Internalism about language

From a philosophical perspective, the above reasoning can seem too quick, and potentially dubious, for ‘[i]t remains an open question whether the rules hypothesised by a grammar are psychologically real’ (Devitt, 2006, p. 9). Devitt here echoes many other philosophers.4

Devitt’s underlying thought is true enough. If we begin with a collec- tion of sentence types, as exemplified above, and then hypothesize various structures involving copies and PRO and much more besides, then it is surely extravagant to claim that such structure is somehow ‘in the head’ of the competent user of the language, even if the posited structures do reflect the pattern of our judgements about the exhibited sentences. The kind of worry Devitt voices, however, only makes sense if premised on the idea that we have no broader theoretical interests in developing syntactic notions of copy and PRO, as if we first have a grammar embodying copy and PRO and then are left wondering what the grammar could be true of, maybe languages understood in some non-cognitive, external sense, or maybe the speaker/hearer’s psych- ology. As it is, Chomsky’s very point is that we begin with our leading questions, which are squarely psychological, and develop theories as

answers to them. In this respect, we are not in a neutral position, and it is the burden of those who would imagine grammars to be about an external language to say why such a conception of language enters into or is presupposed by our leading questions. Chomsky (1981a, p. 7) writes:

The shift of focus from language (an obscure and I believe ultimately unimportant notion) to grammar [i.e. the cognitive states underlying our competence] is essen- tial 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 ideal- ization 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.

The reasoning here is methodological, not metaphysical. The idea of an external language might or might not receive a clear characterization. Whether it does or not is, without further ado, irrelevant to inquiry into the character and development of a speaker/hearer’s linguistic compe- tence. This is because, as Chomsky notes, the very idea of a public lan- guage is an abstraction from what particular members of a population understand; the idea of such a language, then, presupposes some lin- guistic cognition on the part of the users of that language, which is precisely the target of Chomsky’s inquiry.

Responses can be made, for sure. One could entertain a Platonist position, under which a language is somehow a mind-independent, abstract object. In this sense, our linguistic cognition would be one thing; the language we represent would be something else entirely.5

One can, to be sure, talk this way; it comes naturally to us to reify any abstract noun. The real problem with Platonism is not that it is inher- ently obscure or introduces a host of mysteries. (Are there languages in Plato’s heaven no one uses? If not, why not? If so, how do we get to use one of them?) The problem is that Platonic languages are irrelevant, pointless. If languages are abstract objects, then the only way we could discover their properties would be to study the users of the language, an inquiry that does not presuppose or establish the language as an

abstract object. That is, if there were no languages as abstract objects, the methodology and results of linguistics would be exactly as if there were. In essence, therefore, Platonism is merely a metaphysical thesis rather than the natural ontology of a theory that targets our linguistic competence. This reasoning, note, does not refute the very idea of Pla- tonism; it simply tells us that the truth of the thesis is irrelevant to empir- ical inquiry.

One line of resistance to this reasoning goes as follows. We know a language; at any rate, we know lots of facts about the language we speak. If we know a language, then the language must somehow be external to us; otherwise, there would be no difference between the language seeming to us to be a certain way, and the language actually being that way. So, given that we do have linguistic knowledge, a thor- ough internalism about language is mistaken.

The distinction between how things seem and how things are is clearly correct, but the mere distinction does not create any trouble for Chomsky. Chomsky (1981b, p. 223) writes:

[S]aying that a person knows his grammar and knows the rules and principles of his grammar . . . does not imply that he has propositional knowledge that these are the rules and principles of his grammar. The linguist may develop such propos- itional knowledge, but that is quite a different matter.

This is not to say, of course, that competent speaker/hearers do not know a language, or that they don’t know many details about it. The point is that when we speak this way, we have in mind the mass of feel- ings and intuitions that arise from competence; we don’t have in mind the theorist’s principles that are attributed to speaker/hearers in order to explain the feelings and intuitions.