Page 530 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Key Figures
place until a less radical form of behaviorism was developed (Hull 1943) that gave these constructs the status of 'mediating responses,' that is, elements that, while not directly observable, could nevertheless (in principle) be linked deterministically to observable speech.
2. Chomsky's Break with Empiricism
Chomsky's training in the philosophical foundations of linguistics was strictly in this empiricist post- Bloomfieldian tradition—he even published a paper as a student which was designed to sharpen their ana- lytical procedures. But as early as his undergraduate days, he had come to have doubts as to the philo- sophical worth of the enterprise. These doubts soon led him to rethink the philosophical foundations of the field and to set to work to develop an alternative conception of linguistic theory and practice. This approach was laid out in a 900-page manuscript entitled The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, written in 1955, but not published until 20 years later (Chomsky 1975a).
The central themes of this manuscript were con- densed and published in Chomsky's (1957) book Syn- tactic Structures. This book's conceptual break with post-Bloomfieldianism was not over the question of whether linguistics could be a 'science'—Chomsky never questioned that it could be—but over the more fundamental issue of what a scientific theory is and how one might be constructed with respect to linguis- tic phenomena. Chomsky argued at length that no scientific theory had ever resulted from the scientist performing mechanical operations on the data. How the scientist happens to hit upon a particular theor- etical notion, he pointed out, is simply irrelevant; all that counts is its adequacy in explaining the phenom- ena in its domain.
name), there is little discussion in Syntactic Structures of philosophical issues, whether philosophy of language or philosophy of science. Indeed, the only philosophical works referred to in that book are by the arch-empiricists (and Chomsky's teachers) Willard QuineandNelsonGoodman, towhomChomskygave credit for his views on simplicity and the evaluation of formal systems.
Nevertheless, philosophers of science had, in the previous decade, been moving away from the empiri- cist constraints on theory construction and motivation that had generallybeen espoused earlier. For example, in two important papers (ultimately published in 1965) the philosopher Carl Hempel laid to rest any hope for an empiricist approach to theory formation. As he pointed out, even the more permissive empiricist approaches to this question fail to capture the essence of what it takes for a statement to be considered scien- tific. He illustrated at length that there is no direct connection between a scientific term or statement and the empirical confirmation of a theory containing that term or statement. Indeed, many fundamental scien- tific notions, such as 'gravitational potential,' 'absol- ute temperature,' and 'electric field,' have no operational definitions at all. Hempel concluded that science is more in the business of comparing theories than in evaluating statements. A theory is simply an axiomatized system which as a whole has an empirical interpretation.
Hempel's view, which had begun to gather currency by the late 1950s, signaled the demise of empiricism as a significant force in the philosophy of science. As its philosophical props gave way, post-Bloomfieldian structuralism found itself in a distinctly unstable posture. Not surprisingly, it was relatively simple for a theory that itself rattled these props to topple it completely.
Chomsky's rejection of empiricist constraints on
theory formation led him to propose a novel concep-
tion of what a linguistic theory is a theory of. Where-
as to earlier structuralists, a theory was no more than a
concise taxonomy of the elements extractable from a
corpus of data, Chomsky redefined the goal of linguis-
tic theory to that of providing a rigorous and formal
characterization of a 'possible human language,'
that is, to distinguishing as precisely as possible the
class of grammatical processes that can occur in
language from that which cannot. This charac-
terization, which Chomsky later came to call 'uni-
versal grammar,' specifies the limits within which all
languages function. In Chomsky's view, natural scien-
tists set parallel tasks for themselves: the goal of physi-
cists is to characterize the class of possible physical
processes, that of biologists to characterize the class concerned, he endorsed Goodman's (empiricist)
of possible biological processes, and so on.
Aside from his extended demolition of empiricist approaches to grammar construction (although the philosophy of 'empiricism' is never mentioned by
attempt to extend the theory of reference to encompass much of meaning. The residue of meaning intractable to this approach was simply ascribed to language use, presumably based on the contemporary
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3. Chomsky's Early Approach to Meaning
For all its ground-breaking work about theory con- struction in linguistics in general, there is nothing par- ticularly innovative in the Syntactic Structures approach to meaning. On the one hand, in terms of the analysis of meaning, Chomsky adopted the post- Bloomfieldian view that grammar (i.e., syntax and phonology) are autonomous and independent of meaning, though he took pains to stress that this con- clusion was based on an analysis of the data, not on some a priori stricture that demanded the exclusion of unobservable semantic phenomena from the domain of linguistic analysis.
As far as his views on the nature of meaning are