by Noam Chomsky
A simple illustration shows how parameters contribute to making progress and solving problems. Conceive of UG as a set of universal principles. If universal, every language must have the properties specified in the principle. One candidate for such a principle is that all languages must form phrases that consist of a ‘head’ (a lexical item of some category, such as A[djective/. . .dverb] or V[erb]) and a complement, which is itself a phrase, and may be null. Formalizing a bit, XP = X – YP, with ‘X’ and ‘Y’ being any of V, A, P[reposition/postposition], D[eterminer]. This is primitive, but it will do for illustration purposes. Think then of this principle as being parameterized, as allowing options. The options are represented in the formula’s ‘-’, which is unordered. If unordered, heads in a language could be before their complements, or after. English is a “head first” language, so that a VP comes out “call the dog.” Japanese (Miskito, etc.) is a “head final/last” language, so its phrases put heads after complements. If English were head-last, the example would come out: “the dog call.” This parametric option – and others – can be seen as something like a switch that in one position yields a head-first language and in the other, a head-last. Assume (plausibly) a finite, and presumably small number of linguistic parameters. Specifying the full set of linguistic principles and their parameters would, then define the possible structures of the class of all natural languages, each of which is biologically and physically possible. A specification of this sort would ‘say’ what a biologically/physically possible structure for a natural language could be. If there were 12 parameters and they were binary and independent of one another, there could be 212 structurally different languages. Assuming all this, principles and parameters offer very useful descriptive tools; they allow for the description of all possible natural languages with regard to at least their structural and sound differences, allowing a reduced UG to offer adequate descriptions of any possible natural language.
As indicated, they also offer a solution to Plato’s Problem, a dominant explanatory problem that, until solved, blocks dealing with other explanatory issues. Conceive of a parameter amounting to something like a toggle or switch; in the case of the illustration, when the switch is in one position, one has a head-first language, when in the other, a head-last. Think then of a major part of language acquisition as a matter of setting switches in one of the few positions that each parameter allows – in simple cases, position 1 or 2. This picture does not speak to lexical acquisition – or at least, not directly. Language acquisition requires acquiring a vocabulary too. But it does make a major contribution to the task of solving Plato’s Problem with regard to language – the combinatory system. It also suits the facts. There is evidence in favor of the idea that children do set parameters in the course of developing a language. Some of the most interesting evidence is found in the fact that at specific stages of language development, children’s minds ‘experiment’ with parameter settings, trying out settings that are not typical of the languages spoken in their communities, soon converging on the ‘right’ settings for the data they receive. A child acquiring English, for example, might say “What do you think what teddy wants?”, displaying a sentence with a second ‘what’ in the same position as one would find it in some varieties of acquired German. This and related patterns of experimentation might appear occasionally in a child’s speech for a short while, and then disappear. It is as if the mind were exploring the avenues open to it. Because parameters are fixed, the mind’s choice space of alternative structures is very limited, and pre-specified; ‘choices’ are made quickly, on little evidence – in this case, a lack of evidence for one of the possible settings, some evidence for the other. The parameter picture makes nice predictions too. Without parameters, we would not find the predictable periods during which this kind of ‘experimentation’ takes place, nor the swift learning rates (often without negative evidence), unless the choice space were set innately. If all sorts of possibilities were available – if the choice space were open – children’s linguistic behaviors would be close to random, and eliminating some possibilities and selecting others would be very difficult without a lot of outside intervention – intervention that the child in fact neither receives, nor needs.
By solving Plato’s Problem, parameters allow the theoretician to begin in a serious way to consider other explanatory issues, including how one can accommodate language to biology and address how language came to be introduced into the species. I will focus on accommodation – effectively, placing UG in the genome – and on some of the most recent advances. Recalling, the most plausible route to accommodation consists in minimizing UG, where UG is thought of as the language-specific ‘information’ the genome must have in it in order to provide for human languages. To determine that, ask what the sine qua non of language is – what it is that humans must have to have language at all, where this is demonstrably something that no other species has. In an important contribution to Science in 2002, Chomsky along with Marc Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch compared humans to other species with various communication and other systems. They pointed out that other species seem to have at least some of the conceptual materials we express in language, and that other species can both articulate linguistic sounds and signs and perceive them. But no other species has linguistic recursion, the capacity to take lexical items/words and ‘compose’ them, producing hierarchical structures of – in principle – indefinite length. Assume, then, that the sine qua non of language is linguistic recursion – which is due, as indicated above, by Merge. Merge, then, must be specified in the human genome in some way. But could UG be Merge alone? If it were, accommodation would be much easier. But what about parameters? They definitely have a bearing on grammatical/computational structure, and as stated, they seem to be language-specific. For example, the order parameter I spoke of above looks language-specific; its terms are heads and their complements. If it is, it must be in UG. That is much less daunting. But we should not assume anything like that so quickly. One good reason not to is that as those who have been working on the very difficult problem of explaining species variation knew long ago, there is a lot more to development, growth, and morphogenesis than can be explained by the genome and ‘input’ (data) alone. The same must surely be true of language growth and development in a child. These other factors – Chomsky calls them “third factor” considerations – include
(a) principles of data analysis that might be used in language acquisition and other domains [and] (b) principles of structural architecture and developmental constraints that enter into canalization, organic form, and action over a wide range, including principles of efficient computation, which would be expected to be of particular significance for computational systems such as language.
