Lenguaje y Ciencia Psicológica

Abstract

In this article it is argued that the description and the explanation of language is made through different scientific disciplines, depending on the goal and its formal object. Linguistics, Psychology and Sociology are the basic disciplines involved in these general scientific goals. In regard to the psychological level, the relevance of the "speech" concept is emphasized as a synonym of ontogenetic adjustment behaviour to the linguistic conventions of a culture or group. But the main idea developed is that, from a psychological point of view, it is necessary to go beyond the contextualist concept of meaning as the use that an individual makes of a word, in order to fulfill this concept behaviorally and avoid, at the same time, strange explanations of psychological events related to language. The concepts of Understanding and Interpretation are proposed in order to do this, starting from the reading of Turbayne's work on metaphor and the use of the metaphor of language for a theory of perception (Turbayne, 1970). In this sense, a suggestion of a functional equivalence between perceiving and speaking is made.