Lecture 1: Comments

Here are some comments on lecture 1 (here). I’ll try to comment on the others as I get through them sometime in the next couple of weeks.

The aim of the first lecture is to locate the Generative enterprise conceptually. Chomsky notes there have been two lasting themes since the inception: (i) that the central fact about Natural Language is that it involves the generation of an infinite array of hierarchically structured objects that link to systems of thought and systems of externalization; The aim of GG being to describe this I-language in detail. (ii) Language is a biological system, not a social construct. It should be studied the way other such biological systems are studied; the aim being to figure out the underlying structure of its phenotypical properties.

Given these two themes there are several obvious projects: (a) study the structure of I-langauge, (b) study how I-language is acquired (c) study how I-language emerged in the species.  None of this is new or exciting to readers of this blog, I would hope. What is fun to see is how Chomsky understands these projects in a wider philosophical and historical context.  Chomsky is very very good at giving a broad sweep history of earlier influences and differences that the modern perspective has adopted. He’s very good at comparing his views to those of these important precursors.  It’s actually amazing how many giant’s shoulders are trotted out for perching on (Darwin, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Galileo, Locke, Hume, von Humboldt, Russell, Turing, Church, Kleene) and how many views are dumped on (Dummett, Quine, Lewis, Tomasello, Construction Grammarians, Churchlands). 

I especially enjoyed Chomsky’s discussion of the history of the calculus and the early history of Chemistry. He makes a point that he has made before but is worth repeating in the current cultural climate. The point is that methodological pronouncements often lead us astray if the history of science is any indication. Newton’s calculus had real foundational problems, ones that Berkeley identified. It seems that parts of the system were based on equivocations, which vitiated many of the proofs. British mathematicians took Berkeley’s arguments very seriously with the result that they contributed almost nothing to the next steps in the development of the calculus. Continentals basically ignored these problems and made fundamental contributions to its development.  When were these problems resolved? At the end of the 19^th century when solving them really were required for the problem with infinitesimals started impeding mathematical progress.  So are fuzzy equivocal concepts always bad and resolving them always good? Not if history of science is the guide. Sometimes the fuzziness should be tolerated for too much conceptual fussiness has its costs.

I cannot help but think that this has relevance for some issues that we have debated on this blog concerning the utility of formalization in current linguistics. There are some that find the concepts too fuzzy to be born. Others think them clear enough, while conceding problems that will be cleared up when the need arises. We all know who we are. What Chomsky notes is that history on these matters doesn’t always (or even usually) come down on the side of methodological hygiene. Or, really, being careful matters more at some times than at others and one needs to show that a “confusion” is impeding progress before one insists on stopping research that ignores it in its tracks.

I also loved Chomsky’s discussion of the history of the “reduction” of Chemistry to Physics. There was none. The prestige science, physics, never succeeded in explaining chemistry. Rather physics had to change radically before it had anything to say about chemistry, whose methods remained effectively unchanged.  Chomsky, notes that there is every reason to think that this is the same now in domains of relevance to linguists. Think the reduction of the mental to the neural. There is a presupposition that the soft mental sciences must adjust their findings to fit in with the hard brain sciences. The history of chemistry suggests, however, that this reading, even if correct, is tendentious.  Error can come anywhere and when there is a problem it is never obvious what theory requires adjustment.  Moreover, at least in the case of minds and brains, Chomsky notes that there are reasons for thinking that the brain people are barking up the wrong trees. He notes Gallistel&King’s work suggesting the neuro types have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick. Readers of this blog will recognize that I could not agree more.

There are many other excellent riffs in this two hour segment. Chomsky does an excellent job of identifying intellectual precursors and outlining where he thinks they got things right and where wrong.  He arranges his discussion of different conceptions of language around Darwin, Descartes and von Humboldt, noting how each could be seen on focusing attention in I-language as the proper object of study. Darwin by understanding that language was a biological system instrumental in undergirding the distinctive nature of human (vs animal) cognition, Descartes by seeing the creativity of human language as a completely distinctive kind of natural phenomenon calling for a novel kind of scientific approach, von Humboldt by zeroing in on the recursive property of language as the thing that needed explaining. Chomsky also notes that their conceptions required some cleaning up to get to the ones that we now take as fundamental: that what is studyable is linguistic competence, not linguistic behavior, that language really is qualitatively different form what we see in other parts of the biological and physical world, and that there are some aspects of language (and cognition) that may forever stay shrouded in mystery.

Chomsky also sets the stage for his coming minimalist disquisition. He does this in two ways. First, he reviews the logic that drives the search for a few very simple principles that allow for the emergence of FL. He notes that the capacity for language is very recent, and has been stable since its emergence. This implies that whatever prompted its emergence is very simple and very few in number; hopefully a single addition. Second, he notes that the target of explanation is the recursive systems that produces an infinite array of hierarchical expressions that ling to systems of externalization and meaning, the latter being more basic (hour 1;14). An aside: one interesting point Chomsky makes given recent discussions in the comments section here, is his observation that we know next to nothing about the system of thought and its objects (hour 1;15). That would appear to make the role of Bare Output Conditions marginal in what follows, but that’s just a hunch so stay tuned.

There’s lots more: comments on the roles of reference as a semantic primitive (nope!), on how far we should expect to be able to understand the world and our theories of them (the first, not at all, the second up to a point), the importance of being puzzled, the hollowness of most current discussion on the evolution of language and much more. The lecture is a little like some of Dylan’s concert albums with the Band. The songs, though familiar, are all played slightly differently, so they are familiar without being boring and part of the fun is humming along. Sort of high class comfort food. Chomsky has a knack for making the big picture accessible in a way that nobody else can. This is a fun 2 hours. I hope that once he gets technical, it stays as scintillating. I suspect however that come lecture 2 it’ll be time to fasten one’s seatbelt and put all trays into an upright and locked position.

Addendum:

Chomsky makes one point that is relevant to some prior discussions on this blog. He points out that assuming that FL is a real biological object licenses using a very wide array of data to triangulate on its properties. Dat from Japanese bears on the structure of English Gs, and data from acquisition bears on the structure of English Gs and data from processing bears on the structure of English Gs and…In other words, once one sees our theories as theories OF FL then there is (at least in principle) no way of a priori delimiting what data will count as useful in probing its structure. This, Chomsky notes, contrasts with earlier structuralist conceptions wherein the aim was simply a way of effectively organizing a set of data or corpus. Here, anything beyond such data is irrelevant. The same holds if one considers the object of study instrumentally or Platonistically. Such views serve to a priori blinker investigation by dismissing empirical considerations that go  beyond the particular <s,m> pairs before one's nose. In other words, understanding theories to be about FL/UG realistically construed widens the scope of one's inquiries.