The sludge at the bottom of the barrel

It is somewhat surprising that Harper’s felt the need to run a hit piece by Tom Wolfe on Chomsky in its August issue (here). True, such stuff sells well. But given that there are more than enough engaging antics to focus on in Cleveland and Philadelphia one might have thought that they would save the Chomsky bashing for a slow news period. It is a testimony to Chomsky’s stature that there is a publisher of a mainstream magazine who concludes that even two national conventions featuring two of the most unpopular people ever to run for the presidency won’t attract more eyeballs than yet another takedown of Noam Chomsky and Generative Grammar (GG).

Not surprisingly, content wise there is nothing new here. It is a version of the old litany. Its only distinction is the over the top nuttiness of the writing (which, to be honest, has a certain charm in its deep dishonesty and nastiness) and its complete disregard for intellectual integrity. And, a whiff of something truly disgusting that I will get to at the very end. I have gone over the “serious” issues that the piece broaches before in discussions of analogous hit jobs in the New Yorker, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Aeon (see here and here for example). Indeed, this blog was started as a response to what this piece is a perfect example of: the failure of people who criticize Chomsky and GG to understand even the basics of the views they are purportedly criticizing.

Here’s the nub of my earlier observations: Critics like Everett (among others, though he is the new paladin for the discontented and features prominently in this Wolfe piece too) are not engaged in a real debate for the simple reason that they are not addressing positions that anyone holds or has ever held. This point has been made repeatedly (incuding by me), but clearly to no avail. The present piece by Wolfe continues in this grand tradition. Here's what I've concluded: pointing out that neither Chomsky nor GG has ever held the positions being “refuted” is considered impolite. The view seems to be that Chomsky has been rude, sneaky even, for articulating views against which the deadly criticisms are logically refractory. Indeed, the critics refusal to address Chomsky’s actual views suggests that they think that discussing his stated positions would only encourage him in his naughty ways. If Chomsky does not hold the positions being criticized then he is clearly to blame for these are the positions that his critics want him to hold so that they can pummel him for holding them. Thus, it is plain sneaky of him to not hold them and in failing to hold them Chomsky clearly shows what a shifty, sneaky, albeit clever, SOB he really is because any moderately polite person would hold the views that Chomsky’s critics can demonstrate to be false! Given this, it is clearly best to ignore what Chomsky actually says for this would simply encourage him in articulating the views he in fact holds, and nobody would want that. For concreteness, let’s once again review what the Chomsky/GG position actually is regarding recursion and Universal Grammar (UG).

The Wolfe piece in Harper’s is based on Everett’s critique of Chomsky’s view that recursion is a central feature of natural language. As you are all aware, Everett believes that he has discovered a language (Piraha) whose G does not recurse (in particular, that forbids clauses to be embedded within clauses). Everett takes the putative absence of recursion within Piraha to rebut Chomsky’s view that recursion is a central feature of human natural language precisely because he believes that it is absent from Piraha Gs. Everett further takes this purported absence as evidence against the GG conception of UG and the idea that humans come with a native born linguistic facility to acquire Gs.  For Everett human linguistic facility is due to culture, not biology (though why he thinks that these are opposed to one another is quite unclear). All of these Everett tropes are repeated in the Wolf piece, and if repetition were capable of improving the logical relevance of non-sequiturs, then the Wolfe piece would have been a valuable addition to the discussion.

How does the Everett/Wolfe “critique” miss the mark? Well, the Chomsky-GG view of recursion as a feature of UG does not imply that every human G is recursive. And thinking that it does is to confuse Chomsky Universals (CU) with Greenberg Universals (GU). I have discussed this before in many many posts (type in ‘Chomsky Universals’ or ‘Greenberg Universals’ in the search box and read the hits). The main point is that for Chomsky/GG a universal is a design feature of the Faculty of Language (FL) while for Greenberg it is a feature of particular Gs.[1] The claim that recursion is a CU is to say that humans endowed with an FL construct recursive Gs when presented with the appropriate PLD. It makes no claim as to whether particular Gs of particular native speakers will allow sentences to licitly embed within sentences. If this is so, then Everett’s putative claim that Piraha Gs do not allow sentential recursion has no immediate bearing on the Chomsky-GG claims about recursion being a design feature of FL. That FL must be able to construct Gs with recursive rules does not imply that every G embodies recursive rules. Assuming otherwise is to reason fallaciously, not that such logical niceties have deterred Everett and friends.

