Dr. Noam Chomsky
1928–, educator and linguist, b. Philadelphia. Chomsky, who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, developed a theory of transformational (sometimes called generative or transformational-generative) grammar that revolutionized the scientific study of language. He first set out his abstract analysis of language in his doctoral dissertation (1955) and Syntactic Structures (1957). Instead of starting with minimal sounds, as the structural linguists had done, Chomsky began with the rudimentary or primitive sentence; from this base he developed his argument that innumerable syntactic combinations can be generated by means of a complex series of rules.
According to transformational grammar, every intelligible sentence conforms not only to grammatical rules peculiar to its particular language, but also to “deep structures,” a universal grammar underlying all languages and corresponding to an innate capacity of the human brain. Chomsky and other linguists who built on his work formulated transformational rules, which transform a sentence with a given grammatical structure (e.g., “John saw Mary”) into a sentence with a different grammatical structure but the same essential meaning (“Mary was seen by John”). Transformational linguistics has been influential in psycholinguistics, particularly in the study of language acquisition by children. In the 1990s Chomsky formulated a “Minimalist Program” in an attempt to simplify the symbolic representations of the language facility.
Chomsky is a prolific author whose principal linguistic works after Syntactic Structures include Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Language and Mind (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), and Knowledge of Language (1986). In addition, he has wide-ranging political interests. He was an early and outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and has written extensively on many political issues from a generally left-wing point of view. Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974), Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding (1982) [this is actually a book on linguistics, not politics --www.chomsky.info], Manufacturing Consent (with E. S. Herman, 1988), Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s controversial bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state.”
See biography by R. F. Barsky (1997); interviews with D. Barsamian (1992, 1994, 1996, and 2001); studies by F. D’Agostino (1985), C. P. Otero (1988 and 1998), R. Salkie (1990), M. Achbar, ed. (1994), M. Rai (1995), V. J. Cook (1996), P. Wilkin (1997), J. McGilvray (1999), N. V. Smith (1999), A. Edgley (2000), and H. Lasnik (2000); Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (film by P. Wintonick and M. Achbar, 1992) and Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times (documentary film dir. by J. Junkerman, 2002).
Saeid's questions for Dr. Chomsky:
Saeid's notes from Chomsky's works:
Chomsky has until recently seemed rather indifferent as to how his universal grammar might be represented in the brain. Steven Rose
‘I would like to discuss an approach to the mind that considers language and similar phenomena to be elements of the natural world, to be studied by ordinary methods of empirical inquiry’ (p. 106).
The initial state of the language faculty, fixed by genetic endowment, can be thought of as a ‘language acquisition device’
An I-language is a generative procedure that determines a set of structural descriptions.
Indeed, Chomsky is quite explicit that naturalistic theories will fall short of providing a full account of human action such as the
communicative use of language (p. 28).
Bertrand Russell asked, “How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?”
Answers:
- Aristotelian lines: the world is structured in a certain way and that the human mind is able to perceive this structure, ascending from particulars to species to genus to further generalization and thus attaining knowledge of universals from perception of particulars. A “basic of pre-existent knowledge” is a prerequisite to learning.
- a more fruitful approach shifts the main burden of explanation from the structure of the world to structure of the mind. What we can know is determined by “the modes of conception in the understanding. What we do know, then, or what we come to believe, depends on the specific experiences that evoke in us some part of the cognitive system that is latent in the mind.
- conformity of objects to our mode of cognition, the mind provides the means for an analysis of data as experience, and provides as well a general schematism that delimits the cognitive structures developed on the basis of experience. (Kant’s idea)
Chomsky’s answer to that question:
Or systems of belief are those that the mind, as a biological structure, is designed to construct. We interpret experience as we do because of our special mental design. We attain knowledge when the “inward ideas of the mind itself and the structures it creates conform to the nature of things.
It is generally assumed that in these domains, social environment is the dominant factor. The structures of mind that develop over time are taken to be arbitrary and accidental; there is no “human nature” apart from what develops as a specific historical product. According to this view, typical of empiricism speculation, certain general principles of learning that are common in their essentials to all (or some large class of) organisms suffice to account for the cognitive structures attained by humans, structures which incorporate the principles by which humans behavior is planned, organized, and controlled. I dismiss without further comment the exotic though influential view that “internal states” should not be considered in the study of behavior.
