Jerry Fodor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Fodor

In 2007
Born	Jerry Alan Fodor April 22, 1935 New York City, US
Died	November 29, 2017 (aged 82) New York City, US
Awards	Jean Nicod Prize (1993)
Education
Alma mater	Columbia University Princeton University
Thesis	The Uses of "Use": A Study in the Philosophy of Language (1960)
Doctoral advisor	Hilary Putnam
Other advisors	Sidney Morgenbesser
Philosophical work
Era	20th-/21st-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic
Institutions	Rutgers University
Main interests	Philosophy of mind Philosophy of language Cognitive science Rationalism Cognitivism Functionalism
Notable ideas	Modularity of mind Language of thought

Jerry Alan Fodor (/ˈfoʊdər/ FOH-dər; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and the author of works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." At the time of his death in 2017, he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University, and had taught previously at the City University of New York Graduate Center and MIT.

Life and career

Jerry Fodor was born in New York City on April 22, 1935, and was of Jewish descent. He received his degree (summa cum laude) from Columbia University in 1956, where he wrote a senior thesis on Søren Kierkegaard and studied with Sidney Morgenbesser and Arthur Danto. He then earned a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, under the direction of Hilary Putnam.

From 1959 to 1986 Fodor was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1986 to 1988 he was a full professor at the City University of New York (CUNY). From 1988, until his retirement in 2016 as emeritus, he was State of New Jersey Professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers University.

Besides his interest in philosophy, Fodor followed opera and regularly wrote columns for the London Review of Books on that and other topics. Fodor's first marriage was to the applied psychologist Iris Goldstein, with whom he had one son. After their divorce, he married the linguist Janet Dean. Janet and he lived in Manhattan and had a daughter. He died at home on November 29, 2017.

Philosophical work

Fodor argued in his 1975 book The Language of Thought that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintained that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in the mind. Furthermore, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the brain and not just a useful explanatory tool. Fodor adhered to a species of functionalism, maintaining that thinking and other mental processes consist primarily of computations operating on the syntax of the representations that make up the language of thought.

For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and linguistic processes, are structured in terms of modules, or "organs", which he defines by their causal and functional roles. These modules are relatively independent of each other and of the "central processing" part of the mind, which has a more global and less "domain specific" character. Fodor suggests that the character of these modules permits the possibility of causal relations with external objects. This, in turn, makes it possible for mental states to have contents that are about things in the world. The central processing part, on the other hand, takes care of the logical relations between the various contents and inputs and outputs.

Although Fodor originally rejected the idea that mental states must have a causal, externally determined aspect, in his later years he devoted much of his writing and study to the philosophy of language because of this problem of the meaning and reference of mental contents. His contributions in this area include the so-called asymmetric causal theory of reference and his many arguments against semantic holism. Fodor strongly opposed reductive accounts of the mind. He argued that mental states are multiple realizable and that there is a hierarchy of explanatory levels in science such that the generalizations and laws of a higher-level theory of psychology or linguistics, for example, cannot be captured by the low-level explanations of the behavior of neurons and synapses. He also emerged as a prominent critic of what he characterized as the ill-grounded Darwinian theories of natural selection as an explanation of mind.

Fodor and the nature of mental states

The structure of a mental state, such as that an individual called Mary believes that a man has bitten a dog, as described by Rudolf Carnap, Gottlob Frege, and Fodor. Fodor's scheme says that a person's attitude to something makes use of a mental representation of that thing.

Despite the changes in many of his positions over the years, Fodor's idea that mental states embodying intentionality, propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires are relational never changed. He attempted to show how mental representations, specifically sentences in the language of thought, are necessary to explain this relational nature of mental states. Fodor considers two alternative hypotheses. The first denies the relational character of mental states, while the second considers mental states as two-place relations. The latter position can be further subdivided into the Carnapian view that such relations are between individuals and sentences of natural languages, and the Fregean view that they are between individuals and the propositions expressed by such sentences. Fodor's own position, instead, is that to properly account for the nature of intentional attitudes, it is necessary to employ a three-place relation between individuals, representations and propositional contents.

Considering mental states as three-place relations in this way, representative realism makes it possible to hold together all of the elements necessary to the solution of this problem. Further, mental representations are not only the objects of beliefs and desires, but are also the domain over which mental processes operate. They can be considered the ideal link between the syntactic notion of mental content and the computational notion of functional architecture. These notions are, according to Fodor, our best explanation of mental processes.

Functional architecture of the mind

Psychological nativism and modularity

The Müller-Lyer illusion, that two identical lines look to be of differing lengths, even if the subject knows they are the same length, persuaded Fodor that mental processes are grouped in discrete modules without access to each other.

