substantial experimental evidence
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2020 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Georges Rey

Michael Devitt has argued against the view that the intuitive verdicts on which linguists routinely rely result from a special “Voice of Competence” (VoC) whereby the spontaneous intuitions of native speakers provide special evidence of their internal representation of the phonology and syntax of their I-language. This chapter defends VoC by analogizing it to the spontaneous reactions of subjects in vision experiments that provide special evidence of the representations in their visual systems, an analogy for which there is substantial experimental evidence but that requires a number of distinctions that Devitt overlooks, e.g. between a grammar and a parser and between conceptual and non-conceptual content. Moreover, it is argued that his alternative model of speakers’ reactions in terms of sentences merely “having” rather than representing properties fails to explain how those properties might be integrated into a speaker’s psychology so that that speaker ineluctably “hears” her language as language, with all the constraints that language imposes.



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