David Pereplyotchik

This is the second installment of a two-part essay. Limitations of space prevented the publication of the full essay in a previous issue of the Journal (Pereplyotchik 2020). My overall goal is to outline a strategy for integrating generative linguistics with a broadly pragmatist approach to meaning and communication. Two immensely useful guides in this venture are Robert Brandom and Paul Pietroski. Squarely in the Chomskyan tradition, Pietroski’s recent book, Conjoining Meanings, offers an approach to natural-language semantics that rejects foundational assumptions widely held amongst philosophers and linguists. In particular, he argues against extensionalism—the view that meanings are (or determine) truth and satisfaction conditions. Having arrived at the same conclusion by way of Brandom’s defl ationist account of truth and reference, I’ll argue that both theorists have important contributions to make to a broader anti-extensionalist approach to language. Part 1 of the essay was largely exegetical, laying out what I see as the core aspects of Brandom’s normative inferentialism (1) and Pietroski’s naturalistic semantics (2). Now, in Part 2, I argue that there are many convergences between these two theoretical frameworks and, contrary to first appearances, very few points of substantive disagreement between them. If the integration strategy that I propose is correct, then what appear to be sharply contrasting commitments are better seen as interrelated verbal differences that come down to different—but complementary—explanatory goals. The residual disputes are, however, stubborn. I end by discussing how to square Pietroski’s commitment to predicativism with Brandom’s argument that a predicativist language is in principle incapable of expressing ordinary conditionals.

Wilfrid Sellars made profound and lasting contributions to nearly every area of philosophy. The aim of this collection is to highlight the continuing importance of Sellars’ work to contemporary debates. The contributors include several luminaries in Sellars scholarship, as well as members of the new generation whose work demonstrates the lasting power of Sellars’ ideas. Papers by O’Shea and Koons develop Sellars’ underexplored views concerning ethics, practical reasoning, and free will, with an emphasis on his longstanding engagement with Kant. Sachs, Hicks and Pereplyotchik relate Sellars’ views of mental phenomena to current topics in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Fink, deVries, Price, Macbeth, Christias, and Brandom grapple with traditional Sellarsian themes, including meaning, truth, existence, and objectivity. Brandhoff provides an original account of the evolution of Sellars’ philosophy of language and his project of "pure pragmatics". The volume concludes with an author-meets-critics section centered around Robert Brandom’s recent book, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars, with original commentaries and replies.

I examine John Collins’ reconstruction of the cognitive revolution in linguistics, showing that one of the main arguments for cognitivism is simply not compelling. While there is a convincing case for aiming to achieve “explanatory adequacy” in linguistics, over and above mere observational and descriptive adequacy, this aim need not be underwritten by a cognitivist conception of language. A unified theory of all human languages is desirable whether or not cognitivism is correct. Next, I point out that, although cognitivism entails that grammars are psychologically real, the reverse entailment does not hold; a grammar can be psychologically real even if the objects of the formal syntactician’s concern are public, conventional E-languages. Chomsky’s view entails that psycholinguists should seek a relatively transparent relation between the syntacticians’ grammar and the “knowledge-base” that constitutes competence—a “natural” grammar-parser combination. Progress toward this goal has been slow, in part because syntacticians are not as concerned with psycholinguistic data as a cognitivist would expect them to be. In the mainstream syntax literature, psychological reality is a distant, dimly understood, and rarely invoked desideratum. Nevertheless, a parsing model that makes direct use of independently plausible syntactic principles is the simplest and strongest theoretical option.

The main claim of this chapter and the next is that all psychologically plausible parsing models either represent or embody a grammar. I substantiate this claim by surveying top-down, bottom-up, and left-corner parsing algorithms, illustrating the ways in which they can draw on explicit representations of grammatical principles. I then discuss the Parsing as Deduction approach, wherein a proof procedure takes the rules of a grammar as axioms and derives MPMs as theorems, using a subpersonal analogue of natural deduction. This constitutes the most concrete implementation of the idea that the HSPM draws on syntactic principles as data. Finally, I turn to three strategies for dealing with the massive structural ambiguity that any parser will encounter in the input stream. Resource-based approaches emphasize parsing heuristics that minimize the use of computational resources, like short-term memory. Frequency-based approaches use statistical analyses of corpuses and treebanks to guide parsing decisions. Grammar-based approaches appeal directly to Minimalist syntactic principles in accounting for the HSPM’s behavior in the face of ambiguity. The latter possibility is particularly exciting, as it would show that a Minimalist grammar is not only suitable for describing abstract formal relations, but also the real-time operation of psychological mechanisms.

