Guiding questions

This chapter focuses on the conceptual foundations of the Windows Approach for two, closely connected, reasons. One of these is that a full understanding of this approach is impossible without careful consideration of its foundations. Broadly speaking, these foundations are the conceptual distinctions, requirements, conditions and other principles which govern the soundness and structure of window inferences about language evolution. My discussion of these foundations will be guided by three main questions: ‘What are the foundations at issue?’ ‘What is the rationale – the basic reasons – for adopting them?’ ‘How are these foundations interlinked?’

The other reason for focusing here on the conceptual foundations of the Windows Approach is to help clear the way for appraising individual windows on language evolution in later chapters. Such an exercise calls for appropriate conceptual tools. And the answers to the three guiding questions, just posed, will provide those tools.

The Empirical Requirement

In essence, the Windows Approach is a means of facing up to a major obstacle in the investigation of the evolution of language. This obstacle is the result of an apparent clash between two widely held views. The first view is about the mode of inquiry that should be adopted for studying the evolution of language; the second view is about the evidence that is available about the evolution of language. So let us see, next, what these two views involve.

The first view is that the evolution of language should be studied in an empirical mode. At the basis of this view lies the following requirement:

The Empirical Requirement

Claims expressed in hypotheses about the evolution of language need to be empirical.

Unpacked, this requirement says two things. First, that it should be possible to appraise hypotheses about language evolution by bringing factual evidence to bear on them. Second, that these hypotheses should actually be supported by such evidence. The requirement says, by implication, that hypotheses about the evolution of language should not express claims that are not ultimately constrained by factual evidence. In terms of this requirement, unconstrained speculations, dogmatic stipulations, subjective personal beliefs, and disciplinary biases should not form part of accounts of language evolution.