Psycholinguistics without ‘psychological reality’

The metatheoretical concept of 'psychological reality' in linguistics has laid the basis for the relationship between linguistics and psycho linguistics. We argue that this relationship has been misconceived, and has stunted the growth of an independent theory of psycho linguistic processes. The notion of 'psychological reality' has been irrelevant to the practice of linguistics itself, but has led to a linguistic reductionism in psycholinguistics. We conclude that linguistics can make an essential contribution to psycholinguistics once the notion of 'psychological reality' is abandoned. The term 'psychological reality' has figured a good deal in the linguistics of the past two decades. Introduced as a goal of linguistic theory, 'psychological reality' has dominated linguistic metatheory. It has rarely, on the other hand, made an appearance in linguistic theory itself. Relying on quite distinct metalinguistic notions, linguists have developed modes of formal argumentation to which 'psychological reality' is at best irrelevant, at worst a diversion. It is in psycholinguistics that 'psychological reality' has made its impact. Psycholinguists have taken the claim to mean that linguistic theory can provide explanations in psycholinguistics, and have often seen their task as translating linguistic concepts into hypotheses that can be tested in the experimental laboratory. The first two sections of this paper discuss the object and forms of argumentation of linguistic theory. It is claimed that, if empiricist constraints on methodology are rejected, any psychological interpretation of linguistic concepts is both unnecessary and misleading. The rest of the paper considers the implications and effects of such an interpretation on psycholinguistics. The paper concludes with a discussion of what linguistics can and should contribute to psycholinguistics once the psychological interpretation of linguistic concepts is abandoned. The aim of the paper is to provide a critique of the way that linguistic metatheory — in particular, the notion of 'psychologiLinguistics 19 (1981), 37-61. 0024-3949/81/0019-0037 $2.00 © Mouton Publishers, The Hague 38 M. Black and S. Chiat cal reality' — has defined the relationship between linguistics and psycholinguistics. It is NOT an attack on generative linguistics, nor a detailed historical review of the two fields. Psychological reality and linguistic theory It is important to distinguish two forms of empiricism which were brought together and conflated in Chomsky's original critique: empiricism as a theory of learning and behaviour; and empiricism as a set of assumptions about scientific methodology. It was in opposition to the first form of empiricism that the innateness hypothesis and the concept of 'mentalistic' linguistics were put forward. The object of linguistic theory was defined as the 'mental reality underlying actual behaviour' (Chomsky, 1965: 4). Speakers' intuitions about language were then invoked as evidence for the existence of this 'mental reality', or competence. And, since linguistic theory was meant to describe and explain these intuitions, the concepts and theories developed by linguists were said to be 'psychologically real'. The same set of concepts, including 'psychological reality', were used to fight the second form of empiricism simultaneously. Thus, these concepts coalesced into the metatheory adopted by most linguists, although only methodological empiricism directly impinged on their practice as linguists. It was assumed that all these metatheoretical notions were necessary to defend anti-empiricist linguistics. But, if we suspended judgment on the question of innateness and of the 'mental' or 'psychological' status of linguistic concepts, would we inevitably fall into the second form of empiricism? Would linguistic analysis and argumentation become constrained and limited by empiricist assumptions and methods? We think not. In this section of the paper, we consider some of the reasons why. Psychological reality and the competence /performance distinction It is sometimes thought that rejecting the notion of'psychological reality' entails abandoning the competence/performance distinction. Although this distinction was originally introduced together with the notions of speakers' intuitions and psychological reality, there is no necessary connection between the various notions. The competence/performance distinction has been interpreted in many different ways. Leaving aside its significance and function within wider philosophical and psychological debates, we can isolate one interpretation Psycholinguistics without 'psychological reality' 39 which is arguably the one central to linguistic theory. We can interpret it as a distinction between linguistic and extra-linguistic phenomena or, more precisely, between what pertains to the domain of sentence-grammar and what does not. The crucial function of the distinction was that of