Following in the path paved by linguist Noam Chomsky, Fodor developed a strong commitment to the idea of psychological nativism. Nativism postulates the innateness of many cognitive functions and concepts. For Fodor, this emerges naturally out of his criticism of behaviourism and associationism. These criticisms led him to formulate his hypothesis of the modularity of the mind.

Fodor noted the evidence from perceptual errors like the Müller-Lyer illusion that processes such as visually estimating the length of a line are not interfered with by the knowledge that the two lines are actually the same length. He took this to mean that the visual processes were in a separate module from knowledge.

The idea of modularity of mind was presaged by Franz Joseph Gall's 19th century phrenology movement.

The idea can be traced back to the 19th century phrenology movement. Its founder Franz Joseph Gall claimed that mental faculties were associated with specific regions of the brain. Hence, someone's level of intelligence, for example, could be "read off" from the size of a particular bump on his posterior parietal lobe. This simplistic view of modularity has been disproven in the 20th century.

Fodor revived the idea of modularity, without the notion of precise physical localizability, in the 1980s, and became a vocal proponent of it with the 1983 publication of his monograph The Modularity of Mind, where he points to Gall through Bernard Hollander's In search of the soul. Two properties of modularity, informational encapsulation and domain specificity, make it possible to relate functional architecture to mental content. A person's ability to elaborate information independently from their background beliefs allows Fodor to give an atomistic and causal account of mental content. The main idea is that the properties of the contents of mental states can depend, not just on the internal relations of the system of which they are a part, but also on their causal relations with the external world.

Adoption by cognitive and evolutionary psychologists

Fodor's notions of mental modularity, informational encapsulation and domain specificity were taken up and expanded, much to Fodor's chagrin, by cognitive scientists such as Zenon Pylyshyn and evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Henry Plotkin. Fodor complained that Pinker, Plotkin and other members of what he sarcastically called "the New Synthesis" had taken modularity and similar ideas way too far. He insisted that the mind is not "massively modular" and that, contrary to these researchers, the mind was a long way from having been explained by the computational, or any other, model. The main reason for this is that most cognition is abductive and global, hence sensitive to all possibly relevant background beliefs to (dis)confirm a belief. This creates the frame problem for the computational theory, because the relevance of a belief is not one of its local, syntactic properties but context-dependent.

Intentional realism

In A Theory of Content and Other Essays (1990), Fodor takes up another of his central notions: the question of the reality of mental representations. He sought to justify representational realism, so as to justify the idea that the contents of mental states are expressed in symbolic structures such as those of the LOT.

Fodor's criticism of Dennett

Fodor starts with some criticisms of so-called standard realism. This view is characterized, according to Fodor, by two distinct assertions. One of these regards the internal structure of mental states and asserts that such states are non-relational. The other concerns the semantic theory of mental content and asserts that there is an isomorphism between the causal roles of such contents and the inferential web of beliefs. Among modern philosophers of mind, the majority view seems to be that the first of these two assertions is false, but that the second is true. Fodor departs from this view in accepting the truth of the first thesis but rejecting strongly the truth of the second.

In particular, Fodor criticizes the instrumentalism of Daniel Dennett. Dennett maintains that it is possible to be realist with regard to intentional states without having to commit oneself to the reality of mental representations. Now, according to Fodor, if one remains at this level of analysis, then there is no possibility of explaining why the intentional strategy works:

There is ... a standard objection to instrumentalism ...: it is difficult to explain why the psychology of beliefs/desires works so well, if the psychology of beliefs/desires is, in fact, false.... As Putnam, Boyd and others have emphasized, from the predictive successes of a theory to the truth of that theory there is surely a presumed inference; and this is even more likely when ... we are dealing with the only theory in play which is predictively crowned with success. It is not obvious ... why such a presumption should not militate in favour of a realist conception ... of the interpretations of beliefs/desires.

Productivity, systematicity and thought

Building on Chomsky

Fodor also has positive arguments in favour of the reality of mental representations in terms of the LOT. He maintains that if language is the expression of thoughts and language is systematic, then thoughts must also be systematic. Fodor draws on the work of Noam Chomsky to both model his theory of the mind and to refute alternative architectures such as connectionism. Systematicity in natural languages was explained by Chomsky in terms of two more basic concepts: productivity and compositionality.

Productivity is a representational system's unbounded ability to generate new representations from a given set of symbols, using its cognitive architecture. "John", "loves", and "Mary" allow for the construction of the sentences "John loves Mary" and "Mary loves John". Fodor's language of thought theorizes that representations are decomposable into constituent parts, and these decomposed representations are built into new strings.

