Abstract
Devitt articulates and defends what he calls the ‘linguistic conception’ of generative linguistics, where this position stands in contrast to the prevailing ‘psychologistic conception’ of Chomsky and generative linguists generally. I shall argue that the very idea of anti-psychologism vis-à-vis generative linguistics is premised upon a misunderstanding, viz., the thought that there are linguistic phenomena as such, which a linguistic theory may target directly, with psychological phenomena being targeted only indirectly. This thought is incorrect, for the ontology of a theory is ultimately what is invariant over and essential to the explanations the theory affords. In this light, linguistic theory is about psychological phenomena because the psychological states of speaker-hearers are the invariances of linguistic explanation, and there are no such invariances that involve externalia. What ultimately counts as psychological itself is partly determined by the very kind of explanations our best theories offer. In a nutshell, the explanations of generative theories neither entail nor presuppose an external linguistic reality, but do presuppose and entail a system of internal mind/brain states the theories seek to characterise.
Invariants are the concepts of which science speaks in the same way as ordinary language speaks of “things”, and which it provides with names as if they were ordinary things.
Born (1953: 149)
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Notes
- 1.
Some positions admit both externalist and internalist commitments, such as those articulated by George (1989) and Higginbotham (1991). By the lights of the arguments to follow, the externalist aspects of such positions are questionable insofar as they flow from the kind of reasoning that informs the straightforward externalist positions. There are other positions that defend the notion of an external language in opposition to the generative approach, but these tend to be animated by the kind of concerns Devitt makes explicit (e.g., Lewis 1975; Wiggins 1997).
- 2.
Thus: ‘none of [my] critics pays much attention to my argument for rejecting the psychological conception. The failure to address arguments against the psychological conception is traditional’ (Devitt 2006b: 574; cp. 2006a: 8). The critics Devitt has in mind are Collins (2006), Matthews (2006), and Smith (2006). Devitt repeated his charge at an ‘Author meets his critics’ session at the meeting of the Pacific Division of the APA (2007), by which time the benighted critics had swelled to include Collins (2007a), Higginbotham (2007), and Pietroski (2008):
Smith [(2006)] and company do make some rather perfunctory attempts at [refuting the argument] … but they all fail dismally in my view... It is time that my Chomskian critics made a serious attempt to refute it. If the argument is mistaken, it should be fairly easy to say why: it is not an attempt to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem!
Whatever the perceived failings of Devitt’s critics, I trust the present paper is at least a meeting of Devitt’s challenge.
- 3.
For example:
Complex innate behavior patterns and innate “tendencies to learn in specific ways” have been carefully studied in lower organisms. Many psychologists have been inclined to believe that such biological structure will not have an important effect on acquisition of complex behaviour in higher organisms, but I have not been able to find serious justification for this attitude. (Chomsky 1959: 577 n. 48)
[T]here is surely no reason today for taking seriously a position that attributes a complex human achievement entirely to months (or at most years) of experience, rather than to millions of years of evolution or to principles of neural organization that may be even more deeply grounded in physical law... [Language] would naturally be expected to reflect intrinsic human capacity in its internal organization. (Chomsky: 1965: 59)
The faculty of language can reasonably be regarded as a “language organ” in the sense in which scientists speak of the visual system, or immune system, or circulatory system as organs of the body. (Chomsky 2004: 380)
- 4.
The ‘on-line’ conception of psychological reality, although never defended by Chomsky, has been articulated, in some form or other, by many in the field; e.g., Levet (1974), Bresnan (1978), Fodor et al. (1974, 1975), Bever et al. (1976), Bresnan and Kaplan (1982), Fodor (1983), Berwick and Weinberg (1984), Soames (1984), and Pylyshyn (1991). The kind of ‘transparency’ model entertained by Miller and Chomsky (1963) did not take processing to be a criterion of reality for a grammar’s posits, but merely suggested that there was a structural concordance between the two, a claim that can be elaborated in different ways without disrespecting the competence/performance distinction (cp. Berwick and Weinberg (1984) and Pritchett (1992)). Although Devitt accepts that ‘on-line’ processing is the mark of the psychologically real, given his ‘linguistic realism’, he also holds that a grammar need only be respected by the processing rules, i.e., that is all a grammar tells us about psychology. Construed internally, in the way I shall suggest below, ‘respect’ indeed suffices for a perfectly good sense of psychological reality independently of any theory of processing.
- 5.
