Naturalized philosophy

I went to graduate school in philosophy a long time ago. At that time, there was a premium put on “naturalized” research, the idea being that good philosophy needed grounding in a “real” (non-philosophical) discipline. It was a time when Newton and Einstein and Boyle and Godel and Poincare joined the usual dead white European males that we all know and love in the pantheon of philosophical greats. In this setting, it is no surprise that Chomsky and his work made frequent appearances in the pages of the most prestigious philo journals and was a must read for a philosopher of language. It actually took some effort for the discipline to relegate Chomsky to the domain of “philosophical naïf” (I think this was Putnam’s phrase) and it coincided with endless debates about the implications of the referentialist worldview for narrow content and semantic meaning. IMO, this work did not deliver much in the way of insight, though it did manage to make quite a few careers. At any rate, Chomsky’s exit from the main stage coincided with a waning of the naturalizing project and a return to the metaphysical (and metalinguistic) abstruseness that philosophy is, it appears, endemically attracted to. If nothing else, de-naturalizing philosophy establishes academic protective boundaries providing philosophy with a proprietary subject matter that can protect deep thinkers from the naturalizers and their empirical pretentions.[1] Why do I mention this? Because I am a big fan of the kind of naturalized philosophy that the above mentioned luminaries practiced and so I am usually on the lookout for great examples thereof.

What are the distinctive marks of this kind of work? It generally rests on a few pretty “obvious” empirical premises and demonstrates their fertile implications. Chomsky’s work offers an excellent illustration.

What is Chomsky’s most significant contribution to philosophy (and indeed linguistics)? He identified three problems in need of solution: what does a native speaker know when s/he knows her/his native language? What meta-capacity underlies a native speaker’s capacity to acquire her/his native language? And how did this meta-capacity arise in the species?  These are the big three questions he put on the table. And the subsequent questions they naturally lead to: How do native speakers use their knowledge to produce and understand language, how do LADs use their meta-capacity to acquire their native capacity? How are one’s knowledge of language embodied in wetware?  The last three rely on glimmers of answers to the first three. Chomsky has taught us how to understand the first three. 

Here’s the argument. It is based on few really really really obvious facts. First, that nothing does language like humans do. Birds fly, fish swim, humans do language. It is a species specific capacity unlike anything we find anywhere else. Second, a native speaker displays linguistic creativity. This means that a native speaker can use and understand an unbounded number of linguistic objects never before encountered and does this relatively effortlessly. Third, any kid can reflexively acquire any language when placed in the right linguistic environment (linguistic promiscuity), an environment which, when one looks even moderately closely, vastly underdetermines the knowledge attained (poverty of the linguistic stimulus). These three facts make it morally certain that part of linguistic competence implies internalization of a G, that the human meta-capacity of interest involves a higher order capacity to acquire certain kinds of Gs and not others and that this meta-capacity rests on some distinctive species specific capacities of humans. These three conclusions rest solidly on these obvious facts and together they bring forth a research program: what properties to human Gs have and what is the fine structure of the meta-capacity. That Gs exist and that FL/UG exists is trivially true. What their properties are is anything but.[2]

As FoLers know, Chomsky has recently added a third question to the agenda: how FL/UG could possibly have arisen. He argues that the relative rapidity of the emergence of FL and its subsequent stability argues for an intriguing conclusion: that the change that took place was necessarily pretty small and that whatever is proprietary to language must be quite minor. I tend to think that Chomsky is right about this, and that it motivates a research program that (i) aims to limit what is linguistically special while (ii) demonstrating how this special secret sauce allows for an FL like ours in the context of other more cognitively and computationally general mental capacities it is reasonable to believe that our pre-linguistic ancestors enjoyed. Imo, this line of thinking is less solidly based on “obvious” facts, but the line of inquiry is sufficiently provocative to be very inviting. Again, the details are up for grabs, as they should be.

So what are the marks of naturalized philosophy? Identifying questions motivated by (relatively) straightforward facts that support a framework for asking more detailed questions using conventional modes of empirical inquiry. Chomsky is a master of this kind of thinking. But he is not alone. All of the above is actually in service of advertising another such effort by Randy Gallistel. The paper of interest, which is a marvelous piece of naturalized philosophy appeared here in TiCS. I want to say a word or two about it.

