Croatian Journal of Philosophy Vol. VIII, No. 22, 2008 What Remains of Our Knowledge of Language? Reply to Collins BARRY C. SMITH School of Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London The new Chomskian orthodoxy denies that our linguistic competence gives us knowledge *of* a language, and that the representations in the language faculty are representations *of* anything. In reply, I have argued that through their intuitions speaker/hearers, (but not their language faculties) have knowledge of language, though not of any externally existing language. In order to count as knowledge, these intuitions must track linguistic facts represented in the language faculty. I defend this idea against the objections Collins has raised to such an account. Key words: knowledge of language, representions of language, language faculty, intuitions, linguistic self-knowledge What equips us to use and understand a language? The full story of how we experience sounds linguistically, how we produce and hear sentence forms, is both complex and at odds with the everyday impression speakers and hearers have that they are participating in an external, common and conventionally sustained linguistic practice. As speakers and listeners we enjoy conscious experiences of speech that unify quite diverse sources of information giving us the illusion that we are dealing with a single thing: The language. The assumption that there is such a single thing as the language we share has no empirical credibility but remains a fi rm fi xture of our naïve world-view, and is popular with many philosophers. Theoretical progress in generative linguistics, however, has signifi cantly undermined the naïve view, and made us focus instead on non-conventional and largely innate principles of grammatical structuring in the human mind; principles that shape the acquisition of individual grammars. The linguistic elements we make conscious use of when speaking, or of which we are apprised when listening, are not to be found in a shared, public language. There are several sources of an individual's knowledge of language: some of it fi rst-personal knowledge of word meaning, some of it third-personal knowledge of what other speakers mean by their words, and much of it due to the sub-personal 58 B. C. Smith, What Remains of Our Knowledge of Language? infl uence the language faculty has on what we fi nd an acceptable syntactic arrangement of words. With our knowledge of language depending on fi rstthirdand sub-personal aspects of cognition, there is no reason to suppose there is single locus of linguistic signifi cance. Though we need not deny this is how things appear to us. Michael Dummett is right to describe speech as a conscious, rational activity: this is certainly how we experience it. But there is no reason to think, as Dummett does, that all the regularities of our speech are rationally chosen. The grammars that constrain the way our words come out in the right order when we speak are not consciously adopted or rationally adhered to: they are not the result of conventions, but of specialized, cognitive mechanisms to which we have no conscious access. To discover their properties we need to turn to generative linguistics: a branch of cognitive psychology. This shift in focus from studying supposedly shared, public languages-usually by attending to facts about speakers' behaviour1-to the study of linguistic forms in the minds of speakers-the forms their internal apparatus assigns to the sounds, signs or marks they produce and encounter-is due of course to the work of Noam Chomsky (1959, 1965, 1968, 1980, 1986, 2000) who has always stressed that it is knowledge of language, or the speaker/hearer's linguistic competence that linguists are studying when they study language. There is a considerable irony here since Dummett has long maintained that the notion of knowledge plays a crucial role the study of language, and that an account of the signifi cance of a speaker's language must go via an account of his knowledge of language.2 Dummett is certainly right on this point. Without adverting to speakers' knowledge we could not be sure we were actually characterising their language: the languages speakers use and understand. Where Dummett goes wrong is in characterising knowledge of language as a complex practical ability, found at a single level of organisation in the speaker, and emerging from a single source. Dummett sees linguistic knowledge as a practical ability3 because language is conceived as a communal practice that has to be mastered by individuals in the community: a conception Dummett retains by not having seen all the way through to the consequences of his insight that we should be studying the individual speaker's knowledge of language. His residual, almost ancestral, commitment to an external entity-The language-prevents him from recognizing the di1 Michael Devitt is no different to Quine in this respect. Even though the former embraces representations that the later would abjure, it is done on the basis of a theory about behaviour not a theory of the cognitive states of speaker/hearers underlying their behaviour. 2 According to Dummett, a theory of meaning for a language should be a theory of understanding: a theory of what speakers know when they know the language; otherwise the theory we come up with may not capture the properties of their language, the language they use and understand. See Dummett 1976 and 1978. 3 Though Dummett does see this practical ability as having an irreducible theoretical component. None of this, however, explains why speech should be a conscious activity, since our practical abilities need not be part of of consciousness. B. C. Smith, What Remains of Our Knowledge of Language? 59 verse sources and different cognitive levels on which a speaker's knowledge of language depends. As a result, the challenge to characterize the individual speaker's knowledge of language passes to Chomsky and the generative linguistics programme. But here we discover a further irony. For now Chomsky, has recently taken to denying that our knowledge of language gives us knowledge of anything. (See Chomsky 2000) Whereas in Aspects of the Theory Of Syntax, Chomsky claimed that knowledge of language-the knowledge that fi xes the properties of a speaker's language-was unlike ordinary knowledge in being in principle inaccessible to consciousness. Other signifi cant differences between the notion of knowledge Chomsky was trying to capture and the notions of knowledge-that and knowledge-how that philosophers typically focus on led Chomsky to propose the neologism 'cognize' in place of 'know' when talking about a speaker's relation to his or her grammar. But these days little remains of the idea that a speaker stands in a cognitive relation to the grammar of his or her language, or even that he or she has knowledge of language. The move is in many ways a rational one. For Chomsky, 'language has no existence apart from its mental representation' in the mind of the speaker4, so there is no object of knowledge independent of the states of the mind/brain for the speaker/hearer's linguistic competence to be right or wrong about. The facts about a language are fi xed by the psychological states of the speaker that constitute his or her competence. So in what sense can we talk about those states as providing the speaker/hearer with knowledge of the linguistic facts, when those states are not answerable to the facts-as knowledge would require-but rather determine them? Why, therefore, not give up all claim to be talking about knowledge and simply concentrate on the states of the internal mechanism that determine the linguistic properties? What remains is a piece of rather misleading piece of terminology, 'knowledge of language', which we should now see as a technical term, if necessary hyphenated as 'knowledge-of-language', stripped of both its everyday and philosophical connotations. Such is the new Chomskian orthodoxy, and perhaps no philosopher has done more to bring it to other philosophers' attention and explain it cogently than John Collins. Not only has he taken great care to uncover and render perspicuous the real motivations of Chomsky's thought but he has added a much needed philosophical framework to current linguistic theorizing, enabling him to produce a battery of impressive arguments in favour of the new picture. I greatly admire the insights he has brought to this area, and the way he has engaged philosophers who have not yet seen the light, but like all ideologies there will be persisting struggles about the right course for the struggle to take.5 So while Collins describes Robert Matthews and myself as being on the side of the 4 Chomsky 1972, 169 fn. 5 See Collins 2004, 2006, 2007.