5 The Context of Devitt’s Claim and His Psychological Model Appendix

Who are the best subjects for judgment tasks intended to test grammatical hypothe-ses? 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 lin-guistics 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 suc