Gallistel’s paper is on the coding question. The claim is that this question has been effectively ignored in the cog-neuro world with baleful effects. The aim is to put it front and center on the research agenda and figure out what kind of neural system is compatible with a reasonable answer to that question. The argument in the paper is roughly as follows.

First, there is overwhelming behavioral evidence that animals (including humans) keeps track of numerical quantities (see box 1, (3)). Hence the brain must have a way to code for number. It must be able to store these numbers in some way and must be able to transmit this stored information in signals in some way. So it must be able to write this information to memory and read this information from memory.

Second, if the brain does code for number it must do so in some code. There are various kinds, but the two the paper discusses are hash/rate/tally codes vs combinatorial codes (4-5). The former are “unary” codes. What this means is that “to convey a particular number one must use as many code elements are the numerosity to which the number refers.” Thus, if the number is 20 then there are 20 hash marks/strokes/dotes whatever representing the number.

The paper distinguishes such codes from “combinatorial” codes. These are the ones we are familiar with. So for example, ‘20’ conveys the number 20 and does so by using 10 digits in order sensitive configurations (i.e. 21 differs from 12). Note, combinatorial code patterns are not isomorphic to the things they represent.[3] 

The paper explores the virtues of combinatorial codes as against hash/rate/tally codes. The latter are “vastly more efficient” by orders of magnitude. Rate codes “convey 1 bit per spike” (5) while it is known that spike trains convey between 3-7 bits per spike. Rate codes are very energy expensive, combinatorial codes can be “exponentially smaller” (6). Last of all, there is evidence that spike trains use combinatorial codes because “reordering the intervals changes the message” (recall ‘21’ vs ‘12’), as expected if they spike trains are expressing a combinatorial code. 

The conclusion: the brain uses a combinatorial code, and this is interesting because this seems to require that the code be “symbolic” in the sense that its abstract (syntactic) structure matters for the information being conveyed.  And this strongly suggests that this info is not stored in synapses as supposed in a neural net system.

This last conclusion should not be controversial. When first put on the market of ideas, neural nets were confidently sold as being non-representational. Rumelhart and McClelland focused on this as one of their more salient properties and Fodor and Pylyshyn criticized such models for precisely this reason. The Gallistel paper is making the additional point that being asymbolic is, in addition to being cognitively problematic, is also neurophysiologically a problem as the kind of codes we are pretty sure we need are the kinds that neural nets are designed not to support. And this means that these are the wrong neuro models for the brain: “In neural net models, plastic synapses are molded by experience” and were intended to model “associative bonds” which “were never conceived of as symbols, and neither are their neurobiological proxies” (8).

Note, we can conclude that neural nets are the wrong model even if we have no idea what the correct model is. We can know what kind of code it is and what this means for the right neurophysiology without knowing what the right neurophysiology is. And if the codes are combinatorial/symbolic then there is no way that the right physiology for memory can be neural nets. This takes the Fodor-Pylyshyn critique on major step further.

So, if not in nets, what kind of architecture. Well, you all know by now. The paper notes that we can get everything we want from a chemical computer. We can physically model classical von Neuman/Turing machines in chemistry, with addresses, reading from, writing to, etc. Moreover, chemical computation has some nice biological features. Complex chemicals can be very stable for long periods of time (what we want from a long term memory store), and writing to such molecules is very energy efficient (8). In addition, chemical computing can be fast (some “can be altered on a nanosecond time scale”) and we know of instances of this kind of chemical computing that are behaviorally relevant. Last chemical computations are very energy efficient. Both storing and computing can be done cheaply if done chemically.

All of this leads to the conclusion that the locus of neurobiological computing is chemical and where are the relevant chemicals? Inside the cell. So, in place of neural nets we have the “cell intrinsic memory hypothesis” (1). Happily, there is now evidence that some computing gets done intra-celluarly (1-2). But if some gets done there…

This paper is great naturalized philosophy: we argue from pretty simple behavioral evidence that a certain kind of coding format is required and then that these kinds of formats prefer certain kinds of physical systems to support such codes and end with conclusions about the locus of the relevant computations. Thus we move from numbers are required, to combinatorial codes are the right kind, to neural nets won’t cut it to chemical computing within the cell. The big open meaty empirical question is what particular combinatorial code is exploited. It’s the cog-neuro analogue of how DNA stores genetic information and uses it. Right now, we do not know. At all.

This last analogy to DNA is important, and, IMO, is the strongest reason for thinking that this line of thinking is correct. Conventional computers provide an excellent model of how computation can be physically implemented. We know how to chemically “build” a conventional computer. We know that biology already uses chemistry to store and use information in hereditary and development. Is it really plausible that this in place machinery is not used for cognitive computation? Or as the paper puts it in the last sentence: “Why should the conveyance of acquired information proceed by principles fundamentally different from those that govern the conveyance of heritable information?” Why indeed! Isn’t the contrary assumption (the machinery is there for the using but it is never used) biologically scandalous? Wouldn’t Darwin be turning in his grave if he considered this? Isn’t assuming it to be false a kind of cognitive creationism? Yup, connetionists and neural net types are the Jerry Falwells of biology! Who would have thunk it: the road from Associationsim to Creationism is paved with Empiricist intentions. Only Rationalism and Naturalized Philosophy can save you.

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[1] Let me quickly add that I consider philosophy training a very useful aid to right thinking. Nothing allows you to acquire the feel for good argumentation than a stressful philosophical workout. And by “good” I mean understanding how premises related to conclusions, how challenging premises can allow one to understand how to evaluate conclusions, understanding that it is always reasonable to ask what would happen to a conclusion should such and such a premise be removed etc.  In other words, philosophy prizes deductive structure and this is a useful talent to nurture regardless of what conclusions you are interested in netting and premises you are interested in frying.

[2] Chomsky, as you all know, not only posed the questions but showed how to go about empirically investigating them. This is what puts him in with the Gods: he discovered interesting questions and figured out technology relevant to answering them.

[3] Thus, the numeral’s patterning represents the number in the former but not the latter. The difference between the two kinds of codes is similar to the one made (here) between patterns that track the patterning and those that do not.

The wildly successful minimalist program

It’s that time of year: spring has sprung, classes are almost over, and all of those commitments you made to write papers three years ago and forgot about are coming due. I am in the midst of one such effort right now (due the end of May). It’s one of those “compare different theories/frameworks” volumes and I have been asked to write on the Minimalist Program (MP). After ignoring the project for a good long time, I initially bridled against the fact that I had accepted to write anything. In order to extricate myself from the promise, I tried to convince the editor that the premise of the volume (that MP was a theory like the others) was false and so a paper on MP would not really be apposite. This tantrum was rejected. I then sulked. Finally, I decided that I would take the bull by the horns and argue that MP, contrary to what I perceive to be the conventional view, has been wildly successful in its own terms and that the reason for its widespread perceived failure is that most critics have refused to accept the premises of MP investigation. Why would they do so? There are several reasons, but the best one (and one that might even be correct) is that the premises for MP investigation (viz. that we know something about the structure of FL/UG and that something resembles GB) are shaky and so the project is premature. On this view the program is fine, it’s just that we’ve gotten a little ahead of ourselves.

This objection should sound familiar. It is what people who study specific languages and their Gs say about claims about FL and UG. We don’t know enough yet about particular Gs to address questions about FL/UG. Things are more complicated and we need time to sort these out.

I reject this. Things are always more complicated. Time is never right. IMO, GB is a pretty good theory and it is worth trying to see if we can derive some of its features in a more principled way. We will learn something even if we are not completely right about this (which is surely the case). In other words, GB is right enough (or, many of its properties will be part of whatever description turns out to be more accurate) and so trying to see how to derive its properties is a worthwhile project that could tech us something about FL/UG.

This, I should add, is the best reason to demur about MP (and as you can see, I am not sympathetic). Two others spring to mind: (i) MP sharpens the linguistics/languistics kulturkampf and (ii) MP privileges a kind of research that is qualitatively different from what most professionals commonly produce and so is suspect. 

