Chomsky E-Book

James McGilvray

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 516

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Noam Chomsky has made major contributions to three fields: political history and analysis, linguistics, and the philosophies of mind, language, and human nature. In this thoroughly revised and updated volume, James McGilvray provides a critical introduction to Chomsky's work in these three key areas and assesses their continuing importance and relevance for today.

In an incisive and comprehensive analysis, McGilvray argues that Chomsky’s work can be seen as a unified intellectual project. He shows how Chomsky adapts the tools of natural science to the study of mind and of language in particular and explains why Chomsky's "rationalist" approach to the mind continues to be opposed by the majority of contemporary cognitive scientists. The book also discusses some of Chomsky’s central political themes in depth, examining how Chomsky's view of the good life and the ideal form of social organization is related to and in part dependent on his biologically based account of human nature and the place of language within it. As in the first edition, McGilvray emphasizes the distinction between common sense and science and the difference between rationalist and empiricist approaches to the mind, making clear the importance of these themes for understanding Chomsky's work and showing that they are based on elementary observations that are accessible to everyone. This edition has been extensively re-written to emphasize Chomsky's recent work, which increasingly 'biologizes' the study of language and mind and - by implication - the study of human nature.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy, linguistics, and politics, as well as to all those keen to develop a critical understanding of one of the most controversial and important thinkers writing today.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Introduction

A brief biography

1: Chomsky's Contributions

Chomsky's contributions and access to them

The beginning

The natural science of language

Political analysis and criticism

Philosophy of language and mind

The unity of Chomsky's work?

2: The Mind and Its Sciences

Introduction

The issues for the scientist of mind and the strategies

Naturalistic methodology and the study of mind

Natural science

Rationalism vs. empiricism: the strategy for the naturalistic study of mind

3: Partitioning the Mind: Bad and Good Cognitive Science

Problem-solving and beyond

An illustration

The status of cognitive science: Fodor's first error

Computational theories of the mind: Fodor's second error

The selection–adaptation gambit

Modularity: is it enough?

On being innate

4: Human Problem-Solving Capacities

What does the mind do?

Science-formation and commonsense understanding: focusing on concepts

Displaying commonsense concept characters

Examples with false cousin concepts

Accepting the gap

Resistance to the gap in studying the mind

Encapsulating the differences

The status of capacities

Natural limitations on the mind

Overview and conclusion

5: The Science of Language

Where to find a science of language: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics

Comparison to Frege

Language as formal function

Complete theories?

Progress in linguistics

How the Principles and Parameters (P&P) framework makes a sentence

Binding theory

X-bar theory

Movement, progress, perfection – and evolution

Coping with differences

6: Linguistic Meanings and Their Uses

Words to perspectives to interpretations

Deep Structure again

Computation and inclusiveness

Again, the lexicon

Stereotypes, atomicity, and Fodor's misinterpretation of atomicity

Chomsky and Cudworth on interpretation: “innate cognoscitive power” and prolepsis

Relevance of the science of language to politics?

7: Chomsky on Politics: Some Basic Themes

Focusing

Chomsky's focus and style in political writing

Power and its abuse

The manufacture of consent

The anarchosyndicalist conception of persons and their social organization

8: Language and Politics: Justification

The needs of human nature

The relativist's challenge, the new social science, and projection

Orwell's problem

Biological humanist?

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Published:

Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau

Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–1989

Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco

M. J. Cain, Fodor

Filipe Carreira da Silva, G. H. Mead

Rosemary Cowan, Cornel West

George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin

Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi

Oliver Davis, Rancière

Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell

Reidar Andreas Due, Deleuze

Eric Dunning, Norbert Elias

Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett

Chris Fleming, Rene Girard

Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir

Andrew Gamble, Hayek

Neil Gascoigne, Richard Rorty

Nigel Gibson, Fanon

Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin

Karen Green, Dummett

Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell

Christina Howells, Derrida

Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz

Simon Jarvis, Adorno

Sarah Kay, Žižek

S. K. Keltner, Kristeva

Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said

Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls

Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler

James McGilvray, Chomsky

Lois McNay, Foucault

Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl

Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes

Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak

Harold W. Noonan, Frege

James O'Shea, Wilfrid Sellars

William Outhwaite, Habermas, 2nd Edition

Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner

Herman Paul, Hayden White

Ed Pluth, Badiou

John Preston, Feyerabend

Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall

William Scheuerman, Morgenthau

Severin Schroeder, Wittgenstein

Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous

Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn

David Silverman, Harvey Sacks

Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman

James Smith, Terry Eagleton

Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor

Felix Stalder, Manuel Castells

Geoffrey Stokes, Popper

Georgia Warnke, Gadamer

James Williams, Lyotard

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick

Copyright © James McGilvray 2014

The right of James McGilvray to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4989-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4990-0(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5645-8(epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5646-5(mobi)

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Preface

Unlike many second editions, this book is substantially rewritten. I rewrote it to emphasize two things. First, I emphasize here much more than I did in the earlier edition Chomsky's view that the science of language should be – and in the case of his work, is – a natural science. He does not study language in the way the sociolinguist, almost every philosopher, and most psychologists and computational modelers do – as language in use, a form of human behavior. He instead uses the methods of the natural scientist, and treats language as a biological ‘organ’, a biophysical system in the human head (and human head alone) that like any other biologically based organ grows and develops automatically, given appropriate input.

Second, I emphasize the nature of natural science methods, and explain why and how language is best studied scientifically by respecting the goals of these methods. Because of this, a much larger part of this version than of the last deals with what philosophers call “epistemology,” and specifically, to a branch of this form of study found in the philosophy of science.

And new to this edition, I add a glossary of some of the technical terms in Chomsky's linguistics. It appears at the end of the main text.

As in the earlier edition, though, I continue to emphasize the difference between the kind of understanding of the world afforded us by commonsense understanding and that offered by natural science. Chomsky's political work is found in the commonsense domain, his study of language in the scientific. And again as in the earlier edition, I suggest a way in which these two aspects of his work can be related.

I am grateful to many for discussion, criticism, and insight, but particularly to Prof. Chomsky himself. I have enjoyed many interchanges with him and benefitted greatly from discussion, including that which appears in print in a volume called The Science of Language, hereafter designated as C&M. I am also very grateful for critical comments and suggestions from readers for Polity, for the patience and encouragement of Polity's Senior Commissioning Editor, Emma Hutchinson, and for the careful and clarifying attention to the text by my copy editor, Fiona Sewell. Finally, I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for invaluable financial support used in the preparation and writing of this work.

Errors in the text that remain are entirely my responsibility.

Introduction

This book is an introduction to Chomsky's work in linguistics, politics, and the philosophies of mind and language. I have tried to make the material in it accessible to anyone willing to read carefully and think about the text. But it will require attention and thought. There are several reasons for this.

Because Chomsky's work questions generally received assumptions about the nature of language, the understanding of the human mind, the status of social organizations and their justification, the sciences of language and mind, limitations on the human mind, the nature of biological evolution, the status of science and its form of understanding, and the concept of human nature and its needs, no one should expect that understanding Chomsky's views will be easy.

Further, it is not enough in an introduction to Chomsky's work just to outline his views on topics like these. In order to actually understand what he is up to, you must also understand why he adopts the views that he does. That requires investigating his basic assumptions and why he maintains them – what justification they have, if any. He has tried in various ways to help his reading audiences do this. Perhaps the most successful of those ways is found in his contrast between what he calls the “rationalist” approach to the study of mind and the “empiricist” one. That contrast is explained in detail in the text. He places his work as a scientist in the rationalist camp and, ironically, points out that the empiricists are not empirical scientists in their attempts to understand the mind, while the rationalists are. I will explain why and, like Chomsky, will make historical references to figures in both the rationalist (especially René Descartes) and empiricist traditions. But judging by the reactions and decisions even of many of those who claim to offer sciences of language and mind, it can be difficult to abandon the empiricist view. It is for many the default approach.

