The Science of Language (13 page)

NC:
First of all, it [the study of human nature] goes back hundreds of years, of course. And there's been no progress. These are just questions that are too hard.

There is by now some study – like John Mikhail's – some empirical study of elements of human moral nature. Contemporary ethical philosophy has given
interesting examples, the kind that Judith Thompson talks about, and Gil Harman and others – the trolley problem and others. There are situations in which we just have an intuition about what the right answer is – and it's a very strange one. For example, sometimes it leads everybody to prefer an outcome that will kill more people when they have a choice of killing one person; and the results are pretty systematic. By now John in his dissertation along with Elizabeth Spelke are doing
studies on children, and it's pretty firmly established that in very young children they give the same judgments. The judgments are interesting because in a sense they're counterintuitive – like choosing to kill more people – this isn't about taking organs from people, and things like that. Those are interesting studies of what our fundamental moral nature must be. And there are now some
investigations – Marc Hauser's going to do some comparative work on this with other primates – and out of that could come some understanding [too]. But it's going to be primitive – these problems are just too hard. We don't understand anything about how humans behave in complex circumstances.[C]

[
Keep in mind that these complex] problems are too hard for physics, even in its own domain. Physics does not study what goes on in the world – it studies what goes on under the highly controlled conditions of extremely artificial experiments. That's the Galilean revolution. What goes on in the world is just too complicated, so you try to discover some principles by studying artificially simple situations. And, of course, that [yields results that are] not obviously true for anything more than the highly simple entities that physics restricts itself to. It has been a non-trivial task to show that engineers, say, can substantially improve their practices by relying on fundamental principles of
physics, or medical practitioners on biology, and so on. That's one of the reasons why I'm skeptical about work some friends of mine have done in designing an ideal society. A lot of it's interesting, but I don't think we have any idea of whether humans could live in that society.

NC:
I think it's plausible and everyone is engaged in it all the time. If you're even a moral agent – you care about the effects of your actions – you're presupposing something about human nature. It doesn't matter whether you're a revolutionary or a conservative, or a reformist, or whatever you are. If you regard yourself as a moral agent – you're trying to think about actions, or morals, or plans, or ideas that might make human life better – you're presupposing something about what is fundamental human nature. You can't articulate it. But that's not surprising – most of what we do we can't formulate the reasons for, but it's got to be there, otherwise human action makes no sense. If you deal with your children in a certain way, you're presumably trying to help them, not harm them. You must be presupposing something about what's good for them. Well, where does that come from? It comes from some intuitive conception of what their fundamental nature is. And that must be true of every human interaction.

NC:
There are very striking ones. I just gave a talk in England [at the Royal Institute of Philosophy (see Chomsky
2005b
)] . . . It was a talk about truisms – moral truisms and why they're important. I started out by apologizing because I'm only going to bring up platitudes. But they must not be dismissed because they're always ignored – almost universally – and ignoring them leads to horrible effects. So take the most elementary truism we can imagine – the principle of universality. We apply to ourselves the same standards we apply to others – probably more rigorous standards if you're serious. If you accept that principle, practically the entire discussion and policy of international affairs collapses, because it's based on denial of the principle of universality. Sometimes it's explicit. I congratulate the people who say straight out that we've got to be
similar to Nazis – like Henry Kissinger. So when the president's national security strategy came out in September 2002, there was a lot of criticism of it, although the criticisms were narrow, and most of them were of the form, “Well, the principles are right, but they're going about it the wrong way.” But Kissinger was straight about it. Good for him. He said yes, it's a good principle but – his words were – It must not be “universalized.” It's for us; we have the right of aggression. Maybe we
delegate it to clients, but certainly nobody else does. And, as I say, he has to be congratulated for honestly saying what is always presupposed: that we must adopt the doctrines of the Nazis. We can't accept the most elementary moral truism. We have to firmly reject it. And if you look beyond, that's commonly true. So I think you can say a lot about
moral truisms which people will accept abstractly, but reject instantly as soon as they are applied to their own actions and affairs.

NC:
Well, if someone doesn't at least accept that, then they should just have the decency to shut up and not say anything. That does wipe out a good part of the commentary on international affairs, at least – and on domestic affairs too. So it's not a small point – even though it's a
platitude.

NC:
First of all, just to be historically accurate, what's now called evolutionary psychology or sociobiology begins with
Kropotkin in his critique of social Darwinism. But he was a Darwinist. He argued on selectional grounds that you would expect what he called “
mutual aid” – cooperative societies that happened to be his vision of communitarian anarchism. Well, why is Kropotkin disregarded? – because people don't like his conclusions. If you mention him to Dawkins and so on, they'll just ridicule him. Now is it because he didn't have any evidence? Well, he didn't have any relevant
scientific evidence. Does anyone have such evidence for anything else? Barely. They don't like his conclusions.

 

There are several different questions here. What is the nature – what is human nature, or ant nature? Well, those are scientific questions. Separate from that is the question of what role selection had in developing them. And those are just two different scientific questions, not to be intermingled. Part of the problem with the kind of pop biology that's common today is they're just intermingled – it's assumed that if there's a nature, it's got to be selected. It doesn't make any sense – it doesn't make any sense for the kidney or the visual system or anything else, and it doesn't make any sense here.