Chomsky claims that any theory of public “E-languages” will “surely have to presuppose grammars of I-languages.” Public languages are “more abstract” than I-languages, more “remote from mechanisms”. But can psychological mechanisms be described without reference (tacit or explicit) to social facts? I argue that public languages are indispensable to the study of language acquisition, as practiced by working psycholinguists. The data and explananda of acquisition theory are routinely couched in terms that make ineliminable reference to public languages, which serve as “targets” against which children’s successes and failures throughout development are measured. Though this does introduce a “normative-teleological” element into the science, it does not signal a move toward “prescriptive linguistics,” nor require an appeal to messy socio-political considerations. The normative-teleological element is innocuous, deriving from a theoretically motivated idealization of the child’s linguistic community. Next, I argue that the lack of precision in the individuation of public E-languages is just as much a feature of I-languages. Individuating I-languages requires settling unresolved issues about the competence/performance distinction, dialect mimicry, linguistic change, multilingualism, codeswitching, and cognitive disorders. It is not rational to insist on maximal precision in the individuation of either public E-languages or of I-languages at this stage of inquiry.

This is the first installment of a two-part essay. Limitations of space prevented the publication of the full essay in present issue of the Journal. The second installment will appear in the next issue, 2021 (1). My overall goal is to outline a strategy for integrating generative linguistics with a broadly pragmatist approach to meaning and communication. Two immensely useful guides in this venture are Robert Brandom and Paul Pietroski. Squarely in the Chomskyan tradition, Pietroski’s recent book, Conjoining Meanings, offers an approach to natural-language semantics that rejects foundational assumptions widely held amongst philosophers and linguists. In particular, he argues against extensionalism—the view that meanings are (or determine) truth and satisfaction conditions. Having arrived at the same conclusion by way of Brandom’s defl ationist account of truth and reference, I’ll argue that both theorists have important contributions to make to a broader anti-extensionalist approach to language. What appears here as Part 1 of the essay is largely exegetical, laying out what I see as the core aspects of Brandom’s normative inferentialism (§1) and Pietroski’s naturalistic semantics (§2). In Part 2 (next issue), I argue that there are many convergences between these two theoretical frameworks and, contrary to first appearances, very few points of substantive disagreement between them. If the integration strategy that I propose is correct, then what appear to be sharply contrasting commitments are better seen as interrelated verbal differences that come down to different—but complementary—explanatory goals. The residual disputes are, however, stubborn. I end by discussing how to square Pietroski’s commitment to predicativism with Brandom’s argument that a predicativist language is in principle incapable of expressing ordinary conditionals.

Paul Pietroski develops an iconoclastic account of linguistic meaning. Here, I invite him to say more about what it implies about the relations between language, truth, and conceptual content. Readers concerned with securing the objectivity of conceptual thought may be worried about his claims that typical concepts “have no extensions” and that they “fit one another better than they fit the world.” Others might applaud his anti‐extensionalism in natural‐language semantics but fear that his account re‐raises familiar problems about extensions at the level of psychology.

This volume examines two main questions: What is linguistics about? And how do the results of linguistic theorizing bear on inquiry in related fields, particularly in psychology? The book develops views that depart from received wisdom in both philosophy and linguistics. With regard to questions concerning the subject matter, methodological goals, and ontological commitments of formal syntactic theorizing, it argues that the cognitive conception adopted by most linguists and philosophers is not the only acceptable view, and that the arguments in its favor collapse under scrutiny. Nevertheless, as the book shows, a detailed examination of the relevant psycholinguistic results and computational models does support the claim that the theoretical constructs of formal linguistics are operative in real-time language comprehension. These constructs fall into two categories: mental phrase markers and mental syntactic principles. Both are indeed psychologically real, but in importantly different ways. The book concludes by drawing attention to the importance of the often-elided distinction between personal and subpersonal psychological states and processes, as well as the logical character of dispositional and occurrent states. By clarifying these concepts, particularly by reference to up-and-running psychological and computational models, the book yields a richer and more satisfying perspective on the psychological reality of language.