More important than productivity is systematicity since it does not rely on questionable idealizations about human cognition. The argument states that a cognizer is able to understand some sentence in virtue of understanding another. For example, no one who understands "John loves Mary" is unable to understand "Mary loves John", and no one who understands "P and Q" is unable to understand "P". Systematicity itself is rarely challenged as a property of natural languages and logics, but some challenge that thought is systematic in the same way languages are. Still others from the connectionist tradition have tried to build non-classical networks that can account for the apparent systematicity of language.

The fact that systematicity and productivity depend on the compositional structure of language means that language has a combinatorial semantics. If thought also has such a combinatorial semantics, then, Fodor stated, there must be a language of thought.

Formalizing thought processes

The second argument that Fodor provides in favour of representational realism involves the processes of thought. This argument touches on the relation between the representational theory of mind and models of its architecture. If the sentences of Mentalese require unique processes of elaboration then they require a computational mechanism of a certain type. The syntactic notion of mental representations goes hand in hand with the idea that mental processes are calculations which act only on the form of the symbols which they elaborate. And this is the computational theory of the mind. Consequently, the defence of a model of architecture based on classic artificial intelligence passes inevitably through a defence of the reality of mental representations.

For Fodor, this formal notion of thought processes also has the advantage of highlighting the parallels between the causal role of symbols and the contents which they express. In his view, syntax plays the role of mediation between the causal role of the symbols and their contents. The semantic relations between symbols can be "imitated" by their syntactic relations. The inferential relations which connect the contents of two symbols can be imitated by the formal syntax rules which regulate the derivation of one symbol from another.

The nature of content

From the beginning of the 1980s, Fodor adhered to a causal notion of mental content and of meaning. This idea of content contrasts sharply with the inferential role semantics to which he subscribed earlier in his career. Fodor went on to criticize inferential role semantics (IRS) because its commitment to an extreme form of holism excludes the possibility of a true naturalization of the mental. But naturalization must include an explanation of content in atomistic and causal terms.

Anti-holism

Fodor, while following W.V.O. Quine's confirmation holism, criticised semantic holism, the idea that every connection of a concept is part of its meaning. The identity of the content of a mental state, under semantic holism, can only be determined by the totality of its epistemic bonds. Fodor argued that this makes the realism of mental states an impossibility:

If people differ in an absolutely general way in their estimations of epistemic relevance, and if we follow the holism of meaning and individuate intentional states by way of the totality of their epistemic bonds, the consequence will be that two people (or, for that matter, two temporal sections of the same person) will never be in the same intentional state. Therefore, two people can never be subsumed under the same intentional generalizations. And, therefore, intentional generalization can never be successful. And, therefore again, there is no hope for an intentional psychology.

The asymmetric causal theory

Having criticized the idea that semantic evaluation concerns only the internal relations between the units of a symbolic system, Fodor can adopt an externalist position with respect to mental content and meaning. For Fodor, later in his life, the problem of naturalization of the mental is tied to the possibility of giving "the sufficient conditions for which a piece of the world is relative to (expresses, represents, is true of) another piece" in non-intentional and non-semantic terms. If this goal is to be achieved within a representational theory of the mind, then the challenge is to devise a causal theory which can establish the interpretation of the primitive non-logical symbols of the LOT. Fodor's initial proposal is that what determines that the symbol for "water" in Mentalese expresses the property H₂O is that the occurrences of that symbol are in certain causal relations with water. The intuitive version of this causal theory is what Fodor calls the "Crude Causal Theory". According to this theory, the occurrences of symbols express the properties which are the causes of their occurrence. The term "horse", for example, says of a horse that it is a horse. In order to do this, it is necessary and sufficient that certain properties of an occurrence of the symbol "horse" be in a law-like relation with certain properties which determine that something is an occurrence of horse.

The main problem with this theory is that of erroneous representations. There are two unavoidable problems with the idea that "a symbol expresses a property if it is ... necessary that all and only the presences of such a property cause the occurrences". The first is that not all horses cause occurrences of horse. The second is that not only horses cause occurrences of horse. Sometimes the A(horses) are caused by A (horses), but at other times—when, for example, because of the distance or conditions of low visibility, one has confused a cow for a horse—the A (horses) are caused by B (cows). In this case the symbol A doesn't express just the property A, but the disjunction of properties A or B. The crude causal theory is therefore incapable of distinguishing the case in which the content of a symbol is disjunctive from the case in which it isn't. This gives rise to what Fodor calls the "problem of disjunction".

