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Is Linguistics a Part of Psychology? Is Linguistics a Part of Psychology? Gareth Fitzgerald University College London Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. I, Gareth Fitzgerald, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract Noam Chomsky, the founding father of generative grammar and the instigator of some of its core research programs, claims that linguistics is a part of psychology, concerned with a class of cognitive structures employed in speaking and understanding. In a recent book, Ignorance of Language, Michael Devitt has challenged certain core aspects of linguistics, as prominent practitioners of the science conceive of it. Among Devitt’s major conclusions is that linguistics is not a part of psychology. In this thesis I defend Chomsky’s psychological conception of grammatical theory. My case for the psychological conception involves defending a set of psychological goals for generative grammars, centring on conditions of descriptive and explanatory adequacy.I argue that generative grammar makes an explanatory commitment to a distinction between a psychological system of grammatical competence and the performance systems engaged in putting that competence to use. I then defend the view that this distinction can be investigated by probing speakers’ linguistic intuitions. Building on the psychological goals of generative grammar and its explanatory commitment to a psychological theory of grammatical competence, I argue that generative grammar neither targets nor presupposes non-psychological grammatical properties. The latter non- psychological properties are dispensable to grammarians’ explanations because their explanatory goals can be met by the theory of grammatical competence to which they are committed. So generative grammars have psychological properties as their subject matter and linguistics is a part of psychology. 3 4 Table of Contents Abstract___________________________________________________________ 3 Acknowledgements__________________________________________________ 7 1. Introduction _____________________________________________________ 8 1.1 What is the subject matter of Linguistics? ______________________________ 8 1.2 The Psychological Conception of Linguistics ___________________________ 20 1.3 Non-psychological Conceptions of Linguistics __________________________ 41 1.3.1 Social Conceptions ____________________________________________________ 55 1.3.2 Physicalist Conceptions _________________________________________________ 76 1.3.3 Platonist Conceptions __________________________________________________ 90 1.4 Argument Summary _______________________________________________ 98 2. What does Generative Grammar Explain? ___________________________ 101 2.1 Goals and Interests _______________________________________________ 101 2.2 Descriptive Adequacy _____________________________________________ 108 2.2.1 Prescriptive Grammars ________________________________________________ 108 2.2.2 Observational Adequacy _______________________________________________ 110 2.2.3 Descriptive Adequacy and Productivity ___________________________________ 113 2.3 Explanatory Adequacy ____________________________________________ 117 2.3.1 Further Conditions of Adequacy? ________________________________________ 117 2.3.2 Grammar Acquisition and Universal Grammar ______________________________ 118 2.3.3 The Role of Explanatory Adequacy_______________________________________ 120 2.4 Arguments against Explanatory Adequacy____________________________ 126 3. The Competence-Performance Distinction___________________________ 138 3.1 Competence and Use ______________________________________________ 141 3.2 Why Generative Grammar Needs a Competence-Performance Distinction _ 144 3.3 Grammatical Competence and Linguistic Processing ___________________ 152 3.5 Katz’s Case against “Competencism” ________________________________ 163 4. Linguistic Intuitions as Evidence for Generative Grammars ____________ 174 4.1 Intuitions as Evidence _____________________________________________ 174 5 4.2 The Orthodox Model: Linguistic Intuitions as Data for Psychological Theories ___________________________________________________________________ 187 4.2.1 How do Intuitions bear on Competence Theories? ___________________________ 187 4.2.2 Linguistic Intuitions and Visual Impressions________________________________ 190 4.2.3 Are Linguistic Intuitions the “Voice of Competence”? ________________________ 197 4.2.4 Are Linguistic Judgements and Visual Reports Disanalogous?__________________ 200 4.2.5 The Orthodox Model and Introspection____________________________________ 201 4.3 Linguistic Intuitions as Theoretical Judgements _______________________ 203 4.3.1 Devitt’s Model and Belief-Independence __________________________________ 203 4.3.2 Devitt’s Model and Folk theory__________________________________________ 204 4.3.3 A modification to Devitt’s Model ________________________________________ 207 4.3.4 Devitt’s alternative view of the Evidence __________________________________ 209 4.4 Linguistic Intuitions as Observational Judgements _____________________ 215 4.4.1 The Observational Model ______________________________________________ 215 4.4.2 Error, Belief-Independence and Types ____________________________________ 217 4.4.3 Grammatical Variation ________________________________________________ 219 5. Explanation in Generative Grammar _______________________________ 224 5.1 What sort of properties do Generative Grammars appeal to? ____________ 224 5.1.1 Explanation and Supervenience__________________________________________ 225 5.1.2 Psychological Reality, Linguistic Reality and Grammatical Explanation __________ 229 5.2 The No Violence Principle _________________________________________ 234 5.3 Meeting Descriptive Adequacy______________________________________ 245 5.4 Meeting Explanatory Adequacy: Nativism ____________________________ 250 5.4.1 Theories of Grammar Acquisition: Nativist Theories and Learning Theories_______ 251 5.4.2 Poverty of Stimulus Arguments for Grammatical Nativism ____________________ 263 5.4.3 Conventions _________________________________________________________ 287 5.5 Communication __________________________________________________ 292 6. Conclusion ____________________________________________________ 296 Appendix. Beyond Explanatory Adequacy _____________________________ 298 Bibliography _____________________________________________________ 317 6 Acknowledgements This thesis was supervised by Dr. Mark Kalderon, Dr. Guy Longworth and Dr. Barry Smith. I owe them many thanks for their encouragement, ideas and generosity with their time. I thank my examiners Richard Breheny and Gabriel Segal for helpful suggestions and corrections. I would also like to thank the following people for reading and discussing parts of the thesis: Dr. John Collins, Craig French, Dr. Colin Johnston, Jonny McIntosh, Will McNeill, Simon Riches, and Lee Walters. Parts of Chapter One and Five have been presented and then submitted as a paper “Is Linguistics a Part of Psychology?”. They have greatly benefitted from the questions of audiences in Warwick and London, and an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Psychology for whom the paper is being revised and resubmitted. Part of Chapter One is also forthcoming in Minds and Machines as a review of Devitt’s Ignorance of Language. Chapter Two was presented at the Warwick Philosophy of Linguistics seminar where it profited from comments by Matt Soteriou. Chapter Four has been presented to the London Graduate Conference and London Philosophy of Linguistics seminar series. It has also benefitted from comments by two anonymous referees for the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, for whom the paper version is being revised and resubmitted. 7 1. Introduction 1.1 What is the subject matter of Linguistics? This is a thesis in the philosophy of linguistics. The thesis is about the subject matter of linguistic theories. In the broadest terms, linguistics is the scientific study of language. However, the scientific study of language is not an attempt to explain all linguistic phenomena, or everything that we pre-theoretically think of as a part of our language. For example, the science of language does not directly address the kinds of questions literature students ask about Keats’ language and what Keats meant by particular choices of words. They might consider the question of what Keats meant when, speaking of the nightingale, he said that he, Keats, was “too happy in thine happiness”.1 There are special subtleties to a poet’s language and meanings, and discerning these subtleties is an art in itself. It may involve understanding the poet’s particular style, historical circumstances, state of mind and literary intentions. The science of language, as currently practiced, does not afford us much insight into these questions. This is perhaps to be expected because such phenomena look to involve a wide range of potentially intractable factors; factors that may not be easy to make precise and objective. The scientific investigation of language looks to strip away our peculiar perspectives and interests in order to get some precise and objective explanation of central linguistic facts. This is not to detract from the importance of other perspectives on language. It is a theme of Noam Chomsky’s writings on language and mind that someone committed to scientific
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