How to Speak an Alien Language

Human languages are powerful representational tools, but can they represent every possible kind of entity? This seems unlikely. We can easily imagine languages - God's language, or that of advanced extraterrestrials - that represent features of reality that our actual languages fail to capture. Eklund (2024) calls these alien languages. Yet despite the intuitive pull of this picture, it is unclear what alien languages, so understood, would amount to. I argue that there are no alien languages in this sense; human languages can represent any entity that can be linguistically represented at all. Still, I propose an alternative sense in which a language can be alien. On my cognitive account of alien language, a language is alien when linguistic understanding of it requires cognitive resources not used in understanding human languages. This account better explains the sense in which we can and cannot speak an alien language. We can represent whatever alien languages represent, but understanding alien languages may require cognitive resources that we lack.

Duke Scholars

Author Kevin A Richardson Philosophy