grammatical relations over time, and in the process accommodate to whatever
language specific behaviors … [their] target language exhibits.” Further: “From
beginning to end this is a usage based acquisition system. It starts with rote acqui
sition of verb argument structures, and by finding commonalities, it slowly builds
levels of abstraction. Through this bottom up process, it accommodates to the target
language.”
16 Classifying Herder and Foucault among the empiricists will surprise some readers.
Keep in mind that ‘empiricism’ as used here is a label for a research strategy
concerning the human mind, one based on assumptions about the mind’s contents
and how they got there. Clearly, both Herder and Foucault are anti nativist and
externalist in their views of language and how to study it. They are, then, empiricists,
differing from others largely in a tendency to deny that natural science offers
objective descriptions and explanations of world and at least some aspects of mind.
17 I assume a distinction between common sense and science or at the very least, the
advanced mathematical sciences. The distinction goes back to Descartes, perhaps
before. In his Discourse he contrasts the kind of study he is interested in (what we
would now call natural science) and its methodology (which he helped clarify) to what
one finds in “bon sens,” sometimes (and plausibly) translated as “common sense.”
Chomsky adopts the distinction; it appears in much of his work. See his (1975a, 1988a,
1995a, 2000). Motivations for the distinction include the fact that children do not
readily acquire scientific concepts and theories (although they may use sounds like
“lepton”) nor do they or any but those very familiar with the sciences routinely
display scientific creativity. It is relevant too that scientists and mathematicians try to
regulate their uses of technical terms when communicating with others in the field.
Their uses of technical terms are much closer to what the empiricist seems to believe is
the case with common sense concepts and their everyday use in natural languages.
18 That is perhaps true for physics, but not for study of the mind. Quine’s “naturalized
epistemology” holds that there are “causal” relations between sensory impingements
and the beliefs and knowledge people develop about the world, where psychology is
supposed to cash out these causal relations. But the story he tells about psychology in
his naturalized epistemology material (Quine, 1969) seems to be little different from
the view he develops of concepts, language, and world in his neglected 1974 The Roots
of Reference. In that work, one finds standard empiricist claims about how psycho
logical “causal” relations come to be established: with the exception of some “sali
encies” found in sensory systems, causal relationships are under exogenous control.
This is not ‘naturalizing’ the study of mind
it is not treating the mind as a natural
ob
ject that grows according to a biophysical agenda and using the tools of naturalistic
research to understand it. As for Sellars, his (1960, among others) simply assumes that
the science of mind (psychology, I presume) is behaviorism, and he explicitly adopts an
early version of the connectionists’ view of the brain and its ‘learning’. He does gesture
in the direction of evolution for bee languages a naïve version of evolution, at least.
But he shows no inclination to extend what he says there to human language. That
would have the effect of separating language from “reason,” which he takes to be ours
by virtue of learning language. It would detach what he took to be the epistemic norms
of reason from their ‘home’ in the linguistic community. Chomsky’s idea of studying
language (including its meanings) apart from the use of language did not occur to him,
or obviously to many other philosophers and cognitive scientists.
112 Notes to page 22