ire Kpistémologie Langage 13/I (1991) WHAT IS METHODOLOGY (AND HISTORY) OF LINGUISTICS GOOD FOR, EPISTEMOLOGICALLY SPEAKING ? Esa ITKONEN ABSTRACT : This paper tries to answer the question that figures in its title: What is methodology (and history) of linguistics good for, epistemologically speaking? An answer is sought for, in turn, in the following areas: grammatical theory (also known’ as ‘autonomous Iinguistics"), causal linguistics, historiography of linguistics, and the study of language and mind. The paper concludes with some remarks on the recent discussion concerning the nature of linguistics. RESUME : Cet article tente de répondre a la question figurant dans son titre : Quelle est l'utilité de la méthodologie et I'historiographie de la linguistique, du point de vue épistémologique ? Pour trouver une réponse, on passe en revue les themes suivants : théorie grammaticale (aussi connue sous le nom de ‘linguistique autonome’), linguistique causale, historiographie de la linguistique, étude du langage et de l'esprit. Finalement, on fait quelques observations sur le débat récent concernant la nature de la linguistique. 1, General Remarks. Human beings are unique in that, while doing something, they generally also know what they are doing. This ceases to be the case,52 Esa Itkonen however, when they engage in exceptionally complex activities. Science is a prime example of such an activity : it is not at all uncommon to see ‘ordinary practising scientists’ go about their work, while having only a vague, or downright false, idea of what it is, exactly, that they are doing. To me such a state of affairs is degrading ; and, accordingly, knowing what one is doing has an intrinsic value. This is where methodology and/or philosophy of science comes into picture. In general, philosophy of science is considered a respectable undertaking. On closer inspection, however, some differences emerge. The philosophy of natural sciences, especially astronomy and particle physics, enjoys great prestige. So does the philosophy of logic and mathematics, even if to a somewhat lesser extent. But the philosophy of linguistics is sometimes treated with mistrust. To me this is a sign of (temporary, let us hope) immaturity within the field of linguistics. . It may be good to add that there are two (often related) ways of practising methodology which I reject straight away. One is to maintain that a given scientific discipline (here : linguistics) is based on some colossal misunderstanding, with the implication that the achievements of more than two thousand years just have to go down the drain. The other is to dwell upon some utopian stage of a given scientific discipline (here : linguistics) that lies far off in the future. A sound methodology must be based on a detailed ‘phenomenological’ account of what the scientist is doing in fact, not what he thinks he ought to be doing. For instance, in the early phase of a typical grammatical description the grammarian observes nothing, i.e. he neither sees nor hears utterances. Rather, he invents sentences which his linguistic intuition tells him are correct, and he mentally performs some operations which either preserve correctness or change it into incorrectness. Typically, such a mental operation consists in altering either the form or the distribution of constituents, and if it produces an incorrect sentence, the grammarian becomes aware of a (possibly very low-level) rule which has been violated. That is, incorrectness never concerns one sentence alone. In all this, the grammarian has done nothing but analyze his own consciousness, or more precisely, what he himself consciously knows to be the case. Obliterating the distinction between conscious and unconsciousMethodology of linguistics 53 makes here any methodological self-understanding impossible a priori. So does construing the grammarian's activity as an instance either of the observational or of the experimental method. In this paper I shall discuss some lessons that can be drawn from investigating the methodology and/or philosophy of linguistics, with the emphasis on the epistemological aspect. Understandably, I shall concentrate on questions that I have dealt with in my own work. 2. The Status of Grammatical Theory. The basic tenets of my 1978 book Grammatical Theory and Metascience' (henceforth to be abbreviated as GZM) can be summarized as follows. A language is a system of social rules (or norms). The social nature of rules means that they exist as objects of common (or mutual) knowledge. Thus, one can become aware of. rules, which means, more technically, that rules can become objects of subjective atheoretical intuition. Rules determine the correctness or incorrectness of sentences. Any rule can be described by a corresponding (atheoretical) rule-sentence, for instance, "The precedes, as in the man, and does not follow, as in man the’? or ‘Tree means a plant, and not a number, whereas three means a number, and not a plant’ or ‘In a sentence like John likes him the word Aim cannot refer to John’. It is a peculiarity of rule-sentences that since they are known to be true, they are (known to be) unfalsifiable. Any purported counter-examples, like uttering the sentence ‘Man the came in’, are simply irrelevant, because they are (known to be) incorrect. It is this, and only this, feature that distinguishes (descriptions of normative) rules from (descriptions of non-normative) regularities. Denying the unfalsifiability of rule- sentences amounts to denying that there is any ‘rule vs regularity’ - 1. This is a revised and expanded version of my 1974 dissertation Linguistics and Metascience. 