Symposium on linguistics and philosophy of language with Michael Devitt
July 30th 2007 10:53
9am-5.30pm, Monday 16 July -- Central Lecture Block 2 -- University of New South Wales. Click here for the website.
This was on themes related to a recent book by Michael Devitt, Ignorance of language. I've never read the book, but, judging by the blurb, the ideas in it are likely to be similar to a talk Devitt gave last year.
By the way, what was the deal with the surrealist prankster who sat in the front row laughing, and who walked in and out of the room, helping herself to around half a dozen cups of caffeine in the first 45 minutes? Was Michaelis Michael's paper really that boring?
Anyway, a couple of thoughts from and about the symposium...
9am, "Language, function and normativity" by Michaelis Michael (UNSW)
So basically this was (take a breath) a reply to a paper by Scott Soames on a problem that Saul Kripke interprets into Wittgenstein about the difference between plus and "quus", addition and "quaddition", and what fact about our linguistic behaviour means that we mean one rule rather than the other if both rules would so far have generated the same results.
Won't go into the messy details, and frankly don't understand them all. But a nice analysis of the Kripkean presentation (by John Humphrey of Minnesota State University Mankato) can be found here (and, kinda sorta related, I've made some straightforward comments on pattern recognition here).
Among Michaelis's conclusions were: (1) that meaning has a normative dimension -- "whatever fact we nominate as constituting the meaning fact has to explain how we are led by the meanings of words to deploy them as we do"; (2) "being an intentional creature is not just being disposed to act according to a rule, but being guided by the rule"; (3) the rule "must be the sort of thing I can have epistemic access to"; and (4) the significance of Kripke's skeptical problem is that some assumption needs to be rejected, but whichever we reject will have "massive consequences" for our notion of meaning.
During the Q&A, Michael Devitt raised the expected objections: -- Why do we need to be "led" by meanings? Why do we need intentionality? And why do we need epistemic access? When a baseball player is running in for a catch, he moves in such a way that the acceleration of the tangent of the elevation of the ball remains at zero -- this is the rule he follows -- but obviously he doesn't know it. All he needs is "knowledge how", not "knowledge that". So why should our linguistic fielding be any different?
Michaelis thought for a while, then gave a tentative response. -- (1) Yes, it's true that you don't always need epistemic access to the rules in order to act. In fact, people will sometimes give incorrect predictions about how they'll behave, so it's clear that the rules and the representation of the rules can differ; (2) but is all of our linguistic behaviour non-intentional? Don't we sometimes have access to the meaning of our terms? One reason to think so (allegedly) is that we're not surprised, we feel justified, when we apply a rule in a novel case; and (3) Professor Devitt, you're proposing a revision of our notions of meaning and of ourselves as intentional actors, but I just think we need to be clear on what we're giving up on before we make that step.
9.45am, "Knowing-that, knowing-how, and knowing philosophically" by Stephen Hetherington (UNSW)
Hetherington suggests that all "knowledge that" can be reduced to "knowledge how" -- ie, knowing some proposition p means being able to take actions x, y, z. On this account, knowledge is not a substance or a thing inside you; and it's not a simple state; and it doesn't even have precise borders.
Instead of speaking of knowledge as belief that is justified and true, we should recognize it as an activity that's spread across an "epistemic diasphora", and there's no need to prioritize any member of the diasphora.
Knowledge is not just accurately believing in some proposition p (with "accurately" spelled out in terms of whatever "justified and true" means), but accurately remembering, asserting, questioning, answering, representing, sensing, reasoning, discussing, explaining, hypothesising, providing evidence, and taking action, etc in p-related ways.
Competence in one of these activites leads on to competence in others, for the skills are related, and no member can entirely stand by itself.
Performing any of these activities successfully is sufficient for knowledge. But the more of them you master, the richer your knowledge can be said to be. At the start of your philosophy degree you believe in an external world, and at the end of it you still believe in an external world -- but there is a difference in your competence -- your knowledge is richer.
Philosophical knowledge, if there is any, is knowing how to uncover lingering problems bearing on a p. It's not just a listing of truths, but the ability to refine, elaborate, modify, explain, or defend premises, to imagine possible objections, to pose the right questions for extending inquiry. Philosophically knowing that p is therefore always unfinished -- philosophy begins and lives on in wonder.
Some more thoughts on this (my own, unless otherwise indicated):
-- Michael Devitt commented that skill at public speaking could be thought of as a separate but related ability to knowing.