(Chomsky 2005: 6; see also 2007, forthcoming).
No one really knows what these factors are with language – or with the growth of almost anything else, for that matter. But superficial appearances to the contrary, it is not obvious that differences of order in phrases (as with the head parameter) must be language-specific: perhaps the order of head to complement is fixed by something not specifically linguistic. And it is obvious that variations in the patterns of colors on individual pigeon wings (and in the feathers themselves) cannot be attributed to an individual pigeon’s genome alone: that would put far too heavy a burden on it. So perhaps parametric options are to be explained by appeal to third factor considerations, and their ‘setting’ to variations in values provided by these considerations.
Biologists and others working on issues of growth (morphogenesis, ontogenesis, and the like) have increasingly come to take third factor contributions to growth into account within the growing science of “evo-devo,” short for “evolution-development.” In fact, Chomsky has been pointing in this direction for some time, going back to his earliest work. Principles of computational cyclicity and principles of data analysis played a role in early proposals concerning acquisition (Chomsky, Halle, Lukoff 1956; cf. Chomsky 20
05: 6–7). In more recent years, he emphasized the relevance to issues of language variation and growth of Alan Turing’s important work on morphogenesis and D’Arcy Thompson’s earlier and less formal work on related matters, and he often refers to the work of biologists such as Stuart Kauffmann and Charles Waddington. These all revitalize a line of thought in biology that goes back at least to Goethe and his belief that he could predict the possible shapes of any plant by appeal to a formula for an “Urpflanze” (primordial plant). Note that CL includes an explicit reference to Goethe’s speculation and to the way in which what Goethe had to say might speak to matters of language’s generativity and – through that – to one precondition of linguistic creativity. In any case, third factor considerations have been lying in the shadows of the study of language, apparently waiting for a good solution to Plato’s Problem. A solution to that – and consequent clarification of what must be attributed to the genome – was a precondition of asking what the third factor contributions might be.
I will not pursue the matter in detail, but it is interesting to see that if these speculations (but not mere speculations) are on the right track, so that Merge alone is ‘contained’ in the genome, it becomes much easier also to explain how language could have come about as the result of a single mutation. It need not be a “language specific” mutation; it could, for example, be a side result, the result of what Lewontin and Gould (1979) spoke of as a “spandrel” – a structural result of a modification in some other system. It must, though, be ‘saltational’ – happen in a single jump – for otherwise we would have to suppose that language developed over millennia, and there is no evidence of that. In fact – speculations about FOXP2 in the media and technical journals aside, which are likely to be irrelevant anyway – the only apparently relevant evidence indicates the contrary. Humans seem to have begun systematic observations of the stars, attempted to find ‘ultimate’ explanations (found often in religions), produce drawings, develop ways to cope with their environments in systematic ways, and the like, between roughly 100,000 and 50,000 years ago – for about 50,000 years ago is when the migration from Africa began.
Investigation of speaking humans widely separated (so not interbreeding) since then – e.g., in Southeast Asia – indicates full linguistic capacity and suggests that no significant change has taken place since then. Plausibly, capacity to engage in distinctively human forms of cognitive behavior – art, religion, empirical investigation – came about not only suddenly by evolutionary standards, but as the result of the introduction of a single change. An introduction of language – more precisely, recursion and, specifically, the capacity to put concepts together to produce an indefinitely large number of complex concepts that can be used freely – is the most probable cause. If this story is plausible, a humanoid species in effect “became human” as the result of the introduction of language.
This kind of naturalistic and reason-based account of the origin of humans and of their cognitive capacities – one far removed from various religious myths – is an explanation that would have pleased the Enlightenment figures who thought that reason alone is sufficient for answering fundamental questions. Of course, one cannot afford to be overly enthusiastic. If reason (the use of our cognitive capacities) has the biological basis it seems to have, reason must have its limits. Those limits are revealed in an incapacity to make scientific sense of the creative aspect of language use, among other things. But actually, that is a good thing. Without limitations on cognitive resources (innateness) – as the RR thinkers insisted – there would be little in the way of intellectual capacity at all.
