Research

Publications:

Linguistics and the explanatory Economy -Synthese

I investigate an old objection to generative grammar, according to which its methodological stance that certain classes of data are not relevant to the confirmation of its theoretical posits makes such theories unscientific. In particular, distinctions such as that between competence and performance, grammaticality and acceptability, and the core and the periphery, are viewed as insulating these theories from empirical refutation. I provide a novel methodology for linguistics, what I call the 'explanatory economy', and show how this collaborative approach to confirmation rebuts such worries. According to such a model, when theories/models have complementary sets of proprietary data, the explanation of an anomaly by another theory can enhance, rather than reduce, the empirical credentials of a theory for which such data seemed anomalous.

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Idealisations In Semantics -Inquiry

I argue that the debate between contextualists and minimalists about the extent of context-sensitivity in natural language should be viewed as an argument between proponents of different modeling strategies. Minimalism enables the production of simple models capable of capturing high-level generalities. However, it does so by abstracting away from genuinely causally significant influences on meaning. Contextualist models enable us to re-introduce such factors, and thus make accurate predictions of particular cases, but at the cost of generality.

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What Would It mean for natural Language to be the language of Thought -linguistics and Philosophy

Traditional arguments against the identification of the language of though with a natural language assume a picture of natural language which is largely inconsistent with that suggested by contemporary linguistic theory. This has led certain philosophers and linguists to suggest that this identification is not as implausible as it once seemed. In this paper, I discuss the prospects for such an identification in light of these developments in linguistic theory. I raise a new challenge against the identification thesis: the existence of ungrammatical but acceptable expressions seems to require a gap between thought and language. I consider what must be the case in order for this objection to be dealt with.

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Empiricism, Syntax, and Ontogeny- Philosophical Psychology

I recount the debate between nativists and empiricists about language acquisition, and argue that even in the best case for the nativist, the adequacy of their models depends on its integration with empiricist proposals.

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Realism and Observation: The View From generative grammar- Philosophy of Science

Standard proposals of scientific anti-realism assume that the methodology of a scientific research program can be endorsed without accepting its metaphysical commitments. I argue that the distinction between competence, the rules governing one’s language faculty, and performance, linguistic behavior, precludes this. Linguistic theories aim to describe competence, not performance, and so must be able to distinguish observations reflective of the former from those reflective of the latter. This classification of data makes sense only against the background of a psychologically realistic view of linguistic theory. So the very methodology of the science commits one to its realistic interpretation.

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(What) Can Deep Learning Contribute to Theoretical Linguistics?- Minds and Machines

An argument that a proper understanding of the gap between competence and performance should lead to scepticism concerning the extent to which recent developments in computational approaches to linguistic tasks can shed light on scientific accounts of natural language.
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Balancing Evolution and Acquisition in Theoretical Linguistics

This paper identifies and motivates the tension at the heart of contemporary generative linguistics, between the apparent complexity observed in natural language systems, and the apparent simplicity required by evolutionary and developmental accounts of human language. I identify several strategies used by contemporary linguists to resolve this tension, and identify some outstanding difficulties and puzzles.

PRE-PRINT LINK

Public Language, Private Language, and Subsymbolic Theories of Mind: MIND & LANGUAGE

Language has long been a problem-case for subsymbolic theories of mind. The reason for this is obvious: language seems essentially symbolic. However, recent work has developed a potential solution to this problem, arguing that linguistic symbols are public objects which augment a fundamentally subsymbolic mind, rather than components of cognitive symbol-processing. I shall argue that this strategy cannot work, on the grounds that human language acquisition consists in projecting linguistic structure onto environmental entities, rather than extracting this structure from them.

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Theory Interpretation and Observation: The case of Generative grammar

One major challenge for any empirical project is to determine which observations are relevant for theory confirmation and which are not. In this paper, I identify some strategies used by linguists to distinguish relevant data (reflective of competence) from irrelevant data (``mere performance data''). I then argue that such a methodology mandates a particular, cognitivist, interpretation of linguistic theories as hypotheses concerning the human mind. Alternative, Platonist or nominalist, interpretations simply cannot make sense of standard methodological practices in linguistics.

PRE-PRINT LINK

Correspondence And Construction

The most promising philosophical account of the mind, and its place in nature, is the Representational Theory of Mind (RTM). This approach views mental states as paradigmatically functioning to represent features of the world. In this paper, I identify a deep worry for such an approach: many core psychological systems seem to distort, or even wholly fabricate, those aspects of the environment that they are pre-theoretically assumed to be tracking. I focus on the cases of colour vision and speech perception, for which there seems to be no external properties for such systems to be representing. I consider some strategies that can be used to resolve this tension.
PRE-PRINT LINK

Reference and Morphology: Philosophical and Phenomenological Research

Mainstream metasemantic approaches within philosophy rely on assumptions about the nature of words which appear to conflict with standard assumptions in linguistic morphology. Specifically, it is typically assumed that the referential capacities of a word are transmitted from speaker to speaker in a `causal chain' tracing back to its initial introduction. This chain is assumed to consist of repeated uses of one-and-the-same word. However, morphological theory centers on the ways that words are not merely acquired from others and repeated, but are instead constructed on each usage from more basic constituents. In this paper, I spell out how this linguistic work poses problems for philosophical accounts of reference, and suggest that this work provides a novel defense of the view that words are not inherently referential, but are rather put to referential use by speakers in a communicative context.

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How And Why To Draw The Competence/Performance Distinction

This paper summarizes my view of Chomsky's distinction between competence and performance, and suggests application of this interpretation to philosophical disputes concerning cognitive architecture, metasemantics, and more.
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Uncanny Performance, Divergent Competence (WITH GABBY JOHNSON)

This paper argues that mainstream assumptions involved in the production and application of Large Language Models (such as GPT) undermine the claim that such systems attribute the same interpretations to natural language expressions as do the humans from whom they have acquired these expressions. We look at several case studies from modern cognitive science, each of which suggests that human cognitive development looks radically unlike the developmental trajectories of a predictive optimization system, and argue that these different learning styles lead to different representational contents in the developed systems.
Pre-print available here.

Acquiring a Language vs. Inducing a Grammar- Cognition

Standard computational models of language acquisition treat acquiring a language as a process of inducing a set of string-generating rules from a collection of linguistic data assumed to be generated by these very rules. In this paper I give theoretical and empirical arguments that such a model is radically unlike what a human language learner must do to acquire their native language. Most centrally, I argue that such models presuppose that linguistic data is directly a product of a grammar, ignoring the myriad non-grammatical systems involved in the use of language. The significance of these non-target systems in shaping the linguistic data children are exposed to undermines any simple reverse inference from linguistic data to grammatical competence.
Link here.

Commentaries and Book Reviews

RYAN NEFDT- LANGUAGE, SCIENCE, AND STRUCTURE: A JOURNEY INTO PHILOSOPHY OF LINGUISTICS

LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE AND THE LANGUAGES OF THOUGHT. Commentary on Quilty-Dunn et al. (Behavioral and Brain Sciences).

STEVEN DOWNES- MODELS AND MODELLING IN THE SCIENCES: A PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUCTION

NICHOLAS SHEA- REPRESENTATION IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE

SCHINDLER, DROŻDŻOWICZ, AND BRØCKER (EDS.)- LINGUISTIC INTUITIONS: EVIDENCE AND METHOD

GEORGES REY- REPRESENTATION OF LANGUAGE: PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN A CHOMSKYAN LINGUISTICS

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Publications:

Commentaries and Book Reviews