Why has it been so causally assumed that there exists a “learning theory” that can account for the acquisition of cognitive structures through experience?
No doubt what the organism does depends in part on its experience, but it seems to me entirely hopeless to investigate directly the relation between experience and action.
If we are interested in the problem of “causation of behavior” as a problem of science, we should at least analyze the relation of experience to behavior into two parts:
1. relates experience to cognitive state
2. mechanism, which relates stimulus conditions to behavior, given the cognitive state
the proper way to exorcise the ghost in the machine is to determine the structure of the mind and its products.
Body and mind are two substances, one an extended substance, the other a thinking substance. The first falls within mechanical philosophy, the latter not.
Galileo forged a new model of intelligibility for human understanding,
When mechanism fails, understanding fails.
Alexander Koyre: Newton demonstrated that “a purely materialistic physics” is “impossible.”
Early in the seventeenth century Rene Descartes proposed a mechanistic approach to physics, asserting that all causal influence is transmitted by direct contact between material entities. Like Aristotle, he rejected the idea of vacuum, believing that there can be no space (extension) without substance. In accord with his philosophy, Descartes denied the intelligibility of weight as a primitive quality of matter, and argued that material bodies are impelled toward the Earth by the impulse of particles of a “second species of matter” continually arriving at the Earth from all directions. |
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In the second half of the century, Isaac Newton deduced from a combination of terrestrial and celestial phenomena that every two particles of matter are compelled toward each other with a force directly proportional to their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them. This “universal gravitation” provided a unified account of a wide range of phenomena that had previously seemed inexplicable and unrelated, but it was apparently contrary to the mechanistic precepts of Descartes, because it implied that widely separated bodies exert forces on each other directly, without explicit reference to any intervening substance. In private correspondence, Newton (on at least one occasion) disavowed the notion of direct action at a distance, but at the same time he allowed for the possibility that the means by which the action of gravity is transmitted may not be material – in which case the Cartesians would still regard it as unintelligible action at a distance. Indeed, Newton’s overall approach was much more consistent with the view of the ancient atomists, i.e., that nature consists of atoms moving according to abstract mathematical laws in an empty void, and he frequently stated that gravity might be a primary attribute of matter, with no material intervening mechanism. |
Question:
You noted in one of your books, On Nature and Language, different reasons of why Descartes was proven wrong, can you tell us for what reasons?
Julian Jaynes argued to the contrary, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, that for consciousness to arise in a person, language needs to have reached a fairly high level of complexity. According to Jaynes, human consciousness emerged as recently as 1300 BCE or thereabouts. Many philosophers, including W.V. Quine and neuroscientists, including Christof Koch, contest this hypothesis, as it suggests that prior to this "discovery" of consciousness, experience simply did not exist.[13] Ned Block argued that Jaynes had confused consciousness with the concept of consciousness, the latter being what was discovered between the Iliad and the Odyssey.[14] Daniel Dennett argues that consciousness is like money in that having the thing requires having the concept of it, so it is a revolutionary proposal and not a ridiculous error to suppose that consciousness only emerges when its concept does.
We may say that humans are innately endowed with a system of intellectual organization, call it the “initial state” of mind. Through interaction with the environment and maturational process, the mind passes through a sequence of states in which cognitive structures are represented.
What I have called elsewhere “the creative aspect of language use” remains much a mystery to us as it was to the Cartesians who discussed it, in part, in the context of the problem of “other minds.”
Two ways to construct a theory of learning
1. to postulate a schematism, innate to the mind, that is refined and further articulated by experience
2. to suppose that the mind is a blank tablet, equipped only with ability to record impressions and retain faded impressions, to match impressions, to generalize along dimensions that are innate or constructed, to modify the probability of response in terms of contingencies of reinforcement defined in terms of the stimulus space, and so on
Polyarchy
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In modern political science, the term Polyarchy (Greek: poly many, arkhe rule)[1] was introduced by Robert A. Dahl, now emeritus professor at Yale University, to describe a form of government that was first implemented in the United States and gradually adopted by many other countries. According to Dahl, the fundamental democratic principle is that, when it comes to binding collective decisions, each person in a political community is entitled to have his or her interests be given equal consideration. A polyarchy is a nation-state that has certain procedures that are necessary conditions for following the democratic principle.
Does the doctrine mean that a theory of mind should be “continuous and harmonious with today’s physic?
Saeid's Questions for Dr. Chomsky
Questions about consciousness are problems or mysteries.Behaviorism Question: As you mentioned in the preface of your review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, the review was a general critique of behaviorist or empiricist tenets. One of those tenets was their Lockean notion of the mind, believing that individual human beings are born with no innate mental content; it is a blank slate, Tabula Rasa. But your Cartesian skepticism led you to believe that the brain cannot be tabula rasa because of some logical flaws in Locke’s tabula rasa. Can you explain what is wrong with this proposition? And why Descartes believed that the only thing that we cannot doubt is our “thinking matter,” Cogito Ergo Sum? Question: Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate, writes, “[although the genes of the brain are the governors of behavior] …our work showed that in the brain as in bacteria, genes also are servants of the environments. They are guided by events in the outside world.” Bates and Elman in their articles, Rethinking Innateness, suggest, “No learning rule can be entirely devoid of theoretical content nor can the tabula ever be completely rasa.” First of all, why do you think that the word “learning” is misleading in terms of child’s acquisition of language? And secondly, we know that the brain evolved to interact with outside world efficiently, productively, and safely. What would be the roles of external forces that are impinged upon us? Mystery vs. Problem Question: You have suggested that our ignorance of anything can be divided into the problems and the mysteries. Dr. Patricia Churchland believes that “Use of our current ignorance as a premise to determine what we can never discover is one common logical flaw.” Churchland argues that there was a time that vitalists thought that life is a mystery, but it turned out to be a problem, which was unraveled by the discovery of the structure of DNA. What are the basis or bases of your argument about the mysteriousness of the mind, particularly consciousness and free will? On the Mind-Body Problem Question: In several of your essays, you turn to the history of science and, in particular, to the way in which Newton demolished the “mechanical philosophy.” Based on that development in science, why do you think that the traditional mind-body problem had no coherent formulation and was “no longer tenable”? Question: The new version of the mind-body problem was apparently resurrected by Bertrand Russell. His thought experiment of a blind physicist has recently been re-invented in many forms by other philosophers. He asked us to imagine “a blind physicist who knows all of physics but doesn’t know something we know: what it is like to see[, for example,] the color blue.” His conclusion was that what the natural sciences are seeking is what he called “the causal skeleton of the world,” despite the fact that “other aspects of the world of experience lie beyond their reach.” A group of philosophers have endorsed this view, believing that subjective experience has no reductive explanation. What is your position on this? Evolution Question: Daniel Dennett, in his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, believes that “the origin of the human mind must be attributed to some process firmly anchored on the solid ground of materialism and natural selection.” It seems that you’re leery of believing that FLN, faculty of language in the narrow sense, is “an adaptation for ‘communication.’” Dennett criticizes your position on FLN as a “Saltational view of the mind”. Why do you think that this “powerful recursive mapping capability by definition” in human language is unlikely to be formed by natural selection for enhancing communication? And why is Dennett wrong in his characterization of your view? On Neuroscience Do you hold any hope that the collaboration between neuroscience and molecular biology along with linguistics and philosophy would eventually become a new emerging science of the mind? /p>
Occult qualities
Reductionsim: inquiry into the matter leads to empirical hypothesis about biological endowment, interactions with the environment, the nature of the states attained, and their interactions with other systems of the mind (articulatory, perceptual, conceptual, intentional)
A related problem is to explain what are “philosophical accounts of our minds, our knowledge, our language, and how they differ from scientific accounts”
Baldwin (1993: 171) he opens by noting that “A prominent theme of current philosophy is that of the “naturalisation of philosophy
Dennett: one of the happiest trends in philosophy in the last twenty years has been its Naturalzation”(p:171)
Baldwin found two different types of naturalization at work in current philosophy
1. Metaphysical
2. Epistemic(Dennett: “philosophical accounts of our minds, our knowledges, and language must in the end be continuous with, and harmonious with the natural science
Naturalistic approach:
Seeking to construct intelligible explanatory theories