Cartesian Linguistics
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The educational implications of empiricism are obvious: children need and must be given massive amounts of training to ensure that they are put on the ‘right’ path so that they acquire the ‘right’ concepts and come to speak the community’s language and honor the community’s morals and myths. The picture they draw looks very much like indoctrination. And it is not hard to find indoctrination in the state religion – in the US, praise for the wisdom of the ‘founding fathers’, pledges of allegiance, historical myths designed to evince irrational loyalties and submission, praise for a capitalist market economy, and so on. And there is ample evidence that it is effective, at least by the time a student reaches young adulthood.
But it is also possible in early education to find plentiful evidence that with regard to basic acquisition matters, empiricism is just wrong. The scenario empiricist dogma would have us paint of early child education makes no sense of what actually happens. In the case of language, children in schools (and often before, from parents) do, of course, receive something that looks a bit like empiricist training, and they do need it to function in modern societies. What they need, and hopefully get, is help at advancing “language skills,” such as reading and writing. Unfortunately for empiricist dogma, though, to develop a child’s language skills, s/he must have a language and an ample conceptual store in a mental dictionary already. Plausibly, children have these because they have an innate language faculty that develops automatically, and innate machinery that quickly mobilizes concepts (and linguistic sounds too). Similar points concern moral education. Research shows that children have an innate sense of fairness and of the impermissibility of committing assault. With language they have, then, the resources needed to develop into individuals who can critically assess government performance; Chomsky at the age of ten used such resources to write in his school newspaper of the threat posed by fascism – particularly with regard to Spain.
He used and uses those same resources still. Children in current educational institutions are not encouraged to do anything like that; they are encouraged instead to exercise their innate understanding of human intentions and performance in other areas, in sports (as participants and spectators) and in discussing the lives and pronouncements of celebrities. These areas of interest – along with video games, and many other forms of ‘play’ – offer opportunities for marketing, and they serve the interests of power. They can help induce jingoist attitudes; but at the very least, they distract attention.
The educational implications of the RR view of mind are taken up briefly in CL in Chomsky’s discussion of von Humboldt’s work. While children need some help in coming to write and read, and educational institutions should provide this and other skills – such as those of mathematical calculation, and the like – what for the RR view they need most early in life is exposure to a wide range of experiences to give them opportunities to develop individual interests and talents, and encouragement to pursue these interests and talents. To paraphrase Kant and von Humboldt, the only way people can appreciate freedom and creativity is to experience it. Educational institutions should provide the opportunity to do that, even – and perhaps especially – during a child’s early years.
Discussing the political implications of the RR view of mind in full is beyond the scope of this introduction. For some details, see (Rai 1995, McGilvray 1999, 2005). Here I will focus on how advances in recent years in Chomsky’s RR (now “biolinguistic”) science of language supplement the long-standing Enlightenment moral and political view he expresses in CL. Like others of or attracted to the Enlightenment, Chomsky aims to base his political views on reason. Unlike earlier figures, his views are enriched by a nascent science of mind in general, and in particular by a developed science of language with a biological foundation. His humanistic principles assume that humans are biological organisms endowed with a special capacity, language, that not only distinguishes humans from other creatures, but that seems to be central to explaining our cognitive creativity and flexibility. The language faculty likely – plausibly along with an innate moral sense that demands universality of application – constitutes what is distinctive about human nature. So as a result of the work of Chomsky and others in recent years, we now have a much better grip on “what makes us human” – on what is distinctive about our natures – than was earlier possible. Earlier, the most favored explanation of our distinctiveness pointed to Reason. Now we can see that reason is common-sensical and scientific – that we can solve problems in these two ways – and that both depend heavily on language. We have a better grip on human nature. And it is obvious that the explanation we can give of what is distinctive about human nature (and how the species came to have such a nature) is within the reach of naturalistic research. There is no reason to appeal to mysterious powers given us by the gods. We are natural objects, as are other creatures, and have what we have as a result of evolution. And having a naturalistic conception of human nature in hand helps makes sense of how one could define an ideal form of social organization, and justify – or criticize – current practices. It provides the social critic with an indispensable tool for proposing reform and redress.
