The Science of Language

by Noam Chomsky

  NC: It's not so much faith as hope – but there's plenty of empirical evidence for it too. It's true that people cede responsibility, become obedient, become racist, and so on. It's also true if you look at the historical evidence that they overcome it – that they struggle to overcome these things. There's been plenty of progress in every one of these domains in recent years. Take, say, women's rights. [Earlier, people didn’t even consider the matter:] my grandmother didn’t feel oppressed – she didn’t know she was oppressed. My mother knew she was oppressed but didn’t think there was anything you could do about it: it's just the natural order. My daughters aren’t like that. They wouldn’t accept that kind of existence – they’re aware of it, and they wouldn’t accept it. And the society around them doesn’t accept it. That's moral progress; [and] that's progress in understanding our own nature. But it's been achieved. It's not an easy struggle and it's certainly not over. And it's just in our own recent lifetimes, so we can watch it.

  The same is true in case after case. There is slavery – there are maybe 30 million slaves in the world. But we no longer approve it, regard it as the natural order, or make up stories about how it's better for the slaves. Yet the arguments that were given for slavery – which were not insubstantial – were never answered; they were just rejected as being morally intolerable through a period of growth of moral consciousness. I haven’t heard a sensible answer to the main argument offered by slaveholders in the United States – it was a perfectly sensible argument, and has implications. The basic argument was that slaveholders are more moral than people who live in a market society. To take an anachronistic analogy, if you buy a car and I rent the same car, and we look at those two cars two years from now, yours is going to be in better shape than mine, because you’re going to take care of it; I’m not going to take care of mine. Well, the same is true if you rent people or you buy them. If you buy them, you’re going to take care of them; it's a capital investment. If you rent people, they’re just tools; you throw them out when you’re done with them – if they can’t survive, who cares, you can throw them out on the dump yard. That's the difference between a slave society and a market society. In a market society, you rent people; in a slave society, you buy them. So therefore slave societies are more moral than market societies. Well, I’ve never heard an answer to that, and I don’t think that there is an answer. But it's rejected as morally repugnant – correctly – without following out the implications, that renting people is an atrocity. If you follow out that thought, slave owners are right: renting people is indeed a moral atrocity. It's interesting that 150 years ago, when there was an independent, free, labor-based press, it was just taken for granted – so fully taken for granted, that it was even a slogan for the Republican Party, that wage labor is fundamentally no different from chattel slavery except that it's temporary, and has to be overcome.

  JM: That was a different Republican Party . . .

  NC: It was the Republican Party of Lincoln; and actually, there were editorials in the New York Times about it. It was just taken for granted around here, where the industrial revolution began [in the US]. The working-class press – which is extremely interesting – just took it for granted: of course wage slavery is intolerable, and those who work in the mills are rented, and so on.

  JM: Why hasn’t wage slavery been recognized for what it is?

  NC: I think that that's part of our fundamental human nature – to recognize that – and it has been driven out of people's minds by massive propaganda and institutional structures. And I don’t think that it's very far below the surface. I’ve noticed that when I give talks to what are considered reactionary working-class audiences – you know, Reagan Democrats – when you begin to talk about these things, pretty soon, it seems entirely obvious to all. I think it's just below the surface, and that the system of this moral atrocity is sustained only by extensive efforts to divert people's attention from them, so they come to believe that it's a part of the natural order – just like my grandmother, or my mother, who believed that the oppression of women is the natural order, and that that was all there was to say.

  Any kind of activism – say, women's rights – the first step you have to take is what's called consciousness raising: get people to recognize that there's nothing natural about domestic abuse, for example. Until very recently, it wasn’t considered an issue; it's just right – it's the way things work, so what is there to say? Women are property owned by their husbands, and if they want to smack them around, it's ok. That doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t work because there was at first a step of raising the consciousness of women at least to see that this is not the natural order. It takes work to get to where we are; I don’t think you would ever have convinced my grandmother. After some progress in reaching those affected, similar efforts in the rest of society come. And finally, your true moral nature does emerge. Now, domestic abuse is not officially tolerated: I mean, it happens a lot, but it's not acceptable any more. Well, those are striking changes, and I think the same is true of wage labor. It's accepted in the way domestic abuse was accepted by women, and it requires a period of consciousness raising to get us back to the level of understanding that was standard a century and a half ago. There's been regression on this, and the regression has to do with quite clear and definite institutional structures and, often, conscious propaganda. A tremendous part of the propaganda system is directed to that, and pretty consciously. If you read the literature of the public relations industry – the main propaganda industry – they’re fairly conscious of what they’re doing.

  JM: Imagine someone like Foucault who might respond: well, it seems that the other guys are winning now. It's not so much that a basic, intrinsic human nature is coming to be revealed [through consciousness raising and action], it's rather that the small guys are beginning to win.

