Psychological Conception, Psychological Reality: A Response to Longworth and Slezak

My book, Ignorance of Language (2006a), challenges the received Chomskian “psychological conception” of grammars and proposes a “linguistic conception” according to which a grammar is a theory of a representational system. My response to Guy Longworth rejects his claim in “Ignorance of Linguistics” (2009) that there is “mutual determination” between linguistic and psychological facts with the result that both of these conceptions are true. Peter Slezak’s “Linguistic Explanation and ‘Psychological Reality’” (2009) is full of fl agrant misrepresentations of my discussion of the psychological conception and of the psychological reality of linguistic principles and rules. My response summarizes the worst of these misrepresentations.