by Noam Chomsky
JM: Very sad, actually; it sounds like both a fulfilling and a productive relationship . . .
NC: It was a close personal relationship . . . While Carol and I were students, he and his wife – by our standards, old people, like 40; and they were wealthy, and we were poor – they did what they called “slumming with the Chomskys.” They picked us up when we were backpacking in Europe and drove us around. We had extremely interesting trips with them. For one thing, they happened to be on a Romanesque tour through southern France which was planned by Meyer Shapiro – who I also knew – who was a great art historian. We just sort of followed them around. She (Mrs. Goodman) was an artist; he was an art dealer and specialist on a level of insight and understanding into Romanesque art and other things that we would never have gotten to appreciate without that experience.
Somehow we ended up in Switzerland – I don't remember how, exactly – and we were in (I guess) Basel. I remember that there was a huge Klee museum and we went in and looked at the Klee exhibit. But Goodman wasn't satisfied with that – and he was very imperious. He went to the director of the museum and asked to be shown the actual collection, which was down in some basement somewhere. And the guy very meekly led us all down to the storage room where they had the most immense collection of magnificent Klee paintings that you could ever have imagined. I don't know how many of them were ever shown. And we went through those with an excellent exposition from the director. And there were other things like that.
We used to sit their house over the summer – they had a place out in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where they lived. Sometimes we would bring Carol's sister's children; for various reasons, we had to care for them when they were little. So it was a very personal relationship, as well as an intellectual one. I was very sorry to break it off.
JM: He had a wonderful eye. I remember taking him out once to look at a set of Inuit sculptures, and he immediately went to the very finest pieces there. They weren't the most expensive, but they were beautifully done. His eye must have been honed by those many years of work he did as an art dealer.
NC: After he left Harvard in the early thirties – it must have been about fifteen years or so that he was working mainly as an art dealer. He was always deeply immersed in art – and wrote about it too, of course.
JM: He certainly had an interesting view of the nature of art – and an extraordinary view of the syntax of art, based on his nominalist enterprise.
NC: Of his students – he didn't have many – the one who most seriously pursued his projects and carried them furthest was Israel Scheffler, who was a very good philosopher himself; he took up his projects and applied them. Joseph Ullian did for a while. But it was a pretty hard track to follow. The framework was so parsimonious, and the requirements so strict, that the regimen was pretty hard to keep. It was much easier to accept all sorts of things you can't make much sense out of, and to try to go on from there.
Part II Human nature and its study
15 Chomsky on human nature and human understanding
JM: Now we switch to human nature . . .
NC: OK.
JM: Human beings as a species are remarkably uniform, genetically speaking. Yet humans have proven extraordinarily adaptable in various environments, extremely flexible in their ability to solve practical problems, endlessly productive in their linguistic output, and unique in their capacity for inventing scientific explanations. Some, a great many in fact, have taken all this as reason to think that human nature is plastic, perhaps molded by environment – including social environment – and individual invention. The engines of this flexibility and invention are claimed to lie in some recognition of similarities, in induction, or in some other unspecified but general learning and invention technique. This plastic view of human nature has even been thought to be a progressive, socially responsible one. Clearly you disagree. Could you explain why you think that a fixed biologically determined and uniform human nature is compatible with and perhaps even underlies such flexibility, productivity, adaptability, and conceptual inventiveness?
NC: First of all, there's a factual question – does a fixed biological capacity underlie these human capacities? I don't know of any alternative. If somebody can tell me what a general learning mechanism is, we can discuss the question. But if you can't tell me what it is, then there's nothing to discuss. So let's wait for a proposal. Hilary Putnam, for example, has argued for years that you can account for cognitive growth, language growth and so on, by general learning mechanisms. Fine, let's see one.
Actually, there is some work on this which is not uninteresting. Charles Yang's (2004) work in which he tries to combine a rather sensible and sophisticated general learning mechanism with the principles of Universal Grammar, meaning either the first or the third factor – we don't really know, but something other than experience – and tries to show how by integrating those two concepts you can account for some interesting aspects of language growth and development. I think that's perfectly sensible.
Nobody doubts that there's some kind of acquisition mechanism going on. But unless we're told what it is, it can't do anything. To say it's something like induction doesn't help, because you have to say what induction is and any conception of induction that we have gets us absolutely nowhere. Next move is to say, well it's abduction, Peirce's abduction. The term is used in contemporary philosophy, but missing Peirce's whole point as far as I can see. Now it's called something like induction to the best explanation, or something like that. Ok, that's abduction; but Peirce's point was that it's what is now called a kind of canalization. That is, there must be some fixed and restrictive array of choices, otherwise you can't have abduction, so you don't get anywhere. And he gave some bad arguments as to why this could have been selected but, putting that part aside, the crucial point that Peirce is making – Peirce used abduction a lot of different ways, but in the valuable essays, the ones that are worth looking at and mean something today – he emphasized the point that this is an instinct. He compares it to a chicken pecking seeds: we have an abductive instinct which restricts in advance the array of hypotheses that we can select; and unless you have that, nothing's going to happen. Well, that's sort of the framework that's taken over in generative grammar – [although I did not know] Peirce at the time, of course. Universal Grammar or maybe the third factor gives us an array of options, and acquisition works within that channel. Then come the [very difficult] questions of figuring out the first and third factor and how they contribute to it. Well this part is left out of contemporary philosophical discussion, but if that's left out, everything's gone – there's nothing there. To say we search for the best explanation tells us nothing. How do we decide which path? If there're infinitely many theories that we can choose from, we get nowhere; so you have to have some kind of restriction. Well, now you're back to where it comes from. And if you're not a mystic, it comes from either the first or the third factor. Either it comes from some specific genetic endowment or some general principles of the way the world works. You have to assume that they have to integrate to lead you to the restrictive set of hypotheses that Peirce recognized that you have to assume. So as to the factual question, I simply don't see any way of discussing it. There are some specific proposals and then there's some handwaving; and you cannot debate between handwaving and the specific proposals. Now, the specific proposals don't go anywhere near far enough, but that shouldn't surprise us very much. I mean, we can't answer most of these questions for insects – how do we expect to answer them for humans?
So what we're left with is that some combination of the first and the third factor must be giving us the capacity for developing the best explanations in science – or in ordinary life for that matter. Now is it the same in science and ordinary life? Well that's an empirical question. Sue Carey, for example, is trying to show that that's more or less the same, but we really don't know that. Science in the modern sense is an extremely restricted human achievement, developed in the last few centur
ies in a tiny corner of the world. Most of the so-called sciences are barely even aware of how it works. So it could very well be some human capacity that's just never used – like the capacity for mathematics. It's around all the time – we know that – but [almost] never used. That was a puzzle to people like Wallace – we happen to have it, but it's never used [so a selectional story just doesn't work]. And the same could be true of the science-forming capacity. It comes to be used under very specific circumstances, and it's used in the way that it's predetermined [to] by the first and third factor. That can yield creativity, just as in the case of language, the classic case. But you can't have it unless you have a pre-given determination. You cannot have creative use of language unless it's predetermined what the system's going to be in a very narrow channel, because otherwise you can't acquire anything. Descartes and his followers recognized that and it's certainly true.[C]
That doesn't tell you how or what you derive the creative use [of language] from. That's a topic we can't deal with. That's a question of will and choice and that's for the moment, maybe permanently, outside the sciences. If you take a look at studies of insect behavior, you get very intricate and interesting investigations of mechanisms. But nobody asks about the choices. Why does a cockroach turn left? That's not a general question to ask in the sciences. And it's true even of very restricted capacities that we think of as rather passive, such as visual perception. Helmholtz put this famous problem around 1850. He somehow noticed that with a fixed retinal image you can focus attention on one part of it or another, at will. What does that mean? Well, there's a lot of contemporary work on the mechanism, but not on the choice. And when we talk about creative use of language, we are just way beyond these questions, and science too, of course. So we certainly can't deal with them with contemporary understanding, and it's entirely possible that it's out of the range of human cognitive capacity.
There's a view now in philosophy called mysterianism, which is supposed to be a bad thing. Mysterianism is the belief that our cognitive capacities are part of the natural world, so therefore these capacities have scope and limits, and if you believe in that, you're somehow a mystic. That's a very odd thing – it's just like saying that adopting elementary scientific rationality is to be a mysterian. We don't know what the boundaries are of course; but there must be fixed cognitive capacities – for Peirce's reasons, or Hume's reasons. [It's an instinct.] It's a little hard to interpret [what mysterianism amounts to in the minds of those who deride it], but you know the tendency. [No doubt] it's [intended] mostly just [as a] kind of ridicule; but I don't think they realize that what they're ridiculing is ordinary scientific rationality. It's a matter of empirical fact what the range of our cognitive capacities happen to be. We're not angels. And they may or may not include answers to questions that bother us. In fact, we may not even know how to formulate the questions. Everyone who's worked in the sciences knows – or in any field, but it's clear in the sciences – that formulating the right questions is a very hard task. You work very hard and go down many false paths before you begin to get what looks like the right question.
Many questions that puzzle people have an interrogative form, but it's not clear what the question is. Take “What is it like to be a bat?” – Nagel's (1974) question. It has an interrogative form but is it a question? If it's a question, there have to be some possible answers to it. In fact, in formal semantics, it's common to propose that the meaning of a question is the set of propositions that are possible answers to it. Maybe that's too strong, but at least it's some kind of condition of the meaning. Suppose there are no possible answers – is it a question? What's a possible answer to “What's it like to be me?” I can't think of a possible answer; so is it a question? Or maybe the question is something like, “How do things work?” which has an interrogative form but is not really a question.
