The Science of Language (34 page)

The proposal offered here will puzzle many. Chomsky proposes treating semantics as a variety of syntax. Or to put it in a different way: a theory of linguistic meaning is a theory of what is in the head (and of how it can configure experience). In fact, as other appendices such as VI point out, his view is stronger still: what is called “linguistic semantics” or “formal semantics” is syntax, which is for Chomsky the study of (linguistic) symbols inside the head which are intensionally (theoretically) described and explained. Semantics in the traditional referential sense probably does not exist. Reference – a form of human action – appears to be out of reach of
science.

By way of background and to settle on the relevant ways to understand the terms “syntax,” “semantics,” and “pragmatics,” I review Charles Morris's (
1938
) now more-or-less standard distinction between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and then take up Chomsky's modifications in it. Focusing first on the standard view and especially contemporary understandings of it allows us to see why Chomsky's proposal seems surprising and also allows me to highlight the modifications Chomsky proposes.

Morris offered his distinctions – derived to a large extent from distinctions Charles Saunders Peirce advanced before him and that Carnap and others were advancing in the 1920s and 1930s – as a contribution to what he thought of as the scientific study of signs or symbols. He suggested that
syntax be understood as the study of what might be called the intrinsic properties of signs, those that are internal to them. This could include at least some relational properties, such as ‘after’ said of a sign that follows another, where some ordering is specified (temporal, left–right . . .). Sometimes sets of signs and their relevant properties are both stated (lists, etc.) and created – as with the syntactic items found in formal logical systems.
Semantics is the study of how such symbols relate to ‘things’ and sets of things. Semantics focuses, then, on syntax and some set of objects and their states. It appears to be a two-term relationship, although Frege and others made it a three-term relationship between sign, sense, and object(s).
Pragmatics includes still another entity, the speaker. Pragmatics deals with the use of signs by a speaker to deal with ‘things.’ Morris simply assumed that the signs he had in mind are marks on a
page (orthography) or perhaps sounds thought of as somehow ‘out there.’ This is a common assumption among logicians and others who invent and employ symbol systems. Natural language symbols, of course, are in the head.

Formal logic and logicians’ thoughts about it and its aim played an important role in shaping many researchers’ views of signs and how they operate. Consider a formally defined set of symbols such as those that appear in first-order predicate logic. A first-order logic text stipulates that various varieties of marks that appear in the textbook – for example, capital and small letters in some font or another (
a
,
b
,
c
, . . .
P
,
Q
,
R
. . .), parentheses, perhaps some specially created marks such as ├, ≡, or the familiar tilde (~) for a negation operator – constitute the syntax of the calculus. The usual aim is to make the semantically relevant roles of the stipulated signs clear and explicit: some logic text, for example, might stipulate that the complex sign ‘(x)Fx’ is to be read as a universal quantifier ‘(x)’ appearing before the predicate sign ‘F’ and a variable sign ‘x,’ the Fx constituting an “open sentence” with a variable, and the whole with quantifier is a proposition/statement to the effect that F is a property that all individuals x have. Generally speaking, the signs chosen are arbitrary and the reasons for their choices are transparent: logicians care most not about the niceties of syntax, so long as the stipulated elements are ‘perspicuous’ about their jobs. Their job is aiding semantics as they conceive it. Logicians put together some syntax that can highlight the properties and relations that they take to be semantically important. They are primarily interested in truth and reference and the truth-preservingness of various inferences and argument structures. The signs in terms of which a calculation is carried out are designed to help ensure explicitness and provide a way to avoid ambiguities. The users of signs are typically
ignored.

With this kind of focus, the standard view of semantics becomes the study of signs syntactically characterized, but conceived of as items outside the head, and treated in terms of their (supposed) relations to things and circumstances ‘outside’ the sign, usually thought of as things and circumstances in the world or perhaps in a model. Semantic discussion generally, then, focuses on what traditionally have been called matters of truth (for sentences) and reference (for terms), thus on aspects of what philosophers call “intentionality.”

As mentioned in another connection, many who do natural language semantics work within a picture of how a semantic theory should be constructed introduced by Gottlob Frege's efforts at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century to construct a semantics for mathematics. Frege introduced a third element besides sign and circumstances and things (for him, ‘entities’ in a world of mathematical abstract entities). He introduced what he called “senses,” where these are conceived of as mediating between words and things. His reason for introducing them
depended on the
observation that what he called “proper names” (which in his “On Sense and Reference” included any singular term – term that refers to a single entity – and thus included definite descriptions too) could have the same referent while differing in
meaning, or what he called “sense.” For example, the singular terms “the morning star” and “the evening star” both are said to refer to Venus, but to differ in meaning, or sense. A mathematical example might note that “√9” and “3” have the same referent, but differ in sense again. Frege viewed a sense as an abstract object. Others turned it into a psychological entity (Fodor
1998
) or turned it into a function from a sign to a referent, offering mildly different views about what that function might be, and what it involves. Introducing senses complicated matters a bit, but the primary focus remained as before: semantics studies a relation (perhaps mediated, perhaps not) between word and ‘things’ – perhaps abstract, perhaps concrete.

As remarked earlier again, