Phenomenalist linguistics

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I put a lot of effort into studying David Hume’s work and building a phenomenalist foundation for linguistics with the help of his work. I shelved the project after a while (not because it wasn’t going well but because I got sidetracked). And then in the early 2020s, I happened to go back to Friedrich Hayek’s book The Sensory Order (1952), which I had read long before that but without getting much out of it. Suddenly, though, it all made sense. And with Hayek’s orienting influence, I got to work putting into writing my late-2000s, early 2010s work on Humean linguistics, now Humean-Hayekian.

There’s something else that I should also mention that influenced me between my original late-2000s, early-2010s work on Humean linguistics and my recent work on Humean-Hayekian linguistics: Around when I went back to The Sensory Order, I spent a lot of time and energy on logic. Besides doing my own thinking, I studied with great interest John Stuart Mill’s 1,000+ page textbook A System of Logic (1843) and Morris Cohen’s more concise and eloquently written textbook An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934). Thus, between (1) my late-2000s, early-2010s work on adapting Humean phenomenalism to linguistics, (2) my newfound appreciation, as of the early 2020s, for Hayek’s effort to reconcile phenomenalism, which is a traditional doctrine in philosophy, with 20th-century science, and (3) my newfound understanding of logic, I found myself better oriented than ever in all of the ways that mattered for building the phenomenalist foundation for linguistics that I envisioned first in the late 2000s. That project had turned into Humean-Hayekian logico-linguistic system building.

See below for what I’ve written so far on that system:

  1. Sensation as such vs. sensation of
  2. From linguistics to logic
  3. The mental vs. the physical
  4. The subjective vs. the objective
  5. The self vs. the other
  6. Words as sets
  7. Form and substance
  8. Semantics and syntax
  9. Word-thought overwriting
  10. An analogy to word-thought overwriting
  11. The phenomenalism of categorization
  12. The a priori and the a posteriori
  13. The branches of linguistics
  14. The reification of words and money