I have beaten both these drums in the past, and I do so again here. I have convinced myself that the biggest practical problem for MP work is that it sharpens the contrast between the bio/cog and the philological perspectives on language. More specifically, MP only makes sense from the bio/cog perspective as it takes FL/UG as the object of inquiry. FL/UG is the explanandum. If you don’t think FL/UG exists (or you are not really interested in whether it exists) then MP will seem, at best, pointless and, at worst, mystical omphaloskepsis. It is an odd fact of life that many find their own interests threatened by those that do not share them. I suspect that MP’s greatest sin in the eyes of many is that it appears to devalue their own interest in language by promoting the study of the underlying faculty. This, of course, does not follow. Tastes differ, interests range. But there can be little doubt that one of Chomsky’s many vices is that by convincing so many to be fascinated by the problems he has identified that he has robbed so many of confidence in their own. MP simply sharpens: doing it at all means buying into the bio-cog program. Abandon hope all languists who enter here.

Second, furthering the MP project will privilege a kind of work distinct in style from that normally practiced. If the aim is unification then MP work will necessarily be quite theoretical and the relevance of this kind of work for the kinds of language facts that linguists prize somewhat remote, at least initially. Why? Because if a primary aim of MP is to deduce the basic features of GB from more fundamental principles then a good chunk of the hard work will be to propose such principles and see how to deduce the particular properties of GB from them. The work, in other words, will be analytic and deductive rather than descriptive and inductive. Need I mention again how little our community of scholars esteems such work?

I we put these two features of MP inquiry together, we end up with work that is hard core bio-mentalist and heavily deductive and theoretical in nature. Each feature suffices to generate skepticism (if not contempt) among many working linguists. This, at any rate, is what I argue in the paper that I avoided trying to write.

I cannot post the whole thing (or at least won’t do so today). But I am going to given you the intro stage setting (i.e. polemical) bits for your amusement.  Here goes, and may you have a happy time with your own thoughtless commitments.

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What is linguistics about? What is its subject matter? Here are two views.

One standard answer is “language.” Call this the “languistic (LANG) perspective.” Languists understand the aim of a theory of grammar to describe the properties of different languages and identify the common properties they share. Languists frequently observe that there are very few properties that all languages have in common. Indeed, in my experience, the LANG view is that there are almost no language universals that hold without exception and that languages can and do vary arbitrarily and limitlessly. LANGers assume that if there are universals, then they are of the Greenbergian variety, more often statistical tendencies than categorical absolutes.  

There is a second answer to the question, one associated with Chomsky and the tradition in Generative Grammar (GG) his work initiated. Call this the linguistic (LING) perspective.” Until very recently, linguists have understood grammatical theory to have a pair of related objectives: (i) to describe the mental capacities of a native speaker of a particular language L (e.g. English) and (ii) to describe the meta-capacity that allows any human to acquire the mental capacities underlying a native speaker facility in a particular L (i.e. the meta-capacity required to acquire a particular G). LINGers, in other words, take the object of study to be two kinds of mental states, one that grammars of particular languages (i.e. G_L) describe and one that “Universal Grammar” (UG) describes. UG, then, names not Greenbergian generalizations about languages but features of human mental capacity that enable them to acquire G_Ls. For linguists, the study of languages and their intricate properties is useful exactly to the degree that it sheds light on both of these mental capacities. As luck would have it, studying the products of these mental capacities (both at the G and UG level) provides a good window on these capacities.

The LANG vs LING perspectives lead to different research programs based on different ontological assumptions. LANGers take language to be primary and grammar secondary. G_Ls are (at best) generalizations over regularities found in a language (often a more or less extensive corpus or lists of “grammaticality” judgments serving as proxy).[1] For LINGers, G_Ls are more real than the linguistic objects they generate, the latter being an accidental sampling from an effectively infinite set of possible legitimate objects.[2] On this view, the aim of a theory of a G_L is, in the first instance, to describe the actual mental state of a native speaker of L and thereby to indirectly circumscribe the possible legit objects of L. So for LINGers, the mental state comes first (it is more ontologically basic), the linguistic objects are its products and the etiology of those that publically arise (are elicited in some way) only partially reflect the more stable, real, underlying mental capacity. Put another way, the products are interaction effects of various capacities and the visible products of these capacities are the combination of their adventitious complex interaction. So the products are “accidental” in a way that the underlying capacities are not.

