Part 15 (1/2)

rule.

(113) If X and Y are numbers, X plus Y def X Y, the arithmetical sum.

However, someone, say, Ali's use of plus must be based on a finite number of past uses of this word. Hence, there must be some given numbers, say, 55 and 65, beyond which Ali has not checked his use so far. Thus, the entirety of Ali's past usage is also compatible with the following (nonstandard) rule: (114) If X and Y are numbers, X quus Y def X Y for X,Y a 65; def 10, otherwise.

How can Ali tell, when he is currently using plus, that he is not using it in the sense of quus since all of Ali's past uses of plus are compatible with (114) as well? It seems we need some matter of fact that uniquely decides in favor of one of the definitions/usages-preferably (113)-as a representation of Ali's ability to compute the arithmetical sum of two numbers. As Kripke's ingenuous handling of the available options shows, there are no non-question-begging criteria, including a survey of Ali's introspective states, that a rule follower may invoke to justify his particular choice (Kripke 1982, chapter 2).

According to Kripke, the problem just raised leads to Wittgenstein's (1953, paragraph 201) remark that ''no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made to accord with the rule.'' Hence, to ''think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Otherwise, thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it'' (paragraph 202). Therefore, ''when I obey a rule, I do not choose; I obey the rule blindly'' (paragraph 219).

There is a ma.s.sive philosophical literature that tries to understand what Kripke's problem and the a.s.sociated remarks from Wittgenstein mean (Goldfarb 1985; Ebbs 1997; Horwich 1998; Hattiangadi 2007, etc.). Of direct interest here is Kripke's suggestion that ''if statements attributing rule following are neither to be regarded as stating facts, nor to be thought of as explaining our behavior, it would seem that the use of the ideas of rules and competence in linguistics needs serious 142

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reconsideration.'' Kripke (1982, 3132) also thinks that the ''problems are compounded if, as in linguistics, the rules are thought of as tacit, to be reconstructed by the scientist and inferred as an explanation of behavior.'' Since the idea of rule following is used to describe visual systems and insect navigation, the problem compounds even further.

Chomsky (1986, 225) responds to all this as follows: ''If I follow R, I do so without reason. I am just so constructed. I follow R because So maps data presented into Ss, which incorporates R. There is no answer to the Wittgensteinian skeptic and there need be none.'' According to Chomsky, then, the question of justification, or the lack of it, as posed by Kripke simply does not arise in the context of cognitive explanations.

Again, the scope of Kripke's very general problem-and Chomsky's sweeping denial of it-is unclear. Immediately following these remarks, Chomsky gives three examples where he thinks the skeptic need not be answered: ''I know that 27 5 32, that this thing is a desk, that in a certain sentence a p.r.o.noun cannot be referentially dependent on a certain noun phrase etc.''

The first example concerns (113) and it falls squarely within the scope of Wittgenstein's skeptic. It is hard to see that Ali's knowledge that 27 5 32, rather than 27 5 10, can be traced to a fact about Ali's const.i.tution. If Ali was so const.i.tuted, how could he come up with a widely dierent rule in his skeptical moment? The question is all the more pertinent because nonstandard formulation of standard arithmetical practices is part of the practice of mathematics itself. Nonstandard mathematics would have been impossible if our const.i.tution allowed only standard formulations. So, it is more likely that if there are facts of const.i.tution underlying our arithmetical practices-there must be such facts-then a ''rule-following'' description of the const.i.tution will be more abstract than either (113) or (114) such that both are admissible as equivalent descriptions. The desired description will essentially give an account of the meaning of plus, or of the concept PLUS. The issue is whether such an account is available in a non-question-begging manner.

Suppose the second example concerns a meaning rule: desk means desk. Then, in the light of the above and in a Quinean vein, Kripke would suggest that such rules are not qualitatively dierent from arithmetical rules. For example, Kripke (1982, 19) asks, ''Can I answer a skeptic who supposes that by table in the past I meant tabair, where a tabair is anything that is a table not found at the base of the Eiel Tower, or a chair found there?'' Recalling the discussion on Quine's gavagai-problem, it is unlikely that the problem of equivalent descriptions, as it arises for mean- Words and Concepts 143.

ing postulations or translation manuals, has a clear solution in advance of detailed empirical research. In fact, it could well turn out that problems of ''indeterminacy'' resist any coherent empirical approach toward understanding our const.i.tution in these respects. In view of this uncertainty, we do not know what it means to trace Ali's preference for the ''standard''

meaning of desk to some aspect of his const.i.tution.