Btw: I use ‘putative claim’ and ‘purported absence’ to highlight an important fact. Everett’s empirical claims are strongly contested. Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues (NPR) have provided a very detailed rebuttal of Everett’s claims that Piraha Gs are recursiveless.[2] If I were a betting man, my money would be in NPR. But for the larger issue it doesn’t matter if Everett is right and NPR are wrong. Thus, even were Everett right about the facts (which, I would bet that he isn’t) it would be irrelevant to his conclusion regarding the implications of Piraha for the Chomsky/GG claims concerning UG and recursion.

So what would be relevant evidence against the Chomsky/GG claim about the universality of recursion? Recall that the UG claim concerns the structure of FL, a cognitive faculty that humans come biologically endowed with. So, if the absence of recursion in Piraha Gs resulted from the absence of a recursive capacity in Piraha speakers’ FLs then this would argue that recursion was not a UG property of human FLs. In other words, if Piraha speakers could not acquire recursive Gs then we would have direct evidence that human FLs are not built to acquire recursive Gs. However, we know that this conditional is FALSE. Piraha kids have no trouble acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP), a language that everyone agrees is the product of a recursive G (e.g. BP Gs allow sentences to be repeatedly embedded within sentences).[3]  Thus, Piraha speakers’ FLs are no less recursively capable than BP speakers’ FLs or English speakers’ FLs or Swahili speakers’ FLs or... We can thus conclude that Piraha FLs are just human FLs and have as a universal feature the capacity to acquire recursive Gs.

All of this is old hat and has been repeated endlessly over the last several years in rebuttal to Everett’s ever more inflated claims. Note that if this is right, then there is no (as in none, nada, zippo, bubkis, gornisht) interesting “debate” between Everett and Chomsky concerning recursion. And this is so for one very simple reason. Equivocation obviates the possibility of debate. And if the above is right (and it is, it really is) then Everett’s entire case rests on confusing CUs and GUs. Moreover, as Wolfe’s piece is nothing more than warmed over Everett plus invective, its actual critical power is zero as it rests on the very same confusion.[4]

But things are really much worse than this. Given how often the CU/GU confusion has been pointed out, the only rational conclusion is that Everett and his friends are deliberately running these two very different notions together. In other words, the confusion is actually a strategy. Why do they adopt it? There are two explanations that come to mind. First, Everett and friends endorse a novel mode of reasoning. Let’s call it modus non sequitur, which has the abstract form “if P why not Q.”  It is a very powerful method of reasoning sure to get you where you want to go. Second possibility: Everett and Wolfe are subject to Sinclair’s Law, viz. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. If we understand ‘salary’ broadly to include the benefits of exposure in the high brow press, then … All of which brings us to Wolfe’s Harper’s piece.

Happily for the Sinclair inclined, the absence of possible debate does not preclude the possibility of considerable controversy. It simply implies that the controversy will be intellectually barren. And this has consequences for any coverage of the putative debate.  Articles reprising the issues will focus on personalities rather than substance, because, as noted, there is no substance (though, thank goodness, there can be heroes engaging in the tireless (remunerative) pursuit of truth). Further, if such coverage appears in a venue aspiring to cater to the intellectual pretensions of its elite readers (e.g. The New Yorker, the Chronicle and, alas, now Harper’s) then the coverage will require obscuring the pun at the heart of the matter. Why? Because identifying the pun (aka equivocation) will expose the discussion as, at best, titillating gossip for the highbrow, at middling, a form of amusing silliness (e.g. perfect subject matter for Emily Litella) and, at worst, a form of celebrity pornography in the service of character assassination. Wolfe’s Harper’s piece is the dictionary definition of the third option.

Why do I judge Wolfe’s article so harshly? Because he quotes Chomsky’s observation that Everett’s claims even if correct are logically irrelevant. Here’s the full quote (39-40):

“It”—Everett’s opinion; he does not refer to Everett by name—“amounts to absolutely nothing, which is why linguists pay no attention to it. He claims, probably incorrectly, it doesn’t matter whether the facts are right or not. I mean, even accepting his claims about the language in question—Pirahã—tells us nothing about these topics. The speakers of this language, Pirahã speakers, easily learn Portuguese, which has all the properties of normal languages, and they learn it just as easily as any other child does, which means they have the same language capacity as anyone else does.”

A serious person might have been interested in finding out why Chomsky thought Everett’s claims “tell us nothing these topics.” Not Wolfe. Why try to understand issues that might detract from a storyline? No, Wolfe quotes Chomsky without asking what he might mean. Wolfe ignores Chomsky's identification of the equivocation as soon as he notes it. Why? Because this is a hit piece and identifying the equivocation at the heart of Everett’s criticism would immediately puncture Wolfe’s central conceit (i.e. heroic little guy slaying the Chomsky monster).