-- Lloyd Reinhardt mentioned that there's a difference between believing that it's true that light is both wave and particle (because my physics friends tell me so), and knowing that p.
-- How do you know when you've correctly accounted for "knowing"? Is this simply a lexicographical task? Or, if not by reference to language, how do you judge success in the activity?
(And this point came up also during the Q&A: someone asked whether phenomenal experience is necessary for knowledge, and Hetherington replied: (1) that, if we're simply trading intuitions, his intuition is that robots can be said to know, and so can cats and dogs; and (2) that it depends on what criteria we want a definition of knowledge to meet.)
-- Insofar as all these activities are "knowledge that p", what unifies them? For instance, why is one action "that p" rather than "that q"? (And note that Hetherington moves from talking about "accurately believing that p" to speaking, more nebulously, about "accurately taking action in p-related ways".)
-- I don't know if the "belief" of epistemology is the same as the "belief" of philosophy of mind. But it seems to me that a functionalist view in philosophy of mind (for instance, the idea that "belief" is to be characterized in terms of inputs and outputs) leads naturally to a reduction of knowledge that to knowledge how.
-- Philosophical knowledge as always unfinished has family resemblance across the disaphora of definitions of philosophy. For instance: (1) there is an age-old conception of philosophy as a conversation between dogmatist and skeptic; (2) Robert Brandom, in a lecture at Sydney Uni, speaks of philosophy as the discipline that "keeps concepts sharp" (though I can't remember much more of the idea; but the main thoughts he was peddling he repeated at a workshop); (3) Jaegwon Kim, in a review in the Journal of philosophy of Rorty's Philosophy and the mirror of nature, speaks of philosophy as the handmaiden rather than the queen of the sciences (presumably always following and cleaning up after); (4) Slavoj Zizek, in the Zizek movie, denies that there are authentic philosophical problems or answers. "True philosophy" is a modest discipline and not a crazy exercise in eternal truths. It doesn't ask whether we are free or not, or whether there's a God. Instead it redefines problems, asks what it means to be free, and thereby dissolves difficulty; and (5) John Searle comments, in a lecture at Oxford (I think), that philosophy is inherently speculative -- for once people agree on a method for answering, then that field of inquiry breaks off from philosophy and becomes something else -- as was the case for science, economics, psychology, sociology.
11am, "Linguistic description and the generative enterprise" by Nick Riemer (Sydney)
All sciences, especially in their infancy, are to some extent idealizations. You abstract from other factors -- you say, "All things being equal" -- "If friction and wind resistance are negligible, then this will be the speed of the rolling ball", etc.
Galileo and Newton ignored falsifying evidence in the course of developing their theories, hoping that there would be some way, later on, of explaining away the discrepancies. Ie, their sciences initially developed more on the side of idealization than on the side of experimental results.
Now, Chomsky's generative grammar is also an idealization. And has it gone too far? Martin Kusch comments that idealization in science is typically followed by a period of de-idealization.
Generative grammar operates with the concepts of grammaticality and acceptability. There is a "pure" form of whether something is grammatical or not, and the ungrammatical can be acceptable under the right circumstances -- "contextual, processing, and pragmatic variables can override ungrammaticality".
But how do you check a prediction that a certain structure is grammatical? -- You do it by assuming that grammaticality and acceptability usually coincide, and you look to see if your construction is acceptable. So a lot hangs, said Riemer, on how often grammaticality and acceptability do coincide.
Riemer wanted to emphasize structures that were deemed ungrammatical by Chomskyans, but are in practice acceptable. -- How many incompatibilities can the theory tolerate?
One might also wonder how many structures are deemed grammatical, but are in practice unacceptable.
Riemer noted: (1) that tolerance is a question not of accounting, but of judgment and reasonableness; (2) that it's not possible to get clear statistics, for there are infinite possible ways to use language.
During the Q&A, it was mentioned:
-- that a starred sentence in a linguistic textbook doesn't necessarily mean "ungrammatical" but "more degraded" (from an ideal form), and there are degrees of grammaticality;
-- languages change, so one shouldn't suppose that constructions are neatly acceptable or unacceptable; and
-- "niggles" about acceptability -- intuitions about correct usage -- these things come and go -- and linguists are very aware of their variability.
11.45am, "Why music is better than its sounds" by Iain Giblin (UNSW)
About generative grammar of music, and how to formalize descriptions of musical intuitions.
