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What “Intuitions” are Linguistic Evidence?

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Abstract

In “Intuitions in Linguistics” (2006a) and Ignorance of Language (2006b) I took it to be Chomskian orthodoxy that a speaker’s metalinguistic intuitions are provided by her linguistic competence. I argued against this view in favor of the alternative that the intuitions are empirical theory-laden central-processor responses to linguistic phenomena. The concern about these linguistic intuitions arises from their apparent role as evidence for a grammar. Mark Textor, “Devitt on the Epistemic Authority of Linguistic Intuitions” (2009), argues that I have picked the wrong intuitions: I should have picked non-judgmental linguistic “seemings”. These reside between metalinguistic judgments and linguistic performances and have an epistemic authority that the orthodox view may well be able to explain. Textor seems to think that the metalinguistic intuitions are not evidence at all. I argue that he is wrong about that. More importantly, I argue that there are no “in-between” linguistic seemings with epistemic authority.

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Notes

  1. The evidence that VoC is the received Chomskian view is overwhelming yet some strangely resist the attribution: Collins (2008a, pp. 16–19); Fitzgerald (2010); sec. 3.4. I have responded (2010), sec. 4.

  2. All references to Textor are to this paper.

  3. See, for example, Miščević 2006; Fitzgerald 2010.

  4. So this is not the obviously false claim that these intuitive judgments are theoretical (cf. Miščević 2006, p. 539; Devitt 2006c, p. 595).

  5. Culbertson and Gross (2009) challenge this. I have responded (2010: part III).

  6. Textor attributes to me the view that “typists don’t have typing intuitions” (p. 398). I think that they often do (2006a, p. 495; 2006b, p. 107).

  7. Textor does not make much of the alleged distinction between acceptability intuitions and grammatical intuitions. I think he is right not to do so. However, Chomskians commonly make a great deal of it, even claiming that speakers lack intuitions about grammaticality altogether: “Acceptability and interpretability as data sources are to be distinguished from the theoretical notion of grammaticality, and what is generated by a grammar. Speakers have no intuitions about what a grammar mandates, in the theoretical sense of a grammar that concerns linguists” (Fitzgerald 2010, p. 130; see also Collins 2008a, p. 31; Culbertson and Gross 2009). I argue that this is largely mistaken (2010, sec. 3).

  8. So there is room for doubt that a speaker’s linguistic intuitions are accurate. There is also room for doubt that any attempt to elicit such an intuition has succeeded. It can be hard to tell, for example, whether intuitions that an expression “is acceptable’, “is ok”, “sounds good”, and the like are really intuitions about grammaticality. If they are not, I argue, they are evidentially irrelevant (2006a, p. 490; 2006b, p. 102; 2010, sec. 3). There is a further worry that an elicited intuition may not be about grammaticality in the speaker’s actual language but rather in the prescribed language of the speaker’s community. This raises another doubt about the evidential status of these intuitions. However, we should keep in mind that there is likely to be a high correlation between the speaker’s language and the prescribed one.

  9. At one point in the earlier works, in a passage quoted by Textor (p. 399), I carelessly misstated the view as follows: “So she asks herself whether this expression is something she would say and what she would make of it if someone else said it. Her answer is the datum” (2006a, p. 498; 2006b, p. 109). Her answer is not, as I later pointed out (2006c, p. 594 n. 22); it is part of the central-processor reflection. The datum is the experience that the answer is about.

  10. The last two examples are from Gladwell 2005.

  11. I claim that this is the way to view intuitions of the ignorant in the ingenious “minimal pair” experiments (2006a, p. 499; 2006b, p. 110).

  12. Textor seems to have this commitment (p. 396). However, the commitment, hence the standard version, has no friends among my other Chomskian critics (Smith 2006; Collins 2006, 2007, 2008a; Pietroski 2008; Slezak 2009).

  13. Textor responds to this objection briefly (p. 398).

  14. See particularly, Hakes 1980, Ryan and Ledger 1984, Bialystok and Ryan 1985, Bialystok 1986. (I am indebted to Justyna Grudzinska for drawing this literature to my attention).

  15. Pietroski finds my view of what it is to be competent in a language “unduly narrow” in that it does not include “recognizing yuckiness and (un)ambiguity, entailments, and so on?” (2008: 665). In rejecting VoC I am indeed denying that the competence to use a language is essentially conjoined with the competence to make intuitive judgments about the language.

  16. Cf. Fitzgerald 2010, p. 153.

  17. He is not alone in this disagreement: see Collins 2006, p. 480; Fitzgerald 2010, sec. 3.2.

  18. I might have supported my view of these intuitions as evidence by appealing to the general role of testament as evidence. A person’s testament about something counts as evidence whenever there is good reason to suppose that she is likely to be reliable about that thing. Just the same goes for a person’s linguistic intuitions.

  19. This rejection has received a deal of criticism (some of it very harsh): Antony 2008; Collins 2007, 2008a, b; Dwyer and Pietroski 1996; Laurence 2003; Longworth 2009; Matthews 2006, Pietroski 2008; Rattan 2006; Rey 2006, 2008; Slezak 2009; Smith 2006. Devitt 2006c, 2008a, b, c, and 2009 are recent responses to some of these criticisms.

  20. I think (2010) that insufficient attention to the distinction between this indirect evidence and the direct evidence provided by linguistic performances is largely responsible for the mistaken views of Collins (2006, p. 480; 2008a, p. 31) and Fitzgerald (2010) about linguistic intuitions.

  21. Others hanker after a similar sort of intermediary: Miščević 2006; Fitzgerald 2010.

  22. Even if there were, in each competent speaker, a linguistic seeming between performance and judgment, how could it provide linguists with evidence? After all, linguists would have no direct access to it. Presumably, the evidence would have to come from the speaker’s report of her seeming. Then one wonders how that would differ from a metalinguistic judgment. (I am indebted to David Pereplyotchik for this note).

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Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at a conference on the philosophy of linguistics in Dubrovnik in September 2009 and a workshop on intuitions at the University of Stockholm in October 2009. I am grateful for comments received on those occasions. I am also indebted to two anonymous reviewers for Erkenntnis for some very helpful comments.

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  1. Philosophy Program, the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10016, USA

    Michael Devitt

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Devitt, M. What “Intuitions” are Linguistic Evidence?. Erkenn 73, 251–264 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-010-9230-6

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