Abstract
There are three competing frameworks for answering the foundational questions of linguistic theory. Platonism holds that linguistics is about abstract entities, whose essential properties grammarians discover, by using nonempirical reasoning, as in mathematics. Nominalism takes linguistics to be about concrete physical tokens that comprise conventional systems of communication; grammars explain how inscriptions and the like can be, e.g., grammatical, co-referential, or contradictory. Cognitivism takes linguistics to be a branch of psychology, seeing grammars as hypotheses about the tacit knowledge that every competent speaker possesses. I argue that the epistemological side of the platonist position is undermined by W. V. Quine’s attack on the notion of nonempirical modes of inquiry. Jerry Katz contends that Quine’s epistemology is inconsistent, because it entails that principles of reasoning are simultaneously revisable and unrevisable. I show that Katz’ “revisability paradox” overlooks the distinction between our principles of reasoning and our theory of those principles. Drawing this distinction eliminates the threat of inconsistency. Further, I argue that linguists’ claims concerning the infinitude of language need not signal an ontological commitment to abstract entities. Rather, they reflect the lawlike, counterfactual-supporting character of linguistic generalizations, as well as a principled idealization away from mortality, memory constraints, and motivational factors.
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Notes
- 1.
The second line of Word and Object will fare no better with contemporary acquisition theorists in the generative tradition: “In acquiring [language] we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when” (1960: ix, emphasis added).
- 2.
Needless to say, a commitment to both the existence and innateness of a Universal Grammar is characteristic of many theories in the generative tradition. But it is not, I think, a defining feature of that tradition. There has been no shortage of detractors from the innateness thesis, some of whom are nevertheless plainly generative grammarians.
- 3.
- 4.
It is worth pausing over this common piece of terminology and taking stock of the connotations it carries with respect to the debates surrounding what Chomsky has called E-language and I-language. The term ‘target grammar’ carries the implication that there is a grammar external to the child at the time of acquisition, which the child is struggling to grasp. Chomsky and his followers would surely resist this implication, claiming that the use of the term is appropriate only in the informal presentation of a theory, not in its serious development—a distinction that Chomsky wields with worrying frequency. (See, e.g., his exchange with Rey, in Barber [2000]). Still, whether a linguist uses the term or eschews it, we are owed a formal, “serious” statement of the child’s “goal” throughout the acquisition process. This would go a long way toward making sense of what acquisition theorists mean when they claim that a child has made a “mistake” in the course of acquisition, or, equally, that no mistake was made. I am not convinced, at present, that an explicit, formal, and “serious” account of this would make no mention of E-language. See Chap. 3 for further discussion of this issue, as well as of Chomsky’s claim that the notion of E-language plays no role in linguistic theory.
- 5.
- 6.
Though relatively inclusive, this list is still radically incomplete, as Katz is well aware. (Indeed, he notes that he has mentioned “only the most prominent cases.”) Langendoen and Postal (1984: p. 243), provide a more comprehensive, though still incomplete, list. I reproduce their list here, omitting the entries that appear also on Katz’s list, as well as the dates of the relevant publications: Finite Grammar (Hockett), Finite State Grammar (Reich), Realistic Grammar (Brame), Stratificational Grammar (Lamb; Lockwood), Tagmemics (Longacre), Natural Generative Grammar (Bartsch and Vennemann), Semantically Based Grammar (Chafe), Functional Grammar (Dik), Daughter Dependency Grammar (Hudson; Schachter), Phrasal Core Grammar (Keenan), Corepresentational Grammar (Kac), Relationally Based Grammar (Johnson), Dependency Grammar (Hays), Categorial Grammar (Lambek), Cognitive Grammar (Lakoff and Thompson), Meaning-Text Models (Melcuk), The Abstract System (Harris), Configurational Grammar (Koster), Neostructural Grammar (Langendoen), String Adjunct Grammar (Joshi, Kosaraju, and Yamada), Equatorial Grammar (Sanders), and Systemic Grammar (Hudson).
- 7.
As a heuristic, compare the number of philosophers who can rehearse the difference between S4 and S5 modal logics at the drop of a hat, and the number of philosophers who can say anything of substance about the difference between the Government and Binding theory of the 1980s and 1990s, and the Minimalist Program that has slowly replaced it. Though the latter contrast is surely more pronounced, it is rarely discussed in the philosophical literature, while the former is common ground among philosophers of language. The present work is intended as a corrective to this unfortunate trend.
- 8.
Katz wavers between the terms ‘conceptualism’ and ‘mentalism’. I will use the label ‘cognitivism’, which is sufficiently inclusive and has the added virtue of bypassing distracting issues surrounding technical uses of the term ‘concept’ in psychology and philosophy of mind.
- 9.