2. The original formulation of this rule-sentence was ‘In English the definite article precedes the noun'. This created some confusion because ‘definite article’ and noun’ are undeniably theoretical terms (or concepts). I pointed out from the beginning, however, that such terms can be dispensed with ; see GTM : 325-326, n. 90, and 167-168.54 Esa Itkonen opposition. In thus revealing the normative nature of the subject matter of grammatical theory, rule-sentences possess considerable metascientific interest. Because of their atheoretical character, however, they possess no scientific interest®. Such an interest appertains only to theoretical grammatical descriptions, like generative grammars of (fragments of) given languages. A rule as well as the truth of the corresponding rule-sentence is known by intuition, but since one has no prior knowledge about a theoretical description, one cannot know it by intuition. This means that a theoretical description is itself not a normative entity, even if it has been invented for the purpose of giving a systematic overview of normative data (see GTM: 8.3, esp. pp. 215-216, and 9.3, esp. 246-247). They key notions in this account are ‘rule’, '(atheoretical) tule-sentence', and ‘(theoretical) grammar’. The question has been much debated whether linguistics is just a subbranch of psychology or whether linguistics-qua-psychology should be distinguished from grammatical theory (also called ‘autonomous linguistics'). In my published work I have argued at length for the latter alternative. In the present context it suffices to point out that grammatical theory, as here defined, is based on the notion of axiomaticity, or on the idea of ‘describing as much as possible by means of as little as possible’. Experimental- psychological studies have established that the (untrained) human mind does not function axiomatically. (This is not surprising. Anyone who has studied axiomatics knows from bitter personal experience that he has to struggle against his natural inclination.) 3. The ‘atheoretical vs. theoretical’ distinction has turned out to be surprisingly difficult to grasp. (Its general justification is given in GTM: 8.2-3.). The following should clarify the issue : "When formulating our norm-sentences [or rule-sentences] we must have some minimal trust in the intellectual capacities of our audience. In general our trust is justified. Therefore I could just as well have formulated my norm-sentence as ‘the man is right, and man the is wrong’, and could have let the audience infer, or rather recognize, the intended norm. The only members of my audience who would betray my trust are professional linguists. Urged by their professional interest... they would pretend not to understand the norm which they do understand in fact, and would ask to be explicity told all the prima facie exceptions. Althought I intend to give an atheoretical (or pretheoretical) description, and they think they are asking me to give what I intend to give, they would in fact be asking me to give a theoretical description. This is the fallacy in their argument" (CLT : 264).Methodology of linguistics 55 Therefore psycholinguistics is a linguistic subdiscipline distinct from grammatical theory. It is a different matter that psychologists may in turn wish to describe the workings of the (non-axiomatic) human mind as parsimoniously or ‘axiomatically' as possible. Panini's (c. 400 B.C.) grammar is a perfect - and still today largely unsurpassed - example of a non-psychological grammatical description. To give a more recent example, grammars written in the tradition of Montague (1974) are based on a very simple idea, viz. the repeated application of the notion of one-place function. In this way they achieve a very high degree of generalization independent of, and even in direct opposition to, any psychological considerations. It has been claimed, e.g. by Chomsky (1986 : 20), that within grammatical theory, as here defined, questions of truth and falsity do not arise in any interesting sense. This is a serious misunderstanding. Any axiomatic theory (or system) must satisfy the twin desiderata of completeness and soundness : it has to generate all and only desired entities, viz. true sentences in empirical sciences, correct sentences in grammatical theory, or valid formulae in logic (cf. Itkonen 1976). To the extent that it fails to do so, it is falsified. Again, assuming that there are two descriptions which are both complete and sound, there still exists an objective criterion of selection, namely simplicity. Interestingly enough, this was also Chomsky's initial position : It is important, incidentally, to recognize that considerations of simplicity are not trivial or ‘merely esthetic’. It has been remarked in the case of philosophical systems that the motives for the demand for economy are in many ways the same as those behind the demand that there be system at all. ... It seems to me that the same is true of grammatical systems, and of the special sense of simplicity that will concern us directly (Chomsky 1975 [1955]: 114, n. 2; similarly Chomsky 1957 : 55-56). Jn later making his rather half-hearted attempt to come to grips with psychological facts of language, Chomsky has simply confused the issue, by merging two distinct and equally legitimate types of linguistic study.56 Esa Itkonen As already indicated, there turns out to be a broad analogy between grammatical theory and formal logic, in particular ‘philosophical logic' which formalizes atheoretical knowledge related to such conceptual oppositions as ‘necessity vs. possibility’, ‘obligation vs. prohibition’, ‘knowledge vs. belief’. I have justified this analogy in some detail in G7M: 10.0. What is especially important, is that not just correctness but also validity turns out to be a primarily intuitive notion : when there is a conflict between formal validity and intuitive validity, the latter wins. Moreover, grammatical analysis is shown to be closely similar not just to logical but also to philosophical analysis (see GIM : 11.0). This is not surprising, given that logic expands in the direction of philosophy, and philosophy, in turn, develops in the direction of increasing formalization. The common methodological notion turns out to be explication, understood as a method for transforming non-empirical truths of the intuitive kind into non- empirical truths of the formal kind. Explication is the general method of conceptual analysis, which means that grammatical theory, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy are exemplifications of this superordinate notion. This is an ontological characterization. (Notice