Innateness, internalism and input: Chomskyan rationalism and its problems

Innateness, internalism and input: Chomskyanrationalism and its problems§

Philip Carr

Departement d’anglais, Universite Montpellier III (Paul Valery), Route de Mende,

34199 Montpellier, France

Accepted 5 June 2002

1. Introduction

I recently complained, to a prominent British linguist, that many linguists(including many practising generative linguists) seem not to take much interest inNoam Chomsky’s general (‘philosophical’) writings on the nature of language. Hereplied that he certainly never did, and seemed puzzled that anyone should do so.Among such linguists, there appears to be a sense that Chomsky’s more generalthinking about the nature of human language (as opposed to his more specific work,for example, within the current Chomskyan model known as the Minimalist pro-gramme) represents merely ‘the philosophical side of (Chomskyan) linguistics’, anarea that is viewed by many linguists as being, in some sense, an optional extra,distinct from, and not having any obvious direct bearing on, the business of gettingon with doing linguistic analysis (‘linguistics proper’, as opposed to philosophy).This outlook is unfortunate, since foundational ideas are surely what any significantlinguistic theory is derived from. It is certainly the more general issues which driveChomsky’s thinking, and from which the Minimalist programme and all of its pre-decessors are derived. It is equally striking that many of the recent ‘popular science’books on subjects such as the evolution of human language, typically written bynon-linguists, present versions of Chomsky’s ideas which often correspond (at best)only vaguely to what Chomsky has proposed, or attribute to Chomsky views whichhe appears never to have held (such as the mistaken idea that Chomsky argues for aninnately endowed set of rules, an idea recently reiterated, unfortunately, by Terrence

Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635

www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci

0388-0001/03/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/S0388-0001(03)00016-0

§ Review of: Chomsky, N., 2000. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge. Sampson, G., 1997. Educating Eve. Cassell, London. Smith, N., 1999.

Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

E-mail address: phillip.carr@univ-montp3.fr (P. Carr).

Deacon and by John Searle). One cannot help feeling that this state of affairs resultsfrom the (perhaps inevitable, but nonetheless regrettable) phenomenon wherebymany come to internalise certain ‘commonly known’ ideas (i.e. received wisdom)putatively proposed by a major thinker without perhaps having read properly (or atall) the source materials. The welcome appearence of Neil Smith’s book, Chomsky:Ideas and Ideals (henceforth CII) and the equally welcome collection of some ofChomsky’s recent philosophical papers (New Horizons in the Study of Language andMind; henceforth NH) will, I believe, help remedy these states of affairs, if they areread sufficently widely. Geoffrey Sampson’s Educating Eve (henceforth EE) shouldalso prove useful as a counterfoil to the popular presentation of a version of some ofChomsky’s ideas given by Steven Pinker (1994). More generally, Sampson’s bookconstitutes a critique of Rationalist approaches to linguistic knowledge which stu-dents and the general public ought to find accessible and thought-provoking. Inwhat follows, I will discuss NH first, followed by CII, and then EE. I then concludewith some remarks on how the Rationalist/Empiricist debate might move forward.

2. Chomsky (2000)

With limited space, it is hard to do justice to the richness and depth of the think-ing reflected in NH; I will therefore focus on some of the central, and most con-troversial, aspects of Chomsky’s current thinking about the nature of humanlanguage.

2.1. Naturalism and reductionism

One of the most striking aspects of Chomsky’s work is his claim that humanbeings are born with innately endowed, species-specific, specifically linguisticknowledge, and thus that the object of linguistic inquiry is part of the natural world.This naturalistic conception of human language is fascinating and highly con-troversial, since it amounts to excluding conventionality from human language. Thecontroversy stems from the fact that many believe that conventionality plays a cen-tral role in human language, and conventions are not given by nature; equally, thatwhich is given by nature is not conventional. Those who insist that much of whatfalls under the notion ‘human language’ is given by culture, rather than nature, areinclined to accuse Chomsky of being committed to a form of reductionism, and ofadopting ‘scientism’ in the study of human language.But Chomsky is no reductionist. He very cleverly ties in discussion of reduction-

ism with issues in the history of science, particularly the notion of unification in thesciences. Chomsky makes the point that unification in the sciences rarely proceedsvia the reduction of one science to another, and that one must not, therefore, expectthe science of linguistic knowledge to be reducible to physics. In making this point,Chomsky is resisting what he refers to as the dualistic demand that linguistic theo-rising must meet criteria over and above those required in the natural sciences.Chomsky has in mind here the reductionistic metaphysical naturalism adopted by

616 P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635

Dennett, Paul Churchland, Rorty and others. Chomsky’s argument is that it isunreasonable of them to insist that our accounts of mental states must be ‘harmo-nious with’ or ‘continuous with’ (these amount to ‘reducible to’) current physics,since we cannot even make that demand of tomorrow’s physics. However, if theo-rising about linguistic knowledge is not reducible to the theoretical constructs ofphysics and biology, as Chomsky insists, that implies that different constructs, andthus, quite possibly, different criteria, might have to be adopted in linguistictheorising.Nor is Chomsky easily accused of being ‘scientistic’: he makes it perfectly clear

that he believes that there are limits to the reach of naturalistic inquiry into thehuman mind, and that one can learn more about human reality by reading novelsthan by engaging in such inquiry, although this has earned him criticism from avariety of reductionists, who accuse him of mysticism with respect to the study ofthe mind.Chomsky’s naturalism is distinct from metaphysical naturalism: it is methodologi-

cal naturalism, the view that linguistic inquiry begins by assuming that one is dealingwith aspects of minds, considered as part of the natural world, and then proceeds byexamining whatever aspects of the object of inquiry seem amenable to empiricalinvestigation. Methodological naturalism is said by Chomsky to be distinct frommethodological dualism, the view that, when we study the human mind, methodsother than those of scientific rationality must be invoked. Chomsky opposes thisidea, at least for those aspects of the mind which, for him, appear to be amenable toscientific inquiry. Chomsky insists that it makes no sense to demand that the notion‘the mental’ be given any sharp a priori delimitation, any more than chemists needprovide detailed definitions, in advance of inquiry, of what is, and is not, to be takento count as ‘the chemical’: both notions are adopted without any special metaphy-sical significance. Interestingly, though, it is central to Chomsky’s thought to provideaccounts, a prioristically, of what is to count as ‘the linguistic’ (for instance, it isdeemed to exclude everything that falls under the notion ‘E-language’).

2.2. Cartesian dualism

One can understand why Chomsky is at times suspected of implicit Cartesiandualism when he makes statements of the sort ‘People. . . refer to cats,. . .understandwhat others say,. . .their brains don’t’ (p. 28). But such statements may carry nomore metaphysical import than the claim that ‘My eyes don’t see, I do’. They areentirely compatible with the kind of non-reductive materialism adopted by Rose(1997) and others. Chomsky’s response to the currently fashionable accusation ofmind/body dualism is that the mental/physical problem cannot be formulated,because we have had no coherent conception of the physical since the demise of theCartesian ‘clockwork’, contact picture of the physical universe. This is an ingeniousresponse, but it is suspect, since Descartes’ (1644/1970: 199) definition of the physi-cal was ’that which is extended’. That definition still holds, surely, despite the demiseof the clockwork view. The mind/body problem can indeed be formulated. It is theproblem of consciousness: how can a purely material organism be conscious?