Chomsky thinks of the task of constructing a view of an ideal form of social organization as that of constructing a “vision” (1996), a vision that can be used to justify various projects. The vision he constructs assumes that people have basic needs – not only survival, but those needs that are distinctive to human beings. The latter needs consist of freedom (creativity, autonomy. . .) and community with choice. These needs, he supposes with reason, are built into our natures as humans. Given the prominence of language in defining our natures and the creativity language enables, creativity/freedom is an obvious choice for someone aiming towards a form of self-fulfillment ethic. It is not difficult to understand too why community-with-choice figures prominently. People need to choose how they work (thereby choosing with whom they are going to cooperate in productive activity), who their friends are, and so on, and they enter such communities as autonomous individuals who maintain their autonomy. That is the need, but of course, the majority of today’s workforce does not enjoy that autonomy and cannot satisfy that need. The majority consists of what many in the nineteenth century called “wage slaves.” Chomsky’s vision of an ideal form of social organization is that of a system that maximizes the satisfactions of the exercise of individual freedom and of association with others in communities. It ends up with what he calls “libertarian socialism” or “anarchosyndicalism.” He does not prescribe a specific form of organization. By focusing on fundamental human needs and their maximal satisfaction, he offers a justified strategy for improving. Anarchosyndicalist or libertarian socialist visions offer guidance and a goal that can and no doubt must adapt to specific circumstances to come up with specific policies and proposals. Chomsky notes, for example, that while he is an anarchist, he currently suggests strengthening government control of corporations (Chomsky 1996). Private power is so entrenched at this point that only governments can control them.
Chomsky seems to think that really, everyone has a sense of fundamental human needs. But it is not in the interests of those in power to let it surface, much less play a role in political action. With this in mind, it is significant that Chomsky’s political works often focus on simply describing the actions of individuals in positions of power, and the performance of political institutions. His political works aid in a kind of consciousness-raising. The information he details is drawn from the major media, but prominently from other – generally more reliable – sources, including government and academic statistics concerning income levels, budget reports, and reliable alternative sources (NGOs, in-field researchers, etc.). Presenting information that is ignored or heavily massaged by major media and detailing it (in the words of Irene Gendzier [in McGilvray 2005], engaging in “historical retrieval”), he exhibits to any reader or listener not in the grip of a secular religion the failings of individuals in power and the institutio
ns they control. To easily recognize failings from descriptions alone presupposes that people have an idea of what good political institutions should look like – that is, of what they should do.
Political institutions are not natural objects or forces of nature. They are artifacts created by human beings to serve human interests and needs. They are supposed to serve interests and needs, and it does not take much discernment to see that current democracies are “Madisonian,” not “Jeffersonian.” These honor the view that those who own the country should run it; they serve the interests not of the great majority of the population, but of the managers and those with private power – currently, upper management in corporations, hedge fund players, holders of capital, and the like. Given this, Chomsky and Herman’s model of corporate-run media (1978, 1979, 1988; Chomsky 1988b) makes good sense: corporate media personnel ensure that their position is maintained, that no one questions the ‘fact’ that corporations should control the economy and effectively run the country. Apparently, people easily recognize that current democracies are Madisonian, and not genuine, Jeffersonian democracies; they are oligarchies and plutocracies. And they also know that democratic governments are supposed to serve the needs and interests of all their citizens, not just, or even primarily those of individuals with power. People are aware of those needs, for they have the tools – what Chomsky calls “Cartesian common sense” to be aware of them.
In sum, Chomsky’s naturalized science of human nature indicates that human beings are biologically constituted to be creative creatures who also choose to associate with others on conditions of autonomy. This science can, and if one wants to be reasonable, should, help justify a vision of how humans can best live together and meet their needs while doing so. Chomsky’s science of human nature can serve as the key to renovating and establishing Enlightenment moral values.
Cartesian Linguistics
A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought
Noam Chomsky
Acknowledgments
This research was completed while I was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. It was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (Grant No. MH-05120-04 and Grant No. MH-0512005) to Harvard University, Center for Cognitive Studies. The collection of material was greatly facilitated by a grant from the Social Science Research Council.
Much of the material in this essay was presented in a series of Christian Gauss seminars at Princeton University in 1965. I am grateful to the participants for many useful comments. I am also indebted to William Bottiglia, Morris Halle, Roman Jakobson, Louis Kampf, Jerrold Katz, and John Viertel for very valuable suggestions and criticism.
A brief, and sufficiently accurate, description of the intellectual life of the European races during the succeeding two centuries and a quarter up to our own times is that they have been living upon the accumulated capital of ideas provided for them by the genius of the seventeenth century.
