Are linguists better subjects?
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (4):721-736 (2009)
| Abstract | Who are the best subjects for judgment tasks intended to test grammatical hypotheses? Michael Devitt ( [2006a] , [2006b] ) argues, on the basis of a hypothesis concerning the psychology of such judgments, that linguists themselves are. We present empirical evidence suggesting that the relevant divide is not between linguists and non-linguists, but between subjects with and without minimally sufficient task-specific knowledge. In particular, we show that subjects with at least some minimal exposure to or knowledge of such tasks tend to perform consistently with one another—greater knowledge of linguistics makes no further difference—while at the same time exhibiting markedly greater in-group consistency than those who have no previous exposure to or knowledge of such tasks and their goals | |||||||||
| Keywords | intuition methodology language linguistics | |||||||||
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John Hawthorne & Dean Zimmerman (eds.) (2003). Language and Philosophical Linguistics. Blackwell Publishing.
Robert J. Matthews (2006). Could Competent Speakers Really Be Ignorant of Their Language? Croatian Journal of Philosophy 6 (3):457-467.
Isa Itkonen (2008). Concerning the Role of Consciousness in Linguistics. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (6):15-33.
Guy Longworth (2009). Ignorance of Linguistics: A Note on Devitt's Ignorance of Language. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 25 (1):21-34.
Alex Barber (ed.) (2003). Epistemology of Language. Oxford University Press.
Hayley G. Davis (2003). Rethinking Linguistics. Routledgecurzon.
Michael Devitt (2006). Intuitions in Linguistics. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (3):481-513.
Michael Devitt (2010). Linguistic Intuitions Revisited. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (4):833-865.
Steven Gross & Jennifer Culbertson (2011). Revisited Linguistic Intuitions. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (3):639-656.
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