Complicating matters still further, Chomsky's science of language and the methods he adopts for constructing it have dominant roles in his thought – even, I suggest, in what he has to say about human nature and politics. So it is important to come to understand what that science and method are and – perhaps even more important – to understand what kind of science and method they are. For Chomsky, and very much unlike the majority of those who try to study language, the science of language is a natural science like physics or chemistry, differing not in methods, but only in subject matter. So we must take a close look at his view of science, and the science of language and mind in particular. Doing that is an exercise in a branch of what philosophers call “epistemo­logy,” the study of knowledge and belief and their justifications. In particular, it requires a close look at Chomsky's philosophy of science. After outlining Chomsky's accomplishments in chapter 1, I turn to that topic. Some might find discussion of the nature of science and of scientific knowledge remote from their everyday concerns. And it is – but there is an important lesson in that that needs emphasis. If you do not understand Chomsky's views on scientific method, you cannot understand the nature of his science of language, or hoped-for science of human nature. Nor can you understand the ways in which a natural science of the mind could play a role in constituting and justifying a political ideal.

There is another reason for focusing from the start on Chomsky's views on science, and on the sciences of mind – including language – in particular. In recent years there has been a growing emphasis on what Chomsky and others call “biolinguistics.” Chomsky has from the beginnings of his study of language in the 1950s assumed that the study of language must somehow come to be coordinated with the study of biology. There are several reasons for this. One is that humans alone have language; many other creatures have communication systems, but not language. Unless language is a gift from a god, then, it must have appeared in the human species as the result of an evolutionary change – likely a single mutation in a single humanoid who gained from language a capacity for complex and context-independent thought and transmitted this to progeny. Another reason for assuming this is that on the evidence, language is not learned, but develops automatically, which suggests that its development or growth is like that of an organ in a biological organism. Still another reason for it is that the study of language, like the study of another mental system, vision, meets the methodological standards of the natural sciences, not the social sciences. That suggests that language is a natural object, not some kind of socially constructed institution, and thus that its study can be coordinated with other natural sciences – biology, among others. In fact, biology – especially in the form of what is called “evo-devo” (for evolution-development) – is the only science that can plausibly deal with a system that has evolved, that grows automatically as biological organs do, and that is studied with the tools of natural science. In any case, while Chomsky has long assumed that the study of language must be coordinated with biology, it is only relatively recently that it has become possible to make progress in accomplishing this and beginning to address the question of how language evolved. That is because of progress in the science of language. I will explain what biolinguistics is and attempt also to explain why ‘biologizing’ language is so important to Chomsky's attempts to construct a science of human nature. And I will attempt to outline Chomsky's Enlightenment project of coming to understand humans as natural objects with language and an innate moral sense – central aspects of what can be called his “biological humanism.” I hope to make this challenging task an interesting one by trying to involve readers in Chomsky's intellectual challenges.

A glossary of some technical terms of linguistics appears at the end of the main text.

A brief biography

Avram Noam Chomsky was born December 7, 1928 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents William and Elsie Chomsky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His informal education began with his mother's radical politics and his experience of the Depression, which included violent treatment by authorities of workers. His education began at a Deweyite school run by Temple University, a school that emphasized creative self-development rather than instruction according to a set curriculum. He thrived in this environment, producing at the age of ten an editorial for the school newspaper that discussed the fall of Barcelona during the Spanish Revolution and lamented the growth of fascism in Europe and elsewhere. The reading he did for that editorial and into his early teens proved sufficient many years later to allow him to write a trenchant and detailed review of a scholarly book on the Civil War. His teenage years were punctuated by train trips alone to New York where he spent time with a politically active uncle who ran a newsstand. Engaging with the leftist communities there gave Chomsky an opportunity to develop his political knowledge and views, complementing his contributions to and activism in left Zionist youth groups in Philadelphia.1 These trips also give him the opportunity to visit used bookstores, helping satisfy his voracious appetite then and now for the intellectual stimulation of reading. His interest in political discussion and critique continued thereafter, although it did not come to be expressed in mainstream society until 1964 with his prominent role in protests against the Vietnam War. Chomsky's basic anarchosyndicalist political alignments have not changed during his life; they continue to inform his study of current affairs and guide his political critique. But they have come to be strengthened and given a deeper foundation in his view of human nature and his efforts to contribute to a science of human nature, in which the science of language has a crucial part.

