Of Minds and Language (28 page)

H
INZEN
: I would just like to reply to some of your comments, Jim. So if we talk about
walking quickly
again, then you say that you can't talk about events or quantify over them without committing yourself to their existence. Before that, you said something related, when talking about realism and anti-realism, or mentalism/idealism as opposed to some kind of externalism. Now I have come to think that these are completely the wrong ways to frame the issue, and they are really very recent ways, which have to do with the relational conception of the mind that philosophers nowadays endorse. By and large, they think of the mind in relational, referential, and externalist terms. Realism is to see the mind's content as entirely reflecting the external world, rather than its own contents. Therefore, if you start emphasizing internal factors in the genesis of reference and truth, they think you are taking a step back from reality, as it were, and you become an anti-realist, or, even worse, a “Cartesian” philosopher. Now, early modern philosophers thought of all this in quite different terms. Realism and the objective reality of the external world was never the issue in Locke, for example, or even in Descartes, I would contend. What early modern philosophers and contemporary internalists in Noam's sense emphasize is internal structure in the mind, which underlies experience and enters into human intentional reference. But realism or denial is absolutely no issue in any of this. There is no connection between internalism in Noam's sense and an anti-realism or idealism, and that's in part because the relational conception of the mind is not endorsed in the first place. You can be a “mentalist,” and believe in an objective world, realism, etc., as you please. So I don't think there is any indication in what I've said for an anti-realism or mentalism. I would really like to distinguish that.

Let's illustrate this with Davidson's event variable. I would say that as we analyze language structure, we are in this case led to introduce certain new variables, such as the E-position, a move that has interesting systematic consequences and empirical advantages. The E-position is therefore entered as an element in our linguistic representations. But it is just wrong to conclude from this that because we quantify over events, there must be events out there, as
ontological entities. This move adds nothing that's explanatory to our analysis. As I understand Chomsky (though maybe I am misinterpreting him), he'd call this analysis “syntax,” and so would I. The “semantic” level I would reserve for the actual relation between what's represented in the mind (like event variables) and the external physical world, which is made up of whatever it is made up of. Once we have the syntactic theory and it is explanatory, then, well, we can assume that there is something like a computation of an E-position in the mind. Again, to add to this that there are specific entities out there, events, which our event variable intrinsically picks out, doesn't explain anything. My whole point was that we should
explain
ontology, as opposed to positing it out there:
why
does our experiential reality exhibit a difference between objects, events, and propositions, say? Just to posit events out there doesn't tell me anything about why they exist (in the way we categorize the world). And I think that, probably, the answer to the question why they exist, and why we think about events
qua
events, and about the other entities I talked about, like propositions, has to be an internalist one: it is that we have a language faculty whose computational system generates particular kinds of structures. These structures we can usefully relate to the world, to be sure, but this doesn't mean we need to interpret that world ontologically as our mind's intuitive conceptions and the semantics of natural language suggest. In science, we don't, for example, and we could say there are no events and objects, because there are only quantum potentials, or waves, as I am told. So I contend there are no ontological commitments flowing from the way our mind is built, or from how we talk. I really think we should start
explaining
semantics, as opposed to doing it.

H
IGGINBOTHAM
: Well, let's look at two things, first of all a historical correction. The questions of realism and anti-realism can easily be traced back all through early modern philosophy. How did Kant answer Hume? Kant answered Hume on behalf of a kind of immanent realism which he called transcendental idealism, intending thereby to legitimate a version of realism about causation, the existence of bodies, and so forth. As for your second point, about events, it's not a very complicated argument. Nobody doubts that there are events. You don't doubt it, I don't doubt it, nobody here doubts it. The thing that was surprising about Davidson's work was that he located event reference in simple sentences like
John walks quickly
in order to solve the problem of modification. When Davidson's proposal first came out, people said, “My God, he proposes that there's an existential quantifier. Where in the heck did that come from?” There was of course an alternative, and sometimes it was said, “well,
quickly
is a kind of operator which takes
walk
and turns it into
walk quickly
.” This was a solution within categorial grammar and higher-order logic. The solution that
is proposed following Davidson is to say, “Oh no, the way we stick these guys
walk
and
quickly
together is just like
black cat
; the thing that sticks the noun and the adjective together is that the very same thing
x
is said to be black and a cat, and so in
walk quickly
the very same thing
e
is said to be a walk and to be quick.” The price you pay for this solution, as Quine pointed out in an essay from many years ago,
⁴
is that the existence of events of walking etc. becomes part of the ontological commitment of the speakers of the language. Now, once we've taken the step Davidson suggests, for one to say, “Oh well, I'm just talking internally here” is not possible.

