Reddit reviews Origins of Human Communication (Jean Nicod Lectures)

Philosophy isn't simply "musing on the nature of things." I believe the field of philosophy you have in mind here is metaphysics, and, while metaphysics may be defensible in its own right, it's certainly not the only area of philosophy. One of the fields that I find particularly exciting right now is philosophy of language. A big research interest in the field is how we can go from not having genuine meaning and understanding in our practices to having it. This has been one of the trickiest problems in philosophy to date, but after Wittgenstein, philosophers have made some serious progress on the issue which is now converging with empirical science.

One of the top scientists working on the question, Michael Tomasello, who does a bunch of comparative psychology experiments with either apes or young children trying to make sense of intentionality and meaning. In his book Origins of Human Communication he draws heavily from 20th century philosophers such as Wittgenstein, H.P. Grice, and David Lewis. It is not simply that he says "Oh, I showed that these guys (who were just idly musing) turned out to be right. Yay Science!" Rather, he explicitly uses their work (mostly Grice) as models in his theorizing that helps make sense of his empirical data.

Philosophy has a history of doing things like this, charting the way for new fields of scientific study. There's also serious philosophical work to be done within existing scientific fields. Philosophy of biology and philosophy of physics are active fields, and usually the work in these fields focuses around trying to sort out difficult conceptual issues that arise in the empirical research. Typically the philosophers in these fields are experts in that scientific field, they know all of the relevant scientific literature, and often work in conjunction with scientists. It's certainly not just idle musing.

It's actually not the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that you're concerned about here. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is about linguistic relativity leading to conceptual, and thus experiential, relativity. You can reject this relativity and still hold that language is necessary for conscious experience in the full blown sense that humans have, but think (contra Sapir/Whorf) that language shares a basic enough generalized form to avoid complete conceptual relativity. This is in fact the position I hold. You might want to check out Sellars' [psychological nominalism] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_nominalism) with respect to this (although "consciousness" as it's currently formulated in the philosophical literature was not a very standard term at the time Sellars was writing and so he didn't speak to this problem directly).

As for your second question, if one takes anything from the work of the latter Wittgenstein, then no, since the sort of conceptual capacities necessary to invent a language, such as an understanding of the function of labeling can only make sense to one who has been inducted into a language. A good ontogentic story of human language which draws heavily from this Wittgensteinian point is given in Michael Tomasello's book The Origins of Human Communication reviewed here.

Also, there was a post on this a while ago that might be of interest.

First line of the book description:
> Blending the spirit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves with the science of The Language Instinct...

o_0 This does not make me want to read this book. OP be warned. Seems like there will be a lot of facepalming involved. I'll probably check this book out anyway (I love to facepalm), but I'd recommend something by Michael Tomasello instead, such as Origins of Human Communication or The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition.