Language As Interface: Underconstraint, Genealogy, and Moral Incommensurability

This paper examines a persistent assumption underlying much twentieth-century philosophy of language, moral theory, and institutional design: that linguistic clarification should, in principle, secure convergence in abstract domains of disagreement. When moral or political conflicts persist, they are typically diagnosed as failures of precision, definition, or communicative effort. The essay argues that this expectation is misplaced. Drawing on contemporary cognitive neuroscience, it introduces an empirical constraint on cognitively foundational views of language. Evidence of functional dissociation between language-selective neural systems and those responsible for domain-general reasoning, valuation, and decision-making undermines the assumption that language constitutes the medium of abstract thought. Language is better understood as a specialised system for communicative coordination operating atop largely non-linguistic evaluative processes. The paper situates this shift genealogically, tracing how earlier philosophical commitments hardened into orthodoxy under conditions of empirical underconstraint, introspective salience, computational metaphor, and institutional reinforcement. What emerged was a licensed expectation that linguistic refinement should resolve disagreement—a background norm that continues to structure moral, legal, and political discourse despite its repeated failure. The central explanatory claim is that persistent moral disagreement often reflects divergence in tacit, non-linguistic ontological commitments: operative models of agency, motivation, responsibility, and human nature that structure moral evaluation but are not encoded in language itself. In such cases, moral terms function as coordination labels over incompatible evaluative structures. Linguistic refinement sharpens disagreement rather than resolving it. The paper distinguishes this account from relativism, arguing that ontological plurality does not imply moral equivalence, while denying that language provides a neutral adjudicative standpoint for resolving deep evaluative conflict. It further explains how social coordination is nevertheless achieved through shared practices, institutional constraints, power relations, and affective attunement—mechanisms that operate independently of semantic convergence. The result is a reframing of the limits of language in abstract domains. Disagreement persists not because we have failed to clarify our words, but because we have misidentified the site of the conflict.