Page 533 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

possible worlds when they make their judgments. On the other hand, it would be possible to reject any psychological interpretation about possible worlds. But in that case, one would simply be doing some species of mathematics, devoid of linguistic interest. Hence, Chomsky concludes that model-theoretic possible world semantics must be rejected as a com- ponent of a linguistic theory.
8. Chomsky's Philosophy and Linguistic Methodology
In debates with his linguistic opponents over even the most seemingly minute aspects of linguistic structure, Chomsky has made it clear that there are philo- sophical issues at stake that transcend the particular analysis of the particular phenomenon under discussion. And invariably, Chomsky's position leads to the conclusion that the human mind must be more highly structured than had been heretofore believed. Consider again his debate with generative semantics. This framework took what it described as an 'abstract' view of syntax, in that it attempted to ground syntax in semantics. But Chomsky argued that generative semantics was at the root awf/abstractionist, since the effect of its reductionist program was to derive unob- servable syntactic structure from more accessible semantic structure. To this program, Chomsky counterposed and defended at length a view of syntax populated with null elements, abstract structural relations, and complex constraints, none of which have any direct semantic analogue. Since there is no way that the principles of syntax making use of these syntactic elements could have been learned from exposure to the environment (as, at least in principle, semantic constructs might be), the conclusion follows that the language faculty—i.e., the linguistic aspect of the human mind—must be innately endowed with a complex structure.
The more recent opposition to Chomsky's views of syntax have taken the (seemingly) opposite tack from that of generative semantics. Models such as 'gen- eralized phrase structure grammar' and 'lexical func- tional grammar' have tended to downplay the need for abstract principles and constraints, arguing that syntactic generalizations can be stated to a much greater degree on surface structure than Chomsky has been wont to believe. Again, in combating the claims of these rival models, Chomsky makes it clear that more is at stake than the particular formulation of some particular principle. Rather, he sees these models as challenging the view of mind that he has developed over the last few decades.
Chomsky's methodology has always been to focus on the broad picture at the expense of working out fine analytic details. In one sense, this is no more than an exemplification of the 'hypothetico-deductive' method of scientific reasoning. As counterposed to the inductive method, which starts from an observed generalization and proceeds to a law, the hypothetico-
deductive method begins with a law, derives con- clusions from that law, and then matches those con- clusions against observed reality. To give a concrete example, a hypothesized universal constraint, pro- posed on the basis of evidence from one language (or a small number of languages), might lead the inves- tigator to make predictions about the syntactic behavior of some other language, which can then be tested empirically.
By 1980, Chomsky had begun to refer to his variant of the hypothetico-deductive method as the 'Galilean style' of theory construction, a style that carries this method one step farther in the domain of abstractness. Just as Galileo sought out broad principles governing nature, principles 'falsified' at every turn by a myriad of observable phenomena, Chomsky too has attempted to put forward sweeping generalizations about the structure of the language faculty, ignoring, or postponing the discussion of linguistic phenomena that seem to counterexemplify them. This has led Chomsky to receive many outraged attacks, ranging from mild charges of irresponsibility to the data to the more serious one of being an 'idealist,' rather than a responsible scientist.
Chomsky has dealt with these criticisms in a number of ways. First, he has replied that the 'modular' approach to grammar that he has increasingly espoused allows observed complexity to be derived from the interaction of the general systems that the Galilean style led him to posit. That is, he maintains that complex linguistic phenomena can be explained in terms of the interaction of the autonomous gram- matical system with other systems involved in giving language its overall character, such as those based in physiology, cognition, and social interaction.
The modular conception of language, as Chomsky and others have noted, has received independent sup- port from many diverse areas of investigation in recent years, in particular from studies of language acqui- sition, language-brain relationships, language pro- cessing, and language variation. For a summary of some of the most important evidence to that effect, see Newmeyer (1983).
The central principle of Chomsky's current approach to syntax (the 'principles and parameters' approach—see Chomsky 1981; 1995) is that the internal structure of the grammar is modular as well. That is, syntactic complexity results from the inter- action of grammatical subsystems, each charac- terizable in terms of its own set of general principles. The central goal of syntactic theory thus becomes to identify such systems and characterize the degree to which they may vary from language to language (i.e., the extent to which they may be 'parametrized').
The modular approach to explanation, then, illus- trates the internal logic of Chomsky's approach. From an approach to the methodology of science, he derives a linguistic methodology that focuses on broad gen-
Chomsky, Noam
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