  NC: Whether this was Foucault's position or not, I frankly don’t know, because I don’t understand most of the stuff that he wrote. But in the one interchange that we had (Chomsky & Rajchman 2006), it was very clearly his position . . . I have to say that he struck me as the most amoral human being I have ever met. Also, I think it [his position in the interchange] is intellectually incoherent. If it's just a battle of who's stronger than anyone else, why do we have any judgments at all about right and wrong? My impression, from reading his other work, is that he thought that torture in prisons is wrong. But I really don’t understand why.

  JM: When you debated Foucault in the seventies, you claimed against his view that the concept of justice tracks power and authority, that, in fact, justice – and presumably the other concepts of human moral and political virtue – are universal, lodged in a fixed human nature. You haven’t changed your views on this matter, have you?

  NC: [I claimed it] namely, for a very elementary reason. If that weren’t true, then none of us in any culture could acquire the conceptions of that culture. There's something deeply incoherent about Rorty-style relativism (cf. Chomsky 1998), which says that this culture does it this way, and that culture does it that way. The question is how does any culture get established in an individual? It's not by taking a pill. It has to be acquired by an individual by the same means as other forms of cognitive growth. And – like other forms of growth – you can acquire the norms of that culture only if you are predisposed – in a very restrictive fashion – to select those norms from the data around you, and not different norms. And now you’re back to strong innatism; so the whole position is just incoherent. As soon as you ask the first question about it, it collapses.

  JM: Why are people attracted to plasticity theories and to empiricist accounts of human nature and the mind?

  NC: Different reasons for different people, undoubtedly, but I think there is one strain in modern intellectual history that is not insignificant – I don’t want to say that it is everybody. This is an extremely convenient doctrine for managers. I mean, if people have no intrinsic nature – which is incoherent, but let's assume it – then there
is no moral barrier to controlling them. You can say to yourself that you’re controlling them for their own good, even though that's incoherent. [It makes it seem that] there is no moral barrier against it. Well, what are intellectuals? They’re managers. They’re economic managers, political managers, doctrinal managers. That's basically their role; we call certain kinds of managers “intellectuals.” We don’t call corporate executives intellectuals, but that's just terminology. Public intellectuals are just other kinds of managers. We happen to use the word intellectuals for them, and not for economic managers; but they’re all basically trying to control actions, attitudes, beliefs, and so on. And for people in a managerial role, it's highly convenient to think there's no moral barrier to controlling people. In fact, it's morally appropriate to do so. If you look through the intellectual history of this, it's very striking. Somehow, we’re exempt from this. Whoever is writing or speaking [holds], “I’m not part of this formless mass of people who have no character or nature; I have a nature, and I know what's right – they don’t. I’m a different creature and it's proper for me to intervene to help them, to control them.” Well, this goes right back through intellectual history.

  Take a look at John Stuart Mill's classic essay on what is now called “humanitarian intervention”; it's read in courses in law school, and so on. His argument, which is utterly shocking, is that England is an angelic society – so angelic that other people can’t understand it. They attribute base motives to us because they can’t understand how magnificent we are. There's a debate about whether England should become involved in the problems of other people – in India, or on the continent, etc – and there were some that said that it's none of our business, let's just pursue our own interests. And Mill takes a more ‘moral’ position. He said that, since we are angels, and they’re a different kind of creature, it is our responsibility to intervene to help them and to show them the right way, even though they’re going to attribute base motives to us and heap obloquy upon us, nevertheless; we have to face it and do it. And then he applies it in a particular case, the one that interested him – India. He knew all about India; he was Corresponding Secretary of the East India Company, just like his father, who was involved in it. He knew everything that was going on there. Besides, it was all over the press in England; there was a huge parliamentary outrage over British atrocities there, and so on. He was writing right at the point when Britain was carrying out its worst atrocities in India, right after what in England was called the “Indian mutiny,” meaning that Indians rebelled – from the British point of view, mutiny. They committed some atrocities – they killed some Europeans. And the British reaction was just ferocious. The population was actually reduced in several provinces. Mill was in favor of it; he said that we have to do it, because they are barbarians, we’re angels, and the barbarians need our guiding hand. So even if people are going to condemn us, we’ve got to go in and continue the process of conquering India, for their own good.

  JM: As I recall, Marx argued in a similar way.

  NC: Yes, in fact, this runs right across the intellectual tradition. Take Mill's article today and just change a few words, and it's the main literature on humanitarian intervention. Is there any better basis than his? Take a look at the cases.

  The argument is very simple, and it's the foundation of modern political science – that's Lippman, Lasswell, and the other influential founders of the public intellectual tradition. Not everyone, of course, but it's a very powerful mainstream tradition, and it goes way back in intellectual history, and it's understandable. How do you justify it? Always the same way. We’re somehow different from them; they are malleable, or maybe they have barbaric instincts, or something; and for their own good, we have to control them. For their own good, we have to keep them from running across the street.