A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
Introduction
Whitehead’s often quoted remark, cited here, provides a useful background for a discussion of the history of linguistics in the modern period. As applied to the theory of language structure, his assessment is quite correct with regard to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Modern linguistics, however, has self-consciously dissociated itself from traditional linguistic theory and has attempted to construct a theory of language in an entirely new and independent way. The contributions to linguistic theory of an earlier European tradition have in general been of little interest to professional linguists, who have occupied themselves with quite different topics within an intellectual framework that is not receptive to the problems that gave rise to earlier linguistic study or the insights that it achieved; and these contributions are by now largely unknown or regarded with unconcealed contempt. The few modern studies of the history of linguistics have typically taken the position that “everything before the 19th century, not yet being linguistics, can be dealt with in a few lines.”1 In recent years, there has been a noticeable reawakening of interest in questions that were, in fact, studied in a serious and fruitful way during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, though rarely since. Furthermore, this return to classical concerns has led to a rediscovery of much that was well understood in this period – what I will call the period of “Cartesian linguistics,” for reasons that will be sketched below.
A careful study of the parallels between Cartesian linguistics and certain contemporary developments can be rewarding in many ways. A full account of them would go well beyond the scope of this essay, and any attempt to give such an account would, furthermore, be quite premature, in view of the sorry state of the field of the history of linguistics (itself in part a consequence of the disparagement of earlier work that has marked the modern period). I will limit myself here to something less ambitious, namely, a preliminary and fragmentary sketch of some of the leading ideas of Cartesian linguistics with no explicit analysis of its relation to current work that seeks to clarify and develop these ideas. The reader acquainted with current work in so-called “generative grammar” should have little difficulty in drawing these connections for himself.2 Questions of current interest will, however, determine the general form of this sketch; that is, I will make no attempt to characterize Cartesian linguistics as it saw itself,3 but rather will concentrate on the development of ideas that have re-emerged, quite independently, in current work. My primary aim is simply to bring to the attention of those involved in the study of generative grammar and its implications some of the little-known work which has bearing on their concerns and problems and which often anticipates some of their specific conclusions.
This will be something of a composite portrait. There is no single individual who can be shown, on textual grounds, to have held all the views that will be sketched; perhaps Humboldt, who stands directly in the crosscurrents of rationalist and romanticist thought and whose work is in many ways the culmination as well as the terminal point of these developments, comes closest to this. Furthermore, the aptness of the term “Cartesian linguistics” for these developments in linguistic theory may well be questioned, on several grounds. First, these developments have roots in earlier linguistic work; second, several of the most active contributors to them would surely have regarded themselves as quite antagonistic to Cartesian doctrine (see note 3); third, Descartes himself devoted little attention to language, and his few remarks are subject to various interpretations. Each of these objections has some force. Still, it seems to me that there is, in the period under review here, a coherent and fruitful development of a body of ideas and conclusions regarding the nature of language in association with a certain theory of mind4 and that this development can be regarded as an outgrowth of the Cartesian revolution. In any event, the aptness of the term is a matter of little interest. The important problem is to determine the exact nature of the “capital of ideas” accumulated in the premodern period, to evaluate the contemporary significance of this contribution, and to find ways to exploit it for advancing the study of language.
Creative aspect of language use
Although Descartes makes only scant reference to language in his writings, certain observations about the nature of language play a significant role in the formulation of his general point of view. In the course of his careful and intensive study of the limits of mechanical explanation, which carried him beyond physics to physiology and psychology, Descartes was able to convince himself that all aspects of animal behavior can be explained on the assumption that an animal is an automaton.5 In the course of this investigation, he developed an important and influential system of speculative physiology. But he arrived at the conclusion that man has unique abilities that cannot be accounted for on purely mechanistic grounds, although, to a very large extent, a mechanistic explanation can be provided for human bodily function and behavior. The essential difference between man and animal is exhibited most
clearly by human language, in particular, by man’s ability to form new statements which express new thoughts and which are appropriate to new situations. It is quite easy, in his view, to
conceive of a machine so constructed so that it utters words, and even words which correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs (for instance, if you touch it in one place it asks what you want of it; if you touch it in another place it cries out that you are hurting it, and so on). But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do.
(CSM I, 39)6
This ability to use language must not be confused with “natural movements which express passions and which can be imitated by machines as well as by animals.” The crucial difference is that automata “could never use words or put together other signs as we do in order to declare our thoughts for others.” This is a specific human ability, independent of intelligence. Thus,