|
 Philosopher
of the Month
December
2003 - Noam Chomsky
Christopher
Norris
Noam
Chomsky (1928-) is an MIT-based linguist and cognitive psychologist
whose thinking in these fields has been more influential (and controversial)
than any other body of work in recent times. He is also a prominent
left-wing dissident and implacable critic of US government policy
on numerous foreign and domestic issues during the past three decades.
In
linguistics, Chomsky is best known for his theory of transformational-generative
grammar, first developed in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures.
This holds that human beings have an innate capacity for acquiring,
using, and interpreting language, one that transcends any differences
of culture or individual psychology. In his early review of B F
Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour, Chomsky mounted a full-scale
attack on the then dominant school of American linguistic thought.
Here he showed that no behaviourist account based on a stimulus-response
model of language acquisition could possibly explain the rapidity
and ease with which children learn to utter well-formed grammatical
sentences, often sentences more complex than any to which they have
been exposed in their learning environment. Rather, they must possess
a native competence that enables them to construct a huge (indeed
potentially infinite) range of novel expressions from a finite repertoire
of "depth-syntactical" forms.
Such
were the three main arguments – from "nativism",
"poverty of the stimulus", and linguistic "creativity"
– that Chomsky deployed to powerful effect against Skinner’s
behaviourist approach. Thus the task of linguistics was to specify
the various "transformational-generative" mechanisms that
enabled speakers and interpreters to assign a determinate meaning
to this or that surface string of lexical items. These included
the active/passive transformation – the capacity to grasp that
a pair of sentences such as "Alison read the book" and
"the book was read by Alison" have the same underlying
structure despite their disparity of surface form. Ambiguous expressions
(like "flying model aircraft can be a challenge!") are
shown to result from the fact that a single surface grammatical
form has two quite distinct underlying structures, one of which
assigns the meaning: "it can be a challenge to fly model aircraft!",
while the other is construed: "model aircraft that fly can
be a challenge!". Also there is the ability to distinguish
nonsensical but grammatically well-formed strings (such as "colourless
green ideas sleep furiously") from strings that possess neither
semantic coherence nor grammatical structure (such as "sleep
colourless green furiously ideas"). Chomsky’s point is
that language-users are vastly more resourceful – or less at
the mercy of environmental factors – than could ever be explained
by stimulus-response models of linguistic or cognitive grasp.
Besides,
there were some large philosophical, ethical, and socio-political
issues bound up with this debate about the scope and nature of linguistic
creativity. Behaviourism treated human beings as malleable creatures
whose beliefs and conduct were entirely shaped by their passive
response to ambient physical or verbal stimuli. In which case (Skinner
urged) they had better be subject to the right sorts of stimuli
– or social conditioning – so as to ensure their compliance
with acceptable norms. For Chomsky, such arguments are not just
philosophically bankrupt but also a pretext for the worst, most
repressive forms of mass-indoctrination or thought-control. They
deny the competence and the right of each individual to form their
own, critically considered judgement on issues of moral conscience
as regards, say, the US record of involvement in conflicts from
Vietnam to Iraq, or the effective suppression of dissident voices
through "voluntary" control of media access by compliant
editors and journalists. Behaviourism merely elevates this habit
of passive acquiescence to the status of a full-scale programmatic
doctrine in the social and human sciences, a doctrine (moreover)
with thinly veiled punitive sanctions attached.
In
Cartesian Linguistics and other works Chomsky invokes an
alternative philosophical tradition, one that counters this denial
of freedom and responsibility by stressing the inherent rationality
of mind and its freedom to exercise powers of autonomous judgement.
Among the central figures are Descartes and the Port Royal logician-grammarians
of the seventeenth century, thinkers who placed a high value on
just those distinctively human attributes. There are certain problems
here, not only as concerns that original project, but also with
Chomsky’s claim to derive substantive ethico-political values
from such a narrowly rationalist epistemology. Perhaps this explains
his more recent reluctance to be drawn on the topic, no doubt reinforced
by conservative opponents who are apt to say that if a link exists
between Chomsky’s linguistic theories and his political views,
then the theories had better be junked along with the politics.
His
work stands as a powerful riposte to some of the shabbier intellectual
complicities of our time, as well as having made an immensely original
contribution to linguistics and cognitive psychology.
Suggested
reading
Cartesian Linguistics, Noam Chomsky (Harper & Row)
Language and Politics, Noam Chomsky (Black Rose Books)
The Chomsky Reader, ed. James Peck (Pantheon)
Christopher
Norris is distinguished research professor in philosophy at Cardiff
University.
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured mid January 2004
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