  If you look at the way that this has been exercised, it's shocking. Take Mill again. He's particularly interesting because it's hard to find a figure of higher moral integrity and intelligence. He was very knowledgeable. Why was England trying to expand its control over India at that time? Partly just in revenge, because the Indians had dared to raise their heads, and they’re not allowed to do that. But in part it was because they were building the biggest narcotrafficking empire in history. It's hard to imagine anything like it today. They were trying to gain a monopoly of opium so they could force their way into the Chinese market, which they couldn’t get into because their own goods were not competitive; and the only way that they could do it was try to turn it into a nation of drug addicts, by force. And they had to conquer large parts of India to try to gain that monopoly. This narcotrafficking empire was huge. It was the foundation for a lot of British capitalism and the British Empire. Mill wasn’t unaware of that. He was writing right at the time of the second opium war. Of course he knew; and it was being discussed all over the place in England. Interestingly, there were critics – the old-fashioned conservatives, classical liberals, such as Richard Cobden: he thought it was horrendous. If you look today, Robert Byrd [who criticized the US invasion of Iraq] criticizes things [like this]; but [he and a few others are] relics of classical liberalism. If you accept classical liberal principles, yes, it was horrendous. But that's on the margin of intellectual history, not mainstream. And for the mainstream – to get back to the original point – it's very convenient to think that humans have no nature and are malleable. I think this accounts for a lot.

  There are other factors. I know from particular cases – I won’t mention any names – that there are distinguished figures who think it is necessary to accept this point of view to block religious fanaticism, and literally can’t see any difference between adopting what's called “innatism” – meaning scientific rationality [in the study of mind] – and belief in God.

  JM: Is methodological dualism another aspect of the same phenomenon?[C]

  NC: That's my feeling. It's quite striking how sensible people, [even those] embedded in the sciences, just take a different approach toward human mental faculties and mental aspects of the world than they do to the rest. There's no issue of innatism regarding the development of the visual system in the individual; why is there an issue regarding cognitive growth and language's role in it? That's just irrational.

  20 Language, agency, common sense, and science

  JM: Switching topics slightly for a while in order to look at the issue from a different point of view . . . What's on the other side of language [the faculty]? If it has this capacity of integrating, coordinating, and innovating, what are we to think of what lies on the ‘other side’ of its [the faculty's] operations? You spoke of performance systems in some of your earlier works, and in the case of production and perception, it's pretty clear what those are. But what about the conceptual and intentional systems?

  NC: . . . Those are internal systems; they're something that's going on in your head and my head.

  JM: Those are internal systems. OK, but I'm trying to get clear about what role language has in contributing to agency, action. Let me put it this way: philosophers like to think of people as agents, as decision-makers who deliberate, who take into account various kinds of information and bring them to bear on making decisions in ways that satisfy desires, and the like. What about that notion of an agent? To a certain extent, it seems as though language is being given some of those roles (of gathering information, etc.).

  NC: Language can be conceived of as a tool for agents, for agency – whatever that is. It's Descartes's point, basically, that you can use your linguistic abilities to say anything you want about any topic which is in your conceptual range, but when you do it, you're acting as a human agent with a human will, whatever that is.

  Most scientists tend to accept the Cartesian dogma that only humans have this capacity, so that insects are automata. But we don't know that. If you ask the best theorists of ants why an ant decides at one point to turn left rather than right . . . well, the question can't even come up [for a scientific answer]. You can
talk about the mechanisms, you can talk about the motivations, you can talk about the external and internal stimuli, but they don't predict what the ant's going to do. Maybe that's because we don't know enough and the ant's really an automaton. Or maybe we just haven't captured the notion of agency properly.

  JM: Is then the concept of a person and the concept of an agent as we ordinarily think of it – is it something that is a creature of common sense – useful for us, no doubt, but perhaps something that science can't get a grasp on?

  NC: Well, it is clearly a concept of common sense. So when Locke devoted a chapter to trying to figure out what a person is, he's discussing our commonsense understanding of what a person is. He's not discussing something in the outside world. He's discussing an internal, mental conception that we have. And it turns out to be a very strange one.

  JM: This is his ‘forensic’ notion of a person . . .

  NC: . . . his forensic notion. There is a chapter in the Essay, chapter 27 of the first book, or somewhere around there, where he devotes himself to explorations through thought experiments, asking – say – when would you say that somebody is the same person? Well, he basically concludes – what's quite plausible – that it's some manner of psychic continuity – that the whole body can change, and so on; but as long as it remains a continuous psychic entity, you think of it as the same person.

  And he does raise questions to which there is probably no answer, such as what would we do if two bodies had exactly the same psychic constitution: is it one person, or two people? Or what about if one of them changed into the other? Well, at that point you're getting to places where our intuitions just break down. There's no reason whatsoever that our commonsense intuitions should give answers to every question. There's a long tradition going back to Plato, Heraclitus, Plutarch, and on and on about the ship of Theseus. Over the centuries, people have made up impossible conundrums about when we would say that it is the same ship. A standard thing that you learn in your philosophy 101 course is that if you keep replacing the planks at sea, it's the same ship, and if somebody takes those same planks that you threw away and makes a replica of the original ship, somehow it's not the same ship. You can make up case after case like this.