P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635 617

Descartes’s response, that there is a non-material mind, over and above the materialorganism, was hopelessly inadequate: it just did not add up, and still does not, since,apart from the dubious ontology of this putative non-material object, it is incon-ceivable that it could interact, causally or otherwise, with the brain (a materialobject). Despite much in the way of interesting, but purely speculative, stories abouthow consciousness might have evolved (such as those given by Dennett, 1996), andendless assertions that consciousness is brain state/process (of course it is, but thequestion is how this is possible), no one has any definitive, properly scientific answerto the question. Interestingly, brain scientists such as Susan Greenfield (2000) arerefreshingly honest in admitting this, while philosophers such as Churchland andDennett are less so, but have little to offer in the way of a seriously scientific accountof what consciousness is.

2.3. Folk psychology and ‘the science of linguistics’

This brings us to a distinct kind of dualism that Chomsky does advocate, of oureveryday folk-psychological understanding of the world and our scientific under-standing of it. Favourite examples are the fact that we see the sun as setting andrising, or see the moon as large when it is on the horizon. Equally, as Eddington(1927) pointed out, there is a sense in which there are two sorts of table in the world:on the one hand, there are the middle-sized solid objects of our everyday experience;on the other hand, tables are composed largely of space inhabited by subatomicparticles. One of Chomsky’s main points here is that there is no reason to believethat our scientific understanding of the world will be anything like our common-sense folk understanding. The relevance of this for Chomsky’s work is that there istherefore no reason to believe that our theoretical understanding of human languagewill be anything like everyday commonsense beliefs about language. But nor doessuch scientific understanding displace our folk understanding; rather, the two existside by side, offering two completely different pictures of the world.But surely we do not want to say that our scientific accounts of phenomena such

as ’setting suns’ and ’large moons’ have nothing to do with our folk beliefs. Ideally,one wants our scientific account of such things to be consistent with our everydayexperiences and, better still, to explain why we have them. And this is the case: sci-entific theory allows us to argue that the sun does not set, while simultaneouslyexplaining why it appears to, and that the moon does not vary in size; while ourscientific accounts of the human visual system and other aspects of the world explainwhy it appears large to us when on the horizon.The question then is whether linguistic theory as conceived of by Chomsky is

consistent with and can explain our folk beliefs about language. Linguistic theory,conceived of in naturalistic terms, could not possibly tell us anything about manysuch folk beliefs (e.g. the belief that Occitan is a dialect of French). So here theremust be, for Chomsky, a difference between the setting-sun type of belief and com-monsense beliefs about ’language’. In the latter case, the beliefs are, for Chomsky,about something entirely different from the object of Chomskyan naturalistic inquiry(they are about ‘E-language’), whereas, in the case of the setting sun, the large

618 P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635

moon, and the ‘two tables’, both the folk beliefs and our scientific beliefs are beliefsabout the same object.

2.4. The architecture of ‘the language faculty’

Chomsky postulates the existence of a language faculty as a distinct system ofmind, but allows that its parts may not all have uniquely linguistic functions; rather,performance systems might be specially adapted to L, perhaps as special versions ofcapacities which were initially shared with other species, for example psychophysicalcapacities of the sort identified by Mehler and Dupoux (1994) and others. Chomskyis careful to note that such modules are distinct from the putative inner cognitivesystem, using the term ’modularity more narrowly understood’ for the latter. We arewarned by Chomsky not to confuse this innermost cognitive/computational systemof the language faculty with Fodorian input/output modules such as the modularityof perceptual systems, as postulated in Marr’s work on vision. We are also urged toconceive of language acquisition as, in some sense, parallel to the development ofperceptual systems, in the sense that, in both cases, input from the environmenttriggers a pre-determined path of development. But if the language faculty really iswithout significant analogue elsewhere in the natural world, as Chomsky insists, it isarguable that we should resist the latter analogy and stick with the most centralclaim that innately endowed linguistic knowledge is quite distinct in kind frominnate perceptual endowments. If the innermost cognitive system is distinct fromperceptual systems, why should we expect it to exhibit parallels with the develop-ment of such systems? Perhaps innately endowed linguistic knowledge does notmutate from an initial to a steady state. Rather, one might suggest, what developsare aspects of mind which access innately endowed linguistic knowledge.

2.5. Externalism, I-languages and normativity

Chomsky mounts a compelling case against an externalist (Saussurean/Fregean)conception of specific languages (as advocated by Dummett and others) underwhich a language is a public or community object of which the individual comes tohave an imperfect grasp. Against this, Chomsky argues for his internalist conceptionof linguistic knowledge, according to which such knowledge is constituted solely aspart of the psychology of individuals. Taking normativity to be a community-basednotion, Chomsky denies that normativity or misuse of language play any role in thetheory of language. Thus, having taken an I-language to be ‘a way of speaking andmeaning’, Chomsky argues that, if Jones takes ‘arthiritis’ to mean ‘a pain the leg’,then, according to Chomsky, Jones is being faithful to his I-language, rather thanmisusing the community-based meaning of the word, under which ‘arthiritis’ mightbe taken to mean ‘disease of the joints’; the example originates in a paper by Burge(1978); for discussion, see Pateman (1987: 116–119).However, in speaking one’s native accent (a way of speaking), one is surely con-

forming to a norm, engaging in social behaviour which is parallel to that of thespeech behaviour of some community. If I change my accent in order to conform to

P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635 619

what is considered a prestige accent, then it follows from Chomsky’s conception ofan I-language (as subsuming a way of speaking) that I have changed my I-language.Thus, as Burton-Roberts (in preparation) points out, with I-languages defined asways of speaking and meaning, normativity must play a role in a theory of languagewhich takes I-languages to be objects of inquiry, and the I/E distinction is thusundermined.The problem here does not reside in the notion ‘normativity’ itself: Chomsky can

interpret norms (conventions) in terms of individual psychology: he can say that agiven way of speaking, while according with a set of norms, remains part of indivi-dual psychology, and thus part of an individual’s I-language. To allow that ways ofspeaking are normative in nature is not to accept prescriptivism: the latter is objec-tionable because it amounts to members of one community insisting that theirnorms are to be preferred to the norms of another community. The problem withdefining I-languages as ways of speaking and meaning, and including them undernaturalistic inquiry, is that a way of speaking is essentially behavioural: to speak in acertain way is to adopt certain norms of social behaviour. To allow that an I-lan-guage is behavioural (at least to the extent that it is defined as a way of speaking) isincompatible with Chomsky’s anti-behavioural conception of linguistic knowledge.So something has to give here. Perhaps it should be the idea that ‘a way of speaking’constitutes part of linguistic knowledge as conceived of by Chomsky.This point relates to another of Chomsky’s claims: that I-languages are instantia-

tions of a genetically given initial state, so that both the initial state and the instan-tiation of it (the ‘steady state’) are objects of naturalistic inquiry. If an I-languagesubsumes a way of speaking, and if ways of speaking are conventional, then thatmeans allowing that conventional states of affairs form part of naturalistic inquiry.But conventions could not be objects of naturalistic inquiry. There is, arguably, adilemma here for Chomsky. If one is to uphold the claim that the object of linguisticinquiry falls exclusively within the natural world, then conventionality must beexcluded from that object. Thus facts which are plausibly said to be conventional innature must be abandoned as legitimate objects of I-linguistic study, or somehow re-interpreted as not being conventional. Among these are, arguably, facts aboutsequencing, and such facts constitute much of the syntactician’s stock-in-trade. It is atleast as plausible to argue, as Itkonen (1978) does, that sequencing restrictions (e.g.‘In English, do not insert an adverbial expression between a transitive verb and itsdirect object’), are conventional in nature (albeit structure-dependent) as it is to arguethat they are determined by the interaction between ‘the input’ and general para-meters and principles given by UG. The latter approach faces grave difficulties inallowing for synchronic variation and historical change in permissible sequencings.

