Psychological Reality of Grammars: Devitt’s ‘Ignorance of Language’

Devitt makes a sustained critique of Chomskyan linguistics, articulating persistent complaints about the “psychological reality” of generative grammars. I suggest these complaints are merely terminological and that Devitt fails to appreciate the status of Chomsky’s computational formalisms found elsewhere in cognitive science. Devitt ascribes an intentional conception of representations that Chomsky repudiates and that is independently implausible. I argue that Devitt’s proposed alternative “linguistic reality” constituted by physical symbol tokens neglects the problems of tokens as opposed to types and he misses the force of Chomsky’s case against Behaviourism and nominalism. I suggest that Devitt’s case against intuitions as data misunderstands their standard role throughout perceptual psychology. I argue that Devitt’s position exemplifies pervasive errors concerning mental representation seen throughout cognitive science.