Quine’s attitude toward abstract entities evolved over the course of his career. Having defended nominalism in his youth (Goodman and Quine 1947), he later went on to reluctantly admit the existence of some abstract entities—sets, individuated extensionally—on account of their alleged indispensability in the natural sciences. Orenstein (2002) calls Quine a “reluctant Platonist, admitting only as many abstract objects, such as sets, as are indispensable for the business of science” (p. 86). Whatever the case about that, Quine has always been unambiguous in his rejection of propositions and other abstract entities for the purposes of linguistics.
- 10.
I do not mean to suggest that this is all there is to say about the principles in question—a strong version of psychologism. The principles may well do more than serve as descriptive tools for the psychologist. They may, for instance, double as inferential norms. My claim is only that they do not play the role in our psychology or epistemology that Katz’s argument requires.
- 11.
Such talk of rationality also raises the possibility that the principle of noncontradiction is an inferential norm—something we should aspire to conform to, teach children to abide by, and hold others accountable for respecting. Like psychological generalizations, such norms need not play any role in actual reasoning.
- 12.
The fitting/guiding distinction is, I believe, not fine-grained enough to capture differences that will become important later. In Chap. 7, I will draw a tripartite distinction between (1) merely fitting a rule, (2) embodying a rule, and (3) representing a rule—i.e., using it “as a premise” or “as data” in the course of cognitive or computational operations. My claim in the main text is that, pace Katz, the principles of universal revision, noncontradiction, and minimal mutilation do not belong in class (3). Whether they belong in class (1) or class (2) is, I take it, an open empirical issue. To settle it, we would have to determine whether, in the brain, there is a common causal mechanism (Davies 1989, 1995) that is responsible for all of the cognitive operations that conform to each individual principle of reasoning. I suspect that there are no such mechanisms, so my money is on class (1).
- 13.
See Dennett (1991) for an excision of the “central executive” and “central meaner”—vestiges of the Cartesian philosophy that retains its grip on the field, despite facing seemingly insurmountable problems. For a more recent attack on the view that state-consciousness serves an important epistemic function, see Rosenthal (2008, 2012).
- 14.
Michal Devitt and Hilary Kornblith have argued that empirical discoveries could show us not only that our theory of our own inferences was wrong, but also that the inferences we in fact make are not ones that we should be making. Indeed, Devitt points out that results like those of Kahneman (2011) play precisely that role. This sort of view would allow us to see naturalized epistemology as having room for a normative element that is not merely a “chapter of psychology.” This issue is orthogonal to the debate between Quine and Katz.
- 15.
- 16.
My claim, then, is that the following remarks from Rohde (2002) are based on a failure of imagination: “Language is pseudo-context-free or pseudo-context-sensitive, but infinite recursion is an idealization ungrounded in any observable reality. Some like to say that there are an infinite number of possible sentences in a language, meaning that there are an infinite number of utterances that conform to the rules of the grammars that linguists design. But if we limit the definition of a sentence, as I choose to do, to those utterances that could possibly convey a useful and consistent meaning to at least a few fellow speakers of a language, even under optimal conditions, the claim of an infinite variety of sentences is simply not true. There is a finite bound to the length and complexity of sentences that humans can comprehend, and thus a finite bound to the possible sentences we can create, short of inventing new words. If I were to link all of the sentences in this thesis together with and or some other suitable conjunction, the result would not be another sentence. It would be an abomination. I’m not arguing that there aren’t a vast number of possible sentences in English, just that there aren’t an infinite number” (pp. 3–4).
- 17.
The position developed here is shared by Collins (2008a), who writes: “Note, the datum here is not that we understand an infinity of sentences. Given the vagaries of the notion of ‘understanding’ and metaphysical suspicions over the infinite, such a claim would needlessly attract irrelevant objections. The datum, rather, is that our competent use of language is ‘indefinitely new’ or ‘continuously novel’; far from finding ourselves stumped at novel sentences, the vast majority of sentences we produce and consume are entirely novel to us… If our competence were somehow finitely bounded, then our apparent ability to project ‘acceptable’ or ‘grammatical’ across an indefinite range would be a kind of fortunate accident, as if there were a finite upper bound, but one sufficiently great to be unnoticed. Such a speculation is irrelevant and, anyhow, false” (p. 32).
- 18.
Collins (2009) puts the point this way: “Controversy on this issue appears to arise from the common talk in linguistics and philosophy of natural languages being infinite. The infinity of English, as it might be, however, is not a phenomenon. The phenomenon is that particular organisms are continuously novel in their speech and understanding, which we theorize in terms of unbounded generation” (fn. 4).
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Pereplyotchik, D. (2017). The Ontology of Language and the Methodology of Linguistics. In: Psychosyntax. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 129. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60066-6_1
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