LANGers disagree. For them the linguistic objects (be they judgments, corpora, reaction times) come first, G_Ls being inductions or “smoothed” summaries of these more basic data. For LINGers the relation of a G_L to its products is like the relation between a function and its values. For a LANGer it is more like the relation between a scatter plot and the smoothed distributions that approximate it (e.g. a normal distribution).

LINGers go further: even G_Ls are not that real. They are less real than UG, the meta-capacity that allows humans to acquire G_Ls. Why is UG more “real” than G_Ls? Because in a sense that we all understand, native speakers only accidentally speak the language they are native in. Basically, it is a truism universally acknowledged that any kid could have been native in any language. If this is true (and it is, really), then the fact that a particular person is natively proficient in a particular language is a historical accident. Indeed, just like the visible products of a G_L result from a complex interaction of many more basic sub-capacities, a particular individual’s G_L is also the product of many interacting mental modules (memory size, attention, the particular data mix a child is exposed to and “ingests,” socio-economic status, the number of hugs and more). In this sense, every G_L is the product of a combination of accidental factors and adventitious associated capacities and the meta-capacity for building G_Ls that humans as a species come equipped with.

If this is right, then there is no principled explanation for why it is that Norbert Hornstein (NH) is a linguistically competent speaker of Montreal English. He just happened to grow up on the West Island of that great metropolis. Had NH grown up in the East End of London he would have been natively proficient in another “dialect” of English and had NH been raised in Beijing then he would have been natively proficient in Mandarin. In this very clear sense, then, NH is only accidentally a native speaker of the language he actually speaks (i.e. has acquired the particular grammatical sense (i.e. G_L) he actually has) though it is no accident that he speaks some native language. At least not a biological accident for NH is the type of animal that would acquire some G_L as a normal matter of course (e.g. absent pathological conditions) if not raised in feral isolation. Thus, NH is a native speaker of some language as a matter of biological necessity. NH comes equipped with a meta-capacity to acquire G_Ls in virtue of the fact that he is human and it is biologically endemic to humans to have this meta-capacity. If we call this meta-capacity the Faculty of Language (FL), then humans necessarily have an FL and necessarily have UG, as the latter is just a description of FL’s properties. Thus, what is most real about language is that any human can acquire the G_L of any L as easily as it can acquire any other. A fundamental aim of linguistic theory is to explain how this is possible by describing the fine structure of the meta-capacity (i.e. by outlining a detailed description of FL’s UG properties).

Before moving on, it is worth observing that despite their different interests LINGers and LANGers can co-exist (and have co-existed) quite happily and they can fruitfully interact on many different projects. The default assumption among LINGers is that currently the best way to study G_Ls is to study its products as they are used/queried. Thus, a very useful way of limning the fine structure of a particular G_L is to study the expressions of these G_Ls. In fact, currently, some of the best evidence concerning G_Ls comes from how native speakers use G_Ls to produce, parse and judge linguistic artifacts (e.g. sentences). Thus, LINGers, like LANGers, will be interested in what native speakers say and what they say about what they say. This will be a common focus of interest and cross talk can be productive.

Similarly, seeing how G_Ls vary can also inform one’s views about the fine structure of FL/UG. Thus both LINGers and LANGers will be interested in comparing G_Ls to see what, if any, commonalities they enjoy. There may be important differences in how LINGers and LANGers approach the study of these commonalities, but at least in principle, the subject matter can be shard to the benefit of each. And, as a matter of fact, until the Minimalist Program (MP) arose, carefully distinguishing LINGer interests from LANGer interests was not particularly pressing. The psychologically and philologically inclined could happily live side by side pursuing different but (often enough) closely related projects. What LANGers understood to be facts about language(s), LINGers interpreted as facts about G_Ls and/or FL/UG.