that ‘concept’ refers here to an intersubjective entity, i.e. an entity which -as I would say- exists as an object of common knowledge. When a philosopher analyzes the concept of ‘truth’, he is dealing neither with mental representations nor with brain states.) From the epistemological point of view, the three disciplines must be characterized as intuitional sciences, because the act of knowledge on which they have to rely is intuition, as distinguished from observation and introspection (cf. Itkonen 1981a). The fundamental difference between intuitional and natural sciences should be obvious. Now, what is the intellectual gain in all this ? To be sure, an increase in linguists‘ self-understanding is an end in itself. But there is more. As Ringen (1980 [1975] : 101) has pointed out, “explicit discussions of the status of formal analytic philosophy are difficult to find". Concentrating on the analytic philosophy of science, one might say that it has been so busy analyzing other sciences that it has had no time to ask what kind of science (or ‘discipline’) it itself is. On some occasions when this question has been raised, the answerMethodology of linguistics 37 given has been quite obviously wrong, as in Stegmiiller's or Popper's case (cf. Itkonen 1981a: 130-133). Here philosophy of. linguistics can bring about much-needed clarification, by showing that analytic philosophy (of science) is a straightforward instance of. conceptual analysis, just as grammatical theory is. A similar conclusion applies also to the methodological status of philosophical logic. In reaching these results, I have followed the lead of Pap (1958), a neglected classic. Cohen (1976) too probes the intuitional basis of analytic philosophy. 3. The Status of 'Causal' Linguistics. Linguistics is not a homogeneous discipline. Rather, it is divided into several subdisciplines each of which tries to answer its own characteristic question. As I see it, grammatical theory, as here defined, constitutes the logical ‘core’ of linguistics. The question it tries to answer is What ?, namely, What is a correct sentence of a language L ? (If needed, the concept of ‘sentence’ may be embedded in the more encompassing concepts of ‘speech act’ ans ‘text'). Apart from grammatical theory, the three most important linguistic subdisciplines are psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and diachronic linguistics, each of which tries to answer its own characteristic How ?-question, namely How is language produced / understood / stored / acquired ?, How is language used under different circumstances ?, and How does language change ? Notice that answering. a How ?-question presupposes an answer to the corresponding What ?-question. Notice also that it is only after answering a How ?-question that one can hope to answer a Why ?- question. Thus, there is the hierarchy ‘What > How > Why’, as shown by the following pairs of questions and answers : ‘What is X1'-'A.' ‘How is A done ?' - "In the way B.' - ‘Why in the way BY - ‘Because of C.' These conceptual relationships are faithfully reflected in historical relationships: in no linguistic tradition has it ever happened that psychological or sociological or diachronic study emerges before the emergence of grammatical theory. The view that grammatical theory (in the sense of ‘autonomous linguistics‘) is an58 Esa Itkonen invention of the 20th century, betrays a total ignorance of historical facts. The linguistic What ?-question is non-causal (and conceptual) in nature, whereas both the How ?- and the Why ?-questions are about causation : they ask how, and why, it is that something makes something else happen. Therefore it was only logical that, having dealt with grammatical theory in my GM, I should next tackle ‘causal’ linguistics, as I did in my 1984 book Causality in Linguistic Theory (henceforth to be abbreviated as CTL)‘. When approaching linguistic causation, I was solely interested in explanations that actually have been or are being offered in linguistic research. I had no interest whatever in explanations that will, or will not, be offered in one hundred or one thousand years. It turned out that all de facto explanations, without exception, rely in one way or another on the concept of rationality (i.e. the rationality of research objects, not just researchers). Sometimes this concept is well-hidden behind natural-science terminology, but it is always there (cf. CLT: 4.1.3-4.2.7). Rationality may be instantiated both nomically and non-nomically. In the latter instance it explains why nomological explanations do not apply in the human sphere, while in the former it shows that what prima facie appears as a nomological explanation may be so characterized only with qualifications. The upshot is a clear demarcation between human sciences and physical sciences : it goes without saying that in the inanimate world there is no room for rationality. Between what is human and what is physical there obtains a ‘grey area‘ that ranges from animal psychology to biology. What I just said needs some clarification. Since I do not use the term ‘causation’ in the sense of physical causation, but rather in the pretheorical sense of ‘making things happen’, I have no inhibitions against speaking about the causation of human behavior. A typical action is caused by the agent's goal and his belief about available means for achieving the goal : if he had not had just this goal and just this belief, he would not have acted in the way he did. Actions are typically rational, i.e. adequate in light of goals and 4. Anttila (1988) contains a detailed exposition of CLT.Methodology of linguistics 39 beliefs. The goal has the role of a ‘dynamic cause’ while the belief has the role of a ‘static cause’. In acts of speaking the dynamic causes include the speech intention while the static causes include the mental grammar ; and just like all actions, acts of speaking too are embedded in a means-end hierarchy in such a way that a lower-level end (or goal) may serve as a means for a higher-level one. Within the general notion of rationality, moreover, it is necessary to distinguish between socially