Abstract
Intuitions have always played an important role in linguistics. Linguistic intuitions gained momentum due to the rise of generative grammar in the 1960s. Their use became intensified, but also, simultaneously, controversial. In this chapter, I argue that problems with linguistic intuitions are caused by erroneous, justificationist ideas about intuitions. Their interpretation as basic facts about speakers’ competences (the “Voice of Competence” view [Devitt’s 2006a]), induced severe doubts about (a) the very availability of such data to native speakers, (b) their reliability, given their largely unknown etiology and their sensibility to many types of irrelevant influences, and (c) current linguistic practice of working with only one (biased) informant: the linguist him-/herself. These problems dissolve when, in a naturalized perspective, linguistic intuitions of professional linguists are conceived as ordinary, theory-laden but unreflective expert intuitions, in conformity with recent “dual system” cognitive theories (Kahneman 2011). Linguistic practice has always implicitly conformed to this expert view of linguistic intuitions, and rightly so. However, it did not remain entirely undamaged by justificationist influences: grammatical concepts and concepts such as “synonymy,” which appear in intuitive judgments, became “frozen” due to their quasi-factual status, and, therefore, immune to theoretical revision. Naturalism can unfreeze them.
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Notes
- 1.
I dedicate this chapter to my former colleague Sies de Haan. Our narrow cooperation during the late 1970s laid a firm foundation for developing my present ideas about linguistic intuitions.
- 2.
Linguistic intuitions are extensively discussed in Schindler et al. (2020).
- 3.
Chomsky has often repeated this statement. This quotation is from Chomsky’s contribution “A Transformational Approach to Syntax” to the 1958 Texas Conference on problems of linguistic analysis in English. Cf. Chomsky (1962).
- 4.
Some anticipations in Saussure’s work are argued for in Siouffi (2021).
- 5.
Most philosophers regard sense perception as a separate type of immediate apprehension. A minority considers sense perception as a subcategory of intuition.
- 6.
The link between “intuition” and “felt knowledge” is made particularly palpable in German, the term traditionally used for “intuitive” being gefühlsmäßig.
- 7.
- 8.
Non-justificationism was defended through several lines of argumentation, which cannot be discussed here separately. I suffice with mentioning the Duhem-Quine thesis, implying that hypotheses cannot be tested in isolation by checking specific “basic” facts, but only in relation to the total “web of belief.” See for instructive information about critical rationalism and (non-)justificationism Wetterston’s contribution to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Wetterston 2022).
- 9.
- 10.
This explains the “hunch” meaning of “intuition.”
- 11.
The difference between expert intuitions and inferential expert judgments has been investigated intensively during the last few decades. The “dual system approach” accounts for their difference in terms of two separate, but often interacting, mental systems, responsible for “fast” and “slow” thinking processes. Cf. Cokeley and Feltz (2014) and Kahneman (2011).
- 12.
Reflective equilibrium was introduced in Goodman (1955). The term was coined in Rawls (2005 [1971]).
- 13.
- 14.
The case is discussed in Botha (1973, pp. 213–214).
- 15.
- 16.
Itkonen incorporates language in a non-empirical realm of “common knowledge,” Katz in a Platonic reality.
- 17.
Chomsky’s initial preference for and later rejection of behavioral tests are discussed in several contributions to the volume Chomskyan (R)evolutions (Kibbee 2010).
- 18.
Today, Chomsky is often regarded as having actively contributed to the decline of behaviorism, mainly through his seminal review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour (Chomsky 1959).
- 19.
The expression “metalinguistic behavior” applies to all linguistic behavior that refers to language in the broadest sense. Intuitive judgments about properties of words or sentences belong to this category, but also a sentence such as “John beat Mary and vice versa” has metalinguistic features.
- 20.
- 21.
“We do not generally take theory-laden folk judgments as primary data for a theory. So we should not do so in linguistics” (Devitt 2006b, p. 489).
- 22.
Cf. Gross (2020) and Brøcker (2021). Both capitalize on natural reactions to linguistic input, as in self-correction, and are looking for ways in which such reactions “can be fairly directly translated into an intuitive judgment […] without the application of (folk) theoretical concepts” (Brøcker 2021, p. 8177).
- 23.
A comparison is made between linguistic intuitions of the “right” type and “a subject’s report of how bright a flash of light appeared.” Brightness may be a naïve concept, but this does not render it atheoretical.
- 24.
In the light of these extensions of the intuitions area, Gross’ (2020, p. 14) suggestion that “linguistic intuitions in fact do not form a natural kind” seems very plausible.
- 25.
This question has an interesting counterpart in Popper’s remark that intuitionism in mathematics cannot explain “why we—or more precisely Plato and his school—had to wait so long for Euclid” (Popper 1974, p. 136).
- 26.
As early as 1955, Chomsky enumerates alleged native speaker intuitions about, for example, phonological similarities, relations between verbs and their nominalizations, sentence types and subtypes, and subtle ambiguities and subtle difference in sentence structure (Chomsky 1975 [1955], p. 62).
- 27.
Construction grammar, for example, rejects the uniform binary structures of generativism and conceives of sentence structures as networks of binary, ternary, and other substructures. Cf. Langacker (2000).
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Acknowledgments
In preparing the final version of this chapter, I benefited from useful remarks made by David Romand, Henk Verkuyl, Theo Kuipers, and Ad Foolen.
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Elffers, E. (2023). Intuitions in Linguistics: A Blessing or a Curse?. In: Romand, D., Le Du, M. (eds) Emotions, Metacognition, and the Intuition of Language Normativity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17913-6_8
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