Recently, as I’m sure many in the linguistics community are aware, notable English-language linguist Geoffery Pullum wrote a fairly short post on Language Log about the grammaticality of singular they. It is, in short, bad, and Pullum’s rebuttal to Kirby Conrod’s reponses on Language Log and Medium fails completely. Conrod has done great work here and their criticism is wonderful; both Pullum’s thesis and presentation are transphobic, let alone his “political note” and rebuttal. (“Prescriptive Stalinism”? Really?)

However, I think there is one more criticism to be made against Pullum. In Pullum’s original Language Log post, his argument against the grammaticality of singular they is exclusively reliant on his intuitions about what is and is not grammatical. See this quote found in his post:

But it’s a bit much to expect me to start saying things that are clearly and decisively ungrammatical according to my own internalized grammar.

In other words, Pullum’s intuitions about what is and is not grammatical cut against the use of singular they with a personal name.

I understand that intuitions are considered an important source of evidence of competent language use and grammaticality in both linguistics and philosophy of language. However, it isn’t clear that a singular intuition made by a white, cishet man is representative of competent language use to begin with.

Recent research in experimental philosophy (such as Machery et. al.’s (2004) paper in Cognition and Machery et. al.’s (2015) paper in Cognition as well) have shown that intuitions about the referent of proper names aren’t static across cultures, and Knobe’s (2003) paper demonstrates that our intuitions about what counts as intentional vary with the circumstances and benefit of the act in question. These surveys raise an important question for the serious use of intuitions: if we are to use them as information, either in philosophy or in linguistics, we must ask what type of intuitions we are concerned with, how to determine whether intuitions are of that particular type, and whose intuitions we are concerned with.

For philosophy, and now for linguistics, I think that this research requires us to adopt a broader scope when it comes to intuition-based methods. Branches of analytical philosophy that are interested in intuition cannot rely soley on the intuitions of professional philosophers, and programs of linguistics that are interested in grammaticality of an utterance cannot rely soley on the intuitions of professional linguists. Neither of these groups are representative of competent users of some system, and while it would indeed be a challenge to determine what a representative group would look like, surely a group comprised largely of white cishet men in academia is not it. (If linguists and philosophers wish to claim that their intuitions are trained to be reflective of competency, then surveys are needed to determine if this is actually true.) In addition, it’s not even apparent that there even would be a singular intuition in any of these cases without a broader look and survey about intuitions.

Where does this leave Pullum? He must stop claiming that his intuitions about grammaticality are representative. If he says he does not claim this, then he must recognize that his intuitions are simply his intuitions. Additionally, if he is truly concerned with the grammaticality of an utterance, and not just his grammaticality of an utterance, then he should base his actions on this public intuition, after determining it empiricially and not merely asserting it, and train his own intuitions to be reflective of it.

Linguistics is ultimately supposed to be scientific and descriptive. A failure to use this methodology is ultimately a failure to linguistics and a failure to respect those who use language, regardless of one’s asserted loyalties to the latter respect.