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A Difference of Some Consequence Between Conventions and Rules

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Abstract

Lewis’s view of the way conventions are passed on may have some especially interesting consequences for the study of language. I’ll start by briefly discussing agreements and disagreements that I have with Lewis’s general views on conventions and then turn to how linguistic conventions spread. I’ll compare views of main stream generative linguistics, in particular, Chomsky’s views on how syntactic forms are passed on, with the sort of view of language acquisition and language change advocated by usage-based or construction grammars, which seem to fit better with Lewis’s ideas. Then I will illustrate the interest of Lewis’s perspective on the dissemination of conventions with a variety of linguistic examples.

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Notes

  1. This essay was written from the perspective of the American northeast where only the tradition of generative grammar is clearly visible. I am grateful to William Croft, one of the referees, for pointing me to a number of references from outside that contain data and arguments supporting various of my points. I have now cited several of the most pertinent readings that Croft suggested, but I have retained my primary emphasis on very recent writings by Jackendoff, Culicover and Pinker as major spokesmen for a departure from the central generative tradition. It should be evident that these people, at least, could not possibly have simply failed to understand the force of the generative tradition. My bibliography contains a number of references supplied by Croft that I do not cite but that may be of use to others who would like to explore the territory into which I am venturing here.

  2. I will not be trying to prove, of course, that various phenomena I describe cannot possibly be accounted for within a generative grammar perspective. My purpose is only to illustrate the interest of Lewis's idea that conventions are essentially subject to indeterminacy in interpretation.

  3. Including, for example, Searle 1969; Schiffer 1972; Bach and Harnish 1979; Gilbert 1983, 1989/1992; Recanati 1987.

  4. Clark (1996), Croft (2000).

  5. Millikan (1984, Chap. 3, 2004 chaps. 9–12, 2005, Chaps. 8–10).

  6. This is the major premise of those who advocate “usage-based” grammars, for example, Tomasello (2003), Croft and Cruse (2004).

  7. For example, Fillmore (1988), Heine et al. (1991), Fillmore and Kay (1993), Zwicky (1994), Goldberg (1995), Dubrowska (1997), Hopper and Traugott (2003), Tomasello (2003), Croft and Cruze (2004), Culicover and Jackendoff (2003).

  8. These examples are adapted from Jackendoff (2002, Chap. 6).

  9. Compare Croft (2000, p. 26).

  10. From a public lecture Hoffstader gave at Stanford University in 1991.

  11. See, for example, Morgan (1978).

  12. From Snyder (2000), Hiramatsu (2000). See also Debrowska (1997).

  13. For more discussion here, see Millikan (1984, Chap. 4).

  14. “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”’ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

  15. As for what the person calling me “Hillary Clinton” means (rather than says), that is indeterminate too; having crossed some wires, she means two persons at once (Millikan 2000).

  16. This equivocation occurs, I believe, in the Korta and Perry quotation with which I began this section and, indeed, permeates much of the literature in pragmatics.

  17. See Millikan (1984, Chap. 4; 2005, Chaps. 2–3).

  18. He keyed the car has recently come to mean that he took his key and maliciously scratched the finish of the car.

  19. Clark and Clark (1979) compiled a list of denominal verbs that included more than 400 documented examples which they considered to be “innovations,” including He enfant terrible'd gracefully, to stif-upper—lip it through, to bargain—counter the Bible, She Houdinied her way out of the closet, and so forth. They propose that the use of these innovative denominals “is regulated by a convention: in using such a verb, the speaker means to denote the kind of state, event, or process that, he has good reason to believe, the listener can readily and uniquely compute on this occasion, on the basis of their mutual knowledge, …” and so forth. Rules, rules, even here there are supposed to be rules! In exactly what medium are they written?

  20. For example, in Recanati (2007a, b).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut, 101 Manchester Hall, 344 Mansfield Road, Storrs, CT, 06269-2054, USA

    Ruth Garrett Millikan

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Millikan, R.G. A Difference of Some Consequence Between Conventions and Rules. Topoi 27, 87–99 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-008-9026-3

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