In this book I’ve been considering the myth of the language instinct: the ‘language myth’. The language myth is made up of six component myths. These include the myth that language is a singularity, unrelated to any other animal communication system (Chapter 2); the myth that all languages are underwritten by language universals, a detailed Universal Grammar (Chapter 3); the myth that this Universal Grammar is innate, prescribed by our DNA (Chapter 4); the myth that Universal Grammar is a distinct, informationally encapsulated module in the mind (Chapter 5); the myth that natural languages are learnable because there is an innate Mentalese: the language of thought (Chapter 6); and finally, the myth that habitual patterns of thought can’t be influenced by the structure and organisation of different languages, which refutes the principle of linguistic relativity (Chapter 7).

While I’ve presented my alternative to each of the myths as we’ve gone along, we still need to round out the language-as-use thesis. And in this final chapter, I examine several outstanding issues.