Linguistic Intuitions

An overview of debates surrounding the use of meta-linguistic judgments in linguistics, including recent relevant empirical results.

Throughout history, philosophers have drawn on language to clarify or uncover philosophically relevant intuitions, making a tacit distinction between core and periphery of language. This paper argues that such intuitions have the same status as linguistic intuitions, neither of which has the status of belief or even acceptance. This leads to the view that linguistically reflected philosophically relevant intuitions are part of the knowledge of grammar in an extended sense.

This is my entry on natural language ontology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

This paper presents a novel perspective on the force-content distinction making use of truthmaker semantics and an ontology of attitudinal objects, things that are neither acts (or states) nor propositions. It gives a novel norm-based definition of the notion of direction of fit, strictly linking truth and (non-action-guiding) correctness.

Linguistic intuitions are a central source of evidence across a variety of linguistic domains. They have also long been a source of controversy. This chapter aims to illuminate the etiology and evidential status of at least some linguistic intuitions by relating them to error signals of the sort posited by accounts of on-line monitoring of speech production and comprehension. The suggestion is framed as a novel reply to Michael Devitt’s claim that linguistic intuitions are theory-laden “central systems” responses, rather than (...) endorsed outputs of a modularized language faculty (the “Voice of Competence”). Along the way, it is argued that linguistic intuitions may not constitute a natural kind with a common etiology; and that, for a range of cases, the process by which intuitions used in linguistics are generated amounts to little more than comprehension. (shrink)

الملخص قاعدة "الأصل" و "استصحاب الحال" قراءة في منهج النحاة من الاستعمال إلى التعليل إلى القاعدة ملخص تعدّ فكرة "الأصل" (=علة الأصل) منهجـًا اتّبعه النّحاة لتقديم تفسيرات منطقية في بعض مسائل الكلم في العربية، إذ أخذ النحاة إجراء منهج تحليليّ يعتمد افتراض أو استحضار مكوّن بنيوي على أنّه "أصل الاستعمال" غاية إيجاد مقاربات منطقية تربط الاستعمال المنجز بالقاعدة، فـ"الأصل"–وفق النحاة- إمّا "نمطٌ لغويٌّ مهجورٌ غير أنّه اُستعمل في طور من أطوار العربية"، أو "نمط لغوي افتراضي" يجريه النحاة على معيارية الاستعمال (...) بحيث يصحّ عدّه منجزًا لغويًا تقابليًّا لاستعمالات تجري والقاعدة؛ وقد أجرى سيبيويه منهج قياسٍ افتراضي وَفْقَ عبارته:"وهذا تمثيلٌ ولم يُتكلّم به" ليجعل "المكوّن" الافتراضي شاهدًا نحويًّا يمثّل "أصل الاستعمال" ويصحّ الرجوع إليه في اشتقاق القاعدة والوصول إلى التعليل. يدرس البحث علاقة الوظيفة التعليلية بين "الأصل" و"استصحاب الحال" أجْل الوقوف على منهج النحاة في إطلاق الأحكام القواعدية في المسائل التي اعتمدوا فيها فكرة التعليل بـ"الأصل"، وهل كانت أحكامهم في تلك المسائل مقنعة أو غير مقنعة؟ ويسعى البحث إلى بيان العلاقة بين فكرة "الأصل" و"أدلة النحو" (الأصول) من وجهة تسعى إلى بيان منطق التعليل بـ"علة الأصل". The original rule of the historical usage of the primary sentence and the semi-original rules of the grammatical thinking A reading in the grammarian's approach, from usage to the reasoning to the rules Abstract The original rule of the historical usage of the primary sentence is considered one of the methods that followed by the grammarians to provide a logical explanation sequence for some of the language issues. Most of the grammarians assume that there is a new sentence style that referred to an old usage in some of the sentence’s structure. According to the grammarians that these old structures are being the reference rules and evidences to explain the structure of the new structure style. Also based on the grammarian approach the old structure is divided into two parts: the first, sentence structure that have been actually used in the language history. The second is an imagination assumption where such kind of structures have not been used before and therefore can be considered as a hypothetical lingual style only, Sebaweeh has conducted a standard approach according to his phrase "This is a an example only, it has not been spoken". It is important to know that the grammarians have followed an analytical approach to make a center point between the original rule and the semi-original rule so as to provide a logical explanation of these structure styles. This research seeks to study the relation between the original rule and semi-original rules of the grammatical thinking. In addition, this search seeks to study the relation between the original rule and the Grammatical evidence (=OSOL) Key Words: The original rule - the semi-original rules -/- الكلمات المفتاحية أصول النحو، قاعدة الأصل، استصحاب الحال. (shrink)

Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate inferences from descriptions of unusual (stereotype-divergent) cases. We conduct an experiment that combines plausibility ratings (...) with pupillometry to document this “salience bias.” We find that under certain conditions, competent speakers automatically make stereotypical inferences they know to be inappropriate. (shrink)

Recording devices are generally taken to present problems for the standard Kaplanian semantics for indexicals. In this paper, I argue that the remote utterance view offers the best way for the Kaplanian semantics to handle the recalcitrant data that comes from the use of recording devices. Following Sidelle I argue that recording devices allow agents to perform utterances at a distance. Using the essential, but widely ignored, distinction between tokens and utterances, I develop the view beyond the initial sketch given (...) by Sidelle, and I answer the main objections raised against the view. The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 gives a succinct presentation of Kaplanian semantics and of the problem raised by the use recording devices, Section 2 presents the remote utterance view and Section 3 answers the objections put forward against the view and further develops it. I conclude that the remote utterance view can handle the data that comes from the use of recording devices with only modest modifications of the Kaplanian semantics. (shrink)

Recent work in formal semantics suggests that the language system includes not only a structure building device, as standardly assumed, but also a natural deductive system which can determine when expressions have trivial truth-conditions (e.g., are logically true/false) and mark them as unacceptable. This hypothesis, called the `logicality of language', accounts for many acceptability patterns, including systematic restrictions on the distribution of quantifiers. To deal with apparent counter-examples consisting of acceptable tautologies and contradictions, the logicality of language is often paired (...) with an additional assumption according to which logical forms are radically underspecified: i.e., the language system can see functional terms but is `blind' to open class terms to the extent that different tokens of the same term are treated as if independent. This conception of logical form has profound implications: it suggests an extreme version of the modularity of language, and can only be paired with non-classical---indeed quite exotic---kinds of deductive systems. The aim of this paper is to show that we can pair the logicality of language with a different and ultimately more traditional account of logical form. This framework accounts for the basic acceptability patterns which motivated the logicality of language, can explain why some tautologies and contradictions are acceptable, and makes better predictions in key cases. As a result, we can pursue versions of the logicality of language in frameworks compatible with the view that the language system is not radically modular vis-a-vis its open class terms and employs a deductive system that is basically classical. (shrink)

This dissertation is devoted to empirically contrasting the Suppositional Theory of conditionals, which holds that indicative conditionals serve the purpose of engaging in hypothetical thought, and Inferentialism, which holds that indicative conditionals express reason relations. Throughout a series of experiments, probabilistic and truth-conditional variants of Inferentialism are investigated using new stimulus materials, which manipulate previously overlooked relevance conditions. These studies are some of the first published studies to directly investigate the central claims of Inferentialism empirically. In contrast, the Suppositional Theory (...) of conditionals has an impressive track record through more than a decade of intensive testing. The evidence for the Suppositional Theory encompasses three sources. Firstly, direct investigations of the probability of indicative conditionals, which substantiate “the Equation” (P(if A, then C) = P(C|A)). Secondly, the pattern of results known as “the defective truth table” effect, which corroborates the de Finetti truth table. And thirdly, indirect evidence from the uncertain and-to-if inference task. Through four studies each of these sources of evidence are scrutinized anew under the application of novel stimulus materials that factorially combine all permutations of prior and relevance levels of two conjoined sentences. The results indicate that the Equation only holds under positive relevance (P(C|A) – P(C|¬A) > 0) for indicative conditionals. In the case of irrelevance (P(C|A) – P(C|¬A) = 0), or negative relevance (P(C|A) – P(C|¬A) < 0), the strong relationship between P(if A, then C) and P(C|A) is disrupted. This finding suggests that participants tend to view natural language conditionals as defective under irrelevance and negative relevance (Chapter 2). Furthermore, most of the participants turn out only to be probabilistically coherent above chance levels for the uncertain and-to-if inference in the positive relevance condition, when applying the Equation (Chapter 3). Finally, the results on the truth table task indicate that the de Finetti truth table is at most descriptive for about a third of the participants (Chapter 4). Conversely, strong evidence for a probabilistic implementation of Inferentialism could be obtained from assessments of P(if A, then C) across relevance levels (Chapter 2) and the participants’ performance on the uncertain-and-to-if inference task (Chapter 3). Yet the results from the truth table task suggest that these findings could not be extended to truth-conditional Inferentialism (Chapter 4). On the contrary, strong dissociations could be found between the presence of an effect of the reason relation reading on the probability and acceptability evaluations of indicative conditionals (and connate sentences), and the lack of an effect of the reason relation reading on the truth evaluation of the same sentences. A bird’s eye view on these surprising results is taken in the final chapter and it is discussed which perspectives these results open up for future research. (shrink)