Wolfe clearly hates Chomsky. My reading of his piece is that he particularly hates Chomsky’s politics and the article aims to discredit the political ideas by savaging the man. Doing this requires demonstrating that Chomsky, who, as Wolfe notes is one of the most influential intellectuals of all time, is really a charlatan whose touted intellectual contributions have been discredited. This is an instance of the well know strategy of polluting the source. If Chomsky’s (revolutionary) linguistics is bunk then so are his politics. A well-known fallacy this, but not less effective for being so. Dishonest and creepy? Yes. Ineffective? Sadly no.

So there we have it. Another piece of junk, but this time in the style of the New Journalism. Before ending however, I want to offer you some quotes that highlight just how daft the whole piece is. There was a time that I thought that Wolfe was engaging in Sokal level provocation, but I concluded that he just had no idea what he was talking about and thought that stringing technical words together would add authority to his story. Take a look at this one, my favorite (p. 39):

After all, he [i.e. Chomsky, NH] was very firm in his insistence that it [i.e. UG, NH] was a physical structure. Somewhere in the brain the language organ was actually pumping the UG through the deep structure so that the LAD, the language acquisition device, could make language, speech, audible, visible, the absolutely real product of Homo sapiens’s central nervous system. [Wolfe’s emphasis, NH].

Is this great, or what! FL pumping UG through the deep structure. What the hell could this mean? Move over “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” we have a new standard for syntactically well-formed gibberish. Thank you Mr Wolfe for once again confirming the autonomy of syntax.

Or this encomium to cargo cult science (37):

It [Everett’s book, NH] was dead serious in an academic sense. He loaded it with scholarly linguistic and anthropological reports of his findings in the Amazon. He left academics blinking . . . and nonacademics with eyes wide open, staring.

Yup, “loaded” with anthro and ling stuff that blinds professionals and leaves neophytes agog. Talk of scholarship. Who could ask for more? Not me. Great stuff.

Here’s one more, where Wolfe contrasts Chomsky and Everett (31):

Look at him! Everett was everything Chomsky wasn’t: a rugged outdoorsman, a hard rider with a thatchy reddish beard and a head of thick thatchy reddish hair. He could have passed for a ranch hand or a West Virginia gas driller.

Methodist son of a cowboy rather than the son of Russian Askenazic Jews infatuated with political “ideas long since dried up and irrelevant,” products “perhaps” of a shtetl mentality (29). Chomsky is an indoor linguist “relieved not to go into the not-so-great outdoors,” desk bound “looking at learned journals with cramped type” (27) and who never left the computer, much less the building” (31). Chomsky is someone “very high, in an armchair, in an air conditioned office, spic and span” (36), one of those intellectuals with “radiation-bluish computer screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts” (31) never deigning to muddy himself with the “muck of life down below” (36). His linguistic “hegemony” (37) is “so supreme” that other linguists are “reduced to filling in gaps and supplying footnotes” (27).

Wowser. It may not have escaped your notice that this colorful contrast has an unsavory smell. I doubt that its dog whistle overtones were inaudible to Wolfe. The scholarly blue-pallored desk bound bookish high and mighty (Ashkenazi) Chomsky versus the outdoorsy (Methodist) man of the people and the soil and the wilderness Everett. The old world shtetl mentality brought down by a (lapsed) evangelical Methodist (32). Trump’s influence seems to extend to Harper’s. Disgusting.

That’s it for me. Harper’s should be ashamed of itself. This is not just junk. It is garbage. The stuff I quoted is just a sampling of the piece’s color. It is deeply ignorant and very nasty, with a nastiness that borders on the obscene. Your friends will read this and ask you about it. Be prepared.

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[1] Actually, Greenberg’s own Universals were properties of languages not Gs. More exactly, they describe surface properties of strings within languages. As recursion is in the first instance a property of systems of rules and only secondarily a property of strings in a language, I am here extending the notion Greenberg Universal to apply to properties all Gs share rather than all languages (i.e. surface products of Gs) share.

[2] Incidentally, Wolfe does not address these counterarguments. Instead he suggests that NPR are Chomsky’s pawns who blindly attack anyone who exposes Chomsky’s fallacies (see p.35).  However, reading Wolfe’s piece indicates that the real reason he does not deal with NPT’s substantive criticisms is that he cannot. He doesn’t know anything so he must ignore the substantive issues and engage in ad hominem attacks. Wolfe has not written a piece of popular science or even intellectual history for the simple reason that he does not appear to have the competence required to do so.

[3] It is worth pointing out that sentence recursion is just one example of recursion. So, Gs that repeatedly embed DPs within DPs or VPs within VPs are just as resursive as those that embed clauses within clauses.

