Page 60 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology
Wittgenstein. His ideas on, for instance, what it is to able phenomena themselves which constitute the follow a rule of a language (see Wittgenstein 1958, object of inquiry in linguistics. Chomsky is not an
Kripke 1982), are equally well described as belonging to any of the three fields that have been defined. Some scholars, such as Baker and Hacker (1984) have attempted to use the work of Wittgenstein to show that theoretical linguistics simply has no object of inquiry. Others, such as Itkonen (1978) have used Wittgenstein to support the view that theoretical linguistics not only has an object of inquiry, but is autonomous with respect to neighboring disciplines. Wittgenstein sought to show that the notion of private language was incoherent, that the notion of a rule of language can be given a coherent interpretation only if the individual speaker is not considered in isolation from his speech community. This is the argument against 'private language/ Itkonen has tried to show that Chomsky's conception of linguistic reality is tan- tamount to the claim that there may be private rules of language, and is therefore incoherent. Chomsky (1986) has replied that Wittgensteinian skepticism about rules as speaker-internal states is simply a ver-
sion of the refusal to postulate underlying realities for observed behavior.
2. Philosophies of Linguistics
As in most areas of philosophy, 'isms' abound in the 'philosophy of linguistics.' (The entry Foundations of Linguistics describes five of these: psychologism, Pla- tonism, behaviorism, conventionalism, and instru- mentalism.) Katz (1981) outlines three main positions in the philosophy of linguistics: realism, nominalism, and conceptualism. Some commentary on the relationship between these terms, and extent to which they overlap, is therefore necessary.
One can align Katz's terms with those cited in the Foundations of Linguistics entry. For Katz (1981), 'realism' means Platonic realism. This is therefore not entirely equivalent to realism in the philosophy of science. There, realist interpretations of theoretical constructs assume that they correspond to extra- theoretical entities. Thus, Chomsky is a realist in the latter sense, but not in the Platonic sense: he takes linguistic theories to refer to extra-theoretical states (mental states), but not to Platonic states of affairs. The term 'realism' in the philosophy of language has a somewhat wider sense than the same term in the philosophy of science: while realism in the philosophy of language concerns terms in general, scientific realism concerns scientific terms.
Nominalism denies that there are linguistic realities over and above the observable, strictly physical, marks on paper and noises in the air which many linguists take to be manifestations of language, rather than language per se. It is, therefore, an instru- mentalist position. Closely related to this position are empiricism and the version of empiricism known as behaviorism; they share the view that it is the observ-
empiricist in this sense, because he denies that observ- able behavior constitutes the object of linguistic inquiry.
The term 'conceptualism' as used by Katz (1981), is equivalent to the term 'psychologism' (as described in Foundations of Linguistics. It denotes a position which claims that linguistic objects are speaker- internal states of affairs (i.e., mental states).
Chomsky (1995) is the best known advocate of this position. His is an internalist philosopher of linguis- tics, in that the object of linguistic inquiry is, for him, strictly mind-internal in a special sense: it is a specifi- cally linguistic cognitive state which contains an 'aus- tere' computational procedure, austere in the sense of having very limited access to perceptual systems of behavior. The objects of inquiry are a genetically- encoded, specifically linguistic initial cognitive state and the individual 'final states' (referred to informally as 'knowing a language') which are said to be mani- festations of that initial state. Despite his avowed internalism, Chomsky appears to allow that observ- able behavior may be said to be linguistic since it is exposure to 'linguistic experience' ('primary linguistic data') which is said to trigger the transition from initial to final state. The relation between internal linguistic cognitive states and observable external be- havior is, for Chomsky, one of internalization/ externalization. It is arguable that this conception of the relation undermines any attempt at radical internalism, since, in allowing that language may be internalized one is, arguably, conceding that it may be mind-external. An alternative conception of the relation between radically internal language and
the observable products of speakers' behavior is given by Burton-Roberts (1994), who claims that the latter are produced in aid of physically representing the former, without themselves being linguistic. Hence the relation isconventional.
Bibliography
Baker G, Hacker P 1984 Language, Sense, and Nonsense. Blackwell, Oxford
Burton-Roberts N 1994 Ambiguity, sentence and utterance: a representational approach. Transactions of the Philo- logical Society 92: 179-212
Chomsky N 1986 Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use.Praeger, New York
Chomsky N 1995 Language and nature. Mind 104: 1-61 Devitt M, Sterelny K 1987 Language and Reality: an Intro-
duction to the Philosophy of Language. Blackwell, Oxford Hkonen E1978 Grammatical Theory and Metascience. Benja-
mins, Amsterdam
Katz J J 1981 Language and Other Abstract Objects.
Blackwell, Oxford
Kripke S A 1982 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language:
An Elementary Exposition. Blackwell, Oxford Wittgenstein L 1958 Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell,
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