Linguistic Rules and Bush Tracks

It's a mistake to think that because we can discern linguistic rules a language user must, in some sense, know what these rules are. This is like saying a train knows where the track is.

A language user may have a quite restricted kind of linguistic competence, and still be able to function - and to appear to function well.

Imagine someone who knew, say three thousand sentences and was competent in selecting the occasions on which to produce them. It might take considerable study to be sure that this was a case of rote learned responses, rather than what we might think of as full linguistic competence.

What is more important, though, is that these rote learned sentences would sound as though they had been constructed according to grammatical rule - whereas in fact they had just been memorised.

This isn't to say that there may be no such thing as grammatical rules, or other linguistic rules. It is to say that these rules are a tool of the linguistic student, not of the speaker. We should know this from the opening examples from the Investigations - the builders. The rules appear when we analyse, interpret, or translate the builders linguistic behaviour. We do not have grounds for saying that the builders are intentionally following these rules of grammar that we have discovered.

Grammatical rules are rules of linguistic behaviour, not of meaning or truth. We discover them as we discover 'laws of nature', and so these discoveries are subject to the same Goodmanesque or Kripkean uncertainties.