CHAT: THEORY/CHAT: RE: [CONLANG] To Matt Pearson

Matt:
> As I understand it, the chain of reasoning is:
>
> [a] Language is rule-governed: utterances systematically obey
> discoverable rules. (This is a hypothesis, of course, but the
> evidence seems to be strongly in its favour.)
> [b] Language is in our heads: we have linguistic competence. (I take
> this as a given; the only alternative is that supernatural creatures
> are speaking through us. :-))
> [c] Given (a) and (b), it follows that there are rules in our heads.
>
> I know that this is not a proper syllogism or anything, and it may
> not strictly follow the scientific method (I know far too little
> about the history or philosophy of science). But I just can't see how
> [c] could be a controversial claim.
I think [c] should be our best guess at what the truth is, but it
doesn't follow from the [a] and [b], and I do see how [c] could be
disputed. It could be that minds generate language rulelessly and
that the discoverable rules are emergent properties of a complex
system, rather as, say, people walking around a plaza are not
individually obeying any rules of traffic flow, yet the flow of
people around the plaza can nonetheless be accurately modelled by
rules. Economics would be a good example of an academic discipline
where this is fairly clearly the case: economic theory mainly deals
with human behaviour but its laws aren't in the minds of individual
economic agents.

Not that I think that this really applies to language, but I do trot
it out when people complain to me that such and such a rule or theory
is not psychologically plausible, as part of my conception of language
as a nonpsychological object.

--And.