Chomsky claims that any theory of public “E-languages” will “surely have to presuppose grammars of I-languages.” Public languages are “more abstract” than I-languages, more “remote from mechanisms”. But can psychological mechanisms be described without reference (tacit or explicit) to social facts? I argue that public languages are indispensable to the study of language acquisition, as practiced by working psycholinguists. The data and explananda of acquisition theory are routinely couched in terms that make ineliminable reference to public languages, which serve as “targets” against which children’s successes and failures throughout development are measured. Though this does introduce a “normative-teleological” element into the science, it does not signal a move toward “prescriptive linguistics,” nor require an appeal to messy socio-political considerations. The normative-teleological element is innocuous, deriving from a theoretically motivated idealization of the child’s linguistic community. Next, I argue that the lack of precision in the individuation of public E-languages is just as much a feature of I-languages. Individuating I-languages requires settling unresolved issues about the competence/performance distinction, dialect mimicry, linguistic change, multilingualism, codeswitching, and cognitive disorders. It is not rational to insist on maximal precision in the individuation of either public E-languages or of I-languages at this stage of inquiry. Keywords Cognitivism • Noam Chomsky • I-language • E-language • Public languages • Language acquisition • Descriptive vs. prescriptive linguistics • Socio-political considerations • Idealization • Individuation conditions for E-languages • Individuation conditions for I-languages • Dialect mimicry • Linguistic change • Bilingualism • Multilingualism • Codeswitching • Cognitive disorders

In the literature on psychosemantics, fully externalist views hold that nomological brain-environment relations exhaustively determine the representational properties of internal states; computational role has no bearing. Fully internalist views reverse both claims. I argue that there is no overwhelming reason to adopt either view, and that the most promising alternative is functional-role semantics (FRS). Next, I show that the main arguments against FRS fail at the subpersonal level of description—a fact obscured by the “psychofunctionalist” tradition’s persistent conflation of personal with subpersonal. I survey six interrelated differences between them. Unlike personal-level states, subpersonal states are not inferentially integrated, never conscious, never expressed in speech, lack mental attitude, are not composed of concepts, and do not resist computational treatment. I then go on to distinguish between representing a rule, embodying it, and conforming to it, providing rough-and-ready characterizations of each phenomenon. Crucially, embodiment is an intermediate notion, distinguishable from the others by conceivable empirical tests. Finally, I discuss the distinction between occurrent and dispositional personal-level states—propositional attitudes such as datable judgments and standing beliefs. I argue that an analogous distinction operates at the subpersonal level, between mental phrase markers and mental syntactic principles, respectively.

I cast doubt on two proposals for doing without mental phrase markers (MPMs). The first is due to Roger Schank and his colleagues at Yale, who constructed comprehension models that relied almost exclusively on semantic and pragmatic resources. I rehearse the striking and pervasive failures of such models and suggest that similar problems will likely plague newer incarnations in the connectionist tradition. The second proposal for doing without MPMs is Devitt’s “brute-causal” conception of language processing, which sees comprehension as a reflex like, associative mapping directly from words and sentences to concepts and thoughts. I argue on empirical grounds that language comprehension, even at the earliest stages, is neither reflex-like nor associative. Setting that aside, I examine Devitt’s distinction between responding to a property and representing something as having it, and show that the operations of the HSPM cannot be mere “responses” in the relevant sense. Parsing requires keeping track of prior context, and the clues that are relevant for a successful parse may be arbitrarily far back and in discontinuous regions of the stimulus stream. To explain the HSPM’s sensitivity to contextually relevant factors, and the resulting flexibility of its decision-making and behavior, we must posit inference-like transitions between MPMs. Keywords Roger Schank • Semantic resources • Pragmatic resources • Passive sentences • Passive questions • Embedded passives • Reflex • Associationism • Connectionism • Brute-causal processing • The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) • Mentalese • Representing vs. responding • Responding vs. responding-as • Filler-gap processing • Sphex • Flexible behavior • Thematic roles • Incremental processing • Frames • Functional-role semantics • Systematicity • “Mostly-semantic” models • Integrated processing models • Linear structure • Hierarchical structure • Binding ambiguities • Syntactic binding • Positional Template Filling (PTF) • c-command • Precedence vs. dominance relations • Embedded/embodied cognitive science • Fodor Bever and Garrett (FBG) • David Hume • Aristotle