Fodor responds to this problem with what he defines as "a slightly less crude causal theory". According to this approach, it is necessary to break the symmetry at the base of the crude causal theory. Fodor must find some criterion for distinguishing the occurrences of A caused by As (true) from those caused by Bs (false). The point of departure, according to Fodor, is that while the false cases are ontologically dependent on the true cases, the reverse is not true. There is an asymmetry of dependence, in other words, between the true contents (A= A) and the false ones (A=A or B). The first can subsist independently of the second, but the second can occur only because of the existence of the first:

From the point of view of semantics, errors must be accidents: if in the extension of "horse" there are no cows, then it cannot be required for the meaning of "horse" that cows be called horses. On the other hand, if "horse" did not mean that which it means, and if it were an error for horses, it would never be possible for a cow to be called "horse". Putting the two things together, it can be seen that the possibility of falsely saying "this is a horse" presupposes the existence of a semantic basis for saying it truly, but not vice versa. If we put this in terms of the crude causal theory, the fact that cows cause one to say "horse" depends on the fact that horses cause one to say "horse"; but the fact that horses cause one to say "horse" does not depend on the fact that cows cause one to say "horse"...

Functionalism

During the 1960s, philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, and Fodor tried to resolve the puzzle of developing a way to preserve the explanatory efficacy of mental causation and folk psychology while adhering to a materialist vision of the world which did not violate the "generality of physics". Their proposal was, first of all, to reject the then-dominant theories in philosophy of mind: behaviorism and the type identity theory. The problem with logical behaviorism was that it failed to account for causation between mental states and such causation seems to be essential to psychological explanation, especially if one considers that behavior is not an effect of a single mental event/cause but is rather the effect of a chain of mental events/causes. The type-identity theory, on the other hand, failed to explain the fact that radically different physical systems can find themselves in the identical mental state. Besides being deeply anthropocentric (why should humans be the only thinking organisms in the universe?), the identity-type theory also failed to deal with accumulating evidence in the neurosciences that every single human brain is different from all the others. Hence, the impossibility of referring to common mental states in different physical systems manifests itself not only between different species but also between organisms of the same species.

An illustration of multiple realizability. M stands for mental and P stand for physical. The diagram shows that more than one P can instantiate one M, but not vice versa. Causal relations between states are represented by the arrows (M1 goes to M2, etc.).

One can solve these problems, according to Fodor, with functionalism, a hypothesis which was designed to overcome the failings of both dualism and reductionism. What is important is the function of a mental state regardless of the physical substrate which implements it. The foundation for this view lies in the principle of the multiple realizability of the mental. Under this view, for example, I and a computer can both instantiate ("realize") the same functional state though we are made of completely different material stuff (see graphic at right). On this basis functionalism can be classified as a form of token materialism.

Evolution

Fodor and the biolinguist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini co-authored the book What Darwin Got Wrong (2010). In the same, the authors argue that much neo-Darwinian literature is "distressingly uncritical" and that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution "overestimates the contribution the environment makes in shaping the phenotype of a species and correspondingly underestimates the effects of endogenous variables". Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne describes this book as "a profoundly misguided critique of natural selection" and "as biologically uninformed as it is strident". Moral philosopher and anti-scientism author Mary Midgley praises What Darwin Got Wrong as "an overdue and valuable onslaught on neo-Darwinist simplicities".

Awards and honors

Fodor was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received numerous awards and honors: New York State Regent's Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (Princeton University), Chancellor Greene Fellow (Princeton University), Fulbright Fellowship (University of Oxford), Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He won the first Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind and cognitive philosophy in 1993. His lecture series for the Prize was published as The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics (1995). In 1996–1997, Fodor delivered the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, titled Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, which went on to become a 1998 book. He also delivered the Patrick Romanell Lecture on Philosophical Naturalism (2004) and the Royce Lecture on Philosophy of Mind (2002) to the American Philosophical Association, of whose Eastern Division he served as President (2005–2006). In 2005, he won the Mind & Brain Prize.

Criticism

Philosophers of diverse orientations have challenged many of Fodor's ideas.

Simon Blackburn

Simon Blackburn in Spreading the Word (1984) has accused the language of thought hypothesis of falling prey to an infinite regress. If a person understands a word like "dog" through a mental representation which indicates that the word denotes dogs, then a regress takes place. Fodor replies that the language of thought does not involve denoting things. On this view, the process of reasoning works directly to give a result but does not allow the person to examine how it works.