A major flaw of the book is its failure to note Wittgenstein’s role in destroying the mechanical or reductionist or computationalist view of mind. These continue to dominate cognitive science and philosophy in spite of the fact that they were powerfully countered by W and later by Searle and others. -/- There is much talk of W’s use of terms like “grammar”, “rules” etc but never a clear mention that they mean our Evolved Psychology or our genetically programmed innate behavior. (...) There are references to Baker and Hacker's works and to Budd, but none to many standard W refs such as ter Hark, Johnston, and especially to the searchable Intelex CDROM of his complete works, nor to Searle, and none to the vast literature of EP. -/- Many sections of the book are reasonably successful in describing W’s work but there is much aimless wandering and many mistakes and confusions. These will hopefully be obvious to those who read the above and my other reviews as I cannot recount more than a few of the hundreds of critical comments I made in my two readings of this book. A major flaw, common to most writing in the behavioral sciences, is the lack of awareness of the S1/S2 two selves mode of describing personality that W pioneered (though nobody noticed) and a failure to be clear about nature/nuture issues. The fast automatic perceptions, ‘rules’ and behaviors of S1 are mushed together with the slow conscious dispositional thinking, believing and rule following of S2 and neither are clearly or consistently distinguished from the arbitrary cultural behaviors of S3. -/- I wrote this review several years ago and since then my ideas have evolved considerably. Eventually I may revise this but for now the interested reader may consult my many more recent reviews and articles, especially “ The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle” 80p (2016). Briefly, I now see that virtually all authors failed to give Wittgenstein’s last work “On Certainty” the prominent position it deserves and likewise failed to take advantage of the powerful dual systems of thought framework. Nor have they adopted the useful extensions of Wittgenstein’s work made by John Searle. So I first lay out a framework and then provide some detailed comments. -/- This is a reasonable first attempt to bring W’s pioneering work on higher order thought to the attention of psychology but it has many failings and needs a thorough rewrite. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

Intuitive judgments elicited by verbal case-descriptions play key roles in philosophical problem-setting and argument. Experimental philosophy's ‘sources project’ seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess our warrant for accepting them. This article develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception, trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension, and employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to elicit the relevant (...) stereotypical associations of perception- and appearance-verbs. We obtain a debunking explanation that resolves the philosophical paradox. (shrink)

J.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employs an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions in meaning, an approach that has become a standard technique for investigating meaning in both philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we subject Austin's methods to formal experimental investigation. His methods produce mixed results: We find support for his most famous distinction, drawn on the basis of (...) his `donkey stories', that `mistake' and `accident' apply to different cases, but not for some of his other attempts to distinguish the meaning of philosophically significant terms (such as `intentionally' and `deliberately'). We critically examine the methodology of informal experiments employed in ordinary language philosophy and much of contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, and discuss the role that experimenter bias can play in influencing judgments about informal and formal linguistic experiments. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of language uses experimental methods developed in the cognitive sciences to investigate topics of interest to philosophers of language. This article describes the methodological background for the development of experimental approaches to topics in philosophy of language, distinguishes negative and positive projects in experimental philosophy of language, and evaluates experimental work on the reference of proper names and natural kind terms. The reliability of expert judgments vs. the judgments of ordinary speakers, the role that ambiguity plays in influencing (...) responses to experiments, and the reliability of metalinguistic judgments are also assessed. (shrink)

A theory of knowledge is the explanation of things in terms of the possibilities and capabilities of the human way of knowing. The human knowledge is the representation of the things apprehended sensitively either through the senses or intuition. A theory of knowledge concludes about the reality of the things studied. As such it is a priori speculation, based on synthetic a priori statements. Its conclusions constitute interpretation, that is, hermeneutics. Linguistics as the science studying real language, that is, the (...) language spoken, reverts to human subjects in as much as they speak, say and know. Language thus must be studied as a theory of knowledge. (shrink)

