Noam Chomsky (6 page)

Now that the 27-year-old Chomsky was established at
MIT
, the best centre for the applied sciences that the world has to offer, there was a real question as to what his purpose should be, given that applied science was the farthest thing from his mind. Since he was to devote half his time to teaching, there was some potential. Initially he coached PhD students for their language requirements, preparing them for their French and German exams. As this was a task not requiring great intellect – indeed the language requirements were later dropped– there was another lucky break in sight. The
MIT
academic calendar offered a course on language and philosophy. This had been largely dormant due to lack of suitable lecturers, but Chomsky took over and never looked back.

Teaching his very own mix of philosophy and linguistics, Chomsky soon accumulated a wealth of manuscripts and original lecture notes, which in turn became the basis for his immense publications record. His first book,
Syntactic Structures
(1957), is based on his notes for an undergraduate course at
MIT
for engineers, mathematicians and scientists. That’s why so much of its early sections are devoted to Markov sources and finite automata, and to showing why they won’t work – it was almost holy writ that they must work. Both Chomsky and Mouton, the book’s Dutch publishers, became trademark names in linguistics.
Syntactic Structures
was not an immediate runaway success in terms of commercial sales, but it nevertheless eventually became a bestseller as a classic volume in contemporary linguistics. Every self-respecting linguist must have a copy on his/her bookshelf, even if it is never read or understood. Indeed
Syntactic Structures
, as all of Chomsky’s publications in linguistics, is quite hard to read and understand as he takes no prisoners when it comes to technical complexity. Starting off with some innocent-sounding axiomatic statement like ‘let us assume that x equals y+1’, there is an avalanche of logical implications that necessitate the reader continually checking back to previous passages in order to follow the line of thought proposed by Chomsky. Infuriating his critics, Chomsky is not averse to amending the axioms if new data requires it. As this is a matter of course in the natural sciences, Chomsky to this day cannot understand what the fuss is all about. While hard-core linguists battled with the new concepts proposed in
Syntactic Structures
, Chomsky caught the public imagination with ‘A Review of B. F. Skinner’s
Verbal Behavior’
, published in 1959 in the widely read linguistics journal
Language
. As mentioned earlier, the article deals with Skinner’s model of language as learned behaviour. That behaviourism was a dubious theory – best suited to the advertising industry and propaganda – was clear to Chomsky from the start; his main aim was not to discredit Skinner but to prevent the theory gaining in credibility, especially in philosophy and linguistics (as in science in general). Hence, more importantly, this was an attack on another Harvard icon, the philosopher W. V. Quine, who had embraced aspects of behaviourism in his model of a naturalized philosophy, parading as scientific empiricism. As such Chomsky simply demonstrated that the theoretical constructs of behaviourism, namely stimulus, response, reinforcement and motivation, had neither rational nor empirical import, neither in linguistics nor in science. Such a sweeping dismissal aroused considerable controversy in the academic community. Many years later, the media was to latch on to the controversy by reviewing another of Skinner’s books,
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
(1971), and bringing in Chomsky to refute the arguments it contained.

That Quine’s philosophy is a major bugbear for Chomsky can be highlighted by a strange myth created around Chomsky’s now famous sentence: ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.’ No doubt aided by a photograph of Chomsky at a blackboard at
MIT
in 1959 with the sentence in question, there has been much speculation what this sentence is supposed to demonstrate, if anything. Given its Zen-like qualities – not at all envisaged by Chomsky – there have been numerous attempts to elevate Chomsky to lyrical heights, including one by the American poet John Hollander, who uses the line in a poem – dedicated to Chomsky – entitled ‘Coiled Alizarine’. Three lines of the poem, including the ‘Colorless …’ sentence, are given prominence in a book edited by Gilbert Harman, entitled
On Noam Chomsky, Critical Essays
(1974). It is instructive that this volume was one of the Modern Studies in Philosophy Series, demonstrating that Chomsky had by then made a huge impact on philosophy as well. Indeed the introduction proclaims that ‘nothing has had a greater impact on contemporary philosophy than Chomsky’s theory of language’.
¹⁷
Strangely enough, since the main aim of the volume is to curtail Chomsky’s influence, there is a reprint of Quine’s 1972 essay ‘Methodological Reflections on Current Linguistic Theory’, which is a second reply to Chomsky’s earlier article on ‘Quine’s Empirical Assumptions’ (1968). The whole argument revolves around Chomsky’s recognition that Quine is a bigger fish to fry than Skinner, especially inasmuch as the former has taken on behaviourism as part of his philosophy of empiricism. Quine argues that language and meaning are best investigated at their behavioural level. Any such analyses are obviously also a product of language behaviour – the paradox of language investigating itself – and as a result there is no way of determining the veracity of one analysis over another, as long as both account for the language behaviour displayed. Quine finds Chomsky’s position absurd, nihilistic even, in that we could deduce an innate language system that guides our language output. Quine finds it pointless to abstract lexical items and make claims about abstract structures they might be part of. For example, the Chomskyan notion that a canonical sentence (s) is made up of a noun phrase (
NP
) and a verb phrase (
VP
) is only interesting as the attempt to describe a language behaviour but not account for or explain it as some sort of universal and underlying principle. Quine holds that all elements of observable language (as behaviour) have and convey meaning that cannot be abstracted or atomized without adding a new layer of meaning. This includes grammar. Each instance of a sentence or expression has elements of grammar that add to the meaning of its constituents (as made up of words). Now, here comes Chomsky’s sentence ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ to illustrate Quine’s fallacy, namely while the sentence has all the correct grammar – and all the words have their individual meaning – it is nevertheless meaningless. According to Chomsky, the sentence example was intended to refute the whole range of conventional assumptions about what is a grammatical sentence: (1) a meaningful sentence (Quine), (2) a sentence with content words inserted in a grammatical frame (structural linguists, Carnap), and (3) a string of words with a high statistical approximation to English texts (conventional then among psychologists and engineers).
Quod erat demonstrandum
.

