Methodology in the Philosophy of Linguistics

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Notes

¹Both papers are in this issue. Unidentified references to Antony and Pietroski are to these works. All unindentified references to my work are to my book.

²Non-Chomskians don't have this problem; thus, Elizabeth Camp 2007 gets the book pretty right and Mark Crimmins 2007 gets it dead right.

³Most of these papers arose from very productive conferences in the philosophy of linguistics held annually in Dubrovnik since 2005. As a result most have been published in the Croatian Journal of Philosophy, which has become a centre for the philosophy of linguistics.

⁴For convenience I focus on the competence to produce certain outputs.

⁵I apply ‘rule’ to syntax not with its technical sense in linguistics but with a broader sense covering what linguists call ‘principles’[3, n. 1].

⁶This issue of theoretical interest is further explored in [2008a: sec. 4.1].

⁷For my views on this reality see [178–89; also 2006c: 597–604; 2008a: secs. 4.2, 5; 2008b].

⁸Smith [2006: 441] is not part of the consensus. I have responded [2006c: 585–6].

⁹Smith is more brutal, describing my lack of commitment as ‘lily-livered’[2006: 451]. I have responded [2006c: 579 n. 7].

¹⁰So Pietroski's claim that ‘Devitt's case for his own view relies on some unwarranted assumptions about … I-languages’[657] is false. So too is his similar view about linguistic competence, but I have no space to argue the matter.

¹¹Smith [2006: 443–6] and Miscevic 2006 criticize my view on intuitions. My response to Miscevic includes some development of the view [2006c: 594–5].

¹²Five of the book's fourteen theses are clearly committed to cognitivism. Seven oppose a cognitive theory of some sort.

¹³All these claims, bar one, are about the representation of rules and I think those are adequately supported on the spot or by later evidence [210–20]. The exception is a claim about the representation of angles, resulting from the final two words in the following passage quoted by Antony: ‘It is not plausible to suppose that the kingfisher represents any … facts about refraction and angles’[49]. This claim is inconsistent with others in the book (e.g. [21, n. 5]) and I should never have made it.

¹⁴She substitutes a corollary [52] of the Razor for the Razor itself. This is weird. The Razor is stated many times in the book and the substitution does not even serve her hostile purposes.

¹⁵My thanks to Georges Rey and Barbara Scholz for comments on a draft of this paper.