On
not Knowing a Language:
Chomsky’s Review of Skinner Reconsidered
"It as little occurs to me to get
involved in the philosophical
quarrels and arguments of my times as to go down an ally
and take part in a scuffle when I see the mob fighting
there."
— Arthur Schopenhauer, 1828-30, 'Adversaria' in Manuscript
Remains, Vol. 3:
Proposal: Elimination of Epistemology of
Language
The
concept of knowledge and its cognates have no substantive (explanatory) role to
play within theoretical linguistics.
The
language faculty - the object of theoretical interest - is not a propositional
structure. It is not a duplicate of our theory inside the head of the
speaker/hearer.
Components
of FL:
(a)
Lexicon (features)
(b)
Merge - internal/external (combinatorial procedure)
(c)
Expressions (output profile - ‘instructions’ to the external systems)
“But
do we not know the principles which
explain our acceptability judgments/knowledge?”
(i) Harry appealed
to [the boys]i [PROi to like
each otheri].
(ii)
*Harryi appealed to [the boys]i [PROi
to like himselfi].
(iii) Harryi appeared to [the boys] [<Harry>i to like himselfi].
(iv)*Harryi
appeared to [the boys] [<Harry>i to like each otheri].
Compare:
(v) It appeared [to the boys] [that Harry likes
himself/*each other].
(vi)
It appealed [to the boys] [that Harry likes
himself/*each other].
The
acceptable interpretation of (v) is a close paraphrase of (iii), with the
matrix verb having no external q-role
to assign - Harry internally merges
as the goal of EPP probe; its nominative Case is checked.
An alternative derivation - (v) - checks EPP via expletive external merge (NB: the
context of Harry is transparent in
both cases.) Appear assigns double
internal q-roles
in both cases: experiencer and (clausal - finite/infinite) patient.
The
acceptable interpretation of (vi) differs from the
failed interpretation of (ii). In the former, no agent q-role
is assigned; appeal makes the same q-role
assignment as appear. (NB: the prepositional argument of appear is optional at PF (within convergent PHON); if deleted, an implicit argument appears to be present
as an expression of lexical content.) In (ii), on the other hand, Harry is the agent - no internal merge
to check Case occurs (NB: PRO [-Case] occupies the agent position of like, and so
serves as the (failed) antecedent of the reflexive) The reciprocal readings of
(v) and (vi) are blocked in each case, for reciprocals in finite clauses
require a clause-mate antecedent.
Moral:
We explain the phenomena in terms of interpretable (e.g., q-role)
and uninterpretable (e.g., Case, EPP) lexical
features. We have no recourse to propositional principles.
Some Quotations from Chomsky
“…
in English one uses the locutions "know a language," "knowledge
of language," where other (even
similar) linguistic systems use such terms as "have a language,"
"speak a language," etc. That may
be one reason why it is commonly supposed (by English speakers) that
some sort of cognitive relation holds
between Jones and his language, which is somehow "external" to
Jones; or that Jones has a "theory of his language," a theory that he
"knows" or "partially knows."… One should not expect such
concepts to play a role in systematic inquiry into the nature, use, and
acquisition of language, and related matters, any more than one expects such
informal notions as "heat" or "element" or "life"
to survive beyond rudimentary stages of the natural sciences.
¾ Noam Chomsky/B. Stemmer,
1999, ‘An On-Line Interview with Noam Chomsky: on
the Nature of Pragmatics and Related Issues’, Brain and Language, 68, 393-401.
p.397.
“There
is no problem for ordinary language… But there is no reason to suppose that
common usage of such terms as language
or learning (or belief and numerous others like them), or others belonging to
similar semantic fields in other linguistic systems, will find any place in
attempts to understand the aspects of the world to which they pertain.
Likewise, no one expects the commonsense terms energy or liquid or life to play a role in the sciences,
beyond a rudimentary level. The issues are much the same.”
¾
Noam Chomsky, 2000, ‘Linguistics and Brain Science’,
in A. Marantz, et
al. (eds.),
Image,
Language, Brain, MIT, p.23
Origin of a Mistake: 1959 ’n All That
Chomsky’s
famous 1959 review of Skinner’s Verbal
Behavior is most often taken to be an argument for a representational
theory of mind, under which intentional vocabulary is co-opted for scientific
purposes. The reading goes as follows:
The Wrong reading
(i)
The behaviourists (Skinner) argued that colloquial mentalistic vocabulary is
non-explanatory of behaviour. It may be fruitfully replaced by learning
theoretic vocabulary - stimulus, response, control, reinforcement, probability, etc. - which places the
cause of behaviour in
environmental variables, not internal states.
(ii)
The learning theoretic vocabulary is in fact non-explanatory; the mentalistic
vocabulary does a better job.
(iii)
Mentalism is ‘the only president we’ve got’.
(iv)
Therefore, mentalism provides an appropriate basis
for the explanation of behaviour.
The Right
(i)
The behaviourists (Skinner) argued that colloquial mentalistic vocabulary is
non-explanatory of behaviour. It may be fruitfully replaced by learning
theoretic vocabulary - stimulus, response, control, reinforcement, probability, etc. - which places the
cause of behaviour in
environmental variables, not internal states.