Does it follow that all ascriptions of rule following have the same (uncertain) eect? Consider the contemporary research on face recognition.

It has been found that recognition of faces, say, from photographs, depends on interesting geometrical properties which remain invariant under varying light and shade, tilt, rotation, degree of camouflage, and so on (Carey 1979). There are threshold points upto which this ability works with remarkable regularity and success. No one is ever taught these regularities; in fact no one knew about them until recently. Suppose we write these regularities down in some notation to develop a rule system-a ''grammar''-of face recognition.

It will be absurd to suggest that recognition of faces is an unjustified activity just because the relevant capacity has been described in terms of rules and representations, and the subjects are viewed as having internalized this rule system.7 There may be equivalent descriptions here as well as a matter of routine scientific practice. But these are not alternative descriptions we could adopt, but alternative descriptions of a single objective reality, a matter of fact, concerning some aspect of human behavior.

There is no answer to the skeptic and there need be none. We are just constructed that way. It may even be counterintuitive to call such behavior ''rule-governed,'' displaying the usual vagueness with which we enter big philosophical debates.

For the case of face recognition, some neurological evidence has been found to support and extend the early ''top-down'' theories (Rodman 1999). The neurological story is in its infancy; but it is enough to suggest that we are looking at natural principles, perhaps specific to the domain (Jackendo 1992, 73). But suppose there is no neurological evidence as indeed was the case at the beginning of this research. That should not alter the basic methodological issue: the presence or absence of neurological evidence cannot suddenly change a matter of faith to a matter of fact.

If there is a matter of fact to be studied at all, even the use of the vocabulary of rules and representations in the early stages of research ought to be viewed as describing the same aspect of nature. The basic issue seems to be the character of what we are studying, not just the vocabulary in which studies are phrased.

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Consider now Chomsky's third example. The example concerns the phenomenon of p.r.o.noun binding. Speakers of English know that them as in the men expected to like them can not be referentially dependent on the men. We saw that the phenomenon is explained by Principle B of binding theory: a p.r.o.nominal is free in a local domain. The phenomenon is grammatical in character and the relevant principle is buried deep in human const.i.tution such that a nonlinguist is not likely to have any access to it. Even Shakespeare would not have been able to justify the rule that the men can not bind them in the cited construction; he would have followed it blindly. Needless to say, a linguist can now justify this practice, including his own, on usual scientific grounds by furnis.h.i.+ng a variety of evidence, some of which we saw.

The point is further substantiated by another example discussed by Chomsky (1986, 227). It is well known that, at a certain stage of language development, children characteristically overgeneralize the rule for forming past tense-for example, they say sleeped instead of slept (Pinker 1995b, 2001; Pinker and Ullman 2002). Chomsky holds that we have ''no diculty in attributing to them rules for past tense, rules that we recognize to be dierent from our own.'' Whatever principle a theorist may come up with to account for this, the desired explanation will probably invoke several abstract principles working in tandem which do not prevent the child at that stage from saying sleeped, so she says it. No one taught her, just the opposite actually. She probably will become adjusted to normative ways of adult speech and learn to say slept. Let us say sleep, slept, slept will then be just the sort of rule which enables a speaker to conform to a social practice; it is of some interest that we view slept as ''irregular.''8 By parity, the earlier rule sleep, sleeped, sleeped can only be viewed as a fact about the child's const.i.tution. The application of both the rules is ''blind,'' but in dierent ways.

The skeptic need not be answered, then, if we can restrict attention to only those aspects of human language learning ability which may properly be called ''grammatical.'' Two things happen in this area: (i) it allows a level of explanation for a universal object and, hence, the explanation const.i.tutes something like natural principles on par with the face-recognition paradigm; (ii) we can avoid meaning rules as part of the explanatory vocabulary enabling us, thereby, to avoid the principle thrust of the skeptic. It will be puzzling to claim that the Webster's Dictionary reflects how we are const.i.tuted; it is eminently plausible that the principles of universal grammar have a biological basis.

Words and Concepts 145.

It is reasonable then to conclude that the challenges posed by Quine and Kripke do not aect grammatical theory. As to word meanings, I am not rejecting any of the objections stated in this section, but I am not accepting them either at this stage of inquiry. Each of the objections, we saw, can be admitted, set aside or deferred provided a more abstract account of the structure of concepts is reached. At the first guess, it seems that the question of whether such an account is reachable is an empirical one. Thus, more material is needed before we can evaluate the eect of these objections. I return to this topic in section 4.4.

