People
Christopher Norris
Noam Chomsky (1928-) is an MIT-based linguist and cognitive psychologist whose thinking in these fields has been more influential (and controversial) than any other body of work in recent times. He is also a prominent left-wing dissident and implacable critic of US government policy on numerous foreign and domestic issues during the past three decades.
In linguistics, Chomsky is best known for his theory of transformational-generative grammar, first developed in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures. This holds that human beings have an innate capacity for acquiring, using, and interpreting language, one that transcends any differences of culture or individual psychology. In his early review of B F Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour, Chomsky mounted a full-scale attack on the then dominant school of American linguistic thought. Here he showed that no behaviourist account based on a stimulus-response model of language acquisition could possibly explain the rapidity and ease with which children learn to utter well-formed grammatical sentences, often sentences more complex than any to which they have been exposed in their learning environment. Rather, they must possess a native competence that enables them to construct a huge (indeed potentially infinite) range of novel expressions from a finite repertoire of "depth-syntactical" forms.
Such were the three main arguments – from "nativism", "poverty of the stimulus", and linguistic "creativity" – that Chomsky deployed to powerful effect against Skinner’s behaviourist approach. Thus the task of linguistics was to specify the various "transformational-generative" mechanisms that enabled speakers and interpreters to assign a determinate meaning to this or that surface string of lexical items. These included the active/passive transformation – the capacity to grasp that a pair of sentences such as "Alison read the book" and "the book was read by Alison" have the same underlying structure despite their disparity of surface form. Ambiguous expressions (like "flying model aircraft can be a challenge!") are shown to result from the fact that a single surface grammatical form has two quite distinct underlying structures, one of which assigns the meaning: "it can be a challenge to fly model aircraft!", while the other is construed: "model aircraft that fly can be a challenge!". Also there is the ability to distinguish nonsensical but grammatically well-formed strings (such as "colourless green ideas sleep furiously") from strings that possess neither semantic coherence nor grammatical structure (such as "sleep colourless green furiously ideas"). Chomsky’s point is that language-users are vastly more resourceful – or less at the mercy of environmental factors – than could ever be explained by stimulus-response models of linguistic or cognitive grasp.
Besides, there were some large philosophical, ethical, and socio-political issues bound up with this debate about the scope and nature of linguistic creativity. Behaviourism treated human beings as malleable creatures whose beliefs and conduct were entirely shaped by their passive response to ambient physical or verbal stimuli. In which case (Skinner urged) they had better be subject to the right sorts of stimuli – or social conditioning – so as to ensure their compliance with acceptable norms. For Chomsky, such arguments are not just philosophically bankrupt but also a pretext for the worst, most repressive forms of mass-indoctrination or thought-control. They deny the competence and the right of each individual to form their own, critically considered judgement on issues of moral conscience as regards, say, the US record of involvement in conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq, or the effective suppression of dissident voices through "voluntary" control of media access by compliant editors and journalists. Behaviourism merely elevates this habit of passive acquiescence to the status of a full-scale programmatic doctrine in the social and human sciences, a doctrine (moreover) with thinly veiled punitive sanctions attached.
In Cartesian Linguistics and other works Chomsky invokes an alternative philosophical tradition, one that counters this denial of freedom and responsibility by stressing the inherent rationality of mind and its freedom to exercise powers of autonomous judgement. Among the central figures are Descartes and the Port Royal logician-grammarians of the seventeenth century, thinkers who placed a high value on just those distinctively human attributes. There are certain problems here, not only as concerns that original project, but also with Chomsky’s claim to derive substantive ethico-political values from such a narrowly rationalist epistemology. Perhaps this explains his more recent reluctance to be drawn on the topic, no doubt reinforced by conservative opponents who are apt to say that if a link exists between Chomsky’s linguistic theories and his political views, then the theories had better be junked along with the politics.
His work stands as a powerful riposte to some of the shabbier intellectual complicities of our time, as well as having made an immensely original contribution to linguistics and cognitive psychology.
Suggested
reading
Cartesian Linguistics, Noam Chomsky (Harper & Row)
Language and Politics, Noam Chomsky (Black Rose Books)
The Chomsky Reader, ed. James Peck (Pantheon)
Christopher
Norris is distinguished research professor in philosophy at Cardiff University.