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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on August 12, 2006
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2006 57(3):481-513; doi:10.1093/bjps/axl017
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© The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Intuitions In Linguistics

Michael Devitt

The Philosophy Program The Graduate Center, The City College of New York 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA mdevitt{at}gc.cuny.edu

Linguists take the intuitive judgments of speakers to be good evidence for a grammar. Why? The Chomskian answer is that they are derived by a rational process from a representation of linguistic rules in the language faculty. The paper takes a different view. It argues for a naturalistic and non-Cartesian view of intuitions in general. They are empirical central-processor responses to phenomena differing from other such responses only in being immediate and fairly unreflective. Applying this to linguistic intuitions yields an explanation of their evidential role without any appeal to the representation of rules.

  1. Introduction
  2. The evidence for linguistic theories
  3. A tension in the linguists' view of intuitions
  4. Intuitions in general
  5. Linguistic intuitions
  6. Comparison of the modest explanation with the standard Cartesian explanation
  7. A nonstandard Cartesian explanation of the role of intuitions?
  8. Must linguistics explain intuitions?
  9. Conclusion


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