Some observations that caught my eye included:
-- when you listen to the tick-tock of a grandfather clock, it can feel like it's in three-four time, or it can feel like four-four. As with optical illusions, you can change your perspective;
-- similarly, the forbidden diablo tritone has two different possibilities for resolution, and it can feel like it's going either way, depending on what structure you interpret it as belonging to;
-- Che Guevera didn't understand music at all -- "What's this racket?". Some people hear sound without the notes meaning or representing anything. I think Giblin was here mainly speaking about ability to organize sounds into structures of pitch and tempo, etc;
-- Brahms, once, when asked whether he'd heard a piece of music, responded "No, but I've read the score"; Stravinsky allegedly avoided performances because they were worse than the sound he could hear on reading; and Salieri in Amadeus is shown to be doing just this with a Mozart score. -- Well, apparently all of these are myths. Professional musicians can get certain things from the score, but they can't play it in their heads simply by reading it.
1.30pm, "Is logic innate?: a posteriori arguments" by Stephen Crain (Macquarie)
If one sifts through the past few decades of Chomsky, said Crain, four signs of innate linguistic ideas can be interpreted into his thinking. These are something like:
1. The innate idea unifies apparently unrelated phenomena (knowing it saves you the trouble of the piecemeal learning of unrelated facts).
2. The idea is universal (is relevant to every language).
3. There is early emergence.
4. There is emergence without decisive input (you haven't been given enough information to arrive at the idea through experience).
Now, Crain wanted to argue that there's experimental evidence to the effect that all of these criteria are satisfied for inclusive disjunction ("or") -- and, therefore, that this logical idea is innate.
Highlight of the talk was a video that featured Crain saying to 2-year-olds, "Kermit doesn't want a banana or a watermelon; give Kermit what he wants" -- and then they give Kermit an apple -- which I think is supposed to demonstrate, inter alia, that they understood the "or" as inclusive rather than exclusive and that they made the deduction: ~ (A v B) <=> (~A & ~B).
During the Q&A:
-- The ever-perceptive Lloyd Reinhardt objected that you can't rule out context. There are lots of contextual clues and pressures that tell children how to respond.
-- Crain made the point that Japanese children initially treat the Japanese word for "or" as inclusive -- and then need to be corrected and learn that in that language it's used exclusively.
2.15pm, "Is logic innate?: a priori arguments" by Drew Khlentzos (UNE)
Two main arguments.
The first was based on Quine and I didn't follow it at all, so you'll have to e-mail Khlentzos to ask. But, to mangle it horribly, it went something like: Carnap thinks that logical laws are pure stipulations, but Quine thinks Carnap's explanation is circular, because it makes use of an already-understood notion of logical consequence. Therefore you need to have some logical laws already in order to get the whole web of belief off the ground. (I also didn't follow, by the way, why Quine didn't take this argument to an innateness conclusion.)
The second was based on Fodor, and went something like -- "All concepts are either learned or innate. If learned, they're acquired through hypothesis testing in a logically structured way. Lexical concepts aren't logically structured. Therefore they're not acquired by hypothesis testing. Therefore they're innate." -- Khlentzos thought this argument invalid for lexical concepts (because, he claimed, you can learn words through ostension and you don't need hypothesis testing). But he thought the argument works for logical concepts; and in this connection he mentioned a criticism of the Tarskian truth-conditions view of semantics that you can't talk about the truth conditions for truth conditions themselves.
I think (but am probably wrong) that Khlentzos also claimed that you can't be taught logic in the same way that you're shown the rules of chess, because the meaning of something like "and" can't be shown in a way that generalizes.
During the Q&A:
-- Uriah Kriegel pointed out that there's different possible operators you can treat as primitive. For instance, instead of treating inclusive "or" as primitive, you can treat implication and negation as primitive. Khlentzos responded that, yes, this is true, but it's a question of psychological plausibility. The children can't be reasoning in a complex enough fashion to derive "or" in this way.
-- Khlentzos emphasised that some logical rules seem to most non-logicians to be invalid, so they wouldn't teach their children these rules. For instance, the rule of "disjunctive introduction" -- A therefore A v B -- Socrates is a man, therefore either Socrates is a man or George Bush has the complete text of Wuthering Heights tattooed on his fallopian tubes.
3.30pm, "Linguistic explanation and psychological reality" by Peter Slezak (UNSW)
From what I could follow, Slezak thought Devitt attributed an erroneous view to Chomsky, and that Chomsky wasn't committed to representing the rules in order to follow them.
He also thought Devitt was a closet behaviourist.