Daniel Dennett

In 1981, Daniel Dennett formulated another argument against the LOT. Dennett suggested that it would seem, on the basis of the evidence of our behavior toward computers but also with regard to some of our own unconscious behavior, that explicit representation is not necessary for the explanation of propositional attitudes. During a game of chess with a computer program, we often attribute such attitudes to the computer, saying such things as "It thinks that the queen should be moved to the left." We attribute propositional attitudes to the computer and this helps us to explain and predict its behavior in various contexts. Yet no one would suggest that the computer is actually thinking or believing somewhere inside its circuits the equivalent of the propositional attitude "I believe I can kick this guy's butt" in Mentalese. The same is obviously true, suggests Dennett, of many of our everyday automatic behaviors such as "desiring to breathe clear air" in a stuffy environment.

Kent Bach

Linguists and philosophers of language such as Kent Bach have criticized Fodor's self-proclaimed "extreme" concept nativism. Bach takes Fodor to task for his criticisms of lexical semantics and polysemy. Fodor claims that there is no lexical structure to such verbs as "keep", "get", "make" and "put". He suggests that, alternatively, "keep" simply expresses the concept KEEP (Fodor capitalizes concepts to distinguish them from properties, names or other such entities). If there is a straightforward one-to-one mapping between individual words and concepts, "keep your clothes on", "keep your receipt" and "keep washing your hands" will all share the same concept of KEEP under Fodor's theory. This concept presumably locks on to the unique external property of keeping. But, if this is true, then RETAIN must pick out a different property in RETAIN YOUR RECEIPT, since one can't retain one's clothes on or retain washing one's hands. Fodor's theory also has a problem explaining how the concept FAST contributes, differently, to the contents of FAST CAR, FAST DRIVER, FAST TRACK, and FAST TIME. Whether or not the differing interpretations of "fast" in these sentences are specified in the semantics of English, or are the result of pragmatic inference, is a matter of debate. Fodor's own response to this kind of criticism is expressed bluntly in Concepts: "People sometimes used to say that exist must be ambiguous because look at the difference between 'chairs exist' and 'numbers exist'. A familiar reply goes: the difference between the existence of chairs and the existence of numbers seems, on reflection, strikingly like the difference between numbers and chairs. Since you have the latter to explain the former, you don't also need 'exist' to be polysemic."

Some critics find it difficult to accept Fodor's insistence that a large, perhaps implausible, number of concepts are primitive and undefinable. For example, Fodor considers such concepts as EFFECT, ISLAND, TRAPEZOID, and WEEK to be all primitive, innate and unanalyzable because they all fall into the category of what he calls "lexical concepts" (those for which our language has a single word). Against this view, Bach argues that the concept VIXEN is almost certainly composed out of the concepts FEMALE and FOX, BACHELOR out of SINGLE and MALE, and so on.

Fiona Cowie

In her 1999 book What's Within, Fiona Cowie argued against Fodor's innatist view, preferring a John Locke-style empiricism. Fodor replied at length in a 1999 article titled "Doing Without What's Within; Fiona Cowie's Critique of Nativism", stating that he was aiming at a position halfway between nativism and empiricism.

Sociolinguistics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language varies between distinct social groups and under the influence of assorted cultural norms, expectations, and contexts, including how that variation plays a role in language change. Sociolinguistics combines the older field of dialectology with the social sciences in order to identify regional dialects, sociolects, ethnolects, and other sub-varieties and styles within a language.

A major branch of linguistics since the second half of the 20th century, sociolinguistics is closely related to and can partly overlap with pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and sociology of language, the latter focusing on the effect of language back on society. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.) or geographical barriers (a mountain range, a desert, a river, etc.). Such studies also examine how such differences in usage and in beliefs about usage produce and reflect social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and some sociolinguists study these sociolects.

Studies in the field of sociolinguistics use a variety of research methods including ethnography and participant observation, analysis of audio or video recordings of real life encounters or interviews with members of a population of interest. Some sociolinguists assess the realization of social and linguistic variables in the resulting speech corpus. Other research methods in sociolinguistics include matched-guise tests (in which listeners share their evaluations of linguistic features they hear), dialect surveys, and analysis of preexisting corpora.

Sociolinguistics in history

Beginnings

The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by forerunners in Denmark and Switzerland around the turn of the 20th century, but none received much attention in the West until much later. The study of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of his 1939 article "Sociolinguistics in India" published in Man in India.

Dialectology is an old field, and in the early 20th century, dialectologists such as Hans Kurath and Raven I. McDavid Jr. initiated large scale surveys of dialect regions in the U.S.

