One of the oldest themes in the philosophy
of language, going back to at least Plato, concerns language
as a kind of window into the soul or mind. Most of my research
carries on this tradition in a contemporary fashion,
emphasizing current linguistic theorizing and its roles in a
scientifically well-grounded psychology. Along these lines, I
have developed views in three overlapping areas. A consistent
theme emerging from them is that matters are
considerably more complicated than they have often been
thought to be.
(i)
Lexical semantics [e.g. 2002, 2003, 2004b, 2004c,
2006b, 2008b]. Word-meaning and lexical syntax is much more
complex and counterintuitive than a great many philosophical
views claim (given by Evans, Fodor, Peacocke, etc.). Few of us
would pretheoretically identify the expression of “manner of
motion”, “total affectedness”, etc. as semantic elements to be
individuated as genuine parts of word-meaning. But our best
linguistic theories strongly say otherwise. Similarly, human
languages are too complicated to permit simple global
relations between words and syntax, such as systematicity and
reverse compositionality.
(ii)
Metaphysical/epistemological relation between current
linguistic theories and broader psychological processes
[e.g., 2004d, 2004e, 2006c, 2007b]. Many authors have claimed
that our access to the meanings of our utterances is
primitive, a priori, and immediate. But when made precise,
such seemingly obvious claims are nonetheless empirical.
Through a series of studies, I found that subjects had real
difficulties identifying (orthographically and phonologically
unrealized) semantic elements, despite receiving substantial
assistance and priming. It seems that our relationship to
language (in the sense of our higher cognitive processes’
abilities to consciously discern its workings and structure)
is much more complicated and less thoroughgoing than the
traditional views suggest.
(iii)
Methodological issues bearing on linguistic theorizing
[e.g., 2004a, 2007a, 2009a, 2009b, Forthcoming]. Perhaps more
than any other discipline, linguistics has presented and
defended itself as a “scientific” enterprise. I argue that
many of methodological criticisms in the philosophical
literature are simply unfounded, because the corresponding
unquestionably scientific procedures are more subtle, and with
good reason. Similarly, the simplified mathematical structure
of e.g., Gold’s theorem adds no new constraints on the
empirical facts of human language learning. (Some of these
issues have led me to reflect on scientific and statistical
methods more generally; e.g.2006a, 2008a, 2011.) However,
there is still room for methodological improvement.
Theoretical inferences in current linguistics are nearly
always implicit, holistic “expert judgments”. But
decades of research in the decision sciences has shown that
formal explicit methods are to be strongly preferred in such
situations. As an extreme example of this, I considered the
simple case of counting: how can we estimate the size of a
data set used in linguistic theorizing? This turns out to be a
difficult question. A theorem in several parts shows that many
of the standard methods for performing such an estimation will
not work, nor will anything like them.
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