Katz and Postal on Realism in Linguistics

Introduction

The ruling idea behind Katz and Postal, is that with respect to linguistics and linguistic objects, as with Mathematics and mathematical objects, there are three basic philosophies: nominalism, conceptualism, and realism. According to K&P, it is due largely to Chomsky that nominalism has been discredited and conceptualism has become the ruling orthodoxy for the last quarter-century or so. Conceptualism is the view that linguistics is a part of psychology, and that the objects of interest to linguists-grammars, sentences- are psychological objects. K&P argue, however, that it is realism- which Chomsky rejects- that is the truth.

As the foregoing summary makes clear, the paper is a study in the foundation or philosophy of linguistics, not in linguistics itself. Of course, when discussing the foundations (or philosophy) of X, it helps to know a lot of X. Between the two of them, the authors know a lot of linguistics. I do not. Happily, the crux of the paper presupposes no such special knowledge. This crux involves what the authors call, rather unhappily, a paradox. This ‘paradox’ is really a trilemma- or at least it is supposed to be a trilemma, one of which is argued to be much less painful to be gored by than the other two. It is to a discussion of this trilemma that I shall confine myself.