Chomsky's experience at a Philadelphia high school was considerably less satisfying than his early grade school years: he discovered that he was supposed to be a “good student,” but rebelled against the demand for conformity to curriculum and obedience that this was thought to demand. His experience at the University of Pennsylvania – he began there at the age of 16 – was for the first two years disappointing; it was like his high school experience. It became very interesting later, however: a few instructors challenged him, accepting him almost immediately as a junior scholar and treating him even in his undergraduate years as a graduate student. It was at Penn that he discovered language with linguist Zellig Harris (who was also involved in left Zionist politics), developed the formal-mathematical tools of natural science with mathematician Nathan Fine, and evolved and refined an interest in the philosophy of science and its pursuit with philosopher Nelson Goodman. Goodman (who a few years later moved to Harvard) helped arrange an appointment for Chomsky as a Harvard Junior Fellow, which proved to be very important in Chomsky's developing career. It brought him into close association with important thinkers in various fields, and provided him the time and opportunity to develop independently a massive work called The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT), a chapter of which was submitted as his PhD dissertation at Penn. Never published in full, the 900-plus page manuscript was during the 1950s distributed in microfilm and primitive paper copies, and it helped establish Chomsky among a few specialists as an individual who had developed a new formal and mathematical approach to the study of language. Chomsky was later given credit for helping to initiate what is now called the “cognitive revolution” – although Chomsky himself insists that the real cognitive revolution took place in the seventeenth century with the work of Galileo and Descartes. LSLT was eventually published in part in the 1970s. Chomsky's first major published work was Syntactic Structures (1957). It amounted largely to lecture notes for a class given at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) populated primarily by prospective physicists, mathematicians, and early proponents of something called “information theory.” They – and eventually many others – were intrigued by Chomsky's formal approach to natural language, an approach that eventually turned the study of language into a progressing form of natural science. Some students became linguists themselves. Perhaps the work that most brought attention from a larger group including psychologists and philosophers, however, was his devastating 1959 review of behaviorist B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. That, and his 1964 decision, when his career was already thriving, to again participate in political analysis and critique with his principled rejection of the US invasion of Vietnam, broadened his audience eventually to a worldwide one.

There was never a guarantee that Chomsky would become a linguist. His intellectual development depended to a significant extent on coming into contact with the right individuals, and even to some extent on historical accident: seeking a deferment from the military draft at the end of the 1940s, he applied for graduate work leading to a PhD. And in fact, even after Chomsky's experience at the University of Pennsylvania and some of the Harvard fellowship, he and his wife very nearly decided to return to Israel to live on a kibbutz (Chomsky 1987). The attractions of an intellectually challenging career and an opportunity to work out some of the consequences of his undergraduate and Penn MA theses (The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew) led to the decision to stay in the US, however. After the fellowship, he joined MIT, where he was engaged on a machine translation project – a project that for various reasons had little chance of success. Syntactic Structures, however, convinced MIT to initiate a program in linguistics with Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky as faculty. The program soon attracted outstanding students such as Robert Lees, and excellent young staff, including Jerrold Katz and Jerry Fodor. Along with Chomsky's work in linguistics, and aided by the massive amount of reading he did of historical figures in linguistics and philosophy during his fellowship and thereafter (and still), he began to develop a broader framework for the study of language and mind (his rationalism), and began also to integrate his work on language with developing work in ethology, investigations of human nature, and studies of evolution and biology. While rarely recognized for the systematic and comprehensive philosopher that he is (perhaps especially among professional philosophers, whose mistakes he routinely exposes, deflating egos nurtured within what has become a specialty with mistaken assumptions), this work places him within a small group of individuals whose work has universal relevance and interest.

