Syntax as Idealized Dispositions: The Non-Issue of Content Externalism?

ABSTRACT In my (2020) I defended an intentionalist understanding of Chomskyan linguistics whereby standard linguistic entities (“SLEs”) such as words, phrases and phonemes don’t exist, but are “intentional inexistents” merely represented in our brains. Reviewers complained this was in tension with “externalist” theories of representation that require externalia as causes of internal representations. I argue that this requirement can be met by the kind of idealization to which Chomskyan theories appeal, which, like the idealized dispositions that regularly appear in physical sciences, can be understood along the lines of Quine’s (1960) invocation of Weierstrass’s “delta-epsilon” strategy for defining a limit in calculus. Where such a strategy is available in a domain, it would seem to render the externalist/internalist distinction there explanatorily otiose.