Internalist semantics

According to Chomsky’s methodological brand of naturalism, empirical inquiry into language is not constrained to cleave to any pre-theoretical conceptions of the relevant linguistic phenomena. In particular, on the basis of the leading questions that reflect perhaps the most stable and salient phenomena, we are led to eschew any public or external

conception of language, not because such a conception cannot be consistently spelt out, but because it appears to be redundant. Natural- istic inquiry into language is therefore internalist, which means nothing more than that linguistics is conceived as a science of states theoretically individuated independently of factors external to the organism. Of course, many external factors enter into the possibility of a human mind/ brain developing in such a way as to enable the subject’s realization of a linguistic competence, not least the basic environmental factors that sustain the life of an organism. Internalism only claims that the general- izations that serve to explain linguistic phenomena do not factor in external kinds. For example, no one thinks that an isolated child will acquire language. The crucial point is that the input that suffices for the development of language varies massively, so much so that there is next to no prospect of generalizations framed over the states of mature lin- guistic competence and input kinds. In crude terms, independently of the linguistic mind, there is no kind at all that encompasses the varied sound waves, inscriptions and hand gestures that correspond to the sentence The cat sat on the mat.

Although Chomsky’s ideas have proved to be highly controversial in philosophy, there is perhaps now broad acceptance of the general natur- alistic approach to language in the area of syntax. In the area of semantics or meaning, however, Chomsky’s views remain very much against the mainstream. In the remainder of the present section, I shall provide some background to Chomsky’s views on semantics. In the following section, I shall briefly defend Chomsky’s position against some objections.

4.1 Autonomy

Chomsky is celebrated for his work on syntax, but is much less noted as someone with developed views on semantics. In part, this is due to the common misconception that Chomsky’s early ‘autonomy thesis’ (1955–56/1975, 1957) was somehow an anti-semantic thesis. Crudely put, the ‘thesis’ claims that syntactic hypotheses may be formulated without their prior grounding in semantic concepts. Such methodo- logical advice, however, is not intended to denigrate semantic inquiry (‘an essential task for linguistics’ (Chomsky, 1955–56/1975, p. 97)), but only to suggest that the kind of structural phenomena revealed by syntactic inquiry have no clear rationale or explanation in terms of existing conceptions of meaning, a claim highly controversial in the

1950s (Chomsky, 1955).6 _{For example, from the perspective of mean-}

ing, why on earth should contraction be limited in the ways detailed above? Thus, in the absence of a compelling argument that structural phenomena must be based on semantics, syntax can and should be studied on its own terms. From a naturalistic perspective, this advice is unobjectionable. Chomsky (1957, pp. 101–3) made a further claim which is much less discussed, although far more intriguing. He sug- gested that syntax may be happily construed as part of semantics, in the sense that one fruitful way of approaching meaning is to figure out how the ‘vehicles’ of meaning are structured. Such structural facts obviously affect and constrain what can be meant by a construction. Perhaps the best way of exhibiting the syntactic constraints on mean- ing is to consider the ambiguity of minimal pairs.

Take the following sentence: (9) The duck is easy to eat

This sentence is unambiguous; it has the single reading corresponding to the paraphrase: It is easy for one to eat the duck. That is to say, the duck itself is not easy in a to eat-kind of way; it is the eating of the duck that is easy. In abstract terms, easy modifies the event of the duck being eaten, not the duck itself. But compare (9) to (10), where we have just substituted one adjective for another:

(10) The duck is ready to eat

One reading of (10) is immediately accessible: The duck is ready for one to eat it. Note that this reading is distinct from the sole reading of (9); here, ready does modify the duck, not its eating. Also unlike (9), (10) has a second reading, which is not so readily accessible: The duck is ready for itself to eat something or other (imagine a pet duck recovering from ill health). In short, the duck can be both subject or object of eat (the eater or the eaten) in (10), but may only be the object of eat in (9). This difference produces the difference in the number of readings between (9) and (10), but the only difference between the two sentences is the presence of the adjectives easy or ready. In some sense, therefore, a speaker’s understanding of the adjectives involves a cognizance, albeit tacit, of the structural facts just sketched.

The difference between easy and ready manifests itself structurally in other ways, too. Consider the cases in (11):

(11) a. *The duck is easy to be eaten b. The duck is ready to be eaten

Now, (11a) ‘feels’ as if it should mean the same as (9), only in the pas- sive: It is easy for the duck to be eaten by one. For all that, it fails to have the reading: easy forces its grammatical subject (the duck) to be distinct from the understood subject of the infinitive subordinate clause (to be eaten), but that subject position is the only one in which the duck may be understood relative to eat – that is, the duck is not eating, so it must be the thing being eaten. In distinction, (11b) is ambiguous. On one readily available meaning, it means the same as one reading of (10), where the duck is ready for someone or other to eat it. On another read- ing, one may say the duck is prepared to meet its maker, a reading which (10) lacks. The difference is between thinking of the duck being ready as a piece of meat or being ready as a cognitive agent. This subtle difference is easily explicable. The active to eat implies something eaten, whether stated or not, so when we construe (10) with the duck con- strued as the eater, the duck is an agent. With (11b), the duck as the subject of the passive to be eaten cannot be an agent (the eater), but there are two different ways in which one can be ready to be eaten simply because ready is ambiguous between a mental and physical state.

So, with just single changes of word without changes of grammat- ical category, we go from no ambiguity, to two-way ambiguity, to non- sense, back to two-way ambiguity, save different from the first pair of ambiguities. We may say that syntactic structure is somehow bound up in the meanings of words, but is not, in any straightforward sense, derivable from what we take the words to mean. The crucial point, for our purposes, is that such facts about meaning are syntactically grounded. The philosopher may offer a theory of propositions and cor- rectly claim that (9) is associated with one of them, (10) is associated with two of them, (11a) is associated with none of them, and (11b), like (10), is associated with two of them, although not the same two. This advances not a jot, however, our understanding of why the association of meanings is different across the four cases.

So far so good, but granting that the structural conditions on mean- ing are syntactic, and so internalist by the lights of the above discussion, does not establish that meaning is similarly internalist. Content is one thing, its vehicle is quite another. I shall, here, only consider three prin- cipal reasons for the rejection of internalism: (i) the intimacy of truth and reference with meaning; (ii) the possibility of error; and (iii) externalist thought experiments. In his more recent writings, Chomsky (1996, 2000, 2004) has challenged the externalist reasoning in these three areas, although his criticisms go back much further (1975, 1980). In the following section, rather than present Chomsky’s arguments in all their detail, I shall endeavour to distil the arguments against each of the con- siderations just mentioned.