Nigel Love read Modern Languages at Magdalen College, Oxford, and subsequently held a junior research fellowship at Wolfson College. He has taught English in France, French in Jamaica and (from 1981 to 2015) linguistics at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of Generative Phonology: A Case-Study from French (1981), co-author of Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II: The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century (2001), editor of Foundations of Linguistic Theory: Selected Writings of Roy Harris (1990) and of Language and History (2005)
There is arguably a parallel between recent ideas within cognitive science about the distributed mind and the development within linguistics known as integrationism, turning on similarities between the critique offered by the former of the ‘classical’ view of mind and by the latter of the ‘classical’ view of language. However, at the heart of the integrationist attack on the classical view of language is rejection of the idea that natural languages are codes. This idea appears to be taken for granted by certain cognitive scientists as the basis for explaining not only how language is mentally apprehended by the individual, but also how it facilitates ‘second-order cognition’. It is suggested that the language-as-code idea, although prima facie endowed with the attractiveness of common sense, is untenable, and should not figure, at least in the role usually assigned to it, in any inquiry into either language or human cognition in general.
Open peer commentary on the article “A Critique of Barbieri’s Code Biology” by Alexander V. Kravchenko. Abstract: To talk of “code biology” is to change the meaning of the word code in a way that would be impossible if code were a unit of a code, i.e., encoded some fixed meaning. Code biology is in that respect and to that extent a self-refuting linguistic construct dependent on an understanding of language whose contradiction is implicit in the very existence of code biology.