Georges Rey

In my (2020) I defended an intentionalist understanding of Chomskyan linguistics whereby standard linguistic entities (“SLEs”) such as words, phrases and phonemes don’t exist, but are “intentional inexistents” merely represented in our brains. Reviewers complained this was in tension with “externalist” theories of representation that require the external existence of a representation’s referents. I argue that this requirement can be met by the kind of idealization to which Chomskyan theories appeal, and reference to highly idealized SLEs objects can be understood via idealized dispositions, along the lines of Quine’s (1960) invocation of Weierstrass’s “epsilondelta” strategy for defining a limit. Where such a strategy is available in a domain, it would seem to render the externalist/internalist distinction there explanatorily otiose.

This book is a defense of a Chomskyan conception of language against philosophical objections that have been raised against it. It also provides, however, a critical examination of some of the glosses on the theory: the assimilation of it to traditional Rationalism; a supposed conflict between being innate and learned; an unclear ontology and the need of a "representational pretense" with regard to it; and, most crucially, a rejection of Chomsky's eliminativism about the role of intentionality not only in his own theories, but in any serious science at all. This last is a fundamentally important issue for linguistics, psychology, and philosophy that an examination of a theory as rich and promising as a Chomskyan linguistics should help illuminate. The book ends with a discussion of some further issues that Chomsky misleadingly associates with his theory: an anti-realism about ordinary thought and talk, and a dismissal of the mind/body problem(s), towards the solution of some of which his theory in fact makes an important contribution.

“Analytic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are doctors,” have historically been characterized as ones that are true by virtue of the meanings of their words alone and/or can be known to be so solely by knowing those meanings. They are contrasted with more usual “synthetic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are rich,” (knowledge of) whose truth depends also upon (knowledge of) the worldly fortunes of pediatricians. Beginning with Frege, many philosophers hoped to show that the truths of logic and mathematics and other apparently a priori domains, such as much of philosophy and the foundations of science, could be shown to be analytic by careful “conceptual analysis” of the meanings of crucial words. Analyses of philosophically important terms and concepts, such as “material object,” “cause,” “freedom,” or “knowledge” turned out, however, to be far more problematic than philosophers had anticipated, and some, particularly Quine and his followers, began to doubt the reality of the distinction. This in turn led him and others to doubt the factual determinacy of claims of meaning and translation in general, as well as, ultimately, the reality and determinacy of mental states. There have been a number of interesting reactions to this scepticism, in philosophy and linguistics (this latter to be treated in the supplement, Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics); but, while the reality of mental states might be saved, it has yet to be shown that appeals to the analytic will ever be able to ground “analysis” and the a priori in quite the way that philosophers had hoped. (Note that all footnotes are substantive, but inessential to an initial reading, and are accessed in a separate file by clicking on the bracketed superscript. The mention vs. use of a term will be indicated either by quotation marks or italics, depending upon which is most easily readable in the context.)

I supplement Frankish’s defense of illusionism by pressing a point I’ve made elsewhere regarding how actual computational proposals in psychology for conscious processes could be run on desktop computers that most people wouldn’t regard as conscious. I distinguish the w(eak)-consciousness of such a desktop from the s(trong)-consciousness people think humans but no such machines enjoy, which gives rise to an explanatory gap, invites first scepticism, unwanted analgesia, and is not supported by Cartesian introspections or any other non-tendentious evidence. Rather, along lines suggested by Wittgenstein and Chomsky, it seems to be an illusory projection of our innate, involuntary responses to things that look and act like our conspecifics, one encouraged by a de-contexualized philosophical over-reading of ordinary talk, akin to an over-reading of a term like “the sky.” However, it also seems to be an illusory projection we can’t entirely dispell.

The article describes to what extent the structures and contents of the mind are innate, and to what extent they are learned or otherwise acquired from the environment. Aristotle argued that all ideas are derived from experience by a causal process in which forms (or properties of things) in the external world are transmitted into the mind. John Locke insisted that the simple ideas are derived from sensation, and all other ideas are constructed from the simple ones by the mental operations of compounding, comparing, and abstracting. Sober emphasized that there is no common currency with which to compare the relative contributions of genes and environment and suggested that biological determinants do not in general decompose into amounts of genetic versus nongenetic force. Sober suggested that there might not be a single specification of relevant environments and one might need to fix the range pragmatically as it varies with explanatory interests. Ariew suggested that what matters for innateness is whether a trait's emergence is sensitive to certain specific kinds of environmental factors, where the relevant factors can vary with the trait in question and indeed with one's explanatory interest. Fodor's initial agument for the innateness of concepts was quite simple. He pointed out that standard accounts of learning a trait it as a process of hypothesis confirmation.