Confronting Friends and Family

[Hovik]

I'll address this point first. If you didn't have humans at all as a species - but you had some other species as intelligent as we are with the same 5 senses we have, language would still develop in exactly the same way. Thus it's not truly "derived from humans", it can be created by any population which meets the correct criteria. And you would expect the same language itself to develop (not literally of course, but expressively).

It wouldn't be identifiable as language in the same way we think of language because our language is specific to our species. The language (if it can be called that) of another species wouldn't be in any way recognizable.

The very fact that we've successfully taught American Sign Language to gorillas pretty much proves the preceding point.

We have not taught ASL to gorillas. We have taught a different type of sign to orangutangs and gorillas that is much less complex grammatically and lexically than natural language. It definitely does not meet the criteria that formally define language; therefore, what they've learned is not language.

I apply the same question to other things in physics. Do the laws of chemistry depend on the laws of quantum mechanics (to assume QM is correct for the purpose of this argument); or could we still get the laws of chemistry from some other micro-structure of the universe?

Linguistics is not physics. I'm not sure what relevance your analogy has to language. Care to elaborate further?

Language is just a great example of something that shares pretty much nothing in common with the underlying DNA that makes us "human".

That's entirely wrong. First of all, language is dependent on genes. We know what gene is responsible for language. Secondly, the DNA that makes us human shapes our phenotypic characteristics upon which our psychology is contingent. Beyond that, language as we use it develops through cultural interaction, something that is unique to human experience.

I look at it as any other theory of physics. All I mean is that if we didn't know about pragmatics we would have no way to predict their existence, because no one has come up with a theory of physics that makes it implicit. Like the fact that before we knew what fractals were we were unable to have a theory that predicts them, even though we could see and appreciate them.

Again, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. Pragmatics is observable in looking at natural language in the context of usage. Pragmatic concepts are derived from empirical observation.