supplemented with linguistically defined concepts, which helped us to form non-sensory beliefs. Speaking a language is a form of practical knowledge by which humans can express their ideas and knowledge about their environment. However, where experiential knowledge is language-independent, empirical knowledge is language-dependent. To understand the evolution of language from the calls of animals to human speech acts, I draw upon Wayne Davis’s ‘expression theory of meaning’, which maintains that a speaker’s meaning determines word meaning. The theory is partly associated with Paul Grice and sometimes called intention-based semantics. In this context, I discuss how linguistic conventions nevertheless established among a group of language users drawing on works by Ruth Millikan. Based on these accounts of meaning, I describe how individual knowledge in the form of sensory and practical experiences constitutes the foundation of public knowledge we may express in observation reports by giving an empirical description of our individual experiences. I propose that the empirical description concerns entities we can see with the naked eye and that the description happens in terms of predicates whose extension we have defined to cover both visible and invisible qualities of the object.