And the story continues. If you say that the explanation of why we derive the nominal
Rome's destruction of Carthage
from the sentence
Rome destroyed Carthage
is that
Rome's destruction of Carthage
is a definite description of an event, derived from the E-position in the word
destroy
, then you have said our predicates range over events. So in my view it's no good saying, “This is what I believe and say, but it's not for real.” It's like bad faith. There used to be a movement in philosophy that Sidney Morgenbesser discussed, called methodological individualism.
⁵
The methodological individualist would say, “Oh there aren't really countries or peoples or anything like that. There are only individuals.” This movement exemplified the same kind of bad faith. Take Hitler now. He was a dictator. Now try to explain
dictator
without bringing in objects like people or countries. If you can't, then the methodological individualism was just a pretense. Finally, if you say that this semantic theory doesn't tell me how my reference to ordinary things relates to physics, that's perfectly true and it would be interesting to find out more. But it's no good to take referential semantics on board for the purpose of linguistic explanation, and then to say, “No, well, I don't really mean it, it's all syntax.” That won't go, in my opinion.

Luigi Rizzi

I would like to illustrate certain concepts of locality which arise in the context of the theory of movement, a very central component of natural language syntax. I will start by briefly introducing the notion of movement, on the basis of some concrete examples. When you hear a sentence like (1), starting with the wh-operator
what
, one thing that you must determine in order to understand the sentence is what verb that element is construed with, what argument structure it belongs to. And the relevant verb can come very early or be quite far away from
what
, as is the verb
buy
in our example:

(1)    What do you think…people say…John believes…we should buy ___?

In general we can say that, in natural language expressions, elements are often pronounced in positions different from the positions in which they are interpreted, or, more accurately, from the positions in which they receive certain crucial elements of their interpretation, as in the case of
what
in (1), the semantic (or thematic) role of patient of
buy
.

Research on movement has been central in the generative program over the last half-century. A significant recent development is that movement can be seen as a special case of the fundamental structure-building operation, Merge. Merge is the fundamental operation creating structure in Minimalism (Chomsky 1995); it is about the simplest recursive operation you can think of:

(2)    …A…B… → [ A B ]

or, informally, “take two elements, A and B, string them together and form a third element, the expression [A B].”

So we can put together, for example, the verb
meet
and the noun
Mary
and form the verb phrase:

(3)    [meet Mary]

Now Merge comes up in two varieties; in fact it is the same operation, but the two varieties depend on where the elements A and B are taken from. If A and B are separate objects (for instance, two items taken from the lexicon, as in (3)), the operation is called
external Merge
. The other case is
internal Merge
for cases in which you take one of the two elements from within the other: suppose that, in a structure built by previous applications of Merge, A is contained in B; then, you can take A and remerge it with B, yielding

(4)    [B… A… ] → [A [B……]]

Here A occurs twice: in the remerged position and in the initial position: this is the so-called “trace” of movement, notated within angled brackets (typically not pronounced, but visible and active in the mental representation of the sentence).

Concretely, if by successive applications of external merge we have built a structure like the following:

(5)    [John bought what]

we must now take the wh-expression
what
from within the structure, and remerge (internally merge) it with the whole structure, yielding

(6)    [What [John bought ]]

with the lower occurrence of
what
being the trace of movement (e.g., to ultimately yield an indirect question like
I wonder what John bought
through additional applications of Merge).

The idea that movement must be somehow connected to the fundamental structure-building operation is not new, really. This is, in essence, the observation that was made by Joseph Emonds many years ago in his thesis and book under the name of “Structure Preservation Hypothesis” (Emonds 1976) – namely, the idea that movement creates configurations that can be independently generated by the structure-building component: for instance, Passive moves the object to subject position, a position independently generated by the fundamental structure-building rules. In the model in which Emonds first stated the hypothesis, movement was performed by transformations, rules clearly distinct from the phrase structure rules building the structural representations; so, the question remained why two distinct kinds of formal rules
would converge in generating the same structural configurations. In the current approach, structure preservation is explained because movement is a particular case of the fundamental structure-building mechanism, Merge.