Are linguists better subjects?

British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (4):721-736 (2009)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Who are the best subjects for judgment tasks intended to test grammatical hypotheses? Michael Devitt ( [2006a] , [2006b] ) argues, on the basis of a hypothesis concerning the psychology of such judgments, that linguists themselves are. We present empirical evidence suggesting that the relevant divide is not between linguists and non-linguists, but between subjects with and without minimally sufficient task-specific knowledge. In particular, we show that subjects with at least some minimal exposure to or knowledge of such tasks tend to perform consistently with one another—greater knowledge of linguistics makes no further difference—while at the same time exhibiting markedly greater in-group consistency than those who have no previous exposure to or knowledge of such tasks and their goals

Other Versions

No versions found

Similar books and articles

Linguistic Intuitions Revisited.Michael Devitt - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (4):833-865.
Revisited Linguistic Intuitions.Jennifer Culbertson & Steven Gross - 2011 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (3):639 - 656.
Intuitions in linguistics.Michael Devitt - 2006 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (3):481-513.
Linguistics, Psychology, and the Ontology of Language.Fritz J. McDonald - 2009 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 9 (3):291-301.
Linguistics as a Theory of Knowledge.Jesús Gerardo Martínez del Castillo - 2015 - Education and Linguistics Research 1 (2):62-84.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-04-22

Downloads
1,729 (#8,487)

6 months
162 (#24,649)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Steven Gross
Johns Hopkins University

References found in this work

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.Noam Chomsky - 1965 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.Ann S. Ferebee - 1965 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 35 (1):167.
Ignorance of Language.Michael Devitt - 2006 - Oxford, GB: Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ignorance of Language.Michael Devitt - 2006 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 69 (1):186-186.
Intuitions in linguistics.Michael Devitt - 2006 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (3):481-513.

View all 6 references / Add more references