Incidentally, check out this atheism vs God debate between Slezak and William Lane Craig from 2002...
4.15pm, "Imperviousness to evidence: a response to Peter Slezak" by Michael Devitt (CUNY)
Devitt commented that this dispute, for outsiders, was probably more "of sociological interest", and I think he was right.
The response to Slezak was essentially: No, I didn't attribute that view to Chomsky, and, no, I'm not a behaviourist.
This was on themes related to a recent book by Michael Devitt, Ignorance of language. I've never read the book, but, judging by the blurb, the ideas in it are likely to be similar to a talk Devitt gave last year.
By the way, what was the deal with the surrealist prankster who sat in the front row laughing, and who walked in and out of the room, helping herself to around half a dozen cups of caffeine in the first 45 minutes? Was Michaelis Michael's paper really that boring?
Anyway, a couple of thoughts from and about the symposium...
***
So basically this was (take a breath) a reply to a paper by Scott Soames on a problem that Saul Kripke interprets into Wittgenstein about the difference between plus and "quus", addition and "quaddition", and what fact about our linguistic behaviour means that we mean one rule rather than the other if both rules would so far have generated the same results.
Won't go into the messy details, and frankly don't understand them all. But a nice analysis of the Kripkean presentation (by John Humphrey of Minnesota State University Mankato) can be found here (and, kinda sorta related, I've made some straightforward comments on pattern recognition here).
Among Michaelis's conclusions were: (1) that meaning has a normative dimension -- "whatever fact we nominate as constituting the meaning fact has to explain how we are led by the meanings of words to deploy them as we do"; (2) "being an intentional creature is not just being disposed to act according to a rule, but being guided by the rule"; (3) the rule "must be the sort of thing I can have epistemic access to"; and (4) the significance of Kripke's skeptical problem is that some assumption needs to be rejected, but whichever we reject will have "massive consequences" for our notion of meaning.
During the Q&A, Michael Devitt raised the expected objections: -- Why do we need to be "led" by meanings? Why do we need intentionality? And why do we need epistemic access? When a baseball player is running in for a catch, he moves in such a way that the acceleration of the tangent of the elevation of the ball remains at zero -- this is the rule he follows -- but obviously he doesn't know it. All he needs is "knowledge how", not "knowledge that". So why should our linguistic fielding be any different?
Michaelis thought for a while, then gave a tentative response. -- (1) Yes, it's true that you don't always need epistemic access to the rules in order to act. In fact, people will sometimes give incorrect predictions about how they'll behave, so it's clear that the rules and the representation of the rules can differ; (2) but is all of our linguistic behaviour non-intentional? Don't we sometimes have access to the meaning of our terms? One reason to think so (allegedly) is that we're not surprised, we feel justified, when we apply a rule in a novel case; and (3) Professor Devitt, you're proposing a revision of our notions of meaning and of ourselves as intentional actors, but I just think we need to be clear on what we're giving up on before we make that step.
***
Hetherington suggests that all "knowledge that" can be reduced to "knowledge how" -- ie, knowing some proposition p means being able to take actions x, y, z. On this account, knowledge is not a substance or a thing inside you; and it's not a simple state; and it doesn't even have precise borders.
Instead of speaking of knowledge as belief that is justified and true, we should recognize it as an activity that's spread across an "epistemic diasphora", and there's no need to prioritize any member of the diasphora.
Knowledge is not just accurately believing in some proposition p (with "accurately" spelled out in terms of whatever "justified and true" means), but accurately remembering, asserting, questioning, answering, representing, sensing, reasoning, discussing, explaining, hypothesising, providing evidence, and taking action, etc in p-related ways.
Competence in one of these activites leads on to competence in others, for the skills are related, and no member can entirely stand by itself.
Performing any of these activities successfully is sufficient for knowledge. But the more of them you master, the richer your knowledge can be said to be. At the start of your philosophy degree you believe in an external world, and at the end of it you still believe in an external world -- but there is a difference in your competence -- your knowledge is richer.
Philosophical knowledge, if there is any, is knowing how to uncover lingering problems bearing on a p. It's not just a listing of truths, but the ability to refine, elaborate, modify, explain, or defend premises, to imagine possible objections, to pose the right questions for extending inquiry. Philosophically knowing that p is therefore always unfinished -- philosophy begins and lives on in wonder.
Some more thoughts on this (my own, unless otherwise indicated):
-- Michael Devitt commented that skill at public speaking could be thought of as a separate but related ability to knowing.