[4] See Wolfe’s discussion of the “law” of recursion on 30-31. It is worth noting that Wolfe seems to think that “discovering” recursion was a big deal. But if it was Chomsky was not its discoverer, as his discussion of Cartesian precursors demonstrates. Recursion follows trivially from the fact of linguistic creativity. The implications of the fact that humans can and do acquire recursive Gs are significant. The fact itself is a pretty trivial observation.

A typological trap

Are the critics right? Is there scant evidence for universals? The right answer is that it all depends what you mean by ‘universal.’ If by this you intend a Greenberg Universal (GU) then it might be right (in fact, as you will see below, I think it should be right). If by this you mean a Chomsky Universal (CU) then you are not likely right. There is a big difference between these two and the empirical success of GG rests on keeping them firmly distinguished. Why? Because a priori there is little reason to think that there are many GUs out there. There may be a few, but the standard GG universals if understood as candidate GUs are not likely among them. When critics of GG argue that it’s hard to find universals expressed in the world’s many languages, they understand ‘universals’ as GUs. And here they may well be right!  However, as GG commits itself to CUs and not GUs it requires quite some ancillary argument to conclude from the absence of GUs to the non-existence of CUs.

Indeed, from a perfectly normal “scientific” point of view, we should not expect to find many GUs. What do I mean? Well, think of the analogues of GUs in a real science, like Newtonian mechanics. We observe that bodies fall. We ask what makes bodies fall. We propose that bodies “fall” because of gravitational attraction. In particular, there is a force G that causes bodies (i.e. masses) to attract. Larger masses exert a stronger pull than smaller ones. Thus, bodies much smaller than the earth, say a ball, will “fall” in the sense that the mass of the earth will more strongly attract the mass of the ball than vice versa. This will make it appear that the ball “falls” to earth when it is released (rather than the earth “falls” to the ball).  That’s the story, and a good one it is, though we now know that it needs amending, especially if the ball is travelling near the speed of light. At any rate, what’s this have to do with GUs?

Well, is it indeed phenomenologically accurate that when we observe falling bodies in the wild we observe them acting in accord with Newton’s law of gravitation? Nope. Note even close. A leaf drops from a tree.  Does it appear to fall in accordance with the law of falling bodies. Not on your life.  Drop a ball into lake and see how long it takes to hit bottom (or if it hits bottom at all). Does it appear to drop in accordance with the law of falling bodies? Nahh! Or take a body that is electrically charged and drop it in an electrical field and see if Newton’s law suffices to describe its trajectory. It doesn’t. What’s the right conclusion: that gravity is not a cause of falling bodies, that things don’t universally attract (i.e. fall)? Not on your life. Why?

Here’s the conventional wisdom. We understand that the law of falling bodies is not intended as a description of what we see outside our window. It describes one relevant force in causing what we see. And this force in complex interaction with many other factors, causes observed physical behavior. Thus, we know that shape matters (not just mass) if the object is not dropped in a vacuum (and vacuums are pretty rare out there in the real world). We know that the consistency of the space into which an object drops also matters (less frictional resistance in air than in water  and less in air than in mercury). We know that electrical charges exert forces on electrically charged objects and so this, as well as mass, can effect a falling object’s trajectory. If the object is small enough, then other factors may intercede as well. If shaped a certain way, drop an object into water and it will float rather than fall. So many factors stand between dropping and falling and nonetheless gravity does explain why bodies fall.

What’s this mean? It means that whatever the law of falling bodies is, it is not a description of what we see when we look at the world outside our window. In other words, it is not GUish.[1] It is not a description of the immediately phenomenal world, but a proposal about one of the fundamental forces that act on bodies and this force is (often) an important causal factor in determining how bodies that we see fall actually do fall. Pure expressions of the law take careful experimental set up. Indeed, we must control for many other factors, before we can “see” gravity’s effects.[2]

There is an excellent discussion of just how complex this is in Cartwright (here, chapter 4). I have discussed her main points in previous posts (see here). For current purposes, Cartwright makes two very important observations. First, that it takes a lot of work to hook a law up to observation. This is what a good experiment does. It establishes a way of observing the effects of abstract non-observable features to visible effects. It creates a “nomological machine,” a way of hooking up the underlying capacities to surface regularities. And, this is the important part:

There is no fact of the matter what a system can do just in virtue of having a given capacity. What it does , depends on its setting, and the kinds of settingsnecessary for it to produce systematic and predictable results are very exceptional (73).

So, gravity can be seen in action, but only if we arrange things very carefully! And if this is true of gravity, why should it be less true of a principle of UG?  Of course it might be different in the mental sciences, but it might not be, and assuming that linguistic “laws” (aka principles of UG) must be apparent to inspection in the wild is little more than methodological dualism (a real no-no).

Returning to the main topic, GUs are typological generalizations. They describe (and are intended to describe) generalizations thought to be observable across languages, surface generalizations. Why are we surprised that not many can be found? Why are we surprised that the UG principles proposed are not “surface true”? Why should we expect the visible surface properties of language to express the underlying grammatical forces at work any more than we expect the phenomenological observables of real world events to distinctly manifest their underlying causes (e.g. the law of gravity in bodies observed falling around us). We don’t in the latter, and shouldn’t in the former. Which brings us to CUs.

Chomsky understood universals to be properties of FL, FL being the specifically linguistic contribution that minds exploit to build language particular Gs. From the get-go, these were understood to be quite abstract, and to not be inducible from the simple inspection of the surface properties of sentences. Thus, CUs were not intended to be surface true, anymore than gravity is. Thus, the absence of GUs does not imply the non-existence of CUs any more than the phenomenological inadequacy of the laws of gravity to describe what happens when any object falls any time anywhere invalidates Newton’s theory of gravity and its explanation for the law of falling bodies.

IMO, none of this is or should be controversial. I mention it because it seems easily forgotten.  Linguists (or many of them) are currently quite skeptical that we have discovered any universals. But this is because many forget the distinction between GUs and CUs. Doing so leads to skepticism precisely because there is every reason to believe that universals understood as Greenbergian objects are not (and should not be) thick on the linguistic ground. Thus, when critics point out that such GUs are not pervasive we should agree and say that nobody thought (or should have thought) they would be. And then loudly repeat that GUs are not CUs and CUs is what we are looking for.

Why the warning? Because, it seems to me that typological work invites the inference that linguists are on the hunt for GUs and that GGers agree with critics of the Chomsky program that universals ought to be understood as GUs. But this is a mistake, one that misunderstands what GG is about. To repeat a venerable theme: GG takes the object of study to be the structure of FL/UG, not the properties of languages. These latter are interesting to the degree that they illuminate the former. And there is no reason to think that linguistic principles, any more than any other scientific principles, will be visible in the data used to investigate them.

Let me make this point another way. IMO, there is no way that something like FL/UG does not exist (see here and here for a defense). That FL/UG exists is a virtual truism. What’s in FL/UG is not. Thus, what’s up for grabs is the fine structure of FL/UG, not whether it exists. Here’s another triviality: language exhibits the properties of FL/UG only in interaction with many other adventitious linguistic factors, many non-linguistic cognitive factors and probably much else (like the weather, time of day, and who knows what else). This means that we expect the fine structure of FL/UG to be hard to discern and we do not expect it to sit out there waiting to be spotted by (even careful) observation. 

In fact, I would go further (as you knew I would). I suspect that the only really good way to argue for a CU is via something like a POS argument.  Looking at lots of languages and Gs might be helpful (see here), but if you want to zero in on potential candidate universals, there is nothing like a POS argument. Why? Because, POSs limn the borders of the grammatically possible. That’s what’s so nice about them. Inductive surveys of many Gs cannot do this. POSs are the linguistic analogue of Cartwright’s nomological machines. They afford the most direct access to CUs, and for those interested in FL/UG, CUs are the principle objects of interest.

So be careful out there. Languages and their fabulous intricacies can be confusing. It’s not that hard to mistake Greenberg Universals for Chomsky Universals, and it’s a slippery slope from there the dreaded vice of Empiricism (and its concomitant horrors (e.g. connectionism). So watch your step when you go into the field.

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[1] As I’ve noted before, there is a tendency to understand universals as patterns in the data waiting to be revealed. Finding universals is then roughly a problem in signal processing in which the judicious use of statistical techniques will find the signal in the often very noisy noise. This conception understands universals as GUs. It is not the right model of a CU. For discussion see here. Incidentally, mistaking GUs for CUs will eventually lay low Deep Learning/Big Data approaches to language. The latter count on the fact that all universals will be GUs. If this is false, and it is, then such approaches cannot succeed, and so they won’t. Of course it will take time for this to become evident and by then another fad will sweep the Empiricist world.

[2] There is an excellent discussion of just how complex this is in Cartwright (here, chapter 4). I have discussed her main points in previous posts (see here).