valid ‘rationality principles’ and their individual-psychological internalizations ; a similar distinction has to be made, of course, between rules (or norms) of correctness and their internalizations (cf. CLT : 3.2). Rationality encompasses a continuum leading from totally unconscious to totally conscious. The more minute aspects of global behavior are at issue (phonetic variation being the limiting case), the more automatic and unconscious they tend to be, and vice versa ; and the degree of nomicity increases proportionally to the degree of unconsciousness. The study of the unconscious (including the mental grammar) is the proper area for observational and/or experimental methods. By contrast, algorithmic models for conscious behavior, like those constructed within the artificial-intelligence paradigm, reveal an interesting paradox : on the one hand, they are constructed on the basis of the philosophical method of intuition-cum-teflection ; on the other, they are meant to be causal models. The solution of this paradox is as follows. As normative entities, rationality principles are open to (conscious) intuition, and they as a matter of fact constitute the data for models in question. These acquire their ‘causal’ import from the tacit assumption that the principles under scrutiny have in fact been internalized by agents. It follows, somewhat surprisingly, that the Pap-type explication can be, and has been, extented to causal analysis (cf. CLT: 3.7). It is generally thought that causal analysis proceeds, hypothetico-inductively, from known effects to unknown (or less well known) causes. Diesing (1972) points out, however, that social sciences often employ ‘synthetic models' which proceed in the opposite way, namely from known causes to less well known effects. Such ‘known causes’ turn out to be identical with norms for rational behavior, i.e. our rationality principles. Now that we are able to identify the Diesing-type synthetic model with the Pap-type60 Esa Itkonen explication, we may also note (cf. CLT: 6.0), that the ‘causal’ human sciences (including linguistics) have to a large extent misunderstood their own character, and still continue to do so. The intellectual gain consists in being able to point this out. 4, The Lessons of the Historiography of Linguistics. Having investigated the methodology of linguistics in some depth, it seemed only logical to me that I should next get acquainted with its history. This sentiment was reinforced by the fact that within the philosophy of science there was a wide-spread interest in the concept of ‘scientific progress’, an interest originating in Kuhn (1962). To me, it seemed futile to debate this issue in vacuo ; and the concept of ‘progress within human sciences’ (including linguistics), being a relatively untouched topic of research, held out some hope of new discoveries. Moreover, the veridicity or otherwise of epistemic relativism was also the object of much discussion, and it seemed equally futile to consider it in vacuo. To me, this meant that I had to find out whether, and on what basis, I could come to understand linguistic traditions of non-Western cultures. The outcome of this research project is to be found in my forthcoming book Universal History of Linguistics : India, China, Arabia, Europe (henceforth to be abbreviated as UHL). Once I had familiarized myself with the Western tradition, I realized that linguists hold a decidedly wrong, i.e. inflated, view of the amount of progress that their discipline has supposedly undergone since its beginnings. It was a sobering experience to learn that many of the ‘revolutionary innovations’ that we were taught in the mid-sixties had been explicitly stated in the oldest extant syntactic treatise in the West, namely Apollonius Dyscolus' Peri syntaxeos. Similarly, I was surprised to learn that in grammatical theory the achievement of the Middle Ages, understood as a combination of the Modistic universal grammar and the Ockham- type logical linguistics, stood at a level that was reached anew only in the 20th century. The decisive experience, however, was coming to understand the grammatical traditions in India and in Arabia. Especially in its morphophonology, Panini's (c. 400 B.C.) grammar Astadhyayi hasMethodology of linguistics 61 certainly not been outmatched before the 1970's, if even then. Sibawaihi's (d. 793) Al-Kitab, though not quite at the same level of technical mastery, contains a syntactic theory that is certainly superior to its pre-1900 Western counterparts. This means that all preconceptions concerning the ‘progress in linguistics' have to be abandoned, in particular the presumption that there is any kind of similarity between the progress in linguistics and the progress in the natural sciences, e.g. in physics. For more than two thousand years, there was, on the global scale, no progress in linguistics (more precisely, grammatical theory) ; and what progress may have been achieved today, is very much smaller than linguists are inclined to think. Once the facts are known, the next step is to ask for an explanation : Why is the progress in linguistics so different from the progress in physics ? By way of an answer, I offer here an analogy. In the history of philosophy, Plato's and Aristotle's position is almost (but not quite) as strong as Panini's in the history of linguistics. To make matters even clearer, consider Aristotle in his two roles of a philosopher and of a physicist : in the former role he is still our contemporary whereas in the latter he is hopelessly outdated. The reason for this remarkable difference must be that the ontology-cum-methodology of an intuitional science like philosophy (or grammatical theory) has remained the same, whereas within the natural sciences both the research methods and the research objects have undergone a series of fundamental changes. Above, I just gave the bare outline of my argument. It is presented in much greated detail in UHL: 6.1.2. The view, presented in Sections 2 and 3 above, that there is a significant difference between human (in particular, intuitional) sciences and natural sciences has now received additional, and rather dramatic, support. That the result of historiographical research agrees with the result of methodological research, enhances the plausibility of each. What about epistemic relativism ? As is evident from the very structure of UHL, I have no doubt that there is a common basis for comparing the linguistic traditions in India, China, Arabia, and Europe, even if the tradition was less developed in China than it was elsewhere. This common basis may even be characterized as ‘universal’, provided this term is not taken to entail any strong sense62 Esa Itkonen of (nomic) necessity : it is certainly possible that dissimilar linguistic traditions might have occurred elsewhere. (Being interested in the science of language, I ignore here the so-called folk linguistics). In the same vein, if I have shown that relativism does not prevail in linguistics, this by no means entails that it may not be more operative in some other area, e.g. medicine (for more discussion, see UHL : 6.2). What could a relativist do to prove me wrong ? He ought to show that I have not really understood Panini or Sibawailhi, although I think I have. To achieve this, he ought to show that he has understood them better than I have. To the extent that he would succeed, he would undermine his own relativist position : by his own example, he would prove that it is possible to come to understand alien cultures and to compare them with our own culture, presumably on some universal basis®. It may also be good to point out that there is nothing aprioristic in my type of (‘contingent’) universalism. When I started this research project, I expected to encounter a great amount of variety, both within the Western tradition and among the four different traditions. The variety was, however, only apparent : I saw it only as long as I had not transcended my own vantage point, which was that of contemporary Western linguistics. The more I could free myself of it, the more similarities I perceived. My esteem for Panini's grammar and Sibawaihi's syntax is ultimately based on such traditional, and universal, criteria as explicitness, systematicity, coverage of data, and degree of generalization. Intellectual hegemony is generally conceded to the West, as compared with the East. In philosophy the two may have been equals, but elsewhere -it is maintained- the West prevails. This attitude may give rise to apparently opposite types of reactions : either the intellectual achievements of the East are dismissed as irrelevant (because non-scientific) or they are extolled under such non-scientific labels as ‘wisdom' or ‘mysticism'. Both of these reactions are unjustified, because Eastern linguistics certainly 5. It should be evident that I strongly reject the extreme relativism of contemporary French philosophizing, as represented by Foucault and Derrida ; cf. Itkonen (1988b) and (1989).Methodology of linguistics 63 qualifies as scientific. And what is more, it is in linguistics -and only in linguistics- that the intellectual hegemony of the West has been unequivocally broken. What is the gain in all this ? The gain is that we have lost the sense of Western superiority, and have done so in a principled way. 5. Language and Mind. As noted before, in CLT I conceived of the linguistic structure in its internalized form as part of those static causes which contribute to bringing about linguistic behavior of any kind. I did not really face the question whether this cause could in turn be viewed as an effect produced by some ulterior causes. To be sure, T defended the view that linguistic form must have been determined by its function, but having stated my general position (cf. pp. 157-161), I did not pursue the question any farther. During the last ten years or so, however, there has been an increasing amount of research devoted to explaining universal features of linguistic structure, or linguistic universals tout court (see e.g. Haiman 1985, Haiman ed. 1985, Hawkins ed. 1988). At the moment this seems to me the single most interesting avenue of linguistic research. I think it will eventually shed some genuine light on the relation between language and mind. Linguistic structure is jointly produced by different types of causal factors and these have to be disentangled. I distinguish between three causally efficacious categories, namely ontology, cognition, and interaction, each of which will be briefly characterized below. But first it must be made clear precisely what kind of causality is involved here. It is tempting to say that linguistic structure results from verbalizing the results of some antecedent mental processes, namely conceptualizing the world, manipulating conceptualizations, and interacting with other people. Indeed, I have nothing against such formulations, as long as their non-literal character is clearly understood. In a more careful context we should not speak of a process of ‘verbalization', but just of the processes of learning and maintaining a language. That linguistic structure is an ‘effect’, is evident from the joint facts that it universally ‘mirrors’ something antecedent and that it does not cease to do so, i.e. it does not change in a random fashion.64 Esa Itkonen The ontological explanation is based on the isomorphism between language and reality (more precisely, _reality-as- nonlinguistically-conceptualized) ; alternatively, we may speak of the (structural) iconicity of language. Isomorphism between states of affairs and sentences is instantiated by their respective constituents on the dimensions of number, qualitative properties, quantitative properties, order, and cohesion®. The cognitive explanations constitute a more heterogeneous category. They are based on the idea of an additional mental (but still nonverbal) contribution that a person makes to states of affairs (as conceptualized). Here the entire ‘human nature’ comes into play, starting with the differences between animal and human cognition. Also the ‘figure vs. ground' distinction, i.e. the universal tendency to relate what is small to what is big (but not vice versa), is obviously conditioned by the psycho-physical constitution of the humans. So is the notion of metaphor, i.e. the universal tendency to use expressions for bodies-in-space to mean something quite different. Moreover, mental operations like identification, quantification, negation, and inference are _ self-evidently superimposed upon (conceptualizations of (constituents of)) states of affairs. Perhaps surprisingly, I would also place the phenomena of traditional deicticity in this category, even if they are often literally part of, rather than added to, the state of affairs to be spoken about. The interactional explanations attemps to account for phenomena that are subsumed under the label of ‘discourse- pragmatics’. In the present state of our knowledge these explanations do not seem to me quite as trustworthy as their ontological or cognitive counterparts. It has always been known that the sign languages of the deaf are iconic, in the sense of being rather directly conditioned, or ‘caused’, by the extra-linguistic reality which they speak about. Now that oral languages have turned out to be (structurally) iconic, and sign languages have turned out to be more conventional than was generally thought, it has become quasi impossible to deny that they ensue from a common linguistic capacity (see e.g. Poizner: et al. 6. In Itkonen (1970) I presented the general argument for explaining linguistic structure as being ‘caused’ by isomorphic nonlinguistic structure.Methodology of linguistics 65 1987). From this it follows, however, that not only sign languages but also oral languages must have an ontological explanation. How widely the linguistic (or rather, semiotic) capacity must be ultimately understood, is still an open, and very exciting, question. All this evidence constitutes a direct refutation of the innatist hypothesis which flatly denies that linguistic structure can be explained. In defending his own methodological position, Chomsky (1986 : 249) claims that “we try to construct the best theory of all the evidence and tentatively accept its statements as true", giving to understand that his Government-and-Binding theory is precisely this "best theory’. However, Chomsky simply ignores the huge amount of cross-linguistic evidence that, having accumulated over the years, argues for the explanation of linguistic universals. Evidence from experimental psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and auditory phonetics is also ignored, except on those few occasions when it seems to agree with the GB theory. If a linguistic theory should indeed account for ail the evidence, as Chomsky claims, then his theory is far from being the best. The Chomsky-type innate linguistic capacity is supposedly needed to explain the existence, and the nature, of language- acquisition. The traditional view, represented equally by Paul, Saussure, Jespersen, Sapir, and Bloomfield, was that language is acquired by means of analogy. Now, analogy is thought to be a general capacity which is equally operative in different mental domains. Chomsky regards the mind as consisting of several quasi- independent modules, including the linguistic capacity; and he strongly and repeatedly denies the usefulness of any such notion as analogy (e.g. Chomsky 1986 : 12, 43). Fodor (1983 : 106-107) even sets up an exclusive disjunction between modularity and analogy : where the one is, the other cannot be ; and he specifically rules out any analogy in language. It should be obvious at once that our ontological explanations refute not just innatism, but also modularity, simply because the isomorphism between reality and language is tantamount to their structural analogy. Yet this whole discussion has suffered from a serious distortion of the concept of ‘analogy’. Chomsky (1986) sees a failure of analogy in each and every case where (what he takes to be) a formal similarity is not perfectly66 Esa Itkonen matched by a corresponding semantic similarity. But this is like arguing that analogy fails because and and end, though ‘formally similar’, mean quite different things. All this is beside the point, of course, because none of the champions of analogy, from Paul via Bloomfield to Anttila, has used the term ‘analogy’ in this way. Let us make this a little clearer. Chomsky (1986) uses repeatedly the following set of examples : (1) John ate an apple. (2) John ate. (3) John is too stubborn to talk to Bill. (4) John is too stubborn to talk to. As he sees it, the relation of (4) to (3) is analogous to the relation of (2) to (1) ; yet John is the subject of ate in both (1) and (2), while John is the subject of talk only in (3). Chomsky takes this to mean that analogy fails. His argument can be presented in the form of a traditional ‘proportional analogy’, thus : For Chomsky, the concept of analogy requires the question mark to be replaced by (4). To see the error in this reasoning, consider this proportional analogy : (1) John ate an apple (5) John talked to Bill (2) John ate 2 According to Chomsky's logic, the question mark should be replaced by the following sentence : (6) *John talked toMethodology of linguistics 61 This is wrong, however, because (6) is not even a correct sentence’, The right solution is, rather, this sentence : (7) John talked. When we apply this simple observation to the first proportional analogy, we see that the solution cannot be (4). Rather, it has to be (8) John is too stubborn to talk. What about Chomsky's key sentence, i.e. (4)? What is the right analogy for it ? It is to be found in the following equation : (9) The teacher discusses (5°) Bill talks to John the question (10) The question is too John is too stubborn -? difficult to discuss It is here -and only here- that the sentence (4) (= John is too stubborn to talk to) has its rightful place. Notice that there is not only a semantic, but also a formal analogy between (10) and (4), as one cannot help seeing, if one only cares to keep one's eyes open. Over the years Chomsky has used several similar examples to disprove analogy (see e.g. CLT : 63). They have no force, however, because they all suffer from the same defect. To put it simply, it is the view that analogy fails because and and end, though ‘formally analogous’, fail to be semantically analogous. As a proponent of a language-specific innate capacity, Chomsky feels no obligation to present an algorithm for language- acquisition. He has always claimed, however, that supporters of analogy do have such an obligation. But why ? I am free to postulate a non-specific innate capacity to grasp analogies (and a long series of linguists, from Paul to Anttila, have argued eloquently that we do have such a capacity). And if the innatism of one sort does not entail 7. Maybe Chomsky would like to argue that (6) should be a correct sentence ; that it is not, would then speak against analogy. But this is like arguing that analogy fails because there is no conjunction *ond similar in meaning to and.68 Esa Itkonen any commitment to a language-acquisition algorithm, the innatism of the other sort does not either. In sum, ontological and cognitive (and, perhaps, interactional) explanations of linguistic universals promise to illuminate the relation between language and mind in new and interesting ways. 6. Some Remarks on the Recent Discussion concerning the Nature of Linguistics There is a lengthy series of works dealing with the methodological status of (various parts of) linguistics. At least the following deserve to be mentioned here : Botha (1971), Derwing (1973), Kac (1974), Ringen (1980 [1975]), Anttila (1977), Lass (1980), Katz (1981), Chomsky (1986), Pateman (1987), and Carr (1990). Apart from dealing with different aspects of this discussion in my 1978 and 1984 books, I have reviewed Lass's, Katz's and Paterman's works in Itkonen (1981b), (1983), and (1988a), respectively. In the remainder of this paper I shall make a few remarks on Chomsky (1986) and Carr (1990). In GTM : 4.0 I used Wittgenstein's private-language argument to show that Chomsky's language-conception is inadequate ; and I continued this discussion in CLT: 5.1. Chomsky (1986: 4.1) responds to Kripke's (1982) somewhat similar criticism. It seems to me that the two following points have not been understood clearly enough. First, when Wittgenstein speaks of ‘private rules', he means rules that are consciously invented and followed. Therefore in this whole discussion there should be no room for unconscious rules (or rather, ‘rules') of the mental grammar. If one for some inexplicable reason wishes to use the term ‘private language’ also in such a context, one should at least be aware that there is no connection with what Wittgenstein said. Second, the central part of this discussion, mentioned by Chomsky on p. 229, is the thesis that in a genuinely private language one cannot know whether one has made a mistake. My (conscious) use of a ‘private’ word at this moment is based on my memory about how I used it the last time ; and if I want to privately check my memory, I can do so only by referring to the very same memory ; and this is no independent check. (Kenny 1973 : 192-193 contains aMethodology of linguistics 69 particularly lucid exposition of this point). Independent checks are provided only by other people's memories (or intuitions). Nothing guarantees, of course, that these are in fact trustworthy ; but at least they offer a possibility of genuine checking : possible checks (i.e. independent checks) are better than no checks (i.e. non-independent checks, or ‘checks'). The principle of ‘testing on the basis of independent evidence’, which is the cornerstone of scientific thinking, exemplifies the same idea. I am surprised that the connection between this principle and the rejection of (genuinely) private languages is so difficult to grasp. It must be clearly understood that Wittgentein's argument is only secondarily about the nature of language. It is primarily about the nature of (conscious) knowledge in general ; it just so happens that knowledge is expressed and ‘manipulated’ in and through language. The target of Wittgenstein's criticism is the ultimately Cartesian view that (conscious) knowledge is primarily subjective. As against this, Wittgenstein argues that knowledge is primarily intersubjective, be it knowledge of observable events or knowledge of rules (or norms). Why ? Because in the realm of (genuinely) subjective knowledge, expressed in a (genuinely) private language, one cannot know whether one has made a mistake. -I must add that, vis-a-vis e.g. Saunders & Henze (1967), the recent discussion on the private-language problem exhibits more decline than progress”. In presenting his own view on the nature of language, Chomsky (1986) relies heavily on the ‘I-language vs. E-language’ distinction, these two terms standing, respectively, for the mental grammar and for the social and/or public aspect of language. He naturally opts for the former alternative, but it is hard to see why. Consider the following confusions. On the one hand, I-languages are “real elements of particular minds/brains, aspects of the physical world" (p. 26). On the other, the rules that constitute an I-language are comparable to the rules of a game like chess (p. 27). This does not make sense, however, because there is only one set of rules of chess, a set which is 8. It should also be noted that Wittgenstein's originality has been much overrated in this context. At least ever since Hegel, several philosophers have argued quite convincingly for the primarily intersubjective nature of knowledge.70 Esa Itkonen commonly known to exist and is therefore equally accessible to all chess players. It is a different matter altogether that the (socially valid) rules of chess, like any norms, must have been (individual- psychologically) internalized by the players (cf. the discussion in Sections 2 and 3). On the one hand, the rules of the I-language are not normative ; “they entail nothing about what [one] ought to do" (p. 241). On the other, as we just saw, they are comparable to the tules of chess. Again, this is a contradiction because the rules of chess certainly determine how one ought to play. In their written form, they are not just descriptions of behavioral regularities. On the one hand, “the rules [i.e. rule-sentences] are not descriptions of behavior or of regularities in