Chomsky retired recently, but he continues his work in linguistics, politics, and philosophy. It is still very difficult to get to see him, and bookings for his lectures are still arranged years in advance. His wife and lifelong support Carol died in December 2008. He visibly aged thereafter, but remains intellectually vigorous and firmly committed to working in linguistics, the study of mind, and political critique, continuing to travel worldwide to give talks in all these areas. He thinks of himself as just a “worker,” however – an intellectual worker. And he strives to be a responsible one. For what that amounts to – it reveals a lot about the man – see the last chapter.

Note

1 Left Zionists at the time were against the establishment of a Jewish state.

1

Chomsky's Contributions

Chomsky's contributions and access to them

Noam Chomsky works in several intellectually important areas and has made significant contributions to others, including some developing fields. Perhaps the most prominent areas in which he works are linguistics, political analysis and criticism, and the philosophies of language and mind. In this chapter, I will outline these contributions and describe how they have been received. At the end of the chapter, I will say something about the extent to which Chomsky's intellectual contributions relate to one another – the extent to which his science of language relates to his political views through his view of the human mind and human nature.

The beginning

Chronologically speaking, Chomsky's first contributions were to political and social analysis. At the age of ten, he wrote an essay on the Spanish Civil War and the spread of fascism, noting the role of the fall of Barcelona and Toledo in this regard. This and other early contributions were unrecognized except by a small group associated with his Deweyite grade school run by the Temple University in Philadelphia. The reading he did in preparation for this article in his grade school newspaper indicated his strong interest in politics. Continued reading in political affairs during his early teenage years sufficed to write many years later a sophisticated review of Gabriel Jackson's scholarly book on the Spanish Civil War.

There is a lesson in Chomsky's early intellectual achievement in the social/political domain. Perhaps surprisingly, it should not be seen as particularly unusual or remarkable. Any child of his age who focuses their interests in the way he did could do it – although very likely now, of course, with a different political issue. That is because everyone, including the fairly young, has available the tools of folk psychology, which – when joined to a critical attitude supplemented by efforts to find out what actually happened rather than accepting what one is told happened by government officials or standard media sources – suffice to produce a sophisticated essay or discourse on this or other political matters. Other children have managed similar ‘feats’, although not often with the politics of a region of the world and how it is affected by the economic and military imperial ambitions of powerful states. Many children can recite in detail the statistics for players on a football team and assess the chances of the team succeeding. Many others might read in detail and keep up on the exploits of various ‘celebrities’, engaging in sophisticated talk with others about their favorites. Still others can speak with authority on the benefits of various computers and computer games. In effect, other children like the young Chomsky have used the tools of folk psychology to develop remarkably sophisticated understandings of sports and of other domains of human interest and interaction. Sometimes they can assess as well as adults the prospects of a team or the foibles of their parents and other adults. Chomsky's accomplishments in his grade school and early teens relied on the same tools as did theirs: describing people's actions in specific domains and figuring out their interests and motivations. Granted, the fact that Chomsky focused his interest on the actions of people in the political domain does not by itself suffice to explain his sophisticated review of Jackson's book. Clearly, in addition Chomsky had – and has – an extraordinarily good memory and capacity to organize thoughts. He has a very well honed critical attitude. And he describes himself as a “fanatic” in his efforts to gather information. In his teenage years, he would take trips alone to used bookstores in New York to find materials to read. He continues to read massive amounts of material in various fields. Some of these factors make him unusual, but a basic point remains: all people have the intellectual capacity needed to understand, assess, and make decisions in the political and social domains. There is no need for specialized knowledge of the sort needed in the advanced mathematical-formal sciences such as chemistry, physics, or the mathematical linguistics that Chomsky first developed. This difference – and the explanation for the differences in accessibility and ‘expertise’ in the sciences as opposed to politics and other areas of human concern – is one of Chomsky's central themes. I return to it several times, and especially in the fourth chapter.