The Science of Language (23 page)

 

There are at least two important points made here in the main text. One is remarked on elsewhere: that the
evolution of language into its modern form could well have consisted entirely in a single mutation in a single individual – a mutation that allowed a human to construct complex thoughts.
¹
The key is the introduction of a
single operation, Merge, which gives a creature that has this operation the capacity to engage recursion to an in-principle unbounded extent. There is no need, as there is with the
Pinker-Bloom story about language and its evolution, and other appeals to the selectional advantages of increased capacity to communicate, to suppose that language developed slowly over many millennia.
²
A single step would suffice, assuming that Merge provides the means to join concepts together to make complexes and to move them, and that conceptual (thought) systems and – when and where externalization begins to figure, which need not be at the start – articulatory and perceptual systems were in place. There is more to language and the conditions under which it can be acquired and operate than that, and more needs to be done to make sense of how language could be innate yet take so many forms. For more on these matters, see the discussion below of parameters and of what Chomsky calls the “third factor” in language development at both the species and individual levels. However, the basic point seems to remain: the
hypothesis that Merge alone is sufficient for the recursive feature of language remains plausible, and its saltational introduction makes sense of how language came to be introduced into the species. (For a dissenting view, see Pinker & Jackendoff
2005
and for a response to them, Fitch, Hauser & Chomsky 2005.)

The other point is found in Chomsky's remark that
our concepts and thought systems do not operate the way animals’ do. Part of the reason is that the concepts are just different; I return to that below. But another aspect of the matter recalls the point made above about
stimulus freedom and other features of the creative use of language. Descartes in his 1637
Discourse
, and a large number of others following him, were struck by the difference in ways in which animals use their conceptual/cognitive tools and the ways in which humans, able to combine concepts in complex forms of ‘perspective,’ employ theirs. (Arguably, it is this observation, no doubt only obscurely understood under rubrics such as “knowledge” or “reason,” that lie at the root of the myth of special creation for humans: we have language and flexible ways to combine concepts, other creatures do not.) At least two factors play a role in bringing about this difference. One is that our concepts are just different; there is more on that below. The other has to do with what a
language faculty provides. It can in its use operate – so far as we can determine – autonomously, thereby supporting our ability to speculate and wonder about anything whatsoever, without regard to circumstances, external or internal. Stimulus freedom, already noted, is one factor in this. Another is “
unboundedness”: by means of the operations of the language faculty, arbitrarily chosen concepts can be joined with others to form an endless number of complexes (‘expressions’).
Elizabeth Spelke (
2003
) – among others – makes much of the combinatory capacity of language and what it affords humans alone; she could add: combinatory to an unbounded degree. Chomsky (
2000
) puts it this way: with language, we can produce
novel cognitive “perspectives” that allow us to conceive in ways that are clearly unavailable to creatures that lack recursion. Still another factor – almost certainly related – is that human actions seem to
be free. Perhaps that is an illusion, but it is not likely one we can overcome, or for which there is any evidence that we should overcome. Given the number of systems in our heads and the fact that the production of actions requires the coordination of at least several contributing mental, motor, and input systems (with different ones at different times) operating cooperatively over an interval, analyzing the causes of an action would be like trying to solve a massive multi-body problem where there are few if any constraints on what contributes when, and how. As extensive discussion of the n-body problem indicates, that is very likely beyond what we humans are capable of managing. So we might as well acknowledge now that we, with our scientific tools, are very unlikely to be able to produce a deterministic account of the much more complex phenomena of linguistic behavior, especially one that can be generalized to all individuals. However, instead of bemoaning the fact, we should recognize that – as Descartes emphasized – we have the evidence of experience that we feel free. Lacking also any evidence of science against ‘free will,’
and acknowledging the evidence of experience for it, perhaps we should celebrate our freedom instead.

The history of efforts to deal with the distinctiveness of human cognitive capacities is instructive. While few of them were as sharp in
their observations as Descartes, many in both empiricist and rationalist schools followed him in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by attributing the differences seen in human cognitive powers to
reason
. Animals, it was thought, operate not by reason but by
instinct
. While there was agreement on this, however, the schools diverged in how they thought humans come by reason: rationalists assumed it was an innately endowed capacity, heavily dependent on the operation of several innate faculties. Descartes famously placed reason – the mind, or the mental – in a separate substance.
Empiricists suggested that this supposedly distinctive feature of humans comes through exposure to the environment and – certainly by the time of Herder and the majority of the Romantics, and arguably before – to a large extent it comes by learning language and social practices from the community. The claim becomes in effect, then, that
human invention, history, and culture make the difference between us and other creatures – that, and the supposed fact that must accompany this kind of explanation, that to a large extent the human mind is empty at birth, and that it has available a large area where some kind of generalized learning procedure operates, guided by training and experience, and shaped by learned habits and rules that are assumed to link some kind of input to some kind of output.