My (HOPEFULLY) last ever post on Vyvyan Evans and his endless dodging of the central issues

I was going to write something long and pointed in response to this new piece by Vyvyan Evans (VE). I was going to analyze the article noting its inflated combination of self-pity (those “Chomsky disciples” are saying that my work is junk) and self-aggrandizement (I am the leader of a Kuhnian paradigm shift that will overthrow the Chomskyan orthodoxy that, prior to the heroic efforts of people like me, who are now being viciously pilloried by the intellectually enervated Generative establishment, has had a stranglehold on linguistic pedagogy). I was going to note that VE has yet to address a single criticism leveled against his work, preferring instead to personalize the disagreement in a two fold manner; first by noting his personal travails in fighting the Chomskyan dragon and second by citing the approval of various authorities and luminaries that think him and his work wonderful. However, despite the obvious temptations that VE’s public demeanor make almost irresistible, his latest piece has convinced me that nothing much will be gained by doing this (fun as it may be).[1] The reason is that so far VE has provided every kind of reply to the criticisms leveled against his work except one that addresses the identified problems with his chief “arguments” (and yes, these are scare quotes).  These number three.[2]

1.     VE’s work fails to grasp the difference between a Greenberg and a Chomsky Universal. As such its putative arguments against UG are logically insufficient to get to their desired conclusions (see here and here).[3]

2.     The positions VE’s work identifies and argues against are (regularly and repeatedly) caricatures based on egregious serial misquotation. In particular, the texts that VE’s work cites are very selectively quoted from and when the originals are consulted it is clear that the quoted authors are making the exact opposite points from the ones that VE’s work attributes to them (see here and links therein).

3.     The detailed linguistic arguments VE delivers are inadequate. Not only does the work evidence no understanding of the larger conceptual issues like those in (1) above, it even screws up the technical analytic details (see here for one example examined in detail).

Let’s review these three points again one last time.

First, VE really does not understand what is logically necessary to make his case. This is because VE (still) does not understand how the ‘Universal’ in ‘Universal Grammar’ means. Let me elaborate.

There are two basic conceptions of universal in the linguistics literature. Let’s call them Greenberg Universals (GU) and Chomsky Universals (CU). GUs aim to describe surface patterns common to all languages. GUs thus focus on word order patterns (both prevalent and absent, absolute and statistical) such as the rarity of OVS patterns across the world’s languages and the prevalence of SVO and SOV. GET THE NUMBER OF THESE There are other GUs as well, and some have been the focus of some interesting discussion in the Generative literature in the last several years.[4] However, whatever the theoretical and empirical interest of such GUs, they are different from what Generativists of the Chomsky stripe have meant by ‘universal.’ How so?

Well, CUs do note refer to surface linguistic patterns but to properties of the Faculty of Language (FL) and the formal and substantive restrictions FL imposes on competence grammars (G). Let’s unpack this a bit by taking an example or two of a proposed CU.

A popular CU is the principle that restricts G rules to structure dependent operations (i.e. the G rules are stated in terms of structural features of phrase markers rather than linear properties of strings). Another popular one restricts “movement rules” from applying across islands. A third example is the principle that restricts anaphoric elements from c-commanding their antecedents.  These have been proposed as candidate Universals (i.e. principles that delimit the range of possible grammatical operations and relations, thereby restricting the class of admissible generative procedures available to humans). Note, that CUs refer not to surface outputs like GUs do but to the properties of the Gs that generate a given linguistic object’s meaning-sound outputs. As such, CUs are only indirectly related to surface patterns.

So UG on a CU conception is a description of the restrictions that FL places on the kinds of Gs that human natural languages allow. Thus, on a CU conception, UG describes the general characteristics of human Gs and also thereby limns (some of) the fine structure of the higher-level capacity that humans have which undergirds their capacity to acquire the kinds of Gs that they in fact acquire. Note that empirically investigating CUs logically requires going beyond the inspection of surface distributions (in contrast to GUs). It logically requires investigating the features of Gs. And this requires moving beyond observed surface patterns to the underlying Gs that generates them.

So, say you think that this CU conception of UG and FL is hogwash, how do you argue against it? Well, you need to show (most ambitiously) that Gs can have arbitrary structure (i.e. there is no limit to the kinds of rules, operations and structures that human Gs can have) or (more modestly) you must demonstrate that the universals that GGers have actually proposed are wrong. VE’s work does neither, or does neither competently (see below). Why not? Well here is my diagnosis: VE’s arguments completely fail because VE does not understand the difference between a GU and a CU.  How would this explain VE’s practice? It would explain why VE’s main argument against UG has the structure it does. What is that structure? It amounts to the assertion (i) that natural languages display a very wide variety of surface variations and (ii) that this attested variation in the world’s languages implies (or, more modestly, strongly suggests) that there are no CUs. But this, to repeat, is a non-sequitur, unless, of course one takes CUs to be GUs, which, to repeat, they are not!

More specifically, the confusion between GUs and CUs vitiates VE’s arguments as follows: though surface variation directly bears on GU claims, it has an indirect  relation to whether there are CUs. To demonstrate that surface variation undermines UG in the CU sense requires showing that surface variation implies unbounded G variation. But nobody’s work has ever shown that, and certainly not VE’s. Indeed, VE’s work has not even tried to show this. Rather it has simply asserted (and asserted and asserted and…) that the evident linguistic surface variation found among the world’s languages (which, btw, is not really news to GGers, at least not for the last 40 years) undermines claims for UG.

