by Noam Chomsky
27 The language faculty does not actually do anything, of course. People do things. But, having it, people can do things (produce apparently endless numbers of sentences) at will. This point is part of what Chomsky is after in insisting that his is a theory of linguistic competence, not performance.
28 The attractions of a contact mechanics – its apparently obvious character, probably due to the common-sense observation that to move a chair, you must come into contact with it – continued to keep Newton in its grip. He even spoke of action without contact as “absurd,” and tried to save contact mechanics by introducing a “subtle aether,” making various odd-looking moves to justify this effort. Contact mechanics continues its grip. It is hard to find any explanation for why contemporary philosophers who exercise themselves over a mind–body problem apparently continue to assume that Descartes was right about “body.” See below.
29 In recent talks and papers (Chomsky, forthcoming), Chomsky points out that philosophers tend now to focus on quite a different issue. This is an issue raised many years ago by Bertrand Russell with his example of a blind physicist who had a good understanding of the causal structure of the universe, but who could not experience blue: does a complete science of the universe leave out experience as it is undergone? Russell’s answer (or at least one of his answers) is, in essence, that physics aims towards an objective theory of the “causal skeleton of the world,” and – because it does, and introduces formal tools to succeed – it cannot deal with everything, only those matters that the tools of science can reach. Given this, it is hardly surprising that the predominantly anthropocentric aspects of the world of experience are outside of science’s reach (although see the second paragraph below). Science is limited by its aim and by the tools that allow for success in carrying out its task. (And everyday experience and the common-sense concepts we use to configure and understand it are hopeless as science too, of course; they too have their limitations.)
Putting the issue in Russell’s way focuses matters in a way that improves, I think, on the way the discussion often goes in recent work – wondering whether science can deal with experiencing red, speculating about whether we can know “what it is like to be a bat” (weasel, octopus. . .), and the like. Russell focuses discussion not on differences between third-person and first-person understandings in various domains, but on human cognitive capacities and the tools that they provide. This focus on capacities and the tools available for exercising them not only makes it clear that there are substantial differences between what science and common sense provide, but it points to the fact that whatever we have, we have it as biological creatures. Any cognitive capacities we have are limited, and limited in specific, and different, ways. Common sense has an anthropocentric focus and is comfortable with linguistic creativity. It relies heavily on native conceptual tools and on the extraordinary combinatory power offered humans by a system that allows us to put together arbitrarily chosen concepts. Because both come ‘for free’, common sense allows for highly flexible use at an early age – flexibility that is exploited all the time, as we have seen. But common sense proves useless at providing genuinely objective – anthropocentric-free – descriptions and explanations. That is the task of science, a project that (as we have seen) is uncomfortable with ‘ordinary’ linguistic creativity and that succeeds where there is very considerable agreement on how to use the symbols characteristic of a particular science. Apparently, we have at least two ways of ‘cognizing’ the world and ourselves. Neither can do the other’s job. And both have the characters they do because each is biologically based – although this is less obvious in the case of science-formation (for arguments that it is biologically based, see Chomsky 1980/2005).
It is instructive to look at one of the issues that philosophers discuss from this point of view. Consider the matter of qualia. A philosopher might claim that having an experience of red counts as an essentially mental occurrence, out of the reach of ‘physical’ science. But it is easy to see that its distinctively mental character proves elusive. The best existing attempts to say what ‘equipment’ one needs to have such an experience point in the direction of being a biological creature with certain kinds of biophysical equipment. There is little help for a distinct mental domain there. And if asked to describe an experience of red, one would be hard pressed using the terminology of natural languages (as opposed to philosophers’ shop talk terminology of ‘qualia’) to do more than say that you see something red over there – which attributes redness to something ‘over there’ and presumably outside the head, not to some mental event. Ironically, a computational theory of the vision faculty does a better job of making it clear that color (or more technically, a combination of hue, brightness, and saturation) lies in the mind/brain than does common sense or philosopherese. The irony becomes even more apparent when one is asked to describe the experience. Natural languages typically take colors to be properties of surfaces of objects ‘out there’, and color terms (‘red’, ‘yellow’, ‘green’, ‘blue’. . .) are very limited. If one wants a precise description of a color experience, the terminology of hue, brightness, and saturation (which would need to be supplemented to deal with some colors (such as brown and fluorescent colors) that involve other aspects of a theory of color) attributed to retinotopic visual expanses is much better: this clearly locates colors (and even positions) in the head, and offers as precise a specification of color as one is likely ever to need. ‘Mentalists’ about color qualia would do far better with the ‘third-person’ terminology of the sciences than the ‘first-person’ terminology of experience. As for ‘physicalists’, their view of the nature of body is typically Cartesian – as the text indicates. But that conception of body was abandoned by physicists centuries ago. So the points made here hardly indicate that physicalism ‘wins’.