MP adversely affects this pleasant commensalism. The strains that MP exerts on this happy LING/LANG co-existence is one reason, I believe, why so many GGers have taken a dislike to MP.  Let me explain what I mean by discussing what the MP research question is. For that I will need a little bit of a running start.

Prior to MP, LING addressed two questions based on two evident rationally uncontestable facts (and, from what I can tell, these facts have not been contested). The first fact is that a native speaker’s capacities cover an unbounded domain of linguistic objects (phrases, sentences etc.). Following Chomsky (1964) we can dub this fact “Linguistic Creativity” (LC).[3]  dI’ve already adverted to the second fact: any child can acquire any G_L as easily as any other. Let’s dub this fact “Linguistic Promiscuity” (LP). Part of a LINGers account for LC postulates that native speakers have internalized a G_L. G_Ls consist of generative procedures (recursive rules) that allow for the creation of unboundedly complex linguistic expressions (which partly explains how a native speaker effortlessly deals with the novel linguistic objects s/he regularly produces and encounters).

LINGers account for the second fact, LP, in terms of the UG features of FL.  This too is a partial account. UG delineates the limits of a possible G_L. Among the possible G_Ls, the child builds an actual one in response to the linguistic data it encounters and that it takes in (i.e the Primary Linguistic Data (PLD)).

So two facts, defining two questions and two kinds of theories, one delimiting the range of possible linguistic expressions for a given language (viz. G_Ls) and the other delimiting the range of possible G_Ls (viz. FL/UG). As should be evident, as a practical matter, in addressing LP it is useful to have to hand candidate generative procedures of specific G_Ls. Let me emphasize this: though it is morally certain that humans come equipped with a FL and build G_Ls it is an empirical question what properties these G_Ls have and what the fine structure of FL/UG is. In other words, that there is an FL/UG and that it yields G_Ls is not really open for rational debate. What is open for a lot of discussion and is a very hard question is exactly what features these mental objects have. Over the last 60 years GG has made considerable progress in discovering the properties of particular G_Ls and has reasonable outlines of the overall architecture of FL/UG. At least this is what LINGers believe, I among them. And just as the success in outlining (some) of the core features of particular Gs laid the ground for discovering non-trivial features of FL/UG, so the success in liming (some of) the basic characteristics of FL/UG has prepared the ground for yet one more question: why do we have the FL/UG that we have and not some other? This is the MP question. It is a question about possible FL/UGs.

There are several things worth noting about this question. First, the target of explanation is FL/UG and the principles that describe it. Thus, MP only makes sense qua program of inquiry if we assume that we know some things about FL/UG. If nothing is known, then the question is premature. In fact, even if something is known, it might be premature. I return to this anon. 

Second, the MP question is specifically about the structure of FL/UG. Thus, unlike earlier work where discussions of languistic interest can be used to obliquely address LC and LP, the MP question only makes sense from a LING perspective. It is asking about possible FL/UGs and this requires taking a mentalistic stance. Discussing languages and their various properties had better bottom out in some claim about FL/UG’s limits if it is to be of MP relevance.  This means that the kind of research MP fosters will often have a different focus from that which has come before. This will lead LANGers and LINGers to a more obvious parting of the investigative ways. In fact, given that MP takes as more or less given what linguists and languists have heretofore investigated as basic, MP is not really an alternative to earlier theory. More specifically, MP can’t be an alternative to GB because, at least initially, MP is a consumer of GB results.[4] What does this mean?

An analogy might help. Think of the relationship between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The laws of thermodynamics are grist for the stats mechanics mill, the aim being to derive the thermodynamic generalizations in a more principled atomic theory of mechanics. The right way to think of MP and early theory is in the same way. Take (e.g.) GB principles and see if they can be derived in a more principled way. That’s one way of understanding the MP program, and I will elaborate this perspective in what follows. Note, if this is right, then just as many thermodynamical accounts of, say, gas behavior will be preserved in a reasonable statistical mechanics, so too many GB accounts will be preserved in a decent MP theory of FL. The relation between GB and MP is not that between a true theory and a false one, but a descriptive theory (what physicists call an “effective” theory) and a more fundamental one.