In sum, VE’s work has not demonstrated that surface variation requires different kinds of G rules, nor has it discussed the rather extensive empirical literature that aims to show how very different surface patterns can all be generated using the same basic kinds of Gs. As this has been one of the mainstays of GG research over the last 40 years (and there are literally thousands of pages that have been written on tupological variation by GGers), this means that VE’s work has not discussed the empirical literature relevant to making even the modest claim against UG noted above. Rather, VE’s work reduces to the assertion of a logical non-sequitur (incessantly repeated as if repeating the same thing again and again and again and… boosts its verisimilitude)[5]; because languages display a very large variety of distinct surface patterns therefore the Gs that generate these patterns cannot have common properties.[6]

Let me note, in a charitable vein, that the confusion between GUs and CUs is understandable. Undergrads confuse them all the time. VE’s work does too. Consequently, VE’s arguments are based on a pun (i.e. confusing two uses of the concept ‘universal’) and hence cannot hope to show what they intend. In other words, VE’s arguments are prime examples of the fallacy of equivocation. This is one very important reason why these arguments are worthless (dare I say junk!).[7]

So the first problem with EV’s criticism of Chomskyan GG is that it is based on an equivocation and is thus without intellectual interest (though sociologically, well, that’s another matter).  However, this is not the worst thing about VE’s critique, for one might argue that this is a rather subtle mistake (though, it really isn’t). The two other problems with his work are that it is both dishonest and incompetent.  Let’s take these in turn.

First the dishonesty. It has been amply demonstrated that VE’s work has troubles with quotation. David Pesetsky deserves credit for making this point repeatedly in e-discussions with VE. The same point has also been made by others (see here and links therein for a particularly clear set of detailed examples). This egregious misquotation alone should have made the work unpublishable. It certainly suggests that the “review” process that CUP conducted was far from thorough.[8] I strongly urge those skeptical of my claims to take a careful look at the relevant discussions linked to above. The misquotation is really appalling given that it consistently attributes to people the opposite positions to the ones that they are actually offering and then criticizing them on the basis of the severely distorted misquoted passages.

Last but not least, VE’s work is technically incompetent. VE appears not to know his way around a syntactic argument, at least as regards the work he criticizes. This further vitiates VE’s work. After all, one very good rule of critical thumb is that one know something about what one is criticizing. So if you want to criticize the Chomskyan view of universals then you should know a lot about the arguments for and against them. VE’s work is sadly lacking in this respect. I have gone over one example in detail here. EV’s discussion here gets everything wrong; from the description of the relevant data to be explained to the typological contrast at issue to the sentences relevant to adjudicating the claims. In other words, it is technically wrong in every possible way. An undergrad that submitted this as a homework would not have been happy with the resulting grade. Once again, this suggests that the six who reviewed VE’s work for CUP were either not expert in the relevant fields or, just as likely, did not read the book carefully before pronouncing on its merits. These are intro to syntax errors. CUP clearly needs a better vetting process.

As noted at the outset, I intend this to be my last post on VE’s work. I know that I have sounded harsh, but that’s because I wanted to sound harsh as the work VE has produced is really very bad. It is confused, incompetent and more than a tad dishonest.  IMO, this makes it junk in the sense that it teaches us nothing about the vices or virtues of the Chomskyan Generative program. In fact, it’s worse than that: it cannot teach us anything, as the arguments are based on misquotation, equivocation and technical incompetence. This is why I have repeatedly called it ‘junk.’

However, the fact that this work has been published, and apparently endorsed by many luminaries, is insightful. It tells us a lot about the intellectual atmosphere that surrounds us. IMO, most of this junk stems from a resurgent Empiricism, a particularly crude version in fact. For reasons I actually do not well understand, the idea that humans are built to speak is considered provocative. The further possibility that this native capacity is in some ways domain specific is considered by many to be absurd. Both of these reactions to linguistic nativism are, to my mind, nutty. Here’s why.

That we are biologically built for language is a truism. After all, name another physical object or biological being that does what we do linguistically?  There are none, or at least none that we know of.  In short, the claim that we are biologically “language ready” is about as exciting as noting that the sun rises in the East, unless, of course, you don’t believe that our mental capacities are biologically grounded. And nobody believes that! Hence, that we are “language ready,” biologically built for language, is a truism.