Notice that this account of the origins of humans and of the introduction of language (arguably the key to their remarkable cognitive flexibility and power) leaves ample room for what both rationalists and romantics honored – free will. The internal operations of specific mental faculties such as vision and language may well be determined. These computational systems take what is provided them – in the case of language, lexical items with their phonological and semantic ‘information’ – and yield complex kinds of ‘information’ at their interfaces with other cognitive systems. If they do not they crash. At least with language, however, what happens on the other side of the semantic interface is – as the creative aspect of language use reveals – not determined, although it seems to be ‘rational,’ for ‘what is said’ is typically appropriate to discourse context. Furthermore, given that human action involves contributions from multiple, cooperative systems, and that the relations between multiple systems are subject to massive interaction effects, there is no prospect for determinism, or – as we have seen – for a science of human behavior. Given furthermore that ‘free will’ is well-attested in personal experience and in the use of commonsense understanding, we might as well say that humans are free agents, period. There is no reason for regret in this. We have reason to celebrate.
Finally, it is worth mentioning briefly a matter taken up in more detail in the final section of this introduction, for this current section’s focus on progress in accommodation of language to biology also illuminates some of the broader themes of CL. Implicit in Chomsky’s efforts to place the science of language in a prominent place in a biologically based science of human nature is the idea that we might be able to tease out of a science of a distinctive human nature some notion of what humans fundamentally need, and begin, with that in mind, to think of what kind of social organization – polity – could best satisfy those needs. We might, by doing this, provide justifications for political recommendations and policies and for political and economic institutions generally – institutions that have the purpose of meeting those needs to a maximal extent. The appeal of such a science-based project is clear: justification must appeal to universals, here provided by an objective science of a distinctive human nature. (Language is obviously a constitutive element in a distinctive human nature; no other creature has it.) An objective science of human nature can stand the burden of scientific justification. And it can in turn offer the means to do what Enlightenment thinkers would have been delighted to do if they could: take an account of human nature got by reason (without appeal to faith, dogma, or authority), use it to determine fundamental human needs, and – with an understanding of these – make an effort to construct a justifiable view of what an ideal form of social organization would look like. It would be a long process (and may be impossible, for like all biological creatures, we have cognitive limitations), but one would end up with a scientifically based form of humanism, one built on the idea that humans are biological entities, and nothing but. Not faith, but reason – particularly scientific reason, which aims towards universality and objectivity – could provide a reasonable basis for a view of “the good life” and of an ideal form of social organization that permits people to live such a life.
III Descartes’s contributions
Descartes made no direct contributions to the science of language, but he did make indirect ones. I do not include among those contributions any of the claims with which he is in many philosophers’ (and their students’ and readers’) views all but identified. Specifically, there is no reason to think that the scientific study of language or mind is aided by Descartes’s (perhaps only apparent) view that a person has direct, unmediated and certain knowledge of the mind’s contents. Nor is there reason to take seriously his mind/body substance dualism – although it was (as I indicate below) a sensible proposal at the time he wrote. And his foundationalist epistemological project – some hints in it about what he thought about the methodology of science aside – has little to recommend it, and can be ignored. Certainly these aspects of Descartes’s thought play no role in any of Chomsky’s work, nor in a substantive way in the work of others now working within what has come to be called the “Chomskyan paradigm.” Nor do they figure in the discussion of CL in any substantive way.
III.1 Natural science
Descartes’s real contributions – the ones that then were and stil
l are viable – are found elsewhere. First, he helped invent the methodology that yields natural sciences. His insistence on taking the methodology of science to be very different from what one finds in the practical problem-solving efforts of humans trying to get along in the world, where they use the innate concepts of common sense (which he called “bon sens”) is reflected in the first part of his Discourse in his autobiographical reflections on how little he had managed to gain from his education in the “letters.” Even his study of mathematics in the schools, he remarked, was misdirected; he assumed that its uses were practical – for engineering, architecture, and the like. It was only later that he discovered its use in science, where mathematics provides the formal tools for capturing principles and constructing theories that deal with phenomena well out of the reach of common-sense concepts. When used in this way, they are essential aids in idealizing, in constructing and focusing study and experimentation on simple, abstractly described models of phenomena. Galileo made a similar point when he aimed towards mathematical descriptions of the factors that contribute to the motion of bodies: rates of acceleration and changes in them when falling and rolling down inclined planes, for example. He also constructed mathematical descriptions of the motions of pendulums, noting the effects of lengthening the wires or rods by which they are fixed. You do not get sciences of complex phenomena such as the growth of plants by starting at the top. You focus on the elements that you hope will eventually contribute to an explanation – on contributions that, taken with other contributions, bring about the complex phenomenon. At each stage, you invent theories that idealize phenomena, experiment by trying to control for irrelevant contributions, and so on. The theories might well end up postulating properties, forces, and entities completely foreign to you. In fact, you better expect that. Invention can and often does go beyond everyday experience.
