Horwich and the Chomskian Programme

Horwich makes a claim that sets his enterprise apart from Chomsky’s. To understand this, we need to elaborate on the outline of Chomsky’s picture provided in section 1.4. Horwich (2003) argues for what he calls a ‘very simple picture’ of the language faculty’, one which he claims is a simpler, more minimalist account than Chomsky’s picture. He claims that he shares the following assumptions with Chomsky: (a) that each human being has a faculty of language FL as a component of his mind/brain; (b) the possible states of FL, L1, L2, L3… are possible I- languages; (c) each state L is a computational procedure that generates infinitely many expressions E1, E2…; (d) each expression E is a pairing of a phonetic and a semantic object <PHON(E), SEM(E)> which through their respective interaction with the perceptual/articulatory (P/A) and the conceptual intentional system (C/I) determine an association of a sound with a thought; (e) these PHON-SEM pairs are constructed from lexical items, LI1, LI2,.., and (f) these lexical items are stored in a lexicon which is accessed by the computational procedures that form I-expressions. (Horwich 2003: 165)

He suggests that lexical items should be understood as pairings of I-sounds and formal properties which indicate the ‘functional type’ to which the lexical item belongs. So in his picture, there are such lexical items,<I-sound, formal properties>. These are combined according to certain schemata, combinatorial procedures that specify the type and order of constructions. The expressions so computed is a pairing of a phonetic and a semantic object <PHON(E), SEM(E)> , which through their respective interaction with the perceptual/articulatory (P/A) and the conceptual intentional system (C/I) determine an association of a sound with a thought.

This is his major distinction from Chomsky’s picture, as for Chomsky, “lexical items consist not merely of I-sounds (and their formal properties), but of I-sounds paired with I- meanings (and their formal properties); and (b) that the input to and output of the C/I system – namely SEM(E) is constructed not from I-sounds but from I-meanings” (Ibid, 170)

So what Horwich appears to be changing about Chomsky’s picture is the I-meanings, which he claims are inessential, ‘an extra layer of complexity’ (Ibid, 172). He understands I- meanings to be ‘conceptual roles’ which are explicitly represented in FL. He argues however, that all that is required is that “when the sound appears C/I is already in the state required to understand it.”(Ibid, 173) We may ask: what would facilitate C/I’s being in such a state? Horwich suggests that C/I would be in such a state if the I-meanings were composed of their (implicit) definitions: where “I-meanings take the relatively liberal, flexible form of the specification of a regularity of use, rather than the relatively constrained form of an orthodox explicit definition.” (Ibid, 171), for instance, if “the conceptual role of a mental tem “f” consists in the underived acceptance within C/I of certain sentences, “#f” containing it.” (Ibid, 172). As he clarifies, “the idea is that the meanings of I-sounds are constituted by such regularities, which are exemplified in C/I.” (Ibid, 177)

Here Horwich appears to be modifying the nature of I-meanings, in line with his understanding of word meanings which we discussed earlier, rather than getting rid of I- meanings completely. As Chomsky points out in his reply to Horwich (2003), and I tend to agree, it is a matter of choosing ‘regularity of use’ as opposed to semantically interpretable formal features, as constituting I-meanings. Chomsky points out two problems with the idea of regularity of use: firstly that I-sound to which regularities are paired, and PHON(E) are distinct, with a one-many or many to many relation. “Thus, semantic properties of persuade appear in “persuasive” and “persuasion,” though I-sound has different images in PHON(E)… In so far

as we speak of “regularity of use,” it has to be assigned to the underlying element that has these manifestations in PHON(E): its lexical item.” (Chomsky, 2003: 300)

A further and greater problem is that “regularity” cannot explain or contribute to “acquisition of semantic or other aspects of language”. As poverty of stimulus arguments suggest, the acquisition of word meanings is very rapid and proceeds under highly ambiguous conditions. In other words, children are able to develop their language skills almost automatically, with very little exposure to language. In fact, children exposed solely to pidgin or deficient grammatical forms of language are able to develop a full grammatically rich language, creole, within a single generation (Pinker 1994). Further, experience is shaped by internal aspects specific to the organism. To put it differently, our biology constrains our various capacities: human beings normally can, for instance, hear sounds only between 16 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz, though dogs would have different experience of sounds as their range of hearing is normally 40 hertz to 60,000 hertz. Similarly, in the case of other capacities, our experience is constrained by our specific organic makeup as human beings. It would thus follow that the regularities we perceive are also determined by our inner aspects. In fact, often, we choose properties that lack regularities, even with overwhelming regularities in experience, such as in the case of children exposed to pidgin developing creole for instance. So a single experience of a bicycle being ridden, for example, may lead us to conclude that bicycles are for riding, though we may have mostly seen the bicycle being used as an umbrella holder on multiple prior occasions. And we choose to ignore all other factors common to that experience: the person, the place, the weather etc. (Chomsky 2003: 300-301)

Aside from problems with the notion of regularities of use, I-meanings, or rather semantically interpretable formal features, are salient. It is these features which determine the syntactic frames in which a lexical item can appear, and help distinguish between lexical items that appear in similar frames, for example that ‘persuade’ has a causative feature . It is these features that help us for instance to distinguish between ‘persuade’ and ‘expect’.

Thus Horwich’s argument, that we can give up I-meanings in favour of regularities of use, does not seem to hold its ground. Horwich accepts the rest of the Chomskian picture, apart from the introduction of regularities of use. ‘Regularities of use’ is a notion central to his use theory. If we give it up, then what is left of his picture can easily be reconciled with Chomsky, and in fact would not be very different from Chomsky’s position. As the above discussion suggests, Horwich only added regularities of use to the existing Chomskian framework of I-

sounds and (semantically interpretable) formal features (or I-meanings). So, if we abandon the addition of regularities of use, the theory that remains is identical to that of Chomsky’s and is no longer a ‘use theory of meaning’. Chomsky, however, regards himself as a general use theorist, so what is left of Horwich’s theory may be a use theory in the general sense in which biolinguistics is also a use theory of meaning: through shedding light on what the ability to use language is. But what remains is no longer a ‘use theory’ in the sense of explaining meaning through systematizing use. Here the distinction to note is that between the ability to use language, i.e. our language faculty, and the use of that faculty, i.e. language use itself. This is on the lines of the competence-performance distinction that Chomsky stresses. And there is a further distinction between the general use of language and the specific use itself which goes towards explaining the meaning, within a use theory of meaning. This distinction is one akin to that between performance and what the performance signifies. Here following Wittgenstein, we may claim that you cannot say anything about the meaning of a word except to show it through use: in other words, Wittgenstein went back to performance in order to explain its significance. For Chomsky the answers lie in the ability to use language, in the study of the faculty of language itself. We thought, to begin with, that Horwich was adding to this picture by systematizing use, or the actual performance itself. However, we now find that what can be saved from his theory, while avoiding contradictions, is Chomskian and not use-theoretic. This suggests that Horwich’s additions to the standard Minimalist picture are vacuous, and the use theory doesn’t add anything. We shall revisit this problem in section 6 below.44