permitting a redefinition of'language' away from pre-theoretical common sense notions. Under some of the prevailing empiricist conceptions of 'language', a mass of heterogeneous factors would have been taken into account: socio-cultural context, discourse conventions, memory limitations, shifts of attention, etc. Chomsky's classic definition of the object of linguistic theory hinges only on the separation of 'grammatically relevant and grammatically irrelevant' factors (Chomsky, 1965). The effect of the competence/performance distinction was that 'grammar' and not 'language' in a wider sense was identified as the object of linguistic theory. The term 'grammar' designated 'a system of rules that provides representations of sound and meaning' (Chomsky, 1980: 8). Contrary to what might be suggested by some of the initial formulations, the primary function of the distinction was not that of differentiating underlying KNOWLEDGE and actual BEHAVIOUR, but that of isolating one particular TYPE OF KNOWLEDGE from others. Chomsky has in fact stressed that the distinction is one between 'knowledge of grammar' and 'knowledge of language' (Chomsky, 1979), or between 'grammatical competence' and other forms of competence such as 'pragmatic competence' (Chomsky, 1980: 7). Thus, the distinction between competence and performance was set up to prevent linguistic theory from inheriting too wide a field of inquiry: it represented the typical 'idealization' that characterizes the construction of a theoretical object for any emerging science. As Chomsky has often reiterated, 'In this respect, the study of language is no different from empirical investigation of other complex phenomena' (Chomsky, 1965: 4). But, from an empiricist standpoint, both the idealization and the resulting concept of 'grammar' were highly problematic. For empiricism, the domain of a theory should correspond, directly or indirectly, to 'real' objects and phenomena which are physically identifiable or, at least, observable and perceivable through human experience and behaviour. This approach presupposes that the world comes ready-packaged into objects, and that there are extra-theoretical criteria of identification of the relevant 'real' objects and phenomena, so that the correlation can take place, and the legitimacy of the particular theoretical domain can be guaranteed. But the object of linguistic theory — the grammar — cannot be correlated with any 'real' object in this sense. There are no extratheoretical criteria of identification of the grammar, which is not reducible to any pre-given set of phenomena, or actual measurable behaviour. Hence, the empiricist resistance to linguistics as a theory of grammar. It 40 M. Black and S. Chiat was against this, sometimes implicit, empiricism that linguists have defended the competence/performance distinction and still have to insist that: . the question is one of appropriate idealization at a certain level of theoretical discussion . We abstract away from connections that obviously exist, hoping to be able ultimately to reconstruct a full picture of the structure and functioning of the total system — recognizing, at the same time, that even the "total system" . is itself an idealization reflecting a particular way of looking at things and processes in the world, which does not come ontologically prepackaged as a set of individuals with properties (essential or other) apart from our mode of conception. (Chomsky, 1980: 7, our emphasis) As far as linguists were concerned, the main point was to distinguish between grammar and language. The psychological status of the grammar, its 'psychological reality', and the relationship between linguistics and psychology were not at issue. The reason why the psychological status of the grammar became an issue is that this distinction between grammar and language was formulated in terms of KNOWLEDGE of different types, and knowledge is a psychological concept. Furthermore, speakers' intuitions were used at the inception of transformational grammar to argue that A distinction between different types of knowledge was POSSIBLE. For instance, judgments about syntactic well-formedness could be shown to be independent of pragmatic knowledge and context. It would seem, therefore, that the competence/performance distinction, even under the interpretation we have stressed, crucially relied on psychological concepts and categories, and that we are inevitably committed to claiming a psychological status for the grammar. This conclusion, however, is unnecessary both in principle and in practice. Nothing would be changed if instead of distinguishing between different types of knowledge, we simply distinguished different systems of rules and representations without making any assumptions about their psychological status. If we agree that it is legitimate to talk about abstract structures and properties, though they may not be identifiable with any particular physical property of strings of symbols or sounds, the