Page 531 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

influence of the Oxford philosophers and their use theory of meaning.
Indeed, the terms 'meaning' and 'use' are used inter- changeably so often throughout Syntactic Structures that Newmeyer (1986:27) has argued that many of Chomsky's arguments in Syntactic Structures for the autonomy of syntax were in reality arguments for (what he would call a few years later) the competence- performance dichotomy. Many aspects of meaning, in his view at the time, were part of performance.
4. TheDevelopmentofChomsky'sTheoryofMind
The decade following the publication of Syntactic Structures saw Chomsky's views mature into a philo- sophical system in which the boundaries between the fields of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy became ever less distinct.
Chomsky himself did not bring up the question of the psychological implications of transformational generative grammar in either The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory or Syntactic Structures; as he wrote later, it would have been 'too audacious' for him to have done so (Chomsky 1975a: 35). But his student, Robert B. Lees, closed his review of Syntactic Struc- tures with a frontal attack on inductivist learning theory, arguing that there could be no alternative but to conclude that the grammar the linguist constructed was 'in the head' of the speaker. But if that be the case, then how could these highly abstract principles possibly be learned inductively? 'It would seem,' he wrote, 'that our notions of human learning are due for some considerable sophistication' (1957:408).
It was Chomsky's (1959) review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in which he first stressed that his theory of language is a psychological model of an aspect of human knowledge. Chomsky's review rep- resents, even after the passage of some 20 years, the basic refutation of behaviorist psychology. The review takes in turn each basic construct of behaviorism, and demonstrates that either it leads to false predictions or it is simply devoid of content. Chomsky went on to argue that this ability indicates that rather than being born 'blank slates,' children have a genetic pre- disposition to structure the acquisition of linguistic
knowledge in a highly specificway.
By 1965, with the publication of his Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax, Chomsky had come to characterize generative grammar explicitly as a 'rationalist' theory, in the sense that it posits innate principles that deter- mine the form of acquired knowledge. As part of the theory's conceptual apparatus, Chomsky reintro- duced two terms long out of fashion in academic discussion: 'innate ideas' and 'mind.' For Chomsky, innate ideas are simply those properties of the gram- mar that are inborn and constrain the acquisition of knowledge. So, for example, generativists believe, based on their abstractness, complexity, and limited amount of relevant information presented to the child,
that many grammatical constraints are 'prewired,' so to speak, into the child, rather than acquired by any- thing one might reasonably call 'learning.' Hence, these constraints are innate ideas.
Mind, for Chomsky, refers to the principles, both innate and acquired, that underlie actual behavior. Such principles, obviously, are not restricted to the realm of language. For example, as recent research has shown, many important aspects of the visual sys- tem are also prewired and need only a triggering experience from the environment to be set in motion. In Chomsky's terms, then, the theory of vision is a rationalist theory, and the structures underlying visual perception (innate ideas) form part of mind.
While mind may encompass more cognitive fac- ulties than language, Chomsky believes that linguistic studies are the best suited of all to reveal the essence of mind. For one thing, language is the only cognitive faculty that is uniquely human. Not even the study of the communicative behavior of the lower animals sheds any light on it: the mental structures underlying animal communication seem to bear no evolutionary relation to those underlying human language. Also, language is the vehicle of rational thought—another uniquely human ability. And finally, more is known about language and how it functions than about other aspects of cognition. After all, more than two mil- lennia of grammatical research have given us a more detailed picture of the structure of language than a bare century of research has clarified the nature of vision, memory, concept formation, and so on.
Chomsky is happy to refer to the faculty for language as an aspect of 'human nature.' The term 'human nature' for him has real content: it is char- acterized by the set of innately endowed capacities for language, other aspects of cognition, and whatever else, which, being innate, are immune to environ- mental influences.Chomsky sees such a conception in an entirely positive political light: our genetic inherit- ance—our human nature—prevents us from being plastic, infinitely malleable beings subjugable to the whims of outside forces.
Thus at a rather abstract level, there is a connection between Chomsky's philosophy of language and his renowned political anarchism. Just as our innate linguistic endowment shields our language from being shaped in its entirety by external forces, so it is also the case that no oppressive political system has the power to mold our minds entirely to its liking; we are, at root, free agents in this world.
Philosophical critiques of Chomsky's views on language and mind have been legion; while space limi- tations prevent even a sketchy outline of their content, a sampling may be found in Hook (1969), Harman (1974), and Kripke (1982). They have focused on those aspects of his overall theory that appear most vul- nerable: his 'subjectivism,' which entails that a language 'has no existence apart from its mental
Chomsky, Noam
509