3. Smith (1999)

CII will be immensely useful for students and practising linguists alike. It iswriten by someone who has an excellent grasp of all areas of Chomsky’s thinking,and who fully understands the connections between them. It is not an easy task to

620 P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635

set out, in linear sequence, those ideas and the complex conceptual interconnec-tions between them, but Smith has succeeded admirably in doing so, and in a clearand accessible manner. I use it as the set textbook for a course on Chomsky andhis critics for fourth-year students in France; it says a great deal for Smith’s writ-ing style that many students whose native language is not English find the bookclear and approachable. On such a course, it is useful to have NH available asprimary source reading (the first chapter of NH being most useful, since it providesa short and undaunting way into Chomsky’s writings; the other papers are hardergoing for undergraduates, but should be approachable by those who have read CIIproperly). Smith explictly sets out to present and defend Chomsky’s approach tothe study of human language. Those who also wish to offer students critical workon Chomsky’s ideas will find no shortage of such work in their libraries; I use thefirst four chapters of Educating Eve. Some may find Smith’s approach overly par-tisan, but Smith makes it quite clear from the outset that he is a thoroughgoingChomskyan.CII does not focus solely on the technical details of the latest Chomskyan model

of the relationship between syntactic, semantic and phonological knowledge(Minimalism). Far from it; these occupy a small section of the book, and they arelocated within the context of Chomsky’s overall conception of the nature of humanlanguage and of linguistic inquiry. This is a welcome approach, since it reflects thenature of Chomsky’s thinking: with Chomsky, it is the big ideas which come first;the specific empirical programme is derived from those ideas. It is a peculiarity ofmodern linguistics that there are so many generative grammarians who simply adoptthe latest generative framework as yet another possible means of engaging in ana-lysis, without regard to its conceptual underpinnings. Chomsky has never been thatkind of linguist, and therein lies the fascination and importance of his work. Thepredecessors of the Minimalist programme have expired; Minimalism may well meetthe same fate, and when the final Chomskyan framework expires, it is Chomsky’smore general ideas that will remain as a major contribution to the history of Wes-tern thought about human language.Smith is very good at bringing out the importance of the history and philosophy

of science in Chomsky’s thinking; this is an advantage, since one simply cannotappreciate where Chomsky is coming from without appreciating, for instance, whereChomsky stands on the distinction between scientific realism and various instru-mentalist approaches to scientific knowledge, and the implications of that realiststance for the status of mentalism and notions of evidence and reality in Chomsky’sthinking.Another attractive feature of CII is Smith’s integration into the text, at an early

stage, of material on dissociation methodology and an interesting range of doubledissociation phenomena (such as, putatively, Williams’ Syndrome and so-called‘Specific Language Impairment’). Discussion of language disorders is integrated intothis material to good effect. The pedagogical advantage of this strategy is that thesephenomena are accessible and attractive to most students, and thus act as a goodintroduction to the idea of modularity of mind. CII also includes a final chapter onChomsky’s political work, combined with attempts by Smith to establish connec-

P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635 621

tions between Chomsky’s thinking on politics and language (despite Chomsky’sdenial of any significant connection between the two). This too is pedagogicallyuseful: the first four chapters work well as a textbook for teachers not wishing tocover Chomsky’s political work, while the addition of the final chapter will be ofgreat use to students in universities where both aspects of Chomsky’s work aretaught (as is the case in my department), thus encouraging students to make con-ceptual connections between what might be seen as unconnected courses.The arguments presented by Smith in favour of modularity in general, of innate

linguistic modularity in particular, and in favour of scientific realism, are well pre-sented. So too is his discussion of the Chomskyan approach to linguistic knowledgeas falling entirely within individual psychology. His treatment of the evidence for acritical period, and specifically the evidence from Genie is even-handed, and hisdiscussion of connectionist advocates of Empiricism is clear and convincing,although interestingly, he notes that the putatively few results in connectionism fallwithin the sphere of phonology and morphology, rather than syntax and semantics;this is not the only point in Smith’s book where this division crops up (see later). Thefact that there is such a division demands an explanation.

3.1. Perceptual judgements vs. intuitive grammaticality judgements

There are other arguments here which are less persuasive. For instance, Smith (p.29) has it that ‘there is no difference in principle’ between our native-speaker intui-tive grammaticality judgements and the visual judgements we make when we sufferoptical illusions such as those induced by Muller–Lyer diagrams. Thus, a parallel isproposed between perceptual systems and linguistic knowledge: both are said toresult from our biological make-up. True, both sorts of judgement may be said(controversially, but plausibly) to result from ‘the outcome of a computational pro-cess which the speaker as subject registers and reports’ (Pateman, 1987: 100), but thetwo cases are surely in principle distinct in an important sense: there is clearly var-iation among native speakers in intuitive judgements. Like Smith, Chomsky, andmillions of other native speakers of English, I find wanna contraction in an expres-sion like ‘Who do you wanna win?’ (as a version of ‘Who do you want to win?’) ill-formed (unless who is construed as the object of win, which forces an odd inter-pretation under which human beings can be won, not the interpretation beingappealed to here). But experience of presenting such cases to groups of students hastaught me that there is always a substantial minority of native speakers who findsuch expressions well-formed. I have seen this example presented to an audience ofaround 100 British native speakers of English, all university teaching staff; around20 or 30 of whom found the expression well formed. There are countless other suchexamples, and generative linguists typically respond to them (perfectly reasonably,in my view) by appeal to the individualistic conception of linguistic knowledge pro-posed by Chomsky: in as much as there is variation in intuitive judgements, there aredifferences in individual grammars (or I-languages, as they are now known: seelater). Nonetheless, there is no variation whatsoever in reactions to Muller–Lyerdiagrams: we are all, by virtue of being members of the human species, condemned

622 P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635

to suffer such illusions, since it is in our nature to do so: we share a common visualsystem.In such cases, we can perfectly reasonably speak of a constraint on our visual

system which is given by the genes in some way. But it is not at all clear that we canreasonably speak, as Lightfoot (1999) does, of wanna- contraction judgements asbeing determined by ‘a genetic constraint’. If we are to take this claim at face value,it means that our genetic makeup constrains us to interpret such expressions in theway that we do. But it should then be impossible for there to be any variation insuch judgements, just as there is no variation in our perceptual judgments of theMuller–Lyer diagrams. Perceptual judgements of optical illusions do not vary fromindividual to individual, whereas intuitive grammaticality judgements do. Putanother way, intuitive grammaticality judgements are not a species of perceptualjudgement. Chomsky would surely insist that this is so, but at the same time, heproposes parallels between linguistic knowledge and perceptual capacities.