How about the second claim; that what makes us language ready relies on language specific powers and capacities rather than more general cognitive wherewithal? This is not a truism if true. But nor is it absurd. It is what we call in the trade “an empirical issue.” If true, then it argues against simplistic tabula rasa theories of mind. This makes it a favorite target of the Empiricistically inclined. However, one of the glories of GG has been to show how this question can be made empirical rather than philosophical. GG has shown how to argue for and against the language specificity of our linguistic powers. Should linguistic competence be reducible to other more general non-linguistic competences, that would be a fascinating discovery. IMO, this prospect is currently very unlikely (though being a card carrying minimalist I hope (and I know that hoping is one thing and showing another) that many linguistic specific FL/UG details can be off-loaded to more general cognitive operations of other third factors).[9] However, I can see how this might be accomplished in principle. This said, I also know what needs to be done to show this; people who think that linguistic competence does not involve a language specific FL need to show how to explain the mass of data that GGers have discovered and analyzed over the last 60 years without invoking language specific concepts and mechanisms. Nothing short of this will serve. The problem with VE’s work (and that of many others who have preached the same sermon about the demise of GG) is that it completely fails to engage with this work. That’s why it’s intellectual junk, albeit sociologically very revealing.

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[1] I will even refrain from commenting on VE’s most impressive riposte, namely his threat to sue critics (see here). This indiscrete polemical feint was quietly withdrawn and expunged from the record by VE, sans apology. Given the alternatives, I prefer VE’s current less bellicose strategy of simply avoiding discussion of the main issues.

[2] At least these are the major problems. There are a host of lesser ones that the posts linked to above also review.

[3] VE’s latest post linked to above seems to have trouble with many other conceptual distinctions. For example, VE has a problem distinguishing a program from a theory. Chomsky has always been careful to distinguish the two notions. For example, GB theory was part of the P&P program. At this moment, there are many minimalist theories animated by the leading ideas of the Minimalist Program. Thus, Chomsky’s distinction between program and theory is in no way an empirical retreat in the face of empirical findings, as VE suggests.  It’s just the normal way of conducting scientific  business.

           

[4] Cinque initiated a lively discussion concerning GU 20. And people like David Adger have investigated GU 20 like effects in an artificial language learning setting (as discussed here).

[5] Sadly, it does boost its truthiness, which is precisely what the agnotologically inclined count on. Repetition can serve to provide the appearance of controversiality (i.e. the idea that there are two sides to a question) even when one of the sides is based on equivocation, as in this case where GUs are confused for CUs.

[6] It is worth adding that VE’s work does not discuss the now substantial literature that analyzes GUs from a GG perspective. It appears that some GUs are well grounded empirically. Further, there are some interesting attempts to explain their properties using standard arguments based on UG (and other) principles.  It is unclear why EV’s work does not discuss these given their obvious relevance to his basic claims.

[7] I leave as an exercise for the reader the application of the GU/CU equivocation as applied to Everett’s Piraha discussion. This is the poster child against CUs that is endlessly trotted out. It too suffers from the confusion endemic to VE’s oeuvre. See here and here for more detailed discussion.

[8] I mention this because VE seems to point to the fact that six “world leading experts” blessed the book for CUP before publication. They may have blessed it, but it seems that they didn’t read it, at least not carefully.

[9] Let me mention one more confusion that VE seems to have fallen into. Chomsky has conjectured that most of what earlier theories postulated as linguistic specific features of UG could and should be reinterpreted in less linguistically parochial terms. He as further conjectured that the only linguistically specific operation (and even this may not be proprietary to FL he has at times surmised) is Merge.  It is important to note that this is a conjecture, and that’s what makes the Minimalist Program a program. Whether Chomsky is right, is currently being aggressively investigated. For what it is worth, IMO, we are still far from grounding this conjecture empirically, though we have made some very interesting analytic connections in trying to realize it.  Importantly, for Chomsky to be right requires deriving earlier GG results using these less linguistically specific notions. This has not yet been done. In other words, no current minimalist theory has yet realized the ambitions of the program. Is this a problem? Not obviously. Why not? Because this is just how science works. Let me explain.

Programs are not true or false but fecund or sterile. They are judged fecund to the degree that they engender theories that can be empirically evaluated as true and false. In other words, good science attempts to realize fecund programs in various explanatory empirically grounded theories. Theories are constantly proposed, elaborated, and rejiggered in face of puzzles. This is normal science. VE does not seem to appreciate this (could it be because he is not actually a practitioner?).

Nor does he seem to understand what Kuhn intended by an anomaly. Anomalies are problems that current theory cannot accommodate given its current conceptual apparatus (e.g. black body radiation given classical mechanics) not things that theory appropriately revamped doesn’t happen to cover. The former require deep conceptual revisions (hence the revolution) the former require revamping the details of the current conceptions (hence their being normal science). At any rate, this confusion between program and theory leads VE to say, not surprisingly, several odd things and to misrepresent the state of play in current GG.