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The Perils of Content
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Linguistics, Psychology, and the Ontology of Language
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| Translated Title: |
Linguistics, Psychology, and the Ontology of Language |
| Publication: |
Croatian Journal of Philosophy
(27/2009) |
| Author Name: |
McDonald, Fritz J.;
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| Language: |
English |
| Subject: |
Philosophy |
| Issue: |
27/2009 |
| Page Range: |
291-301 |
| No. of Pages: |
1 |
| File size: |
106
KB |
Download Fee:
(only for
non-subscribers) |
4 Euro (€) |
| Summary: |
Noam Chomsky’s well-known claim that linguistics is a “branch of cognitive psychology” has generated a great deal of dissent—not from linguists or psychologists, but from philosophers. Jerrold Katz, Scott Soames, Michael Devitt, and Kim Sterelny have presented a number of arguments, intended to show that this Chomskian hypothesis is incorrect. On both sides of this debate, two distinct issues are often conflated: (1) the ontological status of language and (2) the relation between psychology and linguistics. The ontological issue is, I will argue, not the relevant issue in the debate. Even if this Chomskian position on the ontology of language is false, linguistics may still be a subfield of psychology if the relevant methods in linguistic theory construction are psychological. Two options are open to the philosopher who denies Chomskian conceptualism: linguistic nominalism or linguistic platonism. The former position holds that syntactic, semantic, and phonological properties are primarily properties, not of mental representations, but rather of public language sentence tokens; The latter position holds that the linguistic properties are properties of public language sentence types. I will argue that both of these positions are compatible with Chomsky’s claim that linguistics is a branch of psychology, and the arguments that have been given for nominalism and platonism do not establish that linguistics and psychology are distinct disciplines. |
| Keywords: |
linguistics; psychology; ontology; methodology; Chomsky; Katz; Devitt |
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Nativism: In Defense of the Representational Interpretation
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Medical Ethics, Ordinary Concepts and Ordinary Lives
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Michael Bergmann, Justification Without Awareness: A Defense of Epistemic Externalism
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János Kis, Politics as a Moral Problem
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Paul A. Boghossian, Content and Justification: Philosophical Papers
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