3.2. I-language vs. a language as a set of sentences

Smith (p. 32) has it that Chomsky has all along argued against the definition of alanguage as a set of well-formed expressions (with ‘expression’ often rendered as‘sentence’). The putatively ‘received’ notion that Chomsky had indeed adopted thisdefinition in earlier work, prior to the advent of the term ‘I-language’, is explainedby Smith as follows. Syntactic Structures (1957) started out with a statement of aposition that Chomsky was attacking, namely the position that a language is to beviewed as a set of sentences. Many people, Smith claims, mistakenly identified thatdefinition as the one Chomsky was adopting, rather than repudiating. If this is so,what are we to make of the personal pronoun ‘I’ in the much-quoted statement, inSyntactic Structures, that ‘From now on, I will consider a language to be a set (finiteor infinite) of sentences’ (Chomsky, 1957: 13). If this amounts to outlining a positionto be attacked, it certainly does not read that way. And what about the followingstatement: ‘A fully adequate grammar must assign to each of an infinite range ofsentences a structural description indicating how this sentence is understood by theideal speaker-hearer.’ (Chomsky, 1965: 4)? This extract does not explicitly containthe definition of a language as an infinite set of sentences, but it surely presupposesit. So does the following: ‘the child constructs a grammar—that is, a theory of thelanguage of which the well-formed sentences of the primary linguistic data constitutea small sample.’ (Chomsky, 1965: 25). Anyone who believes that Chomsky didindeed earlier define a language as a set of sentences is in good company: so didSmith and Wilson, as late as 1979: beginning with the statement that ‘a language isdefinable in terms of a set of rules’ (13), they later go on to say that ‘a language isbest described in terms of a grammar, or system or rules. . .a language itself isdefined as the set of sentences described by a given grammar’ (21).The matter is important in its own right as an issue in the history of linguistic

thought. But it is important in pedagogical terms too. In Smith’s section on I-lan-guage vs. E-language, the student is invited (p. 13) to believe that a definition of alanguage as a set of sentences could not have a decisive role to play in linguistic

P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635 623

theory (incidentally, Smith unfortunately uses the term ‘language’, rather than ‘alanguage’ on line 7 of the first paragraph, and later repeats this on p. 100; no one isclaiming, of course, that ‘language’ is to be defined this way). On the same page,Smith states that ‘it is not at issue that people can make judgements about the well-formedness of sentences of their language’. What is the student to make of this? Onthe one hand, there are such things as ‘the sentences of one’s language’, and Smithmakes crucial use of such sentences in presenting his arguments. So those must beproper objects of inquiry, although, of course, it is the underlying grammar (nowknown as an I-language) which we are interested in, and its relation to the postu-lated initial state. Given that it has been granted that there are such things, theremust be a set of them from which Smith chooses his examples. On the other hand,such a set of sentences is deemed to fall within E-language, and thus to fall outsideof the scope of linguistic inquiry. So why give careful (or any) consideration to sen-tences taken from that set?These issues here were always problematic for generative grammar and

Chomskyan mentalism. At an earlier stage in the history of generative grammar thecompetence/performance distinction mapped nicely onto the distinction betweengrammaticality vs. acceptability: strings which were grammatical constituted sen-tences of the language, whereas those which were not did not; additionally, per-formance factors were said to interfere with grammaticality judgements, so that onehad to allow, additionally, for the acceptability vs. unacceptability of utterances. Ata later stage (later than Aspects, where ‘sentence’ and ‘utterance’ are used inter-changeably), the distinction between sentence and utterance also mapped neatlyonto the distinction; as Smith and Wilson (1979: 287) succinctly put it, ‘The sen-tence is a construct of competence, whereas the utterance is a construct of perfor-mance‘. And, since competence was regarded as an object of inquiry, thensentences too must be legitimate objects of inquiry, and thus the sets which theyform. These distinctions also mapped neatly onto the distinction between ‘generate’and ‘produce’: sentences were said to be generated by the grammar, but the notion‘generate’ was quite distinct from the idea that utterances were said to be producedby the speaker–hearer (despite the fact that this crucial distinction betwen generateand produce was, and still is, continually overlooked by practising generativegrammarians).But one thing was never clear: given that the grammar, qua mental state, was

finite, and given that the set of sentences constituting the speaker–hearer’s language(generated by the grammar) was infinite, that set could not reside within the speak-er’s mind, a fact pointed out here by Smith. So what was the ontology of this set ofsentences? Somehow, that set must be of the mind, but not literally in the mind (Iowe this formulation to Noel Burton-Roberts). This problem was part of what ledto the ill-fated Platonistic approach to the ontology of languages in generativegrammar (Katz, 1981) and to the partially similar view that such a set enjoyed somekind of Popperian ‘third world’ status (Carr, 1990). The problem has remain unre-solved; insisting that the idea of a set of sentences falls outside of the object ofinquiry (and is ‘empty of content’) while continuing to make crucial use of sentencesdrawn from such a set does not amount to any kind of resolution. And it will not do

624 P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635

to say that we can cite sentences as evidence for the nature of someone’s I-languagewhile not somehow making implicit appeal to the idea that there is a set of thosesentences from which our examples are drawn.One might argue that worries about distinctions such as the sentence/utterance

distinction are simply irrelevant to linguistic inquiry, since these notions both belongto E-language, and are of no significance. Again, this is not much of an argument ifone insists on relying crucially on specific sentences as evidence for I-language. Andthe distinction is anyway appealed to, implicitly, by those who hold such a view.Thus, Smith at times speaks of ‘our ability to produce and understand utterances ofsentences’ (p. 32), which clearly presupposes a distinction between sentences andutterances. Elsewhere (p. 93), he has it that ‘we can produce and understand unlim-ited numbers of sentences’. So what is it that we produce? Sentences, or utterances ofsentences? Either the answer is unclear, or talk of ’producing sentences’ is ellipticalfor talk of producing utterances of sentences, in which case, we need to know whatthe distinction between sentence and utterance amounts to, what the ontology ofeach might be, and what the relation between them might be.

3.3. The role of intuition

Smith mounts a good defence of the role of intuitive grammaticality judgements,much denigrated by Sampson, as one amongst many sources of evidence in linguis-tics. Oddly, Smith prefaces the relevant section with a quote from Kant, to the effectthat ‘all human knowledge begins with intuition, goes from there to concepts andends with ideas’. Apparently, ‘intuition’, the translation of Anschauung (‘view’), inKant’s thinking designates some aspect of perception (sensibility), such that spaceand time are ‘pure intuitions’, where the latter are ‘pure forms of sensibility’ (Rus-sell, 1946/1961: 685). I am not sure I understand this, despite several attempts, overthe years, at understanding Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason. Nor am I sure thateven the very best linguistics students would either. I also doubt whether even a verybright student reading Smith’s book would have any idea what the distinctionbetween ‘concepts’ and ‘ideas’ is supposed to amount to, or in what sense ‘intuition’,‘concepts’ and ‘knowledge’ are supposed to be related, or how all of this is supposedto bear on the status of intuitive grammaticality judgements.Since Smith is presenting and defending Chomskyan Rationalism, it is natural

that he should seek to downplay the role of general cognitive capacities in languageacquisition, such as the capacities to form inductive and analogical generalisations.To the extent that a case can be made for such capacities being at the centre of theacquisition process, it is Empiricism, rather than Rationalism, which is supported.Smith persuasively presents the kind of argument often made by Chomsky to theeffect that ‘traditional ideas of analogy are not useful in accounting for our knowl-edge of syntax’ (p. 55). Smith cites (1) John is too stubborn to talk to and (2) John istoo stubborn to talk to Bill. He also cites (3) John ate and (4) John ate an apple. Thepoint is that there is a superficial analogy between the two pairs, in that both (1) and(3), but not (2) and (4), may be said to exhibit absence of an object. His point is that,while one may interpret (3) as meaning that John ate something or other, one does