There is a nature, undoubtedly. People who argue against it for a blank slate – that's just puffery for a popular audience. It doesn't mean anything – nobody ever believed in that who was sensible. So yes, there's a fixed nature and it developed somehow, but we do not know for any aspect of it (whether it's the chin or the visual system or the bones in the ear or whatever it may be) – we don't know the answer to how it evolved until we know the answer. And the answers when we find them will often be very surprising. So there's no issue here about
whether natural selection operates – obviously it does – but there are some very big questions about the
channel
within which it does, and about other factors involved in evolution, of which many are known. So we have to separate totally the kind of rhetorical posturing about selection and the question of intrinsic human nature.

Well, there is recent work – like, say, on kin
selection, Hamilton's work – which suggests some plausible evolutionary basis for certain kinds of what appear to be
altruism. But it's pretty narrow. If you pursue kin selection to its limits, you're going to have a hard time explaining why humans devote enormous energy and take tremendous risks to save dolphins but don't care how many children are dying in Africa. Something else is happening. It's interesting work; I don't want to denigrate it. But the results that have some human application come down to the fact that I'm going to pay more attention to my children than to my nephews. We didn't need biology to tell us that, and it doesn't really tell us much beyond that. And it also doesn't tell you why I'm going to pay just as much attention to an adopted child as to my own children – and take the same attitude towards it, even though I know it's adopted. [Nor does it tell you] why many people care more about their cats and dogs than they do about their children – or take dolphins, which are the classic case. So it just doesn't get us very far. It's interesting work and we learn something about insects and other organisms and something about social behavior, but very little about humans that has any implications.

We know in advance that that's going to be true.
Science deals with simple questions. It can't deal with questions that are beyond the borders of understanding. We kind of chip away at the limits.

Take the evolution of language. It's a question; and so is the evolution of bee communication a question. But just compare sometime the literature on one with the literature on the other. There are libraries of material on the evolution of human language and some scattered technical papers on the evolution of bee communication, which mostly point out that it's too hard to study, although it's vastly easier to study than evolution of human language. This is just irrational. Not that it's wrong to study the evolution of human language and I think there are some directions to look, like the one you mentioned. There's comparative evidence about the sensory-motor system, which may turn out to be very peripheral – but it's there. So sure, study it to the extent you can, but sensibly – knowing when you're talking and producing serious science and when you're gesturing rhetorically to a general public who you're misleading. Those are important distinctions, and I think if we make those distinctions, a lot of this literature pretty much disappears.

To some extent, there are other factors that enter into it which cause it to be misleading. Many of these people, like Dawkins, regard themselves very plausibly as fighting a
battle for scientific rationality against creationists and fanatics and so on. And yes, that's an important social activity to be engaged in, but not by misleading people about the nature of evolution – that's not a contribution to scientific rationality. Tell them the truth about evolution, which is that selection plays some kind of a role, but you don't know how much until you know. It could be small, it could be large; it could [in principle even] be nonexistent. We have to find out. In the few cases where something has been learned, it's often very surprising, like the evolution
of the eye. What appears to be the case is completely different from what had been speculated for centuries in biology, and the same is true of many other things – it could be true of human language. So there's nothing wrong with sociobiology or evolutionary psychology – the field that Kropotkin basically invented – but it has to be done seriously and without pretense.

NC:
Trivers's work is quite interesting. I don't think it gets us very far. I don't think it explains why people are willing to support the system of social security that's going to give a disabled widow across town enough food to survive – or the fact that we care more about dolphins than we do about people pretty near us who could help us. It just deals with a very small topic. It's interesting; and there are game-theoretic approaches that try to work out the consequences. All that's fine and should be done. But does it yield conclusions of human significance or scientific interest? Well, not of human significance as far as I can see. Of scientific interest, yes, but within a very narrow domain. Are there other human capacities that enter into our moral nature? I just don't see how that can be doubted. We know too much from our own experience and intuition; it shows that there's a huge domain – in fact, virtually all of human action, thought, and interpretation that doesn't fall within this category.

Is there some other evolutionary explanation for the rest of it? No. But that's true of almost everything.
There's no evolutionary explanation for bee communication, or the most elementary questions of how simple organisms function – nematodes, for example. So yes, of course, science shines often-penetrating light on extremely simple questions. One of the reasons
that physics is such a successful science is that it is granted the unique privilege of keeping to questions that are extremely
simple. If the helium atom is too hard to study, you give it to the chemists. Other fields don't have that privilege but deal with the level of complexity that they're presented with, and as a result they're very shallow by comparison. In these areas – evolutionary explanations – we're just groping in the dark for the moment – there aren't good ideas, even for much simpler organisms. So all this work is fine. If you can achieve some plausible confirmed scientific results, everybody applauds; and there're no issues. What are its implications for human life and society? – well, that you have to investigate, and I think when you do, you find them extremely limited. Hume's and Smith's assumptions are, I think, much more plausible
and lead to suggestions about how to behave in the world that are far more reasonable – and in fact that we adopt all the time.

JM:
If we're decent, anyway
.

NC:
If we're decent. And that's why people like
Kissinger are important – to tell us that we must reject our fundamental moral nature for reasons of power and so on. OK; that's interesting to hear. Now tell me something about moral human nature.

JM:
Kissinger does strike me as pathological
.

NC:
. . . or maybe honest. I kind of prefer him to people who look at that view with horror and then presuppose
it.