Devitt’s point here is inherited from Quine’s (1972) suggestion that rule ‘following’, as opposed to ‘conforming’, involves consciousness of the rule. The distinction misses the obvious difference between behaviour being explained by a posited rule, regardless of consciousness, and behaviour merely conforming to any number of conceivable rules (Chomsky 1975). Devitt also echoes Soames’s (1984: 134) thought that ‘linguistic theories are conceptually distinct and empirically divergent from psychological theories of language acquisition and linguistic competence’. According to Soames, the first claim of conceptual distinctness rests upon linguistic theory being animated by ‘leading questions’ that are independent of psychology and the second claim of empirical divergence rests upon the clear implausibility of taking the rules and principles posited by syntactic theories to be the actual causal springs of linguistic behaviour. As we shall see, the first claim amounts to a stipulation in favour of an externalist notion of language (the ‘leading questions of linguistics’ are open to both externalist or internalist construal; the choice between them cannot be decided by a priori fiat). The second distinction rests upon a conception of the relevant psychology as restricted to speech production/recognition. It is perfectly sensible to attempt to delineate the abstract structure the mind/brain realises without thinking that one is thereby specifying the actual causal processes involved in linguistic processing, whatever that might mean. Besides, it is not even the case that generative theorists have sought psychological theories in Soames’s sense. Soames (1984: 147–151) appears to be confused on the competence/performance distinction. He imagines that the traditional cognitivist approach is to insulate competence (narrowly construed) from any data from processing; competence is merely a theory of the ‘grammatical judgements of idealized speaker-hearers’ (1984: 148 n. 19). Little wonder that Soames (1984: 154–155) sees the linguist as facing a ‘dilemma’: on the one hand she seeks a psychological theory, on the other she insulates herself from the relevant data. In explicit contradiction of this reasoning, the first chapter of Aspects (Chomsky 1965) seeks to establish the empirical integration of performance and competence, without competence itself being competence to produce or consume anything. Competence is a standing state, abstractly specified, that enables the integration of distinct capacities called upon in linguistic behaviour (for discussion, see Collins 2004, 2007b).
- 6.
Of course, not every term of an evidentially supported theory is understood to correspond to a real element of the domain; many elements will be wholly theory internal and at a given stage of inquiry it might not be clear what is real and what is not. This kind of complication, however, holds for any empirical inquiry, and poses no special problem for linguistics in particular. See Harman (1980) and Chomsky (1980b) for discussion.
- 7.
Although my focus in this paper is on intuitive evidence, for that is the locus of much of the philosophical disputes, it bears emphasis that it is Chomsky’s long-standing position that ‘discoveries in neurophysiology or in the study of behaviour and learning... might lead us to revise or abandon a given theory of language or particular grammar, with its hypotheses about the components of the system and their interaction’ (Chomsky 1975: 37). In general, ‘We should always be on the lookout for new kinds of evidence, and cannot know in advance what they will be’ (Chomsky 1980a: 109). For overviews of the relevant evidence far beyond intuitive data, see, e.g., Jenkins (2000, 2004) and Anderson and Lightfoot (2002).
- 8.
See Lange (2002: ch. 2) for a good discussion of these issues.
- 9.
Devitt offered me something very similar to this argument in personal correspondence.
- 10.
This line of reasoning is equivalent to that of Katz (1981: 70–73, 81–83) and Katz and Postal (1991: 524–525), who argue that a conception of a language must be prior to a conception of the putative underlying psychological states, for any evidence on such states must be indirect relative to direct evidence from the language itself. Soames (1984: 140) makes the same point, suggesting that psychological evidence is ‘indirect’ given a fixed ‘pretheoretical’ conception of language. In a related vein, Wiggins (1997: 509–510) claims that any psychological inquiry into ‘speakers’ ‘presupposes the results’ of a non-psychological inquiry into language.
- 11.
Of course, there is a reality of ink marks, hand gestures, pixels, etc. The only issue is whether such a heterogeneous domain supports properties of the kind that concern linguistics, where these properties might depend upon the human mind/brain but not be part of it.
- 12.
For example:
We do not know for certain, but we believe that there are physical structures of the brain which are the basis for the computations and representations that we describe in an abstract way. This relationship between unknown physical mechanisms and abstract properties is very common in the history of science... In each case the abstract theories pose a further question for the physical scientist. The question is, find the physical mechanisms with those properties. (Chomsky 1988: 185)
- 13.
According to standard accounts, the relevant difference is that, in (3a), he c-commands Fred, which rules out a joint construal. In (3b), his does not c-command Fred, and so a joint construal is permitted. C-command is a central relation of grammatical analysis: an item c-commands all and only its sisters and their daughters, where sisters and daughters are arboreal items related to a given item as if in a family tree.
- 14.
It is tempting to adopt a ‘projectionist’ position here, as if the mind projects linguistic structure onto a string such as to render it structured, much as a given opaque surface might be said to be coloured. I think this temptation should be resisted. In an obvious sense, there is a projection, for we do hear and read various materials as being structured and meaningful, even though they are just lifeless marks in our absence. Such a projection, however, is far too shallow to support an attribution of full syntactic structure to the external material. We can, indeed, distinguish word boundaries and (some) phrases to such a degree as to make their attribution to the string seem obvious, but obviousness quickly reduces to zero for the kind of structure and properties that linguistic theory posits, much of which has no morphological signature at all. Still, we can think of the mental structure linguistics posits as constraining our phenomenology, so that we have available to us a shadow or blueprint, as it were, of the actual constraints.
I think these remarks critically bear on the position of Rey (2006a, b), who views linguistic structure as a kind of illusion our minds reliably generate. We might well have an illusion of words out there, but not the illusion of PRO, or of phonologically null copies, or relations of domination, etc. Again, such features seem to generate or at least constrain the character of our ‘illusion’, but they are not part of it (see Collins 2009, 2014).
- 15.
A functional specification of some traditional grammatical notions is not uncommon, and can be extended (Chomsky 1965: 68–74). Such a procedure, however, involves relations between linguistic categories or structural positions, and so cannot be a general characterisation of linguistic structure of the sort Devitt supposes is available. In essence, Devitt’s problem is to identify some non-linguistic properties that might be conventionally recruited to carry syntactic properties by way of their role in communication or the general expression of thought. This task is difficult enough for simple cases of being a noun (I’ve never heard of any attempt to carry out such a programme), but looks impossible for empty categories that are defined in terms of syntactic position. For debate on this point in relation to PRO, see Devitt (2006b, 2008a, b) and Collins (2008a, b).
Devitt (2006a: 39–40) readily acknowledges that linguistic reality largely supervenes/depends on the mind/brain. Such dependence, though, does not mean that linguistic reality is cognitive: dependence does not make for constitution; were it to, the only inquiry would be physics. The issue of supervenience, however, is irrelevant. The reason linguistics is about the mind/brain is not that language supervenes on the mind/brain, but that only cognitive phenomena are explained by the linguistic theories, and external factors are neither entailed nor presupposed by such explanations.
- 16.
Devitt (2006a: 98–100) does rightly claim that evidence for a grammar is not restricted to intuitions. As previously noted, though, it doesn’t follow that any such extra-intuitive evidence is non-psychological. The only pertinent case Devitt mentions is corpus studies (2006a: 98–99). A corpus, however, is simply an example or database of constructions used. It only serves as evidence for a grammar on the basis of the theorist taking the various constructions to reflect the understanding or competence of the users of the language. After all, a linguistic theory is not a theory of what utterances people have made. A corpus, of course, can provide invaluable evidence for acquisition models, but here the corpus is treated as a record of the cognitive development of the child, not as direct data on the language itself.
- 17.
Katz made his distinction in defence of a Platonist position, where it is much easier to construe the import of the intuitive data as being about abstracta on analogy with the case of mathematical intuition; after all, the abstracta just are the essential linguistic properties pruned of any contingent excrescence (what Katz calls their ‘cohesiveness’), not so for Devitt’s concrete tokens. Even so, Katz’s analogy does not hold up. A linguistic theory is meant to explain the data – why we have the intuitions we have, and not others – whereas a mathematical theory does not explain why we have the mathematical intuitions we have. It is the job of psychology, I take it, to explain our mathematical competence, regardless of whether Platonism is true or not.
- 18.
- 19.
Chomsky (1981: 7) writes:
The shift of focus from language (an obscure and I believe ultimately unimportant notion) to grammar [I-language] is essential if we are to proceed towards assimilating the study of language to the natural sciences. It is a move from data collection and organization to the study of the real systems that actually exist (in the mind/brain) and that enter into an explanation of the phenomena we observe. Contrary to what is widely assumed, the notion “language” (however characterized) is of a higher order of abstraction and idealization than grammar, and correspondingly, the study of “language” introduces new and more difficult problems. One may ask whether there is any reason to try to clarify or define such a notion and whether any purpose is served in doing so. Perhaps so, but I am sceptical.
See Collins (2008c) for wide discussion of these themes.
- 20.
This particular passage from Syntactic Structures has often been cited by defenders of externalism: e.g., Cummins and Harnish (1980: 18), Katz and Postal (1991: 521), and Postal (2004: 5, 174). Curiously, none of the critics seem to have been bothered to understand the remarks in their proper context (see below and Collins 2008c for lengthy discussion).
- 21.
- 22.
After quoting from Syntactic Structures, Devitt (2006a: 31) asks us to compare another quotation from Chomsky (1980a: 220), where Chomsky does indeed talk about a grammar being a theory of a language. Devitt, however, appears to misunderstand the point of the passage. Chomsky closes the relevant paragraph by saying:
When we speak of the linguist’s grammar as a “generative grammar,” we mean only that it is sufficiently explicit to determine how sentences of the language are in fact characterised by the grammar.
