Humpty Dumpty's knowledge of language, or: why linguists cannot be physicalists
Frege and Husserl have argued that logical or linguistic phenomena, being
intrinsically normative, cannot be accounted for in a physicalist way.
Chomsky's plea for a scientific revision of our ordinary linguistic notions
is meant to circumvent this classical argument and would seem to provide a
global strategy for incorporating the different branches of linguistics
into the framework of the natural sciences. We will subject Chomsky's
proposal to a strictly internal criticism. On Chomsky's own assumptions it
is shown that when following his strategy, a language can no longer be seen
as something that a speaker can know in any acceptable sense of the word.
Thus, his attempt to uphold physicalism by means of a scientific revision
of our normative linguistic concepts fails.
Harry P. Stein