4.3.2.

Nouns The cla.s.sic work of Jerrold Katz (Katz and Fodor 1963; Katz 1972) contains the most explicit articulation of the goal of semantic decomposition.

Katz proposed his theory several decades ago, and everyone in the field knows that it has fatal problems. Yet, it is unclear if these problems pertain to the specific formulations in Katz's theory, or whether the stated goal of lexical semantics is fundamentally flawed. To focus on this issue, I will ignore several aspects of Katz's work that he thought to be central to his theory, and which have been strongly criticized in the subsequent literature.9 Thus, I will simply pick a noun and ask what concepts can be listed, in some order, to specify its meaning-that is, I will treat all concepts that enter into the decomposition of a complex concept as semantic markers.

Katz's basic idea is that once we have a sucient body of decompositions in terms of semantic markers for a variety of nouns, some patterns and uniformities are likely to emerge to lead us toward a finite set of general concepts which superordinate on the rest. Following this intuition, the only constraint I will impose in the theory is superordination: a more general concept must dominate a less general concept in a semantic tree.

This will ensure that, in the final a.n.a.lysis, the most general concepts ( primitives) dominate the rest. Testing for taxonomic organization of common nouns as coordinate (arm-leg) and superordinate ( fruit-apple) is a standard method of measuring semantic competence (Morais and Kolinsky 2001, 471).

Furthermore, it is advisable that we begin with nouns whose decompositional character is something of common knowledge-that is, nouns that have generally agreed definitions for some of their central uses. It is well known that explicit decomposition of meaning is a rare phenomenon in any case. It seems to work, if at all, for fairly restricted cla.s.ses 146

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of lexical items: these include jargon vocabularies (ketch, highball ), terms in axiomatized systems (triangle), and kins.h.i.+p vocabularies (grand-mother, bachelor) (Fodor et al. 1980). As Jerry Fodor (1998, 7072), following Putnam (1983), observes, it is dicult to deny the ''conserva-tive'' intuition that bachelor and unmarried have an ''intrinsic conceptual connection'' such that bachelors are unmarried is ''boringly a.n.a.lytic.''

I will focus on bachelor to judge the theory on its strongest cla.s.sical ground.

Since semantic markers are nothing but concepts, we represent a semantic marker also in the uppercase. Markers such as HUMAN and COLOR are not supposed to be English words. They are supposed to be ''theoretical constructs'' lexicalized in English as human and color. In a language dierent from English, these constructs will be either lexicalized dierently, or borrowed from some other language, or not lexicalized at all. In other words, the English word human is supposed to invoke, among other things, the conceptual information HUMAN; similarly for other common nouns such as male, adult, animal, and the like. Thinking of common nouns as ''predicates'' that take (a set of ) semantic markers as ''arguments,'' these markers may now be used to decompose the meaning of a complex predicate such as bachelor. Following the constraint of superordination, the dictionary entry for bachelor will then be listed as a path with markers [HUMAN MALE ADULT UNMARRIED], in that order of increasing specificity. Despite the high rhetoric borrowed from grammatical research, the theory is beset with serious internal problems from the beginning.

The lexical item bachelor typically means an unmarried male, as noted; but it could also mean a male animal without a mate during breeding sea-son (mawam), among other things. It is important that these two readings apply to the same word bachelor since it is a part of the native user's grasp of bachelor that, unlike kite and bat, it is not ambiguous. How do we capture this in a single lexical entry? The problem is that the dierences between these two readings of bachelor begin straight away. Since bachelor could cover either people or mawams, the markerese paths branch right at the top, HUMAN or ANIMAL. So, the semantic decompositions for the two readings will consist of [HUMAN MALE ADULT UNMARRIED] and [ANIMAL MALE YOUNG WITHOUT-A-MATE] respectively. Notice that we must use MALE after HUMAN (or, ANIMAL) since HUMAN/ANIMAL is a higher category. This means that the marker MALE will have to be listed twice: once after HUMAN to terminate in UNMARRIED, and again after ANIMAL to Words and Concepts 147.

terminate in WITHOUT-A-MATE. The generalization that MALE is common to the two readings of bachelor is missed. The result is that we are forced to view bachelor as lexicalizing two entirely dierent conceptual paths with nothing in common. But in fact, apart from MALE, the two readings have a central feature in common-something like WITHOUT-A-MATE; how do we insert this item?