On the “Innateness” of Names

The article continues the discussion of the name as an “innate linguistic property” started by Alexei Koshelev in a previous issue of this journal, and it is of a polemical nature. Subscribing to most of Koshelev’s important observations and inferences regarding the dynamics of infants’ development, I question his main and, seemingly, paradoxical conclusion about the innate character of names as linguistic properties of objects and argue that such a conclusion is inevitable in the framework of the dualist Cartesian philosophy with its rationalist epistemology still dominant in academia. As an alternative way to avoid such paradoxes, I argue for a different kind of epistemology based on radical constructivist philosophy as its theoretical foundation, particularly Humberto Maturana’s biology of cognition and biology of language. A constructivist, systems approach to the issue of the relationship between cognition and language, or “objectivity with parentheses”, offers a new perspective on the nature of concepts and the role of language in their formation, leaving no room for the idea of presumed innateness of names.