What's My Philosophy of Language? 1. Chomsky

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax by Noam Chomsky




Note: I haven't actually read this book, but I just got through the excerpt included in Critical Theory Since 1965 and I wanted to set down my thoughts.

In the first section of his book, Chomsky develops the idea of a “deep structure” within the mind that helps us generate language. Only this essentially rationalist approach (modeled with mathematics) can explain how we produce and understand infinitely many sentences, for empiricist approaches oversimplify the complex, active agency of the mind in acquiring language. Chomsky’s theory of language thus figures a debate between two theories of knowledge acquisition. I’ll need to think a lot more on where I should take this idea in my own writing about culture.

Noam Chomsky’s central interest is in how our language abilities develop as the consequence of principles deeply inherent in who we are as human organisms:

[I:]t seems reasonable to suppose that a child cannot help constructing a particular sort of transformational grammar to account for the data presented to him, any more than he control his perception of solid objects or his attention to line and angle. Thus it may well be that the general features of language structure reflect, not so much the course of one’s experience, but rather the general character of one’s capacity to acquire knowledge – in the traditional sense, one’s innate ideas and innate principles.

What is most surprising, and most compelling, about Chomsky’s opening chapter is that he derives this plan to study the “deep structure” of the mind’s language acquisition ability from 17th century rationalist philosophy. Chomsky’s impressive reading in this area shows the predominance of the thesis that what Chomsky calls “the acquisition of knowledge” is not a simple matter of perceiving external objects, but the active application of “the innate vigour and activity of the mind itself.” (Cudworth 1731, p. 49 of Adams and Searle). Descartes was far from alone, and thus not entirely original, in this line of thought.

Chomsky locates his own investigation in the deep structures of language acquisition in rationalism to contrast it with behavior scientific approaches the he correspondingly locates in “empiricism:” which models the mind as a rather simple “device:”

…it assumes that the device has certain analytical data-processing mechanisms or inductive principles of a very elementary sort, for example, certain principles of association, weak principles of “generalization” involving gradients along the dimensions of the given quality space, or, in our case, taxonomic principles of segmentation and classification…

Chomsky’s big problem is that the empiricist view makes dogmatic presumptions about these interior mental processes.

It’s clear that Chomsky’s line of thinking has implications far beyond the acquisition of language, which is now no more than a figure for an investigation of the human mind. Chomsky defends Leibniz’s wonderful metaphor of the mind, not as tabula rasa, but as veined marble, with the ideas of the mind, the mind’s output, shaped and determined in part by the veins of the marble.

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