Chomsky's work advances
the rationalist cause considerably by making reason into not just a
consequence rather than an apparently independent explanatory principle, but a consequence, largely, of treating language – its growth/development and its internal operations – as an ‘animal instinct’ introduced by mutation into the human species. (The use of language, however, remains well within the domain of freedom.) Unlike Descartes, he accepts that our minds and the combinatory mechanism of language especially are apt objects for natural scientific research.
³
Moreover, unlike the empiricists, he maintains that what makes us human is not society, culture, and the training of a plastic mind, but the introduction of a special kind of instinct to our species. As an organ of the human body, language develops automatically and operates internally according to innate principles. And
most of our commonsense concepts, at least, seem to be innate too – hence, the result of some kind of internal system or systems. The same can be said for the kinds of linguistic sounds that we can produce. However, by providing a way to put arbitrary concepts together in complex structures at arbitrary times in arbitrary circumstances, language surely
provides humans with the essential tools for speculation, explanation, inference, and the like – certainly within the commonsense domain, at least. Making a contribution no doubt too to our capacity to create scientific theories – at the very least, assuming recursion came via Merge – it appears to yield the discrete infinities of natural numbers, so it has a role to play in the development of science. Chomsky remarks on that above and below in the text. In effect, then, the claim in its simplest form is that the
introduction of recursion through the mutation that introduced Merge leads not just to the conceptually necessary operations of language (putting elements together, and moving them), but to what
Jared Diamond called “the great leap forward,” the introduction to the species of the distinctive features of human cognitive capacity. That is not quite enough, as suggested above: human-unique concepts play a role too. But their distinctive nature may be the result of their being – at least in some measure – due to Merge or something like it too. The topic is taken up in the text and
Appendix V
.

The empiricist explanation has not changed substantially, nor has it advanced appreciably since its beginnings – ignoring in this regard contemporary redefinitions of empiricism as efforts to seek the best explanations. No doubt
connectionism and the like provide pictures of what the area of the mind might look like, if something like the empiricist picture were correct. In this way, it is an advance over Locke's “blank slate” (assuming he actually believed that tale, which is less than obvious). But the rest of the story – and especially the dependence on
some kind of training or learning – is unchanged. We differ from animals by having weak instincts, or perhaps lacking instincts altogether with regard to our higher cognitive operations. For these to become available, we need recurring experiences, acculturation, and (typically) training in order to bring shape to and constitute these operations and the conceptual materials on which they operate.
⁴
We must have large areas of our minds that allow for this. And reason continues to be celebrated as what makes us distinctive. Consider, for
example, the work of Wilfrid Sellars and his followers – a group that includes several contemporary philosophical stars. In Sellars's essay “Philosophy and the Scientific Image
of Man” in (
1963a
), he presents a sweeping picture – not unlike Hegel's – of how humans come to be what they are now, with advanced cultures, sciences, and institutions. In this picture, humans are portrayed as gradually being weaned from a framework in which they placed themselves at the center of the universe and had no inkling of science to our current epistemically advanced states and our sciences by continuous refinement in their
ability to reason. Their ability to reason comes to be modified through greater and greater sophistication of common sense (Sellars's “original” and “manifest” images of world and humans in them), which eventually comes to be scientific understanding in its modern form. Improvement and greater sophistication are throughout treated in terms of ways of offering
better and better ways to describe and explain the world and humans in it – that is, as improvements in our abilities to reason, provided by better and better ‘theories.’ And concepts are characterized by their contributions to reasoning – by their roles in reasoning about the world and ourselves. Concepts – like language itself – are treated as normatively governed, and the largely epistemic norms that do the governing are seen as inferential rules that Sellars calls “practices.” These rules are in turn portrayed as the rules of reason and language, conceiving of language in the way that Wittgenstein did as a game or set of games we ‘play.’ Crucially, unlike rationalist accounts of primitive cognitive
systems, including for Chomsky language, we must
learn
to reason. To learn how to reason is largely a matter of learning how to infer (or play the game); and learning that is learning how to speak in accord with the rest of the specific community in which we find ourselves. We learn how to speak by being trained by our communities; our communities, in fact, are repositories of, and in a way constitute, the standards of correct reasoning. Communities train their children to produce the right words in the right circumstances. Once a child sufficiently meets community standards, he or she “knows a language” (a form of know-how), or masters it, and can teach it to others, because he or she has the relevant discriminative capacity to recognize divergence and conformity. The view of learning is basically
behavioristic; indeed, Sellars acknowledged his behaviorism, and in fact celebrated a slightly sophisticated form of it as the proper and only science of mind. The slightly sophisticated form of it appears in essays in which Sellars treats the brain as a neural net that is modified by experience and training to emulate the inferential connections he thought constituted the rules of languages. These essays offer an early form of a
connectionist model of the brain, one according to which the brain's pathways leading from sensory input to behavioral output are modified as training proceeds to produce the right outputs, given specific inputs. To have a language is to have a brain that yields what a community takes to be appropriate behavior (epistemically correct, etc.), given circumstances. And to have a concept is to have a node in the brain that yields the right outputs,
given a specific input. It is remarkable that this Sellarsian picture of language, mind, brain, and reason continues to dominate philosophical (and psychological, etc.) study of language and
mind. In philosophy, it is found in both the ‘analytic’ school and (although with less emphasis on learning, science, and the brain), the ‘continental.’ Both are empiricist in their assumptions, and differ largely in style and emphasis.

Chomsky's rationalist alternative to this empiricist account treats reason – exemplified in problem-solving in both science and common sense – as (at least for common sense) heavily dependent not on training and acculturation, but
on our having the innate instincts we do. This very different perspective on the matter is found in earlier rationalists Chomsky discussed in his
Cartesian Linguistics
, such as
Herbert of Cherbury, one of the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century. Herbert noted that we have to have (innate) “common notions” in place in order to come to reason at all – that is, to describe and explain at all. These common notions are, essentially, the commonsense concepts typically expressed in our natural language use. Chomsky adds a further, and crucial, instinct or innate contribution to Cherbury's picture, a language organ and its combinatory powers. Given this, reason that is divorced from circumstances – and flexible cultures, human institutions, and individual styles, etc. – becomes possible.