Page 198 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
3.4 Criticism of the Idea of Deep Linguistic Com- petence
This theory has met with much criticism, only some of which, however, focuses on the nature of rules. Quine (1976) has rejected the idea that there is any- thing intermediary between, on the one hand, merely conforming to rules and, on the other hand, being guided by explicitly stated rules. Y ou can learn a fore- ign language by way of learning to follow rules, as explicitly stated, but you do not learn your mother tongue that way. Since there is nothing intermediary, learning a mother tongue is not a matter of acquiring rules at all. Consequently there is no basis for claiming that a grammar which correctly specifies the class of sentences of a language may still be incorrect. The student can only choose between equally good gram- mars on the basis of preference for elegance and sim- plicity.
An extensive criticism, based on interpretation of Wittgenstein, directed at Chomsky and other linguists as well as at several modern philosophers of language, has been provided by Baker and Hacker (1984). First of all, they stress that to the extent that there are rules of a language, these rules have normative force. Only rules which speakers of the language in fact express, apply, and appeal to in teaching, justification, and criticism can have normative force. Rules which are only discovered by the linguist and thought to operate unconsciously, by way of being internally represented, cannot have any normative force and are not, there- fore, rules which govern the linguistic practice. This issue, however, runs the risk of reducing to a ter- minological one about the word rule, and it is treated as such in Chomsky (1986).
Another, even more basic, point concerns the very notion of a set of rules which determine the whole class of well-formed, meaningful sentences, and also provide interpretations of them. According to Baker and Hacker, this conception belongs to the mistaken picture of rules grinding out consequences on their own. The correct view is that the meaning of an expression is determined by nothing else than its actual use. This holds for complex expressions as much as for individual words. It is a mistake to think that the meaning of a sentence is determined in advance. It is again a mistake to think that a line can be drawn, once and for all, between what is a sentence and what is not a sentence, and between expressions that make sense and expressions that do not. Some- thing which does not make sense in one context of use may make perfectly good sense in another.
Above all, so Baker and Hacker claim, it is a mis- take to think that there is any particular problem about producing and understanding new sentences, something which needs to be explained and which is to be explained by appeal to rules. Only if it is assumed that the meaning of a new sentence is determined in advance does the question arise as to how one can
know what it is. Against this, however, it can be said that what needs to be explained is just the fact that speakers do understand new sentences in the same way, regardless of whether the meanings of those sen- tences are determined in advance. It seems plausible that an appeal to rules is part of a good explanation of this fact. It is another question whether the normative aspect of rules has a role to play in such an expla- nation.
3.5 Concluding Remarks
A person can be said to have an ability only if what counts as success, in exercising that ability, is sufficiently well determined. In the case of linguistic abilities, however, it can only be speakers of the language who decide what is to count as success. So it seems that what counts as successful exercise of linguistic abilities is determined precisely by exercise of linguistic abilities. This makes the notion of rules of language problematic.
On the other hand, if we want to retain the idea of a common language as something which all members in a speech community know, something which is more than just similarities in the ways speakers talk and interpret each other, then it seems that the notion of normative rules of language is required, for without this notion it remains unclear what a common lang- uage, so conceived, would be.
See also: Analyticity; Convention; Conversational Maxims; Game Theoretical Semantics; Language Game; Montague Grammar; Private Language.
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