Intuitions : The discrete voice of competence

Abstract

In Devitt's view, linguistic intuitions are opinions about linguistic production or products, most often one's own. They result from ordinary empirical investigation, so they are immediate and fairly unreflective empirical central-processor responses to linguistic phenomena, which reactions are, moreover, theory-laden, where the 'theory' encompasses all sorts of speaker's beliefs. The paper reconstructs his arguments, places his view on a map of alternative approaches to intuitions, and offers a defense of a minimalistic voice-of-competence view. First, intuitions are to be identified with the data, the minimal products of tentative linguistic production of naive speaker-listeners, and not with their opinions about the data. Second, the data involve no theory and very little proto-theory. Third, although there might be admixtures of guesswork in the conscious production of data, these are routinely weaned out by linguists. Finally, mere acceptance of the voice of competence does not land us in any objectionable Cartesianism: it is compatible with naturalism and with distrust of a priori philosophy.