-- Lloyd Reinhardt mentioned that there's a difference between believing that it's true that light is both wave and particle (because my physics friends tell me so), and knowing that p.
-- How do you know when you've correctly accounted for "knowing"? Is this simply a lexicographical task? Or, if not by reference to language, how do you judge success in the activity?
(And this point came up also during the Q&A: someone asked whether phenomenal experience is necessary for knowledge, and Hetherington replied: (1) that, if we're simply trading intuitions, his intuition is that robots can be said to know, and so can cats and dogs; and (2) that it depends on what criteria we want a definition of knowledge to meet.)
-- Insofar as all these activities are "knowledge that p", what unifies them? For instance, why is one action "that p" rather than "that q"? (And note that Hetherington moves from talking about "accurately believing that p" to speaking, more nebulously, about "accurately taking action in p-related ways".)
-- I don't know if the "belief" of epistemology is the same as the "belief" of philosophy of mind. But it seems to me that a functionalist view in philosophy of mind (for instance, the idea that "belief" is to be characterized in terms of inputs and outputs) leads naturally to a reduction of knowledge that to knowledge how.
-- Philosophical knowledge as always unfinished has family resemblance across the disaphora of definitions of philosophy. For instance: (1) there is an age-old conception of philosophy as a conversation between dogmatist and skeptic; (2) Robert Brandom, in a lecture at Sydney Uni, speaks of philosophy as the discipline that "keeps concepts sharp" (though I can't remember much more of the idea; but the main thoughts he was peddling he repeated at a workshop); (3) Jaegwon Kim, in a review in the Journal of philosophy of Rorty's Philosophy and the mirror of nature, speaks of philosophy as the handmaiden rather than the queen of the sciences (presumably always following and cleaning up after); (4) Slavoj Zizek, in the Zizek movie, denies that there are authentic philosophical problems or answers. "True philosophy" is a modest discipline and not a crazy exercise in eternal truths. It doesn't ask whether we are free or not, or whether there's a God. Instead it redefines problems, asks what it means to be free, and thereby dissolves difficulty; and (5) John Searle comments, in a lecture at Oxford (I think), that philosophy is inherently speculative -- for once people agree on a method for answering, then that field of inquiry breaks off from philosophy and becomes something else -- as was the case for science, economics, psychology, sociology.
***
All sciences, especially in their infancy, are to some extent idealizations. You abstract from other factors -- you say, "All things being equal" -- "If friction and wind resistance are negligible, then this will be the speed of the rolling ball", etc.
Galileo and Newton ignored falsifying evidence in the course of developing their theories, hoping that there would be some way, later on, of explaining away the discrepancies. Ie, their sciences initially developed more on the side of idealization than on the side of experimental results.
Now, Chomsky's generative grammar is also an idealization. And has it gone too far? Martin Kusch comments that idealization in science is typically followed by a period of de-idealization.
Generative grammar operates with the concepts of grammaticality and acceptability. There is a "pure" form of whether something is grammatical or not, and the ungrammatical can be acceptable under the right circumstances -- "contextual, processing, and pragmatic variables can override ungrammaticality".
But how do you check a prediction that a certain structure is grammatical? -- You do it by assuming that grammaticality and acceptability usually coincide, and you look to see if your construction is acceptable. So a lot hangs, said Riemer, on how often grammaticality and acceptability do coincide.
Riemer wanted to emphasize structures that were deemed ungrammatical by Chomskyans, but are in practice acceptable. -- How many incompatibilities can the theory tolerate?
One might also wonder how many structures are deemed grammatical, but are in practice unacceptable.
Riemer noted: (1) that tolerance is a question not of accounting, but of judgment and reasonableness; (2) that it's not possible to get clear statistics, for there are infinite possible ways to use language.
During the Q&A, it was mentioned:
-- that a starred sentence in a linguistic textbook doesn't necessarily mean "ungrammatical" but "more degraded" (from an ideal form), and there are degrees of grammaticality;
-- languages change, so one shouldn't suppose that constructions are neatly acceptable or unacceptable; and
-- "niggles" about acceptability -- intuitions about correct usage -- these things come and go -- and linguists are very aware of their variability.
***
About generative grammar of music, and how to formalize descriptions of musical intuitions.