P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635 625

not interpret (1) as meaning that John is too stubborn to talk to someone or other.The argument is often put that the child fails to draw such mistaken analogies dur-ing the course of language acquisition, but children ought to make such mistakes ininterpretation if the general capacity for forming analogical generalisations is centralto the language acquisition process. Thus the startling claim (pp. 117–118) that‘learning of the sort that takes place in school or the psychologist’s laboratory typi-cally involves association, induction, conditioning, hypothesis formation and test-ing, generalisation, and so on. None of these seems to be centrally involved in (first)language acquisition, which takes place before the child is capable of exploitingthese procedures in other domains’. No empirical evidence is offered to substantiatethe claim that the child is unable to exploit such capacities in other domains at thelanguage acquisition stage.Smith hedges this claim with the statement that ‘There are some areas where

analogy, hypothesis formation and generalisation do seem to play a (restricted) role’(p. 118), citing over-generalisations in morphology such as three sheeps comed. Buthe argues that such analogical generalisations are not characteristic of syntacticacquisition (the most central part of the acquisition process, for Chomskyans). Evenif this were the case, no explanation is offered as to why analogy should play a rolein morphological acquisition, but not in syntactic acquisition. Nor is there anymention of the many cases of analogical generalisation in the acquisition of pho-nology. Nonetheless, it is striking that there exists a large set of possible analogicalgeneralisations in syntax which the child does not avail herself of, and Empiricistsneed to respond to that fact. One possible middle-way approach is to argue thatanalogical generalisation is available in syntax, but that the capacity for forminganalogical generalisations is constrained by the Principle of Structure Dependence,so that sets of expressions are taken to be analogous only if they are structurallyanalogous. It then remains to be established whether Structure Dependence is trulyan innately endowed, specifically linguistic, principle. But even if it is, the possibilityarises that the domain-general capacity to form analogical generalisations operatesin tandem with that principle.

4. Sampson (1997)

Sampson first sets out (in chapter 2) to dismantle earlier arguments (from,roughly, the sixties and seventies) in favour of innate linguistic knowledge. He thenproceeds to attack more recent work, by Bickerton and Jackendoff, and above all,Pinker. Next, he rehearses, in chapter 4, arguments he originally proposed sometime ago, to the effect that the sole case of a linguistic universal (recursion) supportsEmpiricism, since the universals in question are, he claims, simply universal factsabout any complex object. He ends (chapter 5) by defending Cartesian mind-bodydualism, as revitalised (anachronistically) by Popper and Eccles (1977), arguing that,while it runs counter to the Zeitgeist, it must be taken seriously. It is intriguing thatSampson’s version of Empiricism should lead him to support this doctrine, which isunacceptable to many, not simply because it no longer forms part of the intellectual

626 P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635

climate of opinion, but because it just cannot be made to stand up to serious scru-tiny: as mentioned earlier, no one can offer any explanation as to how a non-mate-rial object could interact with a material object, and Descartes himself offered nosatisfactory explanation. While Sampson’s objections to Bickerton and Pinker, onthe topics of creolisation and a supposed discontinuity in child acquisition of syntax,are fascinating and, to my mind, deeply persuasive, I will concentrate here (for thesake of brevity) on his criticisms of the arguments from the ‘speed’ and ‘ease’ ofacquisition, on the role of Motherese and on the putative evidence for innately-endowed linguistic knowledge said to be provided by so-called Specific LanguageImpairment.

4.1. Countering the standard arguments for Rationalism

Sampson’s critique of the standard arguments for Rationalism are well put, andfun to read. One of his responses to the ‘speed of acquisition’ argument is, to mymind, very persuasive. It is that speed is a relative notion, requiring some point ofcomparison. But, under Chomskyan assumptions, or indeed any assumptions, thereis nothing to compare it with. One may as well argue that language acquisition isslow, but that too is a claim which cannot be assessed. Chomsky is fond of citing theclaim that children ‘acquire’ about one word an hour (an estimate based on com-prehension vocabulary). Even ignoring the question of whether one should base thatestimate on root morphemes alone or both root and inflected and derived forms, onemay as well argue that this is painfully slow, given that the child may well be beingbombarded with new words at the rate of a great many per hour. Why not one perminute, sixty times faster?The argument from putative ‘ease of acquisition’ is harder to assess, partly

because there is so little available in the way of a criterion for judging what mightconstitute cognitive difficulty for the child during the course of development.Sampson believes that it is crucial to the Rationalist case that there be a criticalperiod for language acquisition. But one can surely remain agnostic on the critical-period hypothesis while remaining committed to Rationalism: from the fact that agiven capacity is innate (if it is a fact), it does not follow that it need be associatedwith a critical period. For instance, the capacity to breathe is innately endowed, butthere is no question of there being a critical period during which breathing willemerge, given appropriate input. It is innately-endowed perceptual capacities inparticular that typically exhibit critical periods. But it is arguable that Chomsky setshimself up for the kind of criticism Sampson adopts, precisely because Chomsky hasalways (since Aspects) drawn analogies between language acquisition and the devel-opment of perceptual capacities, with the latter exhibiting critical-period effects.Chomsky has always (again, since Aspects) been attracted to such analogies becausethey seem to him to show that the input, in all such cases, has a triggering, but not adetermining, role in development. The distinction is an interesting and importantone, but the nature of the ’input’ in the two cases is surely quite distinct. Withrespect to syntactic and semantic knowledge at least, the input is not sensory innature.

P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635 627

Sampson notes that children make grammatical mistakes, and that all we cansafely conclude about the presence or absence of mistakes in children is that theyfind some aspects of grammar easier to acquire than others. Sampson feels that agood guess as to the reason for this lies in the nature of the input, ‘for instance, thefrequency with which evidence for various features crops up’. There is an increasingamount of evidence to support the view that frequency of occurrence is central toexplaining phonological acquisition (Pierrehumbert, 2001, for instance), but when itcomes to acquisition of syntax, the picture is more complex than Sampson suggests.Let us take a specific case, cited by Sampson (p. 86), the well known one of the

child of psycholinguist Michael Braine, who resisted Braine’s attempts to correcther ‘other one spoon’ to the adult version ‘the other spoon’. This child’s construc-tion (as evidenced in our own recent work on our own child: see Brulard and Carr,to appear) is regular, in the sense that it is not restricted to any specific noun (ourchild had ‘an indefinite article’ before the noun, but in all other respects, the con-struction is the same as that of Braine’s child). It is clear that frequency of occur-rence in the input from adults cannot explain the phenomenon. Let us assume(pretty safely, I’d say, but it’s an empirical claim) that the phrase ‘the other N’crops up fairly frequently in the adult speech heard by, and, more specifically,addressed to, the child. Despite this, its frequency of occurrence is not sufficient toguarantee that the child will produce the construction properly at first. And thezero frequency of ‘Other one N’ fails to guarantee that it will not crop up in thechild’s speech.It seems to me that this is fatal to Sampson’s case. Most striking of all is the fact

that the child attempts the construction: it is not as if the child is simply flummoxedby it, and therefore simply does not even attempt it (which is often the case withcertain sorts of phonological, morphological and syntactic structures which count asrelatively complex for the child to master at a given stage). Rather, the child has, insome sense, ‘grasped’ the construction, is not at all phased by it, but insists on pro-ducing its own version of it. But why that version? And how come my child, here inthe South of France, years later, is doing almost exactly the same thing as Braine’s,and in a radically different external (geographical and cultural) setting? It seems tome that Sampson has nothing to offer in the way of explanation of this intriguingphenomenon.The trouble with both Pinker’s and Sampson’s discussion of this, and other, cases,

is that they are so brief (although both can be forgiven for this: they have set out towrite short popular books). As Vihman (1996) points out, it is unwise to discuss anyaspect of child development independently of the developmental context in which itoccurs. What is crucial is the stage at which Braine’s child started uttering ‘anotherone’. Appearing on the printed page, other one spoon looks like a three-word utter-ance. But such an assumption may not be warranted. In the speech of my own child(see again Brulard and Carr, to appear), the expression (the/an) other one (utteredas [alawan] or [anawan]; henceforth alawan) appeared prior to the two-word stage.That is, it was almost certainly taken by the child to be a holistic single expression.When it appeared, utterances of genuine two-word expressions such as big diggerand snail gone had not yet appeared: alawan was not an early two-word utterance,

