Abstract

Barry C. Smith: Quine and Chomsky on the Ins and Outs of Language: W.V.O. Quine's thinking has had a profound and lasting influence on the philosophy of language despite the fact that he remained firmly at odds with the science of linguistics for over thirty years. His rejection of the cognitive revolution ushered in by Noam Chomsky's work on language was rooted in a deeply held philosophical conviction that language was a publicly observable medium. However, Quine's advocacy of naturalized epistemology should have inclined him to defer to advances in empirical linguistics due to generative grammar. Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior provided a devastating critique of behaviorism in the study of language and led to a subsequent mentalism about linguistic phenomena. But Quine did not revise his view about the proper way to study language, or his attendant view about the nature of language. His reasons for resisting Chomsky's position are worth reconsidering since they are in the background to many philosophers' views about the nature of language. The question addressed here is whether the dispute between Quine and Chomsky was a purely philosophical one, or whether it could have been resolved had greater attention been paid to the empirical facts.