Linguistics: What's Wrong with "The Right View"

What is linguistics about? A simple enough question, you might think, but one that has generated surprising controversy, much literature, and no very convincing answer. The focus of controversy has been on transformational approach to syntactic theory, a central subdomain of linguistics. That will be our concern. Jerry Fodor, who should know about such matters, says that there are...really only two schools of thought on this question (1981: 197). With careful neutrality he names these the Right and the Wrong View. The Right View is standard view of Noam Chomsky and his followers, including Fodor. Fodor attributes Wrong View (pp. 198-9) to Stephen Stich (1972) and Jerrold Katz (1977).1 The Wrong View is a sort of instrumentalism. The task of linguists is to construct a grammar that simply captures its data base, linguistic intuitions of speakers; intuitions about grammaticality, ambiguity, passives, and so on. Provided linguist gets things right at level of intuitive judgments, he has done all that is required. The theory is just an instrument for predicting some such judgments on basis of others. According to Wrong View, then, linguistics is not about anything beyond concerns of those judgments; it is not about any deeper reality.