Meta-Linguistics: Methodology and Ontology in Devitt's Ignorance of Language

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹Unattributed page numbers refer to Ignorance of Language.

²Although even here, I overstate the case. Intuitions of impossibility can be quite mistaken.

³I was confused by this wording in the original. Devitt considerately provided the following gloss in personal correspondence: ‘We need wait only until no better explanations are likely, given what we already know.’

⁴Devitt in fact concedes that facts about speaker's competences may constrain the theory of the structure rules of a language—thus, his Third Methodological Point:

(MP3): The Respect Constraint makes the justification of the grammar partly dependent on the justification of the theory of competence, and vice versa. Beyond that, however, the grammar and the theory of competence are independent of each other.

[274]

But he's silent on the matter of how this mutual evidential constraint works, much less how it works without flouting the ‘epistemic and explanatory priority’ of the language's grammar that MP4 bids us respect.