Laws and Luck in Language

Abstract

AbstractThe concern in this chapter will be with the different roles of laws and luck in linguistics, and specifically in what ways various phenomena of spoken language depend upon accidental or “lucky” facts that are not sufficiently stable to feature in laws, and so should not serve as the foci of linguistic theory. This “nomological” conception is what drives the Chomskyan study of an “I-language” as an internal computational system underlying human linguistic “competence,” as opposed to the more widespread, commonsensical view, advocated by, e.g., David Lewis and Michael Devitt, of language as fundamentally concerned with conventional “performance.” The chapter briefly reviews some of the crucial data that support this Chomskyan conception in the cases of syntax, phonology, and at least an internalist semantics. With regard to this last case, numerous examples are discussed that suggest that an externalist, referentialist semantics is indeed too subject to “lucky” contextual effects to be nomologically explanatory. The chapter concludes by pointing how such a denial of an externalist semantics does not have the dire consequences for metaphysical realism that both friend and foe of Chomskyan linguistics sometimes seem to assume.