30 He observed that – given what his optics revealed about the eye, the retina, and light – properties of the signal, the retina, and of the eyeballs themselves can at best correlate with ‘what one sees’ – with colored, shaped visual fields, and the sensation of depth that partially constitutes these fields. These various “movements” of eyeball, etc., which act upon our “soul” clearly do not resemble the mental qualities sensed (“light, colour, position, distance [depth], size and shape”); rather, nature “ordains. . . [that the movements make the soul] have such sensations” (CSM I: 167). He could have done the same with sound: tympanic vibrations correlate with, for example, a heard brilliant high E. Or with touch, etc.
31 In comments on a draft of this introduction, Chomsky pointed out to me that Descartes had made some visual poverty observations that invited maintaining that Euclidean geometry is innate to the mind. In effect, he not only made poverty observations, but he understood that they demanded an explanation by recourse to a theory/science of what the mind brings to experience. Chomsky remarks, “To my knowledge, [Descartes] is the first to have clearly stated the problem of poverty of stimulus, in his passage in the Dioptrics about how an infant on first seeing a figure will interpret it as a distorted triangle, not as a perfect instance of whatever crazy figure it is, which seems only a step away from postulating that something like Euclidean geometry is innate [to the human mind] and provides the framework for perception, on poverty of stimulus grounds.”
32 See David Marr’s 1982 Vision for an early and still very impressive account. His view of color processing is by no means state-of-the-art, and a lot has gone on since the book’s appearance in the early 1980s in other areas of vision. But his view of how to proceed remains a paradigm.
33 An I-language is something like a specific person’s idiolect. More carefully, it is a language that is individual, internal, and intensional. The first two terms – ‘individual’ and ‘internal’ – are self-explanatory. To say that an I-language is intensional is to say that it is specified “under intension” – in effect, you have to have a theory of language in order to say what it is. Or to put it another way, a language is an i
ntensional function: take a list of lexical items and specify the combinatory principles/functions; together, these determine the possible sentences of a language. In practice, assuming that the combinatory principles of a person’s language faculty are in a known steady state, one can specify an I-language by listing a person’s lexical entries.
34 Could he have had in mind not sensation of (say) a color or depth sort, but judgment thereof? That would, on his own grounds, involve more than what the visual (or for the blind, touch) system can provide. Against this is that he clearly holds that colors and sounds are mental and innate to the mind, and are distinct from the “movements” of sensory equipment.
35 An early reference is found in reprinted form in his Towards a New Cold War (1982): 64. He sometimes calls intellectuals (responsible ones excepted) members of a secular priesthood. Where priests are supposed to mediate between a deity and the human beings who need to be told what they should and should not do and justify the authority of the deity, members of a secular priesthood mediate between a different kind of authority to explain and justify to the ignorant the considerably less-than-obvious principles of the “state religion.” In the US and other capital-dominated systems currently, the state religion is a form of neoliberal or neoconservative faith in “free markets,” “free trade,” and other supposed miracles of the marketplace that are thought to somehow justify massive economic and political inequalities. The eighty percent or so of the US population who lack a managerial position seem to need considerable guidance in this matter, for these “rabble” must be kept in line. Note that Chomsky includes among these intellectuals the personnel of major corporate-run media institutions – TV, newspapers, etc. The propaganda model of media performance that he and Edward Herman constructed to explain these intellectuals’ actions nicely predicts how they filter and skew what they write about, and how they present information. Their hypothesis is that while corporate-run media personnel may engage in internal dispute about whether they are not perhaps too liberal, they will never question the articles of the secular faith, and will frame the information they provide their audiences in ways that advances these articles. The hypothesis’s success at prediction (detailed by Chomsky and Herman, and Chomsky alone [in Chomsky 1988b]) shows that they must be near the mark.
CARTESIAN LINGUISTICS
1 M. Grammont, Revue des langues romanes 60 (1915), p. 439. Quoted in G. Harnois, “Les théories du langage en France de 1660 à 1821,” Études françaises 17 (1929). Harnois in essence agrees, holding that earlier linguistics hardly merits the name “science” and that he is engaged in a “history of linguistics before there was a linguistics.” Similar views have been widely voiced.
2 By a “generative grammar” I mean a description of the tacit competence of the speaker-hearer that underlies his actual performance in production and perception (understanding) of speech. A generative grammar, ideally, specifies a pairing of phonetic and semantic representations over an infinite range; it thus constitutes a hypothesis as to how the speaker-hearer interprets utterances, abstracting away from many factors that interweave with tacit competence to determine actual performance. For recent discussion, see Katz and Postal, An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1964); Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (The Hague: Mouton, 1964); Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1965). [Terminology related to “competence” includes “core grammar” (Chomsky, 1981). The distinction between competence and performance can be seen as a distinction between language and its use; it appears in Chomsky’s work in various forms. The literature is enormous. Restricting the list to a few of Chomsky’s representative works alone, see Chomsky 1975a, 1980, 1981, 1986, 1988a, 1995, and 2000. Among these, 1975a, 1980, 1988a, and 2000 are more accessible to general audiences than the others. For useful additional discussion, see Smith 1999.]