Western contributions

The study of sociolinguistics in the West was pioneered by linguists such as Charles A. Ferguson or William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK. In the 1960s, William Stewart and Heinz Kloss introduced the basic concepts for the sociolinguistic theory of pluricentric languages, which describes how standard language varieties differ between nations, e.g. regional varieties of English versus pluricentric "English"; regional standards of German versus pluricentric "German"; Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian versus pluricentric "Serbo-Croatian". Dell Hymes, one of the founders of linguistic anthropology, is credited with developing an ethnography-based sociolinguistics and is the founder of the journal Language in Society. His focus on ethnography and communicative competence contributed to his development of the SPEAKING method: an acronym for setting, participants, ends, act sequence, keys, instrumentalities, norms, and genres that is widely recognized as a tool to analyze speech events in their cultural context.

Applications

Sociolinguistics can be divided into subfields, which make use of different research methods, and have different goals. Dialectologists survey people through interviews, and compile maps. Ethnographers such as Dell Hymes and his students often live amongst the people they are studying. Conversation analysts such as Harvey Sacks and interactional sociolinguists such as John J. Gumperz record audio or video of natural encounters, and then analyze the tapes in detail. Sociolinguists tend to be aware of how the act of interviewing might affect the answers given.

Some sociolinguists study language on a national level among large populations to find out how language is used as a social institution. William Labov, a Harvard and Columbia University graduate, is often regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics which focuses on the quantitative analysis of variation and change within languages, making sociolinguistics a scientific discipline.

For example, a sociolinguistics-based translation framework states that a linguistically appropriate translation cannot be wholly sufficient to achieve the communicative effect of the source language; the translation must also incorporate the social practices and cultural norms of the target language. To reveal social practices and cultural norms beyond lexical and syntactic levels, the framework includes empirical testing of the translation using methods such as cognitive interviewing with a sample population.

A commonly studied source of variation is regional dialects. Dialectology studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Sociolinguists concerned with grammatical and phonological features that correspond to regional areas are often called dialectologists.

Sociolinguistic interview

The sociolinguistic interview is the foundational method of collecting data for sociolinguistic studies, allowing the researcher to collect large amounts of speech from speakers of the language or dialect being studied. The interview takes the form of a long, loosely structured conversation between the researcher and the interview subject; the researcher's primary goal is to elicit the vernacular style of speech: the register associated with everyday casual conversation. This goal is complicated by the observer's paradox: the researcher is trying to elicit the style of speech that would be used if the interviewer were not present.

To that end, a variety of techniques may be used to reduce the subject's attention to the formality and artificiality of the interview setting. For example, the researcher may attempt to elicit narratives of memorable events from the subject's life, such as fights or near-death experiences; the subject's emotional involvement in telling the story is thought to distract their attention from the formality of the context. Some researchers interview multiple subjects together to allow them to converse more casually with one other than they would with the interviewer alone. The researcher may then study the effects of style-shifting on language by comparing a subject's speech style in more vernacular contexts, such as narratives of personal experience or conversation between subjects, with the more careful style produced when the subject is more attentive to the formal interview setting. The correlations of demographic features such as age, gender, and ethnicity with speech behavior may be studied by comparing the speech of different interview subjects.

Fundamental concepts

While the study of sociolinguistics is very broad, there are a few fundamental concepts on which many sociolinguistic inquiries depend.

Speech community

Main article: Speech community

Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a distinct group of people who use language in a unique and mutually accepted way among themselves. This is sometimes referred to as a Sprechbund.

To be considered part of a speech community, one must have a communicative competence. That is, the speaker has the ability to use language in a way that is appropriate in the given situation. It is possible for a speaker to be communicatively competent in more than one language.

Demographic characteristics such as areas or locations have helped to create speech community boundaries in speech community concept. Those characteristics can assist exact descriptions of specific groups' communication patterns.

Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct social groups like high school students or hip hop fans, or even tight-knit groups like families and friends. Members of speech communities will often develop slang or specialized jargon to serve the group's special purposes and priorities. This is evident in the use of lingo within sports teams.

Community of Practice allows for sociolinguistics to examine the relationship between socialization, competence, and identity. Since identity is a very complex structure, studying language socialization is a means to examine the micro-interactional level of practical activity (everyday activities). The learning of a language is greatly influenced by family, but it is supported by the larger local surroundings, such as school, sports teams, or religion. Speech communities may exist within a larger community of practice.

High-prestige and low-prestige varieties

Main article: Prestige (sociolinguistics)

Crucial to sociolinguistic analysis is the concept of prestige; certain speech habits are assigned a positive or a negative value, which is then applied to the speaker. This can operate on many levels. It can be realized on the level of the individual sound/phoneme, as Labov discovered in investigating pronunciation of the post-vocalic /r/ in the Northeastern United States, or on the macro scale of language choice, as is realized in the various diglossia that exist throughout the world, with the one between Swiss German and High German being perhaps most well known. An important implication of the sociolinguistic theory is that speakers 'choose' a variety when making a speech act, whether consciously or subconsciously.

