Abstract

Current understanding of the nature of language owes much to two authors: Noam Chomsky and the later Wittgenstein. What is interesting is that the conceptions of language proposed by each appear to conflict. The key question is: what is it to understand a language? In these terms, the internalist/individualist view of linguistic understanding which Chomsky has consistently advocated throughout his career appears to flatly contradict the later Wittgenstein's externalist account of linguistic understanding . In short, the relation between these two conceptions is not well-understood. 2 The aim of this paper is to establish some rapprochement along the following lines: philosophy of language may be the richer for what it can learn from empirical linguistics but that area of philosophy remains the context within which empirical linguistics derives its significance