628 P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635

but a holistic expression, counting as a one-word expression, as far as the child isconcerned. It was typically uttered on its own, when the context of utterance nor-mally made it clear what the child wanted.One aspect of what is going on here concerns the child’s production phonology.

As is known, once the child gets the hang of pronouncing a given expression, even ifit deviates considerably from the adult target, the child often sticks with it (or itsown variants of it), even when it has passed the point of having difficulty with thephonological form. For instance, our child had difficulty with fricatives in onsetposition, often replacing them with stops. Thus Sophie was uttered [kiki], withreduplication. Even when the child had got past the point of having problems withonset fricatives, [kiki] remained in place for some months, to be replaced by [fofi],with consonant harmony. By the same token, in the case of alawan, even when thechild is capable (if coaxed) of uttering the word other on its own, the alawan formsurvived. If its meaning is something like ‘other’, then, in a sense, the child is utter-ing ‘other spoon’ when it utters ‘alawan spoon’: the child, having reached the two-word stage, has reached the point of being able to specify the referent, rather thanleave it to the addressee to figure out what the referent is from the context of utter-ance. But there remains a syntactic problem for the child: my (and probablyBraine’s) child, even though he had reached the two-word stage, still had not got tothe point of comparing ‘the/another one’ with expressions such as ‘the/anotherspoon’. The child has yet to ‘realise’ that one is a separate unit from the/another, andthat one can be used to replace nouns (or ‘N bars’).There is a sense in which this case supports Sampson’s position and a sense in

which it fails to do so. It is surely undeniable that, at a given stage, some thingscount as ‘too difficult’ for the child. But the question is what we are to make of thisfact. A Rationalist interpretation might be to conclude that the stages of develop-ment are given by nature, while an Empiricist such as Sampson might argue thatcertain structures are in some sense objectively more complex than others, so thatbig digger, say, is easier than other digger. But why? The otherness of another dig-ger is a relational concept, not a directly perceptible one, but then big is relationaltoo, although in perceptual terms. Pinker’s point is a valid one: correction byadults has no impact if the child is at a given stage and the acquisition of the phe-nomenon in question lies beyond that stage. And, in the case of phonologicalacquisition, even if the child has reached the appropriate stage, correction by adultswill often have no effect on a pronunciation which is entrenched in the child’sproduction repertoire.It is perhaps best to conclude that, in cases such as this, it is an open, empirical

question to what extent innately given factors play a role. At any rate, it is notunreasonable to conclude that they do, while it is quite implausible to suggest thatfrequency of occurrence in the adult input has a role to play in such a case (whereasit certainly does in other cases). However, frequency of occurrence in the child’srepertoire almost certainly does play a significant role in such cases: for the childreported on in Brulard and Carr (to appear), it is precisely words which are highestin frequency in the child’s speech (typically, those which are uttered many times perday) which tend to resist change, as has been widely noted.

P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635 629

There are other cases in which frequency of occurrence appears irrelevant. One can-not possibly account for children’s preference for me over I in subject position in Eng-lish main clauses in terms of frequency of occurrence in the adult input: its frequency ofoccurrence in that position is zero. I find it entirely plausible that such phenomenareflect Chomskyan ‘inner-directed’ cognitive development, even if we can only hazard aguess at the actual inner mechanisms which are at work. Whether the stages in devel-opment reflect the unravelling of an innately endowed language faculty or aspects ofmore general cognitive development is perhaps best viewed as an open question.Sampson makes the case that Motherese does indeed help the child in the acqui-

sition process. But the Motherese phenomenon cuts both ways. There seem to betwo distinct arguments here. First, there is an Empiricist case that Motherese issimpler, thus easing the child’s task. This is taken by Empiricists to undermine thePoverty of the Stimulus (POS) argument. But this argument is undermined byabsence of Motherese in some cultures: there is no evidence that the path of lan-guage acquisition is any different among children who are not exposed to Mother-ese. Second, there is a Rationalist case that, because Motherese is simpler, itconstitutes a POS argument: how could the child acquire all that complex grammarif the input is impoverished in the sense of being simplified so as to exclude much ofthe very complexity to be acquired?

4.2. Specific language impairment

It is interesting to compare and contrast the treatment of the evidence from so-called Specific Language Impairment (SLI), specifically the case of the K(E) family,given by Sampson, by Smith, and by Pinker (1994). The case is probably known tomost linguists. A 1990 paper by Gopnik had claimed that the members of the Kfamily who suffered from SLI exhibited a specifically linguistic deficit (putativeinability to form regular plurals on nonsense words such as sass, zash and zat) andhad otherwise normal intelligence, thus suggesting a genetically inherited dissocia-tion between linguistic knowledge and general intelligence (Gopnik, 1990). Pinker(1994) then made great mileage out of this case as evidence supporting geneticallyinherited linguistic capacities. Cases such as this also appear to support his ‘dualmechanism hypothesis’, according to which humans have at their disposal twoinnately endowed means (one given by UG) of storing and accessing linguisticknowledge: the formation of general rules which can then be accessed in a productiveway, as opposed the simple storing of forms as wholes which can then be accessed,as in the case of suppletive go/went (see Dabrowska, 2001 for an incisive critique ofPinker’s position, and empirical evidence supporting an Empiricist alternative).It is interesting that the very sorts of analogically-based rules portrayed by Smith

as being marginal, and not (for Chomskyans) characteristic of language acquisition,are taken by Pinker to be central exemplars of the Chomskyan conception of lan-guage acquisition. Which is it to be? Is the normal child’s mastery of English regularplural and past tense forms peripheral to the Chomskyan approach to languageacquisition, since analogical generalisation seems centrally involved in that mastery?Or is such mastery to be interpreted as crucial support for the Chomskian approach?

630 P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635

If the latter, how does the role played by analogy in such generalisations square withChomskyan assumptions?Sampson points to subsequent work by Vargha-Khadem et al. (1995), which ser-

iously undermines both claims made by Gopnik, pointing to low verbal and non-verbal IQ among the family members who suffer from SLI, and a range of deficits innon-linguistic areas, such as difficulty in performing both simultaneous andsequenced actions. Despite this, Gopnik et al. (1997: 120), in a paper published afterthe appearance of the Vargha-Khadem (henceforth, V-K) paper, insist that ‘one ofthe clinically defining characteristics of this disorder is that the affected individualshave performance IQs in the normal range’. The V-K results are only briefly andpartially cited by Gopnik et al. in their paper: they do not cite the average verbal IQof 75, for instance. Worse still for the Gopnik/Pinker line is the fact that a sub-stantial number of morphological errors produced by SLI sufferers in the K familyshowed evidence of over-generalisation.Smith does refer to the V-K study, but in a footnote, in which he acknowledges

that there are alternative interpretations of the data. But that is putting the case forV-K too weakly. What is at issue is not just the interpretation of the data; what is atissue is what the data are. These SLI sufferers either do or do not have lower thannormal IQs, and either do or do not exhibit non-linguistic deficits. V-K’s workprovides the relevant evidence. It is normal, in scientific practice, to argue about theinterpretation of the data, but it is surely not normal practice to simply fail to dis-cuss falsifying data. To the extent that Chomskyans fail to mention or discussempirical evidence bearing on their claims, they do not deserve to have taken ser-iously their claim to be engaged in scientific investigation.Sampson notes that it took him some time to track down the V-K studies, but had

he consulted Elman et al. (1996), he would have found that the first of the V-K studieshad already been discussed in detail from an Empiricist point of view (but notSampson’s version of Empiricism). However, it may be that this book was unavail-able to Sampson during the writing of EE. The wisest conclusion one can draw aboutso-called SLI is that the jury is out on this fascinating topic; it is not even clear that theterm is more than a vague syndrome-type cover term for a range of deficits. Thepapers in Gopnik et al. (1997) show that it is not clear what is and is not to be taken tofall under this term, and, more importantly, the extent to which it may be specificallylinguistic; at least one author in that volume (Johnston) concludes that, ‘However weare to interpret particular findings, we are forced to the general conclusion that Spe-cific Language Impairment is not very specific’ (p. 175), arguing that SLI sufferersexhibit ‘information-processing deficits, particularly in the areas of perception, pro-cessing rate and attentional capacity’ (p. 174). If this is correct, then so-called SLIoffers no support at all for Chomskyan Rationalism (quite the contrary, in fact).Although I have failed to discuss many of Sampson’s interesting points here, my

own judgement of EE is that it is good to have available for students, as a counter-weight to CII and Pinker (1994). It seems to me that Sampson is better at producinga detailed critique of the Rationalist position than he is at fleshing out convincingdetails of his version of an Empiricist alternative. For instance, one of his attemptsat explaining well-formed vs. ill-formed syntactic structures is to appeal to the

P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635 631

traditional distinction between essence and accidence. But that distinction is vague,and fails to meet Sampson’s own criterion that grammatical explanations be fullyexplicit. It is an odd irony that Sampson, whose position is explicitly Popperian,should appeal to essentialism, which Popper consistently opposed (see Popper, 1963,for instance). And it is regrettable that the philosophical basis of his critique of lin-guistic Rationalism should lead him to a version of Empiricism which embracesCartesian dualism, a doctrine which is simply untenable.

5. Where does the debate go from here?

Even if a consensus eventually emerges according to which Chomsky’s mainclaims are widely believed to be mistaken, his adopting a radically internalist con-ception of linguistic knowledge coupled with naturalism has forced us to ask aboutthe respective roles of nature and convention in linguistic phenomena and hasspurred critics into questioning the nature of innate endowments in the acquisitionprocess. I end by mentioning some recent responses to these issues.In an acute review of the issues, Cowley (2001) suggests that there are shared, and

questionable, assumptions adopted by both Sampson and Chomskyan Rationalists,and that the way forward is to abandon those assumptions, taking understanding tobe indeterminate, and emerging from joint activity. One such questionable assump-tion, Cowley suggests, is the idea that languages are determinate sets of forms. In asense, Chomskyans, in abandoning the idea that a language is a set of sentencesgenerated by a grammar, have abandoned the idea that languages are determinatesets of forms. But in another sense, Minimalism has retained this notion, in that thepostulated grammar is still taken to generate sets of expressions with formal proper-ties. Cowley’s alternative to both Sampsonian Empiricism and Chomskyan Ration-alism is inspired by the work of Roy Harris (1981 and elsewhere). I lack the space toconsider Cowley’s proposals in any detail, but he makes it clear that accepting themmeans abandoning, for instance, the ideas (a) that it is possible to distinguish think-ing from concurrent activity, (b) that it is possible to abstract language from humanbodily action, and (c) that learning consists in using examples to make general-isations. Many will be quite unwilling to abandon those ideas, which seem perfectlyplausible. It is difficult to see why one should consider adopting Harris’s ‘integra-tional’ perspective on human language until we see serious empirical work on childlanguage acquisition conducted by Harris’s followers which genuinely does abandon,for example, the idea of generalising from exemplars. One suspects that no such workwill be forthcoming, whereas recent work in exemplar theory and in stochasticapproaches to acquisition (see Pierrehumbert, 2001 for an overview) looks like it isoffering genuinely novel insights into the nature of the acquisition process.Regarding the nature vs convention distinction, Burton-Roberts (2000 and else-

where; see also Burton-Roberts and Carr, 1999, Carr, 2000) has recently argued thatone can adopt Chomskyan naturalistic internalism while allowing that specific lan-guages are the locus of conventionality. B-R argues for this approach to the nature/convention distinction as follows. There are two distinct conceptions of ‘Language’

632 P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635

(L) currently appealed to in linguistics. One is the generic conception, whereby theconcept of ‘a (particular) language’ is primary and UG is universal in the sense thatit ranges over particular languages; thus the theory of UG is the theory of languages(one arrives at the notion ‘Language’ by abstracting away from particular lan-guages). This conception of UG also takes particular languages to be instantiationsof Language, as tokens of the type Language. The generic conception lends itself toan interpretation of the notion ‘Language’ which B-R calls ‘instrumental realism’.That is, ‘Language’ may be viewed instrumentally, as no more than a theoreticalconstruct: the reality of the linguistic lies in actual languages.B-R distinguishes this from the naturalistic conception, which leads to a more

strongly realist interpretation of L as a real object in the natural world (specifically,an innately endowed state of mind/brain). Here, L has a reality independent of lan-guages, and UG here is universal in that it ranges over, not all languages, but allindividuals with the relevant innate endowment. On this conception, the ‘I’ in ‘I-language’ here stands for both ‘individual’ and ‘internal’ and ‘Language’ is not anabstraction over specific languages. Rather, Language and specific languages aretwo distinct sorts of reality. On the naturalistic conception, L is not acquired, it isradically internal, not socio-cultural: L is formal, not functional in nature; it is amodule of mind/brain which is distinct from perceptual systems, behavioural abil-ities and general cognitive capacities. It is also, unlike languages, unique and invar-iant: it is not the locus of variation. For B-R, the relation between (a) thespatiotemporally unique utterances produced by speakers and (b) the linguisticexpressions given by naturalistic L is one of physical representation: speakers pro-duce mind-external E-physical phenomena in aid of representing those expressions.This is the Representational Hypothesis (RH). According to the RH, ‘representa-tion’ is to be understood in its normal, transitive (two-place predicate) sense,whereby, for instance, a painting of a pipe (as in the painting by Magritte) representsa pipe, but does not constitute a pipe. B-R refers to this as M-representation; it isdistinct from the Chomskian sense of ‘representation’, in which linguistic knowledgeis said to be constituted as mental representation.Crucially, the M-rep relation is a non-natural relation: it is not a natural fact about

LEs that they are the objects of M-rep, and nor are M-reps natural facts. M-reps ofLEs are non-natural in the sense of being conventional; both the relation of M-repitself and its conventionality fall outside of L. Mind-external physical phenomenacan only be intended and interpreted as conventionally M-representational givenmutual systems of representational conventions, that is Conventional Systems ofPhysical Representation (CSPRs). So, for B-R, languages are CSPRs, and what isacquired is one or more CSPR. On this view, there is no reason not to see theacquisition of a CSPR as a form of learning, in line with Empiricist assumptions,while retaining Rationalism.Within the Empiricist camp, work by Karmiloff-Smith (1992, 1998 and elsewhere;

see also Elman et al. 1996) offers an interesting version of Empiricism (although shesees her position as lying between the extremes of Rationalism and Empiricism)according to which modularity effects are largely emergent during development. K-Spostulates innate endowments which are initially less detailed and less domain-

P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635 633

specific than those postulated by Rationalists such as Chomsky and Pinker, and‘development itself is seen as playing a crucial role in shaping phenotypical out-comes’ (Karmillof-Smith, 1998: 331). The emphasis here is on ‘domain-relevantmechanisms that might gradually become domain-specific as a result of processingdifferent kinds of input’. (Karmillof-Smith, 1998: 332).A fascinating outcome of this approach is her work on sufferers of Williams’

Syndrome (WS). Recall that, for Smith, SLI and WS provide a pair of cases whichneatly point to a double dissociation between language acquisition and generalintelligence, since SLI is said to show normal intelligence but damaged linguisticcapacity, while WS is said to show the reverse. WS sufferers are also said to havenormal face recognition capacities, which lends even more support to the widelyattested modularity of face recognition. We have already seen that, for the K familyat least, the claim about normal levels of general intelligence is questionable. In thecase of Williams’ Syndrome, the work of K-S sheds some doubt on the claim thatthey have normal linguistic cognitive capacities.Her point is that, instead of looking just at the behaviour of WS sufferers on lin-

guistic tasks, one needs to look at the underlying mechanisms and the developmentalroute which led them to their linguistic capacities. She points out that several studieshave investigated brain activation in WS sufferers, studies which show abnormalpatterns of event-related potentials for such sufferers in both linguistic and facerecognition tasks. Additionally, WS sufferers ‘spend far more time than controlsfocused on faces and language, suggesting that more of the developing brain might bedevoted to processing such inputs.’ (Karmillof-Smith, 1998: 338). She concludes that‘brain volume, brain anatomy, brain chemistry, hemisphereic assymetry and thetemporal patterns of activity are all atypical in people with WS’ and asks ‘how couldthe resulting cognitive system be described in terms of a normal brain, with partsintact and parts impaired, as the popular view holds?’ (Karmillof-Smith, 1998: 338).The question is an important one, and suggests a view of modularity as emergent,

rather than strictly innate in the Chomsky/Pinker sense, and a role for ‘the input’which is more significant than the mere triggering role consistently suggested byChomsky since the publication of Aspects.While K-S has little to say about the role of conventionality, and while B-R has not

yet looked in detail at acquisition, putative language/speech disorders, or double dis-sociations, it is arguable that a synthesis of (aspects of) these two approaches is possible.It may be possible to allow (contra Karmiloff-Smith) for fully abstract innately endowedsemantico-syntactic knowledge, and for the idea that specific languages are systems forthe conventional E-physical representation of its contents, while simultaneously allow-ing that a host of other innate endowments, conceived of in K-S’s terms, develop, undera representational rationale, in such a way as to yield emergent modularity.

References

Brulard, I., Carr, P. French/English bilingual acquisition of phonology: One system or two? (to appear in

the International Journal of Bilingualism).

634 P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635

Burge, T., 1978. Individualism and the mental. In: French, P. et al. (Eds.), Midwest Studies in Pholosophy

IV. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MI, pp. 73–121.

Burton-Roberts, N., Carr, P., Docherty, G.J. (Eds.). Phonological Knowledge: Conceptual and Empirical

Issues. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Burton-Roberts, N., 2000. Where and what is phonology?. In: Burton-Roberts et al. (eds.). pp. 39–66.

Burton-Roberts, N. Natural Language and Conventional Representation (in preparation).

Burton-Roberts, N., Carr, P., 1999. On speech and natural language. Language Sciences 21/ 4, 371–

406.

Carr, P., 1990. Linguistic Realities. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Carr, P., 2000. Scientific realism, sociophonetic variation and innate endowments in phonology. In: Bur-

ton-Roberts et al. (Eds.). pp. 67–104.

Chomsky, N., 1957. Syntactic Structures. Mouton, The Hague.

Chomsky, N., 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Cowley, S.J., 2001. The baby, the bathwater and the ‘‘language instinct’’ debate. Language Sciences 23,

69–91.

Dabrowska, E., 2001. Learning a morphological system without a default: the Polish genitive. Journal of

Child Language 28, 545–574.

Dennett, D.C., 1996. Kinds of Minds. Phoenix, London.

Descartes, R., 1644/1970. Principles of Philosophy, Part II. In: Anscombe, E., Geach, P.T. (1970). Des-

cartes: Philosophical Writings. Van Nostrand Reinhold, Wokingham.

Eddington, A.S., 1927. The Nature of the Physical World. Cambridge University Press, London.

Elman, J., Bates, E.A., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., Plunkett, K., 1996. Rethinking

Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. MIT Press/Bradford Books, Cambridge, MA.

Gopnik, M., 1990. Feature-blind grammar and dysphasia. Nature 334, 715.

Gopnik, M., Dalalakis, J., Fukuda, S.E., Fukuda, S., 1997. Familial language impairment. In: Gopnik,

M. (Ed.), The Inheritance and Innateness of Grammars. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 111–

140.

Greenfield, S., 2000. Brain Story. BBC Worldwide, London.

Harris, R., 1981. The Language Myth. Duckworth, London.

Itkonen, E., 1978. Grammatical Theory and Metascience. Benjamins, Amsterdam.

Karmiloff-Smith, A., 1992. Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science. MIT

Press, Cambridge, MA.

Karmiloff-Smith, A., 1998. Development Itself is the Key to Understanding Developmental Disorders.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2. Reprinted in Tomasello, M., Bates, E. (Eds.), 2001. Language Devel-

opment: The Essential Readings. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 331–350.

Katz, J.J., 1981. Language and Other Abstract Objects. Blackwell, Oxford.

Lightfoot, D., 1999. The Development of Language. Blackwell, Oxford.

Mehler, J., Dupoux, E., 1994. What Infants Know. Blackwell, Oxford.

Pateman, T., 1987. Language in Mind and Language in Society. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Pierrehumbert, J., 2001. Stochastic phonology. Glot International 5.

Pinker, S., 1994. The Language Instinct. Penguin, London.

Popper, K.R., 1963. Conjectures and Refutations. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

Popper, K.R., Eccles, J., 1977. The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism. Routledge &

Kegan Paul, London.

Rose, S., 1997. Lifelines: Biology, Freedom, Determinism. Penguin, London.

Russell, B., 1946/1961. History of Western Philosophy. Routledge, London.

Smith, N., Wilson, D., 1979. Modern Linguistics: The Results of Chomsky’s Revolution. Penguin, Har-

mondsworth.

Vargha-Khadem, F., et al., 1995. Praxic and non-verbal cognitive deficits in a large family with a geneti-

cally transmitted speech and language disorder. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of

the United States of America 92, 930–933.

Vihman, M.M., 1996. Phonological Development: The Origins of Language in the Child. Blackwell,

Oxford.

P. Carr / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 615–635 635