The terms acrolectal (high) and basilectal (low) are also used to distinguish between a more standard dialect and a dialect of less prestige.

It is generally assumed that non-standard language is low-prestige language. However, in certain groups, such as traditional working-class neighborhoods, standard language may be considered undesirable in many contexts because the working-class dialect is generally considered a powerful in-group marker. Historically, humans tend to favor those who look and sound like them, and the use of nonstandard varieties (even exaggeratedly so) expresses neighborhood pride and group and class solidarity. The desirable social value associated with the use of non-standard language is known as covert prestige. There will thus be a considerable difference in use of non-standard varieties when going to the pub or having a neighborhood barbecue compared to going to the bank. One is a relaxed setting, likely with familiar people, and the other has a business aspect to it in which one feels the need to be more professional.

Social network

Understanding language in society means that one also has to understand the social networks in which language is embedded. A social network is another way of describing a particular speech community in terms of relations between individual members in a community. A network could be loose or tight depending on how members interact with each other. For instance, an office or factory may be considered a tight community because all members interact with each other. A large course with 100+ students would be a looser community because students may only interact with the instructor and maybe 1–2 other students. A multiplex community is one in which members have multiple relationships with each other. For instance, in some neighborhoods, members may live on the same street, work for the same employer and even intermarry.

The looseness or tightness of a social network may affect speech patterns adopted by a speaker. For instance, Sylvie Dubois and Barbara Horvath found that speakers in one Cajun Louisiana community were more likely to pronounce English "th" [θ] as [t] (or [ð] as [d]) if they participated in a relatively dense social network (i.e. had strong local ties and interacted with many other speakers in the community), and less likely if their networks were looser (i.e. fewer local ties).

A social network may apply to the macro level of a country or a city, but also to the interpersonal level of neighborhoods or a single family. Recently, social networks have been formed by the Internet through online chat rooms, Facebook groups, organizations, and online dating services.

Differences according to class

Further information: Linguistic insecurity

Sociolinguistics as a field distinct from dialectology was pioneered through the study of language variation in urban areas. Whereas dialectology studies the geographic distribution of language variation, sociolinguistics focuses on other sources of variation, among them class. Class and occupation are among the most important linguistic markers found in society. One of the fundamental findings of sociolinguistics, which has been hard to disprove, is that class and language variety are related. Members of the working class tend to speak less of what is deemed standard language, while the lower, middle, and upper middle class will, in turn, speak closer to the standard. However, the upper class, even members of the upper middle class, may often speak 'less' standard than the middle class. This is because not only class but class aspirations, are important. One may speak differently or cover up an undesirable accent to appear to have a different social status and fit in better with either those around them, or how they wish to be perceived.

Class aspiration

Studies, such as those by William Labov in the 1960s, have shown that social aspirations influence speech patterns. This is also true of class aspirations. In the process of wishing to be associated with a certain class (usually the upper class and upper middle class) people who are moving in that direction socio-economically may adjust their speech patterns to sound like them. However, not being native upper-class speakers, they often hypercorrect, which involves overcorrecting their speech to the point of introducing new errors. The same is true for individuals moving down in socio-economic status.

In any contact situation, there is a power dynamic, be it a teacher-student or employee-customer situation. This power dynamic results in a hierarchical differentiation between languages.

Non-standard dialect (associated with lower classes)	Standard dialect (associated with higher classes)
It looks like it ain't gonna rain today.	It looks as if it isn't going to rain today.
You give it to me yesterday.	You gave it to me yesterday.
Y'gotta do it the right way.	You have to do it the right way.

Social language codes

Basil Bernstein, a well-known British sociolinguist, devised in his book, Elaborated and restricted codes: their social origins and some consequences, a method for categorizing language codes according to variable emphases on verbal and extraverbal communication. He claimed that factors like family orientation, social control, verbal feedback, and possibly social class contributed to the development of the two codes: elaborated and restricted.

Restricted code

According to Basil Bernstein, the restricted code exemplified the predominance of extraverbal communication, with an emphasis on interpersonal connection over individual expression. His theory places the code within environments that operate according to established social structures that predetermine the roles of their members in which the commonality of interests and intents from a shared local identity creates a predictability of discrete intent and therefore a simplification of verbal utterances. Such environments may include military, religious, and legal atmospheres; criminal and prison subcultures; long-term married relationships; and friendships between children.

The strong bonds between speakers often renders explicit verbal communication unnecessary and individual expression irrelevant. However, simplification is not a sign of a lack of intelligence or complexity within the code; rather, communication is performed more through extraverbal means (facial expression, touch, etc.) in order to affirm the speakers' bond. Bernstein notes the example of a young man asking a stranger to dance since there is an established manner of asking, yet communication is performed through physical graces and the exchange of glances.

