Page 529 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

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Given the central role that Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) has played in the linguistics of the past few decades, it is important to understand the philosophical system that underlies his ideas. This article traces the devel- opment of this system from Chomsky's earliest train- ing to the present, pointing to its relevance to philosophy, psychology, and, most importantly, linguistic methodology.
1. Chomsky's Philosophical Training
Noam Chomsky was trained in the most rigidly empiricist linguistic tradition that has ever been prac- ticed, namely that of 'post-Bloomfieldian struc- turalism.' Leonard Bloomfield, a central figure of American linguistics in the interwar period and the intellectual forefather of this tradition, had pioneered an approach to linguistic methodology that allowed only statements drawn from direct observation of the phenomena under investigation or generalizations that could be derived from observations by a set of mechanical procedures. As he put it, The only useful generalizations about language are inductive gen- eralizations. Features which we think ought to be universal may be absent from the very next language that becomes accessible' (1933:20). Such a view dis- couraged not only an inquiry into the universal properties of language, but the study of meaning as well, given the notorious difficulty of making explicit the precise meaning of an utterance.
The 'post-Bloomfieldians' consisted of those stu- dents of Bloomfield's, and their colleagues, who domi- nated American linguistics in the 1940s and 1950s. One of their most prominent members was Chomsky's teacher Zellig Harris. They set to work to devise a set of procedures in accord with Bloomfield's theoretical strictures, while avoiding what they saw as the pitfalls
in his actual analytical work, which was prone to make use of 'mentalistic' constructs and nonrigorous procedures. Their goal was explicitly to 'discover' a grammar by performing a set of operations on a cor- pus of data. Each successive operation was to be one step farther removed from the corpus. Since the physi- cal record of the flow of speech itself was the only data considered objective enough to serve as a starting point, it followed that the levels of a grammatical description had to be arrived at in the following order: phonemics, morphemics, syntax, discourse.
The empiricism that dominated American linguis- tics from the 1930s to the 1950s was a simple reflection of the fact that this intellectual current dominated all the social and behavioral sciences in the USA at the time. Its wide appeal was in large part a function of the fact that there was no other period in American history in which there was greater respect for the methods and results of science. Contemporary phil- osophy of science (as well as naive common sense) informed linguists and others that what distinguishes science from other types of activity is the ability to generalize laws on the basis of precise measurement of observable data. Post-Bloomfieldian structuralism promised to bring linguistics in accord with what was seen as the practice in physics, chemistry, biology, and the other natural sciences.
Not surprisingly, the post-Bloomfieldians looked to behaviorist psychology for independent support for their approach to language. However, American psy- chology at this time, under the leadership of B. F. Skinner (1957) was under the grip of a form of empiri- cism that was so extreme that it would not even tol- erate theoretical terms such as 'phoneme,' 'morpheme,' and so on, which could be derived by a set of mechanical operations. Hence, the marriage of structural linguistics and psychology did not take
Chomsky, Noam F. J. Newmeyer
Chomsky, Noam
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