The Science of Language (30 page)

1.
An early step is settling on the
methods to pursue and facts to take into account in constructing a science of meaning. The methods, as suggested, are those of naturalistic scientific research: to aim for descriptive and
explanatory adequacy, objectivity, simplicity (where available), and possible accommodation to another science (here, surely biology and any physiochemical, physiological, and computational constraints that might apply to linguistically expressed meanings and their growth/development in a human). And one must over time make genuine progress in one or more of these dimensions. No other standards are worth pursuing if one wants anything like a genuine theory, and no other is worth attempting, judging by the unfortunate results of insisting that in studying the mind and language, one must do something else – default to some form of behaviorism. Its sole ‘advantage’ is that anyone can understand it; it is not simple in the way scientific theories are, however, but simple in a considerably less complimentary way. Surely the right course is to pursue a methodology that has yielded good results in the science of mind elsewhere (vision, for example), and in linguistic syntax, morphology, phonology, formal semantics (construed in an internalist, syntactic way), phonetics, and aspects of formal pragmatics – particularly since at least syntax and morphology are directly involved in determining linguistically expressed meaning at the language system's
semantic interface. The methodology applied to the mind is internalist: it apparently works only where one focuses on the internal operations and ‘outputs’ of internal systems that develop or grow automatically (because they are natural ‘organs’) and that ‘interface’ with other internal systems. The methodology apparently does not work with the acts and actions of a person. As for the relevant facts, at a general level, they include the creative aspect of
language use observations as well as the poverty of the stimulus ones, the latter not only for the progress made in syntax and phonology by respecting them and deciding to not only look for a ‘natural’ system located in the head, but because the rate of acquisition of lexical items is remarkably swift with no apparent training involved, and because infants clearly understand many of the concepts expressed in natural languages before they can speak or sign (express) the concepts themselves. At a finer-grained level, the facts include the richness and human interest-focused natures of commonsense concepts (making their swift acquisition all the more remarkable), the open-ended nature of concept and lexical acquisition and the ease with which individuals (including the very young) manage them, an apparent difference between human and non-human concepts, the degree of
flexibility that our conceptual systems have available in them (due perhaps in part to morphological operations), the apparent universality (assuming acquisition) of remarkably rich concepts, the facts of polyadicity and its limits, and the like.

2.
The next two stages consist of choosing how to place the study of meaning within an existing naturalistic research enterprise. Assuming that the
theory at issue aims to offer a naturalistic account of linguistically expressed meanings, start by coming to an understanding of what the fundamental ‘atoms’ of meanings are. Any scientific effort – perhaps because of the natures of our minds, as mentioned in the main text – proceeds by looking for fundamental elements and assigning them the properties they need to have to provide an adequate theory. At the same time, come to an understanding of how these elements are put together to yield the complex meanings that sentences express. As it stands, doing the latter amounts to adopting an adequate version of the architecture of the language faculty. One of the simplest and easiest to understand is found in the idea that meaning ‘information’ is lodged in ‘words’ or lexical items (or some other technical notion with similar effect) in some way and that syntactic operations (Merge, at least) combine these to provide the complex form of meaning ‘information’ in sententially expressed ‘concepts’ provided at what Chomsky calls the “conceptual-intentional interface.”

Then decide on the scope of the theory in a way that respects the poverty and creativity observations, and any other basic facts that a serious theorist must take into account. To this end, choose an
internalist approach. That is why I put scare-quotes around ‘information’ in the last paragraph. The word invites in many people's minds an intentional reading, which for them implies a referential reading.
Fodor, mentioned above, is one. To try to avoid that implication, it might help to use Chomsky's technical-sounding term “
semantic feature,” although this too can invite a referential reading because of ‘semantic.’ And “meaning feature” can do the same. So in what follows, I stipulate: ‘semantic feature’ and the other terms mentioned here are to be read non-intentionally, and ‘computation’ does not track truth or truth-conditions, as some insist it should; it must only somehow meet the conditions that the systems which language ‘interfaces’ set, and the semantic interface(s) in particular. Thus, these terms are to be read as semi-technical terms that, at the least, serve to distinguish the kind of information that – if a computation/derivation is successful – plays a role at the “semantic interface(s)” SEM rather than the “phonetic interface” PHON.
Intuitively, then, semantic, phonological, and formal ‘information’ is placed in lexical items, or in some other way inserted into a sentential computation, and the computation/derivation offers the relevant kinds of information at the relevant interfaces to other systems.

3.
That much is basic; the decisions in (2) are difficult to reverse because that would risk abandoning assumptions that have worked and proven fruitful in advancing naturalistic research into the mind so far. After that, decisions about what kind of theory to construct – which hypotheses to offer and find
data concerning – reflect issues disputed by those working in the framework chosen in (2). For example, should one
adopt what Hagit Borer (
2005
) calls an “endoskeletal” account of computation, where the relevant ‘information’ concerning a computation and how it proceeds is contained in some selection of lexical items, or instead adopt as I did above an “exoskeletal” account that assigns a ‘package’ of semantic features a status as noun or verb as computation proceeds, and if verb, assigns an adicity (the number of ‘arguments’ or nouns in “referring positions” (meaning by this in positions in sentences where they could be used to refer/where they have a case assignment)). Choosing one over another, one must make other choices consistent with one of the options. On an exoskeletal account, for example, the
semantic information in a package of semantic features will be something that can in one form of computation get read as having the form of a noun, and in another, the form of a verb. And so on. Another decision to make is whether one treats the semantic information in a lexical item as compositional itself, or whether to conceive it as
essentially
‘atomic,’ a morphological root that even in an account of concept/lexical semantic feature acquisition is not put together out of more basic features, but is one of the many thousands of ‘root’ concepts that humans can acquire. If one chooses the other option, one can explore the possibility that although from the point of view of syntax/morphology a lexical semantic root is treated as atomic, from the point of view of acquisition, it is composed. There is some discussion of this in the main text. Then there is the matter of how to conceive of the way in which semantic composition takes place. Does it have recourse in a fundamental way to notions such as
truth, or does it proceed in a fully internalist manner? “Functionist” accounts are popular (Heim & Kratzer 1998) and many of them do seem, at least, to give a central role to truth, making them less than desirable for someone who wants to proceed in an internalist way,
⁷
and they also have problems in explaining why there seem to be limits on the adicity of natural language verbs. There are alternatives that are more nearly internalist, and that do speak to other problems with the functionist approach. One is found in
Pietroski's (
2005
) internalist version of Davidsonian-based event semantics joined to Boolos-style second-order quantification. Another possible move is to adopt one or another form of
functionist semantic theory and model-theoretic work but denature them of any of their (supposed?) representationalist aspects. For reference, Chomsky (
1986
) pointed to a denaturing move mentioned above: adopt
a model-theoretic way of saying what ‘appears’ at SEM in the way of semantic information, and continue to use terms such as “refer,” but read them as “Relation R,” where R is “
reference,” but taken to be a ‘relation’ defined over
mental
models. It is not clear what to do about
truth if one wants to keep anything like ‘real’ truth (likely impossible, I suspect). Model theory allows it to be denatured too: truth becomes largely stipulative. And there is an advantage in denaturing both: one gets an easy way to conceive of how to appropriate much of the machinery of formal semantics and appropriate the insights – and they are real – of the many who work in formal semantics now. But one can do that in other ways too. I will not mention other disputed issues.

4.
The last stage (and really, the idea that there are stages or steps involved is a fiction; theory-construction is usually a matter of proceeding on all fronts at once, although attending to what must be dealt with at any given time) is trying to speak in at least a preliminary way to basic questions that no one has much of a clue about yet. Chomsky in the text says this of
human concepts, and he is right: they are, as we have seen, a puzzle. However, the naturalistically inclined theoretician can do at least some things. For one, restricting discussion to
linguistically expressed concepts focuses attention on what appears at the semantic interface, and what is needed at that place where a sentence/expression offers information to other systems (or places, if one adopts a staged or “phased” conception of computation). By assuming this, and by assuming (see pp. 28–29 and commentary) that the semantic interface works much as the phonetic one does, so that there is no need to link linguistically expressed meaning information to a
separate
concept (in the manner of
Fodor with his “language of thought,” for example), we could call the semantic information at SEM a “linguistically expressed concept,” period. In a connected vein, another thing to do (also anticipated above) is acknowledge that while from the point of view of morphology and syntax a lexical concept is ‘atomic,’ from the point of view of the acquisition of the concepts expressed in
lexical items themselves, they could be treated as decomposable. Neither of these moves says what the basic elements of concept acquisition are, what human linguistically expressed concepts in general are, and how either of these might have evolved. As Chomsky points out in the text in connection with the question of the evolution of language, these are very likely matters that we cannot now even begin to address. We cannot because – unlike the state of “narrow syntax” in its minimalist form, which is sufficiently strong to begin to address these matters – there really are no respectable theories of concepts yet in
place.

In addition, even when we can try to address issues for the study of linguistically expressed concepts in a reasonable way, lying in wait are
the kinds of problems that Richard Lewontin emphasized in his (
1998
). With the possible exception of a plausible saltational account of evolution of the sort that Chomsky discusses in the main text, where it is possible to gather at least some paleoanthropological and archaeological evidence (and the like), it is extremely difficult to conceive of how one could gather any evidence for the evolutionary development of human conceptual capacities – capacities that on the face of it are very different from those available to other
creatures.