In this chapter, I survey a variety of grammars that have played a role in psycholinguistics, tracing the coevolution of theories in formal syntax and the computational parsing models that they inspired. In Chomsky’s “Standard Theory” the output of context-free rules is fed into the transformational component of a grammar. Many incorrectly interpreted early psycholinguistic experiments as shedding doubt on the psychological reality of transformational operations. These arguments, based on the Derivational Theory of Complexity, ultimately fail. But transformational parsers were rejected anyway, on computational grounds. Augmented Transition Networks (ATNs) rose to prominence, offering a promising framework for describing the surface syntax of natural language, as well as a natural implementation of the grammar as a parsing model. ATN parsers thus serve as a clear example of how grammatical rules can be viewed as procedural dispositions. A strong criticism of the ATN architecture, due to Lyn Frazier and Janet Fodor, relied heavily on the fact that ATNs do not explicitly represent the rules of a grammar in a separate data structure. Frazier and Fodor’s argument faces difficulties, but it vividly illustrates the kind of explanatory payoff that a model might derive from explicitly representing a grammar. Finally, I turn to principle-based parsers, which implement the principles of the Government and Binding (GB) theory as either generators or filters of syntactic analyses, yielding compact, efficient, wide-coverage systems. More recently, computational linguists have built parsers that use the syntactic principles of the Minimalist program. Indeed, Amy Weinberg has argued that parsing is “the incremental satisfaction of grammatical constraints” imposed by Minimalist grammars. If successful, her proposal would constitute the strongest argument for the psychological reality of Minimalist principles. Keywords Standard theory • Context-free grammar (CFG) • Transformational grammar • Transformational rules • Backwards transformations • S-structure • D-structure • Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC) • Augmented Transition Network (ATN) • Representation • Computational efficiency • Principles-and- Parameters (P&P) • Government and Binding theory (GB) • Principle-based parsing • Ambiguity resolution • Mental syntactic principles (MSPs) • Minimalism • Minimalist grammar • The Minimalist program • Joan Bresnan • Lexical-functional grammar (LFG) • Precomputed lexical realization • Chronometric data • Incremental parsing • Covering grammar • Strong Competence Hypothesis • Feature unification

Noam Chomsky equates an individual’s idiolect with a hypothesized psychological structure, an “I-language”, which the competent speaker/hearer “tacitly knows” or “cognizes” via “mental representations” of syntactic principles. Just what do these claims amount to? And what grounds are there for believing them? I attempt to pin down Chomsky’s evolving commitments regarding the relation between an I-language and the performance systems that are involved in comprehension and speech. This in turn raises issues about the empirical methodology and naturalistic credentials of Chomsky’s “cognitivist” conception of language. I then discuss Michael Devitt’s “Linguistic Conception,” a contemporary descendent of nominalism, according to which language consists of concrete entities—inscriptions, acoustic blasts, and the like. Devitt argues that linguists describe certain properties of these entities—e.g., grammaticality and entailment—that allow them to play a role in communication. Both approaches face non-trivial difficulties. Chomsky’s view awaits an articulation of the relation between grammars and neurophysiological mechanisms. Devitt’s requires a more detailed account of public language conventions and a satisfactory strategy for paraphrasing away apparent references to unvoiced and abstract elements of syntactic structure—empty categories. Finally, I argue that Devitt is right to distinguish a competence from its outputs, and hence linguistics from psycholinguistics. Keywords cognitivism, nominalism, E-language vs. I-language, idiolect, structural description, tacit knowledge, competence vs. performance, parsing, internalism (see also: individualism), Michael Devitt, conventions, empty categories (see also: unvoiced elements, phonologically null constituents), outputs of competence, the Linguistic Conception, supervenience, discovery procedures, Representational Thesis (RT)