Chomsky’s point here is just to unpack the notion of ‘generative’ in terms of explicitness, i.e., the linguist’s grammar has sufficient deductive structure to generate a set of phrase markers that encode the relevant properties that explain the speaker-hearer’s unbounded competence. There is no conception here of a grammar being about an external language.
- 23.
One can think of a phrase structure analysis as the description of how categorical information relates a set of lexical items to each other. The relations are not ones identifiable on the surface of the strings, although, of course, competent speaker-hearers are able to map phrase structure to and from linear strings. The relation between linearity and phrase structure is contested, but no one suggests that phrase structure just is a property of linear organisation, no matter how high-level or functional (see Kayne 1994; Nunes 2004).
- 24.
- 25.
It is useful here to distinguish between ‘linguistic hunches’ and ‘linguistic intuitions’. The former are suggestions from theorists themselves about the status of a construction, not the naïve view of an informant. Of course, to distinguish between these cases is not to suggest that the theorist will depart from the naïve informant in what they reckon to be acceptable or unacceptable; on the contrary, there is great concord (Sprouse and Almedia 2013). The point, rather, is that the theorist may have a hunch about the reason for a construction’s unacceptability, say, in a way the informant may not.
- 26.
Since Aspects (1965: 11–15), Chomsky has distinguished between grammaticality and acceptability. The former is a theoretical notion referring to what structures a given grammar generates. Speaker-hearers do not have grammaticality intuitions, but only acceptability ones, which a grammatical theory seeks to explain, in concert with other theories. Acceptability refers to what a speaker-hearer finds non-deviant, OK. It is a complex empirical matter, of course, to determine how acceptability bears on grammaticality in particular, as opposed to matters of semantics, pragmatics, lack of imagination, contextual priming, etc.
- 27.
Devitt (2006a: 96) does provide evidence that something like the ‘voice of competence’ view is widely held, that intuitions are direct evidence on the nature of the language faculty, as if one can intuit that a construction is F, for some grammatical property F. However this evidence should be read, it does not militate for an orthodox meta-linguistic conception of intuitions in linguistics (see Collins 2008a; Ludlow 2011: ch. 3).
- 28.
- 29.
Often, externalist critics of Chomsky neglect to offer an account of the role of psychological evidence in linguistics. For example, Cummins and Harnish (1980), without denying the existence of something like a language faculty, suggest that Chomsky has somehow begged the question by presuming linguistics to be a branch of psychology. Chomsky (1980c: 43) correctly replies that if one is concerned with the truth of one’s theories, ‘as opposed to one or another way of axiomatizing some range of data’, then one should seek all available evidence, including ‘“psychological constraints” deriving from other studies’ (see note 7). Katz and Postal (1991: 526–527) defend Cummins and Harnish by suggesting that Chomsky begs the question again by presuming that the truth of a linguistic theory could only be a psychological matter. Not a bit of it. Chomsky’s point is merely that Cummins and Harnish presume that a certain data source is somehow irrelevant – an unprincipled presumption shared by Katz and Postal.
- 30.
These are cases of center embedded relative clauses. Thus:
(i) The boat [(that) the sailor [(that) the dog bit] built] sank.
- 31.
- 32.
For example:
[I]n English one uses the locutions “know a language,” “knowledge of language,” where other (even similar) linguistic systems use such terms as “have a language,” “speak a language,” etc. That may be one reason why it is commonly supposed (by English speakers) that some sort of cognitive relation holds between Jones and his language, which is somehow “external” to Jones; or that Jones has a “theory of his language,” a theory that he “knows” or “partially knows.” … One should not expect such concepts to play a role in systematic inquiry into the nature, use, and acquisition of language, and related matters, any more than one expects such informal notions as “heat” or “element” or “life” to survive beyond rudimentary stages of the natural sciences. (Chomsky and Stemmer 1999: 397)
- 33.
See Matthews (2007) for a general treatment of propositional attitude attribution consistent with this approach. Matthews suggests, after others, that the relational form of propositional attitude attributions is measure-theoretic, allowing, but not requiring, the mind/brain states so picked out to be monadic rather than relational, just as X weighs 3 kg has a relational form, even though the underlying magnitude picked out is a monadic property.
- 34.
My greatest debt is to Michael Devitt, for literally hundreds of emails and conversations. I disagree with Michael, but I’ve learnt a lot from this engagement, which has been one of the highlights of my philosophical life. A nigh-on equal debt is to Georges Rey, who is my constant interlocutor on all things philosophical. I’ve also benefitted enormously from conversations with Bob Matthews, Frankie Egan, Paul Pietroski, Barry Smith, and Guy Longworth. Especial thanks, too, to Andrea, for organising the volume and very helpful comments.
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Collins, J. (2020). Invariance as the Mark of the Psychological Reality of Language. In: Bianchi, A. (eds) Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 142. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47641-0_2
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