The role of intuition in Kripke's arguments for the causal-historical theory of reference has been a topic of recent debate, particularly in light of empirical work on these intuitions. In this paper, I develop three interpretations of the role intuition might play in Kripke's arguments. The first aim of this exercise is to help clarify the options available to interpreters of Kripke, and the consequences for the experimental investigation of Kripkean intuitions. The second aim is to show that understanding the (...) role of intuition in Kripke's arguments, and in other arguments commonly interpreted as ?appeals to intuition? requires that we pay careful attention to the argumentative context and theoretical commitments of the work in question. The interpretations of Kripke developed here provide a set of options which might be adapted to other arguments to help clarify what role (if any) intuition plays. (shrink)

Phonological change of vowel length in Farsi -/- Author / Authors : Reza Heidarizadi Page no. 50 - 55 Discipline : Persian Linguistics/language Script/language : Roman/English Category : Research paper Keywords: Farsi vowels, vowel length, Compensatory lengthening.

Epistemic invariantism is the view that the truth conditions of knowledge ascriptions don’t vary across contexts. Epistemic purism is the view that purely practical factors can’t directly affect the strength of your epistemic position. The combination of purism and invariantism, pure invariantism, is the received view in contemporary epistemology. It has lately been criticized by contextualists, who deny invariantism, and impurists, who deny purism. A central charge against pure invariantism is that it poorly accommodates linguistic intuitions about certain cases. In (...) this paper I develop a new response to this charge. I propose that pure invariantists can explain the relevant linguistic intuitions on the grounds that they track the propriety of indirect speech acts, in particular indirect requests and denials. [Note: this paper was written in 2010-11.]. (shrink)

Linguists often advert to what are sometimes called linguistic intuitions. These intuitions and the uses to which they are put give rise to a variety of philosophically interesting questions: What are linguistic intuitions – for example, what kind of attitude or mental state is involved? Why do they have evidential force and how might this force be underwritten by their causal etiology? What light might their causal etiology shed on questions of cognitive architecture – for example, as a case study (...) of how consciously inaccessible subpersonal processes give rise to conscious states, or as a candidate example of cognitive penetrability? What methodological issues arise concerning how linguistic intuitions are gathered and interpreted – for example, might some subjects' intuitions be more reliable than others? And what bearing might all this have on philosophers' own appeals to intuitions? This paper surveys and critically discusses leading answers to these questions. In particular, we defend a ‘mentalist’ conception of linguistics and the role of linguistic intuitions therein. (shrink)

Proper assertion requires belief. In support of this thesis, I provide an explanatory argument from linguistic patterns surrounding assertion and show how to handle cases of "selfless" assertion.

Keith DeRose has argued that context shifting experiments should be designed in a specific way in order to accommodate what he calls a ‘truth/falsity asymmetry’. I explain and critique DeRose's reasons for proposing this modification to contextualist methodology, drawing on recent experimental studies of DeRose's bank cases as well as experimental findings about the verification of affirmative and negative statements. While DeRose's arguments for his particular modification to contextualist methodology fail, the lesson of his proposal is that there is good (...) reason to pay close attention to several subtle aspects of the design of context shifting experiments. (shrink)

Linguists, particularly in the generative tradition, commonly rely upon intuitions about sentences as a key source of evidence for their theories. While widespread, this methodology has also been controversial. In this paper, I develop a positive account of linguistic intuition, and defend its role in linguistic inquiry. Intuitions qualify as evidence as form of linguistic behavior, which, since it is partially caused by linguistic competence (the object of investigation), can be used to study this competence. I defend this view by (...) meeting two challenges. First, that intuitions are collected through methodologically unsound practices, and second, that intuition cannot distinguish between the contributions of competence and performance systems. (shrink)

Michael Devitt ([2006a], [2006b]) argues that, insofar as linguists possess better theories about language than non-linguists, their linguistic intuitions are more reliable. (Culbertson and Gross [2009]) presented empirical evidence contrary to this claim. Devitt ([2010]) replies that, in part because we overemphasize the distinction between acceptability and grammaticality, we misunderstand linguists' claims, fall into inconsistency, and fail to see how our empirical results can be squared with his position. We reply in this note. Inter alia we argue that Devitt's focus (...) on grammaticality intuitions, rather than acceptability intuitions, distances his discussion from actual linguistic practice. We close by questioning a demand that drives his discussion—viz., that, for linguistic intuitions to supply evidence for linguistic theorizing, a better account of why they are evidence is required. (shrink)

What considerations place genuine constraints on an adequate semantics for normative and evaluative expressions? Linguists recognize facts about ordinary uses of such expressions and competent speakers’ judgments about which uses are appropriate. The contemporary literature reflects the widespread assumption that linguists don’t rely upon an additional source of data—competent speakers’ judgments about possible disagreement with hypothetical speech communities. We have several good reasons to think that such judgments are not probative for semantic theorizing. Therefore, we should accord these judgments no (...) probative value for the development of a semantics for our moral terms. Such judgments can no longer be presumed to put pressure on theories according to which our moral expressions share a semantics with ordinary, descriptive terms. Many rivals to pure, Descriptivist theories count among their advantages the ability to accommodate these judgments. If these judgments have no probative value, such theories lose an important source of support. (shrink)

Who are the best subjects for judgment tasks intended to test grammatical hypotheses? Michael Devitt ( [2006a] , [2006b] ) argues, on the basis of a hypothesis concerning the psychology of such judgments, that linguists themselves are. We present empirical evidence suggesting that the relevant divide is not between linguists and non-linguists, but between subjects with and without minimally sufficient task-specific knowledge. In particular, we show that subjects with at least some minimal exposure to or knowledge of such tasks tend (...) to perform consistently with one another—greater knowledge of linguistics makes no further difference—while at the same time exhibiting markedly greater in-group consistency than those who have no previous exposure to or knowledge of such tasks and their goals. (shrink)

While philosophers of language have traditionally relied upon their intuitions about cases when developing theories of reference, this methodology has recently been attacked on the grounds that intuitions about reference, far from being universal, show significant cultural variation, thus undermining their relevance for semantic theory. I’ll attempt to demonstrate that (1) such criticisms do not, in fact, undermine the traditional philosophical methodology, and (2) our underlying intuitions about the nature of reference may be more universal than the authors suppose.

I explore one apparent source of conflict between our naïve view of grammatical properties and the best available scientific view of grammatical properties. That source is the modal dependence of the range of naïve, or manifest, grammatical properties that is available to a speaker upon the configurations and operations of their internal systems—that is, upon scientific grammatical properties. Modal dependence underwrites the possibility of conflicting grammatical appearances. In response to that possibility, I outline a compatibilist strategy, according to which the (...) range of grammatical properties accessible to a speaker is dependent upon their cognitive apparatus, but the properties so accessible are also mind-independent. (shrink)

In his latest book, Michael Devitt rejects Chomsky’s mentalist conception of linguistics. The case against Chomsky is based on two principal claims. First, that we can separate the study of linguistic competence from the study of its outputs: only the latter belongs to linguistic inquiry. Second, Chomsky’s account of a speaker’s competence as consisiting in the mental representation of rules of a grammar for his language is mistaken. I shall argue, first, that Devitt fails to make a case for separating (...) the study of outputs from the study of competence, and second, that Devitt mis-characterises Chomsky’s account of competence, and so his objections miss their target. Chomsky’s own views come close to a denial that speaker’s have knowledge of their language. But a satisfactory account of what speakers are able to do will need to ascribe them linguistic knowledge that they use to speak and understand. I shall explore a conception of speaker’s knowledge of language that confirrns Chomsky’s mentalist view of linguistics but which is immune to Devitt’s criticism. (shrink)

While engaged in the analysis of topics such as the nature of knowledge, meaning, or justice, analytic philosophers have traditionally relied extensively on their own intuitions about when the relevant terms can, and can't, be correctly applied. Consequently, if intuitions about possible cases turned out not to be a reliable tool for the proper analysis of philosophically central concepts, then a radical reworking of philosophy's (or at least analytic philosophy's) methodology would seem to be in order. It is thus not (...) surprising that the increasingly critical scrutiny that intuitions have received of late has produced what has been referred to as a "crisis" in analytic philosophy. This paper will argue, however, that at least those criticisms that stem from recent work on semantic externalism are not as serious as their proponents have claimed. Indeed, this paper will argue while the conceptual intuitions (and the analyses that result from them) will have to be recognized as fallible, they still have a prima facie claim to correctness. A naturalistic and externalistic account of concepts thus merely requires that the methodology of conceptual analysis be reinterpreted (from a 'Platonic' to a 'constructive' model) rather than given up. (shrink)

This paper examines popular‘conventionalist’explanations of why philosophers need not back up their claims about how‘we’use our words with empirical studies of actual usage. It argues that such explanations are incompatible with a number of currently popular and plausible assumptions about language's ‘social’character. Alternate explanations of the philosopher's purported entitlement to make a priori claims about‘our’usage are then suggested. While these alternate explanations would, unlike the conventionalist ones, be compatible with the more social picture of language, they are each shown to (...) face serious problems of their own. (shrink)