JM: It's precisely that kind of question – if you can call it a question – that exercises philosophers.
NC: It does, but the first thing they've got to do is turn them into meaningful questions. Much of the discussion about consciousness is like that.
JM: But let me press the point a bit – take, for instance, the visual system – the human . . .
NC: Oh, but wait a moment. We never got to the social implications. As far as the social implications are concerned, they may go in any direction. The belief that empty organism theories are somehow socially progressive relies on a hidden assumption, that there's some master somewhere who's going to arrange the environment so that the people are going to be trained the right way. That's Leninism, basically, and that's a natural position for intellectuals, because they're going to be the managers. So you have to be suspicious right away. But there's nothing socially progressive about it. In fact, it's either socially vacuous if you take away the hidden assumption, or else it's basically totalitarian if you add the assumption. On the other hand, what must be true, assuming we're part of nature, is that capacities are fundamentally predetermined. After that, nothing follows unless you tell us what the capacities are. If classical liberalism is right – say Hume, Adam Smith, and so on – and one of the fundamental capacities is sympathy, well then you get one kind of society. If the fundamental capacities are aggression and avarice, well then you get a different kind of society. You can't make an a priori claim about this. When you look at other primates, the ones that are our nearest cousins, they just differ radically. Take bonobo and chimpanzee, they're completely different – one aggressive and violent, the other called nature's hippies. But they're equally distant from us and you cannot make a priori judgments about what their nature is. You have to find it out, and the same with humans. So maybe Adam Smith and Hume were right – they were optimistic about human nature.
JM: There is an assumption built into this, that human nature is fixed.
NC: How can you avoid that? If it's not fixed we can't do anything – we're just formless blobs. Unless you have a fixed human nature you cannot achieve any cognitive or social development, or physical growth or anything else.
JM: Let me move to some related questions, ones that were first raised back in the 1970s. You suggested then that in some sense Universal Grammar, perhaps supplemented by other factors that are not specifically part of our linguistic endowment, contains all biologically possible languages. I wonder if a more general point could be made, that language plus the other biologically based cognitive capacities and affects that we have available to us somehow contain all biologically possible social structures.
NC: I don't see how that can be false. It's the same question – unless there's initial structure, nothing can happen. You can't have any kind of growth. We take that for granted for the visible parts of the body; but it's got to be true for the non-visible parts as well. So yes, of course, the answer is that only certain kinds of social structures are possible and the enquiry into fundamental human nature will give the answer to that.
John Mikhail in his PhD dissertation in philosophy (2000; see also Mikhail 2011) brought to my attention – I hadn't noticed it – that Hume had the basic idea of what becomes generative grammar and everything else in his theory of moral nature. [He points to it] in those passages where he says something like this: the number of our duties is in a manner infinite, and ‘duties’ just means moral responsibilities; so we have an infinite number of moral responsibilities. Then he goes on to say that we know them and we use them in new situations, somehow. We must, then, have gotten them somehow. It can't be by induction or by experience; that's impossible. So, he says, it comes from the hidden hand of nature, which we would now call either genetic endowment or the third factor contribution. But that's the basic point, and if you take it seriously, it's true for our moral nature, and everything else.
JM: I know quite a few Hume scholars who ignore that particular claim.
NC: I never noticed it, I must say. And I'd read it.
JM: OK, I'll pick up on that last question. You once suggested carrying out the projec
t of humanistic social science by studying the biological limits of human capacities, thereby offering a science of human nature; and would propose an ideal form of social organization on that science, and on an understanding of the fundamental needs of human nature. Has the intervening 35 years since you gave that speech and published it – as “Language and Freedom” – led you to a different conception of that project or to any signs of progress or lack of it?
NC: First of all, it [the study of human nature] goes back hundreds of years, of course. And there's been no progress. These are just questions that are too hard.
There is by now some study – like John Mikhail's – some empirical study of elements of human moral nature. Contemporary ethical philosophy has given interesting examples, the kind that Judith Thompson talks about, and Gil Harman and others – the trolley problem and others. There are situations in which we just have an intuition about what the right answer is – and it's a very strange one. For example, sometimes it leads everybody to prefer an outcome that will kill more people when they have a choice of killing one person; and the results are pretty systematic. By now John in his dissertation along with Elizabeth Spelke are doing studies on children, and it's pretty firmly established that in very young children they give the same judgments. The judgments are interesting because in a sense they're counterintuitive – like choosing to kill more people – this isn't about taking organs from people, and things like that. Those are interesting studies of what our fundamental moral nature must be. And there are now some investigations – Marc Hauser's going to do some comparative work on this with other primates – and out of that could come some understanding [too]. But it's going to be primitive – these problems are just too hard. We don't understand anything about how humans behave in complex circumstances.[C]