Some observations that caught my eye included:
-- when you listen to the tick-tock of a grandfather clock, it can feel like it's in three-four time, or it can feel like four-four. As with optical illusions, you can change your perspective;
-- similarly, the forbidden diablo tritone has two different possibilities for resolution, and it can feel like it's going either way, depending on what structure you interpret it as belonging to;
-- Che Guevera didn't understand music at all -- "What's this racket?". Some people hear sound without the notes meaning or representing anything. I think Giblin was here mainly speaking about ability to organize sounds into structures of pitch and tempo, etc;
-- Brahms, once, when asked whether he'd heard a piece of music, responded "No, but I've read the score"; Stravinsky allegedly avoided performances because they were worse than the sound he could hear on reading; and Salieri in Amadeus is shown to be doing just this with a Mozart score. -- Well, apparently all of these are myths. Professional musicians can get certain things from the score, but they can't play it in their heads simply by reading it.
***
If one sifts through the past few decades of Chomsky, said Crain, four signs of innate linguistic ideas can be interpreted into his thinking. These are something like:
1. The innate idea unifies apparently unrelated phenomena (knowing it saves you the trouble of the piecemeal learning of unrelated facts).
2. The idea is universal (is relevant to every language).
3. There is early emergence.
4. There is emergence without decisive input (you haven't been given enough information to arrive at the idea through experience).
Now, Crain wanted to argue that there's experimental evidence to the effect that all of these criteria are satisfied for inclusive disjunction ("or") -- and, therefore, that this logical idea is innate.
Highlight of the talk was a video that featured Crain saying to 2-year-olds, "Kermit doesn't want a banana or a watermelon; give Kermit what he wants" -- and then they give Kermit an apple -- which I think is supposed to demonstrate, inter alia, that they understood the "or" as inclusive rather than exclusive and that they made the deduction: ~ (A v B) <=> (~A & ~B).
During the Q&A:
-- The ever-perceptive Lloyd Reinhardt objected that you can't rule out context. There are lots of contextual clues and pressures that tell children how to respond.
-- Crain made the point that Japanese children initially treat the Japanese word for "or" as inclusive -- and then need to be corrected and learn that in that language it's used exclusively.
***
Two main arguments.
The first was based on Quine and I didn't follow it at all, so you'll have to e-mail Khlentzos to ask. But, to mangle it horribly, it went something like: Carnap thinks that logical laws are pure stipulations, but Quine thinks Carnap's explanation is circular, because it makes use of an already-understood notion of logical consequence. Therefore you need to have some logical laws already in order to get the whole web of belief off the ground. (I also didn't follow, by the way, why Quine didn't take this argument to an innateness conclusion.)
The second was based on Fodor, and went something like -- "All concepts are either learned or innate. If learned, they're acquired through hypothesis testing in a logically structured way. Lexical concepts aren't logically structured. Therefore they're not acquired by hypothesis testing. Therefore they're innate." -- Khlentzos thought this argument invalid for lexical concepts (because, he claimed, you can learn words through ostension and you don't need hypothesis testing). But he thought the argument works for logical concepts; and in this connection he mentioned a criticism of the Tarskian truth-conditions view of semantics that you can't talk about the truth conditions for truth conditions themselves.
I think (but am probably wrong) that Khlentzos also claimed that you can't be taught logic in the same way that you're shown the rules of chess, because the meaning of something like "and" can't be shown in a way that generalizes.
During the Q&A:
-- Uriah Kriegel pointed out that there's different possible operators you can treat as primitive. For instance, instead of treating inclusive "or" as primitive, you can treat implication and negation as primitive. Khlentzos responded that, yes, this is true, but it's a question of psychological plausibility. The children can't be reasoning in a complex enough fashion to derive "or" in this way.
-- Khlentzos emphasised that some logical rules seem to most non-logicians to be invalid, so they wouldn't teach their children these rules. For instance, the rule of "disjunctive introduction" -- A therefore A v B -- Socrates is a man, therefore either Socrates is a man or George Bush has the complete text of Wuthering Heights tattooed on his fallopian tubes.
***
From what I could follow, Slezak thought Devitt attributed an erroneous view to Chomsky, and that Chomsky wasn't committed to representing the rules in order to follow them.
He also thought Devitt was a closet behaviourist.
Incidentally, check out this atheism vs God debate between Slezak and William Lane Craig from 2002...
***
Devitt commented that this dispute, for outsiders, was probably more "of sociological interest", and I think he was right.
The response to Slezak was essentially: No, I didn't attribute that view to Chomsky, and, no, I'm not a behaviourist.
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Comment by Damo
So give me a bit of time to read it.
Comment by Adrian
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