| Abstract: | The author first wonders whether it was necessary to re-examine now the old problem of the relations between language and thought, as they are still too much related to traditional philosophical formulations, even among psychologists. He gives the reasons why, since Whitney, the scientific linguists, because of their epistemological prudence, voluntarily discarded this problem which they were not armed to study. Then he surveys some of the issues which, after a century of healthy anti-mentalistic views, an interdisciplinary scientific study could presently approach in a more valid and less ambitious experimental frame of work: thought without language, Whorf's hypothesis, relations between language and “splitting of the world”, lessons from experiences of translators, learning of language and pathology of language. Eventually, even though he seems to be avoiding it, he outlines the very complex problem of evaluating the still altogether unstructured draft of model with which Chomsky proposes to explain the relations between language and thought. The validity of this model is related to epistemological presuppositions and to a use of the notion of hypothetical-deductive models which it is difficult, but necessary to scrutinize at first. |