If this is right, then GB (or whatever FL/UG is presupposed) accounts will mostly be preserved in MP reconstructions. And this is a very good thing! Indeed, this is precisely what we expect in science; results of past investigations are preserved in later ones with earlier work preparing the ground for deeper questions. Why are they preserved? Because they are roughly correct and thus not mimicking these results (at least approximately) is excellent indication that the subsuming proposal is off on the wrong track. Thus, a sign that the more fundamental proposal is worth taking seriously is that it recapitulates earlier results and thus a reasonable initial goal of inquiry is to explicitly aim to redo what has been done before (hopefully, in a more principled fashion).

If this is correct, it should be evident why many might dismiss MP inquiry. First, it takes as true what many will think contentious and tries to derive it. Second, it doesn’t aim to do much more than derive “what we already know” and so does not appear to add much to our basic knowledge, except, perhaps, a long labored (formally involved) deduction of a long recognized fact.

Speaking personally, my own work takes GB as a roughly correct description of FL/UG. Many who work on refining UGish generalizations will consider this tendentious. So be it. Let it be stipulated that at any time in any inquiry things are more complicated than they are taken to be. It is also always possible that we (viz. GB) got things entirely wrong. The question is not whether this is an option. Of course it is. The question is how seriously we should take this truism.

So, MP starts from the assumption that we have a fairly accurate picture of some of the central features of FL and considers it fruitful to inquire as to why we have found these features. In other words, MP assumes that time is ripe to ask more fundamental questions because we have reasonable answers to less fundamental questions. If you don’t believe this then MP inquiry is not wrong but footling.

Many who are disappointed in MP don’t actually ask if MP has failed on its own terms, given its own assumptions. Rather it challenges the assumptions. It takes MP to be not so much false as premature. It takes issue with the idea that we know enough about FL/UG to even ask the MP question. I believe that these objections are misplaced. In other words, I will assume that GBish descriptions of FL/UG are adequate enough (i.e. are right enough) to start asking the MP question. If you don’t buy this, MP will not be to your taste and you might be tempted to judge its success in terms of your interests rather than its own questions.

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[1] There are few more misleading terms in the field than “grammaticality judgment.” The “raw” data are better termed “acceptability” judgments. Native speakers can reliably rank linguistic objects with regard to relative acceptability (sometimes under an interpretation). These acceptability judgments are, in turn, partial reflections of grammatical competence. This is the official LING view. LANGers need not be as fussy, though they too must distinguish data reflecting judgments in reflective equilibrium from more haphazard reactions. The reason that LANGers differ from LINGers in this regard reflects their different views on what they are studying. I leave it to the reader to run the logic for him/herself.

[2] The term set should not be taken too seriously. There is little reason to think that languages are sets with clear in/out conditions or that objects that G_Ls generate are usefully thought of as demarcating the boundaries of a language. In fact, LINGers don’t assume that the notion of a language is clear or well conceived. What LINGers do assume is that native speakers have a sense of what kinds of objects their native capacities extend to and that this is an open ended (effectively infinite) capacity and that is (indirectly) manifest in their linguistic behavior (production and understanding) of linguistic objects.

[3] Here’s Chomsky’s description of this fact in his (1964:7):

…a mature native speaker can produce a new sentence of his language on the appropriate occasion, and other speakers can understand it immediately, though it is equally new to them. Most of our linguistic experience, both as speakers and hearers, is with new sentences; once we have mastered a language, the class of sentences with which we can operate fluently is so vast that for all practical purposes (and, obviously, for all theoretical purposes), we may regard it as infinite.

 [4] Personally, I am a big fan of GB and what it has wrought. But MP style investigations need not take GB as the starting point for minimalist investigations. Any conception of FL/UG will do (e.g. HPSG, RG, LFG etc.). In my opinion, the purported differences among these “frameworks” (something that this edited collection highlights) have been overhyped. To my eye, they say more or less the same things, identify more or less the same limiting conditions and do so in more or less the same ways. In other words, these differing frameworks are largely notational variants of one another, a point that Stabler 2010) makes as well.