behavior", because one “might choose to violate" them (p. 231). On the other, rules are “appropriate to describe... the way a spider spins a web" (p. 239). Again, this is a contradiction, because it makes no sense at all to assume that a spider might choose to violate its (his ?) rules. It is very revealing that Chomsky fails to understand the presence of free will in humans and its absence in (lower) animals. As the above quotations show, Chomsky's concept of I- language is hopelessly incoherent. It would have been better for him to stick to his original language-conception. For Bloomfield, a language was an E-language, i.e. "the totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community" (quoted in Chomsky 1986: 19 ; emphasis added). This was also Chomsky's original position : “The grammar thus gives a theory of these utterances...we have, at any time, only a finite corpus of utterances out of an infinite set of [possible] grammatical utterances" (Chomsky 1975 [1955] : 77-78). Most people, Chomsky himself included, seem to have forgotten that he started as a Bloomfieldian antimentalist and Harrisian distributionalist : "[A new criterion of significance] will rule out mentalism for what were essentially Bloomfield's reasons, i.e. its obscurity and inherent untestability" (p. 86). "We will refer to linguistic analysis carried out in these terms as ‘distributional analysis" (p. 127), "this term [being] borrowed from Harris" (p. 63,Methodology of linguistics 1 n. 1). Today the distributional analysis of E/languages continues, but now it is called ‘analysis of genetic endowment”. Carr's (1990) language-conception is quite different from Chomsky's in that he makes a clear distinction between grammatical theory and psycholinguistics (understood as the study of mental grammars). In particular, he accepts the view that “linguistic objects [i.e. “rules and sentences, and thus languages", p. 37] exist in a public space as intersubjective objects of mutual knowledge" (p. 43-44). He tries to provide his concept of grammatical theory with underpinnings taken from Popper's philosophy of science. Not content with the view, defended in G7M: 8.3., that a theoretical grammar is just a (theoretical) systematization of (atheoretical) normative data!°, he requires -presumably in accordance with the ‘realist’ stance in the philosophy of science- the theoretical- descriptive concepts of grammatical theory to refer directly to something. And since they cannot refer to psychological entities (= Popper's ‘world-2'), he concludes that they must refer to ‘objective knowledge’ or ‘knowledge ‘without the knower' (= Popper's ‘world-3'). The problems with this approach are intrinsic to the Popperian concept of ‘objective knowledge’. It is not enough just to illustrate it, by saying that it is equally exemplified by libraries and by birds making their nests. Nor is Popper's authority a sufficient guarantee 9. When Chomsky (1986 : 48-49 n. 17), apparently in all seriousness, claims that in his 1955 dissertation he was dealing with the I-language ("although the term was not used"), i.e. that rejection of X is in fact acceptance of X, one can only marvel at this instance of Orwellian Newspeak ; for more examples, see Chomsky (1986 : Ch. 5). 10. In fact, the issue is not quite that simple ; cf. GTM : 8.4, and CLT: 132-135, 284-286. In this context, having quoted’ me as saying that the ‘realism vs. instrumentalism’ distinction does not apply to autonomous linguistics, Car oddly céncludes (p. 73) that I am “mistaken” in thinking that there is an intimate connection between instrumentalism and autonomous linguistics. In the same context (and also p. 28) he tries to make me out as a thorough-going relativist, on the grounds that when I speak about the purposes (or goals) of scientific activity, he interprets them as subjective and “arbitrarily changing purposes". There is no basis for such an interpretation. The goals of different sciences (c.g. autonomous linguistics, as opposed to psycholinguistics) are intersubjective entities. They may change, but not arbitrarily. On the issue of relativism, see also Section 4 above.2 Esa Itkonen that there is indeed a coherent notion behind the mysterious-sounding label of ‘knowledge without the knower'. Since Carr is unable to give any independent characterization of objective knowledge qua referent of grammatical descriptions, he is forced to conclude, post factum, that wherever a grammatical description appears, there was objective knowledge waiting to be described, even if we did not know it. But this makes the whole notion redundant. It does not help to refer to objective knowledge as the force behind progress (e.g. p. 138), when ‘progress' remains undefined. Since Carr wishes to prove the superiority of his Popperian account vis-a-vis my ‘hermeneutic’ account (which emphasizes the social and normative nature of language), he must find fault with the latter. His criticism is presented on pp. 102-105, where he argues that I am guilty of the following confusion : Rule-sentences describe something normative ; they must contain theoretical concepts ; but theoretical descriptions are not normative. This criticism collapses, because the middle sentence is wrong: rule-sentences (being atheoretical in character) must not contain theoretical concepts (cf. Section 2 above). Carr concludes (p. 112) that I have failed to prove the normative character of linguistic objects. In view of this, it is curious that he takes no note of G7M : 7.0. ‘The Ineliminability of Linguistic Normativity') where I explicity p out the fallacies in the five best known attempts to get rid of linguistic normativity. It is even more curious that, having denounced linguistic normativity, Carr repeatedly argues (p. 129) for linguistic conventionality. But ‘norm’ and ‘convention’ are just synonyms. In sum, I see no reason to accept the Popperian account, but I do see a few reasons not to accept it. REFERENCES Anttila, Raimo (1977). Analogy. The Hague : Mouton. Anttila, Raimo (1988). "Causality in Linguistic Theory and in Historical Linguistics". 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