Examples include Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Winfrid Sellars, Hilary Putnam, and John Searle.
During the 19th century, when sociological questions remained under psychology,[17] languages and language change were thought of as arising from human psychology and the collective unconscious mind of the community, shaped by its history, as argued by Moritz Lazarus, Heymann Steinthal and Wilhelm Wundt.
[18] Advocates of Völkerpsychologie ('folk psychology') regarded language as Volksgeist; a social phenomenon conceived as the 'spirit of the nation'.
Wundt claimed that the human mind becomes organised according to the principles of syllogistic reasoning with social progress and education.
[19] Folk psychology was imported to North American linguistics by Franz Boas[20] and Leonard Bloomfield who were the founders of a school of thought which was later nicknamed 'American structuralism'.
[27] The study of culture and language developed in a different direction in Europe where Émile Durkheim successfully separated sociology from psychology, thus establishing it as an autonomous science.
These notions translated into an increase of interest in pragmatics, with a discourse perspective (the analysis of full texts) added to the multilayered interactive model of structural linguistics.
This movement was interested in the Durkheimian concept of language as a social fact or a rule-based code of conduct; but eventually rejected the structuralist idea that the individual cannot change the norm.
Post-structuralists study how language affects our understanding of reality thus serving as a tool of shaping society.
At this end of the spectrum, structural linguist Eugenio Coșeriu laid emphasis on the intentional construction of language.
[18] Daniel Everett has likewise approached the question of language construction from the point of intentionality and free will.
Approaches to language as part of cultural evolution can be roughly divided into two main groups: genetic determinism which argues that languages stem from the human genome; and social Darwinism, as envisioned by August Schleicher and Max Müller, which applies principles and methods of evolutionary biology to linguistics.
[42] Also known as biolinguistics, the study of linguistic structures is parallelised with that of natural formations such as ferromagnetic droplets and botanic forms.
[43] This approach became highly controversial at the end of the 20th century due to a lack of empirical support for genetics as an explanation of linguistic structures.
Behavioural ecology and dual inheritance theory, the study of gene–culture co-evolution, emphasise the role of culture as a human invention in shaping the genes, rather than vice versa.
Instead of arguing for a specific innate structure, it is suggested that human physiology and neurological organisation may give rise to linguistic phenomena in a more abstract way.
[42] Based on a comparison of structures from multiple languages, John A. Hawkins suggests that the brain, as a syntactic parser, may find it easier to process some word orders than others, thus explaining their prevalence.
The idea of languages and cultures as fighting for living space became highly controversial as it was accused of being a pseudoscience that caused two world wars, and social Darwinism was banished from humanities by 1945.
Although meant as a softer alternative to genetic determinism, memetics has been widely discredited as pseudoscience,[39] and it has failed to establish itself as a recognised field of scientific research.
As Jamin Pelkey explains,Theorists who explore such analogies usually feel obliged to pin language to some specific sub-domain of biotic growth.