(ii)
But the terms of the new nomenclature are “mere homonyms, with at most a vague
similarity of meaning” to the vocabulary defined in the lab. In fact, the terms
are “metaphoric” of our “mentalistic” ones, which “simply disguises
a complete retreat to mentalistic psychology” (pp.552-3).
(iii)
Therefore, the “terminological revision adds no objectivity to the familiar mentalistic mode of description”
(p.556), especially when “used with the full vagueness of the ordinary
vocabulary” (p.559).
(iv)
But is just doesn’t follow that the
mentalistic vocabulary is explanatory. “It is futile to inquire into the
causation of verbal behavior [or any other type of behaviour] until much more
is known about the specific character of this behavior” (p.575).
(Quotations
are taken from the reprint of Chomsky’s review in J. Fodor and J. Katz, 1964,
(eds.), The Structure of Language
(pp.547-578). Prentice-Hall.)
A Typically
Egregious Thought
“The
refusal to get bogged down in merely verbal disputes is crystallized in the popular
move, initiated by Chomsky, of abandoning the word ‘knowledge’ in favour of
some surrogate… ‘tacit knowledge’, ‘competence’,
‘cognizing’, ‘representation’, or even simply ‘R’.
This terminological manoeuvre has its
place but hardly eliminates the importance of reflecting on the character of
the corresponding relatum. After all,… we are
presupposing attributions of cognizing to be explanatory, and for this to be
the case there must be some explanatory framework within which the attribution
is embedded - one cannot simply stipulate one’s way to explanation. To what
extent does letting go of the word ‘knowledge’ signal an abandonment of the
associated explanatory framework, intentional explanation?”
—
Alex Barber, 2003, ‘Introduction’, in A. Barber (ed.), Epistemology of Language.
To
untie this knot of error, misunderstanding,…
(1)
‘Knowledge’ has not been “abandoned”. All of the surrogates, just like
‘knowledge’ itself, are informal terms. The surrogates were variously
introduced because philosophers insisted, and still insist, on raising
epistemological questions and complaints which were and remain irrelevant to
the theoretical and empirical issues. If one has never been confused, then one
should feel free to speak of ‘knowledge’. All of the surrogates are simply
attempts to clarify the methodological point that linguistics concerns an
internal state of the mind/brain. The attempts have proved to be curiously
unsuccessful, as Barber goes on to exemplify.
(2)
Barber suggests that employment of the surrogates might deflect from “the
importance of reflecting on the character of the corresponding relatum”. It is
difficult to see what Barber means. By the “relatum”, he can only mean UG or
I-languages (in general, states of the language faculty); but it is absurd to
suggest that the study of the language faculty has, in some sense, been
neglected - linguistic theories are theories of the faculty, period. Further,
it is a misnomer to think of the faculty as a relatum: as Chomsky makes clear
(see the above quotations), a speaker/hearer isn’t externally related to the
faculty; the faculty is a state of the speaker/hearer. A speaker can be said to
be internally related to her language
faculty, but such is a mere formal locution which, again, has no explanatory
role to play.
(3)
Barber takes it as given that “attributions of cognizing” are
“explanatory, and for this to be the case there must be some explanatory
framework within which the attribution is embedded - one cannot simply
stipulate one’s way to explanation”. This thought is confused. Linguistic
theories hypothesise that the mind/brains of ‘normal’ speaker/hearers realise certain complex states of a specific character; the
theories don’t, nonsensically, attribute to speaker/hearers a cognizing of such
states: speaker/hearers ‘cognize a language’, which means that their
mind/brains are in particular states. ‘Cognize’ is a wholly informal term to
signal that the mind/brain is our target; the term does no explanatory work at
all. Barber’s remark about “stipulation” is a non sequitur whose provenance it would be tedious to explore.
(4)
Barber asks “[t]o what extent does letting go of the word ‘knowledge’ signal an
abandonment of the associated explanatory framework, intentional explanation?”
This would be an interesting question if ‘knowledge’ were abandoned, or if
there were an associated explanatory framework, or if such a framework were
intentional. As it is, none of these conditions hold, or at
least they don’t hold of linguistic theory.
A Conciliatory Coda: Two Options (Thanks to Guy Longworth)
(i) Epistemological/intentional concerns are hived off from
the science proper. The science is ‘pure’, but there is no eliminativism.
This
is a coherent response to the above arguments. The question arises, however, as
to what one’s epistemology is of
given that ‘language’ itself gives way to the faculty understanding…
(ii) Intentional vocabulary might be indispensable
to our achieving a ‘global view’ of how the language system relates to external
systems and, ultimately, the speaker/hearer’s environment, including other
persons.
Yes. Chomsky’s third characteristic of creativity is “appropriateness/coherence” of language use. This feature is indispensable to our conception of a language user, yet it falls outside of any scientific understanding; it is apparently dependent on our colloquial idioms for expression. Perhaps it always will remain so. However the facts may fall, here intentional vocabulary is a) not part of our theory proper and b) is not causally explanatory. It is the idiom which Skinner tried and failed to escape from. So much the worse for the causation of behaviour, and so much the worst for the idea that our folk conceptions are on scientific duty. (See Chomsky, 1966, Cartesian Linguistics, New York: Harper Row, pp.3-5; 1968/72, Language and Mind, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p.12.)