Linguistics, Psychology, and the Ontology of Language

Croatian Journal of Philosophy 9 (3):291-301 (2009)
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Abstract

Noam Chomsky’s well-known claim that linguistics is a “branch of cognitive psychology” has generated a great deal of dissent—not from linguists or psychologists, but from philosophers. Jerrold Katz, Scott Soames, Michael Devitt, and Kim Sterelny have presented a number of arguments, intended to show that this Chomskian hypothesis is incorrect. On both sides of this debate, two distinct issues are often conflated: (1) the ontological status of language and (2) the relation between psychology and linguistics. The ontological issue is, I will argue, not the relevant issue in the debate. Even if this Chomskian position on the ontology of language is false, linguistics may still be a subfield of psychology if the relevant methods in linguistic theory construction are psychological. Two options are open to the philosopher who denies Chomskian conceptualism: linguistic nominalism or linguistic platonism. The former position holds that syntactic, semantic, and phonological properties are primarily properties, not of mental representations, but rather of public languagesentence tokens; The latter position holds that the linguistic properties are properties of public language sentence types. I will argue that both of these positions are compatible with Chomsky’s claim that linguistics is a branch of psychology, and the arguments that have been given for nominalism and platonism do not establish that linguistics and psychology are distinct disciplines.

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Fritz J. McDonald
Oakland University

Citations of this work

Why Language Exists.Fritz J. McDonald - 2012 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 12 (1):1-12.

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References found in this work

Linguistics and psychology.Scott Soames - 1984 - Linguistics and Philosophy 7 (2):155 - 179.
Realism vs. conceptualism in linguistics.Jerrold J. Katz & Paul M. Postal - 1991 - Linguistics and Philosophy 14 (5):515 - 554.
Is linguistics a branch of psychology?Stephen Laurence - 2003 - In Alex Barber (ed.), The Epistemology of Language. Oxford University Press.

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