As such, implied meaning plays a greater role in this code than in the elaborated code. Restricted code also operates to unify speakers and foster solidarity.

Elaborated code

Basil Bernstein defined 'elaborated code' according to its emphasis on verbal communication over extraverbal. This code is typical in environments where a variety of social roles are available to the individual, to be chosen based upon disposition and temperament. Most of the time, speakers of elaborated code use a broader lexicon and demonstrate less syntactic predictability than speakers of restricted code. The lack of predetermined structure and solidarity requires explicit verbal communication of discrete intent by the individual to achieve educational and career success.

Bernstein notes with caution the association of the code with upper classes (while restricted code is associated with lower classes) since the abundance of available resources allows persons to choose their social roles. He warns, however, that studies associating the codes with separate social classes used small samples and were subject to significant variation.

He also asserts that elaborated code originates from differences in social context, rather than intellectual advantages. As such, elaborated code differs from restricted code according to the context-based emphasis on individual advancement over assertion of social/community ties.

The codes and child development

Bernstein explains language development according to the two codes in light of their fundamentally different values. For instance, a child exposed solely to restricted code learns extraverbal communication over verbal, and therefore may have a less extensive vocabulary than a child raised with exposure to both codes. While there is no inherent lack of value to restricted code, a child without exposure to elaborated code may encounter difficulties upon entering formal education, in which standard, clear verbal communication and comprehension is necessary for learning and effective interaction both with instructors and other students from differing backgrounds. As such, it may be beneficial for children who have been exposed solely to restricted code to enter pre-school training in elaborated code in order to acquire a manner of speaking that is considered appropriate and widely comprehensible within the education environment.

Additionally, Bernstein notes several studies in language development according to social class. In 1963, the Committee for Higher Education conducted a study on verbal IQ that showed a deterioration in individuals from lower working classes ages 8–11 and 11–15 years in comparison to those from middle classes (having been exposed to both restricted and elaborated codes). Additionally, studies by Bernstein, Venables, and Ravenette, as well as a 1958 Education Council report, show a relative lack of success on verbal tasks in comparison to extraverbal in children from lower working classes (having been exposed solely to restricted code).

Contradictions

The idea of these social language codes from Bernstein contrast with famous linguist Noam Chomsky's ideas. Chomsky, deemed the "father of modern linguistics", argues that there is a universal grammar, meaning that humans are born with an innate capacity for linguistic skills like sentence-building. This theory has been criticized by several scholars of linguistic backgrounds because of the lack of proven evolutionary feasibility and the fact that different languages do not have universal characteristics.

Sociolinguistic variation

Main articles: Variation (linguistics), Dialectology, and Language and gender

The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its contextual environment. The variations will determine some of the aspects of language like the sound, grammar, and tone in which people speak, and even non-verbal cues. Code-switching is the term given to the use of different varieties of language depending on the social situation. This is commonly used among the African-American population in the United States. There are several different types of age-based variation one may see within a population as well such as age range, age-graded variation, and indications of linguistic change in progress. The use of slang can be a variation based on age. Younger people are more likely to recognize and use today's slang while older generations may not recognize new slang, but might use slang from when they were younger.

Variation may also be associated with gender, as men and women, on average, tend to use slightly different language styles. These differences are typically quantitative rather than qualitative. In other words, while women may use certain speaking styles more frequently than men, the distinction is comparable to height differences between the sexes—on average, men are taller than women, yet some women are taller than some men. Similar variations in speech patterns include differences in pitch, tone, speech fillers, interruptions, and the use of euphemisms, etc.

These gender-based differences in communication extend beyond face-to-face interactions and are also evident in digital spaces. Despite the continuous evolution of social media platforms, cultural and societal norms continue to shape online interactions. For instance, men and women often adopt different non-verbal cues and roles in virtual conversations. However, when it comes to fundamental aspects of communication—such as spoken language, active listening, providing feedback, understanding context, selecting communication methods, and managing conflicts—their approaches tend to be more similar than different.

Beyond these stylistic differences, research suggests that gendered language patterns are also influenced by social expectations and power dynamics. Women, for instance, are more likely to use hedging expressions (e.g., "I think" or "perhaps") and tag questions ("isn't it?") to soften their statements and promote conversational cooperation. Meanwhile, men tend to adopt more assertive and direct speech patterns, reflecting broader societal norms that associate masculinity with dominance and authority.

Variation in language can also come from ethnicity, economic status, level of education, etc.