3 Nor should it be assumed that the various contributors to what I will call “Cartesian linguistics” necessarily regarded themselves as constituting a single “tradition.” This is surely not true. With the construct “Cartesian linguistics,” I want to characterize a constellation of ideas and interests that appear in the tradition of “universal” or “philosophical grammar,” which develops from the Port-Royal Grammaire générale et raisonnée (1660); in the general linguistics that developed during the romantic period and its immediate aftermath; and in the rationalist philosophy of mind that in part forms a common background for the two. That universal grammar has Cartesian origins is a commonplace; Sainte-Beuve, for example, refers to the Port-Royal theory of grammar as “a branch of Cartesianism that Descartes himself had not developed” (Port-Royal, vol. III, 1860, p. 539). An association of the general linguistics of the romantic period to this complex is less immediately obvious, but I will try to show, nevertheless, that some of its central features (and, furthermore, those which seem to me to constitute its most valuable contribution) can be related to Cartesian antecedents.
By discussing romantic theories of language and mind within this framework, I am forced to exclude other important and characteristic aspects of these theories; for example, the organicism that was (rightly or wrongly) taken to be a reaction against Cartesian mechanism. In general, it must be emphasized that my concern here is not with the transmission of certain ideas and doctrines, but with their content and, ultimately, their contemporary significance.
A study of this sort could profitably be developed as part of a more general investigation of Cartesian linguistics as contrasted with a set of doctrines and assumptions that might be referred to as “empiricist linguistics” and illustrated by modern structural and taxonomic linguistics as well as by parallel developments in modern psychology and philosophy. I will not attempt to develop this distinction any more fully or clearly here, however.
4 It should be borne in mind that we are dealing with a period that antedates the divergence of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. The insistence of each of these disciplines on “emancipating itself ” from any contamination by the others is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Again, current work in generative grammar returns to an earlier point of view, in this case, with respect to the place of linguistics among other studies.
5 He leaves open, as beyond the limitations of human reason, the question whether the explanatory hypotheses that he proposes are the “correct” ones in any absolute sense, limiting himself to the claim that they are adequate, though obviously not uniquely so. Cf. Principles of Philosophy, pt. IV, art. CCIV.
The context of this discussion of the limits of mechanical explanation must be kept clearly in mind. The issue is not the existence of mind, as a substance whose essence is thinking. To Descartes, this is obvious from introspection – more easily demonstrated, in fact, than the existence of body. What is at stake is the existence of other minds. This can be established only through indirect evidence of the sort that Descartes and his followers cite. These attempts to prove the existence of other minds were not too convincing to contemporary opinion. Pierre Bayle, for example, characterizes the presumed inability of the Cartesians to prove the existence of other minds “as perhaps the weakest side of Cartesianism” (art. “Rorarius,” in Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697); Historical and Critical Dictionary, trans. R. Popkin (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 231).
6 Discourse on the Method, pt. V. [In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–5), abbreviated CSM I, CSM II.]
In general I will use English translations where these and the original are readily available and will cite the original otherwise, if available to me. In citing original sources, I will occasionally regularize spelling and punctuation slightly.
7 For some recent views and evidence on this question, see E. H. Lenneberg, “A Biological Perspective of Language,” in New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. E. H. Lenneberg (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press
, 1964). [The literature is now massive. For a popular discussion of some issues, see Pinker 1995; Pinker and Chomsky do not, however, agree on the issue of the evolution of language. Jenkins 2000 has a clear and general but more technical discussion of some of Chomsky’s views on the topic. In a related vein, Chomsky often now refers to formal work on morphogenesis by Alan Turing and D’Arcy Thompson, and has suggested – speculatively at this stage – that perhaps language ‘evolved’ as a consequence of what happens to physical and biological processes when placed in a specific and complex form of organism. This is not evolution as popularly conceived, where it is supposed that evolution amounts to some kind of natural selection that yields reproductive advantages. This usual conception of evolution is generally assumed to require many millennia in order to produce a complex system; it also bears a remarkable resemblance to behaviorism, a fact noted by Skinner. It may not even be Darwinian; often, it assumes a Lamarckian cast.
Recent linguistic work within the minimalist project (post-1990s) has opened up the possibility that language (specifically, competence, or what is now seen as a ‘narrow’ conception of language (FLN: the faculty of language, narrow) that focuses on the linguistic ‘core’ (also “narrow syntax”) is in fact very simple, amounting perhaps to nothing more than recursion or the operation Merge. This also makes the introduction of language at a single step a realistic possibility. Assuming that what happens with regard to the production of sounds or the interpretation of semantic ‘features’ is already in place, it would be enough if a single mutation took place in a single member of the species homo, where that mutation introduced Merge and was genetically transmissible. Having recursion allows for n-word sentences (more interestingly, n-concept meanings), offering extraordinary advantages to members of a group that had the relevant gene(s). The introduction of language at a single step also makes sense of the fact that sometime between 50 and 100 thousand years ago, humans began to develop art and religion (a form of explanation, after all), organize themselves into different forms of social system, observe the stars and seasons, develop agriculture, and so on. The great migration from Africa began about this time too. This all makes sense if it was during this period that language came to be introduced, a period that is very short in evolutionary time.]