I marshal several lines of empirical support for the claim that the human sentence processing mechanism (HSPM) constructs representations of the syntactic structures of linguistic stimuli—what I call “mental phrase markers” (MPMs). Powerful neurocognitive evidence for this hypothesis is drawn from recent EEG and MEG studies. Further support comes from studies of structural priming and garden-path processing, which provide insight into the structure of MPMs. Structural priming involves modulating the speed of behavioral responses by exciting certain MPMs prior to a task. In the case of garden-path processing, the HSPM encounters a locally ambiguous input and resolves the ambiguity in a way that turns out to be incorrect. The principles of ambiguity resolution that are operative in such cases all seem to make direct ineliminable reference to MPMs. Finally, I discuss various attempts to demonstrate the psychological reality of so-called “empty categories”. The available evidence suggests that wh-traces are psychologically real and that the HSPM employs sophisticated strategies in searching for them, making use of both grammatical constraints and cues provided by their antecedents. In the concluding section, I discuss whether the contents of MPMs can help us decide which grammar the HSPM employs in on-line processing.

In this paper, I argue for a modified version of what Devitt calls the Representational Thesis. According to RT, syntactic rules or principles are psychologically real, in the sense that they are represented in the mind/brain of every linguistically competent speaker/hearer. I present a range of behavioral and neurophysiological evidence for the claim that the human sentence processing mechanism constructs mental representations of the syntactic properties of linguistic stimuli. I then survey a range of psychologically plausible computational models of comprehension and show that they are all committed to RT. I go on to sketch a framework for thinking about the nature of the representations involved in sentence processing. My claim is that these are best characterized not as propositional attitudes but, rather, as subpersonal states whose representational properties are determined by their functional role. Finally, I distinguish between explicit and implicit representations and argue that the latter can be drawn on as data by the algorithms that constitute our sentence processing routines. I conclude that skepticism concerning the psychological reality of grammars cannot be sustained

I defend a claim, central to much work in psycholinguistics, that constructing mental representations of syntactic structures is a necessary step in language comprehension. Call such representations “mental phrase markers”. Several theorists in psycholinguistics, AI, and philosophy have cast doubt on the usefulness of positing MPMs. I examine their proposals and argue that they face major empirical and conceptual difficulties. My conclusions tell against the broader skepticism that persists in philosophy—e.g., in the embodied cognition literature —about the usefulness of positing mental representations in psychological models. Using my discussion of sentence parsing as a case study, I propose several conditions on an appropriate appeal to mental representations. Finally, I point out that the familiar arguments from productivity, systematicity, and inferential coherence suffice to establish that MPMs themselves have a c..

Gennaro presents a version of the higher-order thought theory of consciousness that differs from the version defended by Rosenthal . I explore several key differences between Gennaro's and Rosenthal's views, with an eye toward establishing that Rosenthal's Extrinsic Higher-Order Thought theory is preferable to Gennaro's Wide Intrinsicality View . Gennaro's attempts to demonstrate the superiority of the WIV rest on an unargued and implausible assumption to the effect that the higher-order intentional contents of self-representing conscious states are necessarily accurate. Gennaro relies on this assumption in avoiding what he sees as problematic consequences of Rosenthal's EHOT theory, which countenances the possibility that higher-order thoughts sometimes misrepresent lower-order states. I argue that these consequences, far from being problematic, actually constitute a strength of the EHOT theory, allowing it to explain phenomena such as dental fear, perceptual learning, and rare c..

In “How We Know Our Own Minds: The Relationship Between Mindreading and Metacognition,” Peter Carruthers argues for a view according to which first-person awareness of one’s own propositional attitudes is always interpretive, though one’s awareness of “sensory-imagistic” states is not. In this commentary, I criticize Carruthers’ way of drawing the distinction between sensory states and propositional attitudes. Furthermore, I argue for the superiority of a view, which I derive from Wilfrid Sellars, according to which all self-ascriptions of mental states are, at bottom, interpretive—i.e., the outputs of an inferential process that consists in applying a folk-psychological theory to oneself.