Page 46 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology
associated with the program initiated by Chomsky.) Others reject this approach on the grounds that such intuitions do not provide a suitably intersubjective basis for testing linguistic claims. (How are cases in which some speakers claim grammaticality and other speakers deny it to be understood? For critical dis- cussion of this approach, see Sampson 1975: ch. 4.)
Alternatives (or supplements) to such intuitionism include psycholinguistic investigation of speech pro- duction and comprehension, and corpus-based inves- tigation of distributional structure.
Those who seek psycholinguistic foundations demand, for the justification of some claim, that it be supported by evidence about the psychological states of language users. That the sentences Alf persuaded Beth to leave and Alf expected Beth to leave have different 'deep structural' analyses has its epistemic grounding, on this account, in facts, revealed in 'click paradigm' experiments, about language users' per- ceptual images of these sentences (Fodor et al. 1974: ch. 6).
Corpus-based investigations, by contrast, take as epistemically primitive observations of the distri- bution, in an attested corpus of utterances, of various subsentential elements (for an influential account, see Harris 1964).
3. RelationsBetweenOntologicaland Epistemological Foundations
There is no straightforward relation between positions on questions about ontological and epistemological foundations. Someone who accepts a psychologistic account might but need not be an intuitionist; s/he might reject intuitionism in favor of a psycholinguistic approach. Perhaps more surprisingly, a Platonist might adopt the same intuitionistic approach to epis- temological foundations as a rival psychologistic the- orist. Of course, in treating users' intuitions as authoritatively justificatory, these rival theorists will interpret them differently—the 'psychologist' will interpret them as evidence about competence, whereas the Platonist will interpret them as evidence (on the
model of perceptual evidence) about structures which exist independently of human psychological states.
4. Theoretical Foundations
Another approach to linguistic foundations is embodied in attempts to articulate the findings of linguistics with those of other sciences. Those involved in the neurolinguistic enterprise are plausibly rep- resented as seeking to discover the bases or foun- dations, in the architecture and functioning of the brain, of human linguistic capacities and perform- ances. In a distinct but related way,comparative etho- logists might try to discover the precursors of human language capacities and performances in the capaci- ties and performances of nonhuman species (see Lieberman 1984).
Articulation of mathematical models for linguistic structure provides another example of theoretical foundationalism. Investigations of the properties of mathematical systems might even be thought to bear on the adequacy of devices of grammatical rep- resentation. (For some applications of mathematical techniques to the understanding of language acqui- sition, see Wexler and Culicover 1980.)
Bibliography
Bennett J 1976 Linguistic Behaviour. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Chomsky N 1986 Knowledge of Language Its Nature.Origin. and Use.Praeger, New York
Fodor J A, Bever J G, Garrett M F 1974 The Psychology of Language. McGraw-Hill, New York
Harris Z 1964 Distributional structure. In: Fodor J A, Katz J J (eds.) The Structure of Language. Prentice-Hall, Engle- wood Cliffs, NJ
Katz J J 1981 Language and Other Abstract Objects. Blackwell, Oxford
Lieberman P 1984 The Biology and Evolution of Language. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Sampson G 1975 The Form of Language. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London
Skinner B F 1957 Verbal Behavior. Appleton-Century- Crofts, New York
Wexler K, Culicover P W1980 Formal Principles of Language Acquisition. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
The term 'instrumentalism' is used in the philosophy of science to describe a particular way of interpreting scientific theories, and the terms embedded in those
theories. Instrumentalism is usually defined in contra- distinction to 'realism.' Realist philosophies of science claim that scientific theories describe a reality over
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Instrumentalism P.Carr