Chomsky and his sentence.

The Chomsky–Quine issue concerns empiricism and rationalism. Quine, with his narrow focus on empiricism, denies what Chomsky says has always been the true course of natural science, namely the explanation of natural phenomena by way of rational abstracts, which in turn are not necessarily subject to empirical verification. Take the oft-quoted example of Newton’s so-called discovery of gravity, which nicely explains the motions of our universe – but no one, neither Newton nor any person since, has come up with an empirical explanation of what exactly gravity is. Maybe one day we will find out. In the meantime it would be absurd to relegate Newton’s ‘idea’ of gravity to the scrapheap of scientific endeavour. In the same way Quine and empiricists in general want to relegate Chomsky and rationalists in general to the scrapheap of all serious science and philosophy. The arguments occasionally take on quite an amusing, if not sarcastic, tone, especially when proving the point that the empiricists don’t have a leg to stand on. Take the assertion that, just because we do not have any exact empirical notions on how thought and language emanates from the brain, we should dispense with the ideas of ‘thought’, ‘language’ and possibly with the idea of a ‘brain’ as well. One can even go a step further, as does Chomsky, and pronounce at least some strains of empiricism, such as behaviourism, as ‘brainless’ and indeed dangerous. Chomsky minces no words when he asks ‘Is this science?’, and then goes on to say:

Chomsky also argues that Quine’s ‘empirical assumptions’ reek of the extreme empiricism of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, whom Russell dismissed as follows: ‘he developed to its logical conclusion the empirical philosophy of Locke and Berkeley, and by making it self-consistent made it incredible.’
¹⁹
One should note, though, that in certain respects Chomsky does regard Hume as one of the greatest philosophers, especially as he held that in order to understand the mind we have to postulate principles that are a kind of ‘animal instinct’ – and as such support the tenets of Chomsky’s biolinguistics. Such apparent ambiguities are typical of Chomsky, who is highly selective in his evaluation of philosophical and scientific theories: there is no need to dismiss a whole theory if in parts it is reasonable.

Chomsky thus engages in one of the key philosophical arguments of our time, batting for rationalism in no uncertain terms when he dismisses Quine and his ilk. Since language has always played a central part in philosophy, Chomsky is not about to give an inch when it comes to defending his patch, firing a heavy volley at Quine when saying that his ‘use of the term “language” to refer to the “complex of present dispositions to verbal behaviour, in which speakers of the same language have perforce come to resemble one another”, seems rather perverse.’
²⁰

As mentioned before, an issue Chomsky is always willing to discuss, within linguistics and the philosophy of science, is the question of whether a linguistic theory should have a ‘psychological reality’. While it smacks of an empiricist angle, it nevertheless sounds like a fair question, especially as it was posed often among linguists when it comes to the ‘reality’ or otherwise of phonemes. These are abstract sound units of a given language, namely those sound units that impact on the meaning of words so made up. The extension of the argument is to ask if a grammar, in part or as a whole, should, or even must, reveal or assert itself in psychological testing or whatever the scientific tools of psychology may be. Chomsky, however, finds the question disingenuous and vacuous. First, if linguistics is part of psychology, as it may well be, then it would be an odd question to ask, much as one would ask whether the Freudian constructs of the
id, ego
and
superego
are psychologically real – or for that matter if the behaviourist constructs of stimulus and response are psychologically real. If linguistics and grammar on the other hand are not part of psychology, then the question is equally odd. ‘Do chemical formulas have to have psychological reality’, he asks. ‘Do chemical formulas have to have a chemical reality’,
²¹
he also asks, driving home the point.

By the 1960s Chomsky was issuing forth ever more sophisticated and technical treatises that baffled the general readership with their scientific rigour but which instilled a loyal following in those who kept up with the latest developments. The latter were often astounded by the ease with which they could communicate with him and discuss ideas that have an impact on what has by now become known as the Standard Theory. Even undergraduate students became active collaborators in the research agenda. The corridors of the
MIT
Linguistics Department became liberated zones for academic workers, where status and hierarchy were left behind. Graduate students and new faculty forged ahead with new ideas and amendments to the Standard Theory. The essence of this work was finally published in 1965 under the title of
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
.
²²
This remains one of the great published works in linguistics, even though Chomsky and his supporters have long since moved on and established quite a few more theories along the way. In the preface of
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Chomsky pays homage to his predecessors, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Panini, who led the charge for a generative grammar.

The third chapter deals with deep structures and grammatical transformations.
²³
By way of an example it generates the following surface structure sentence: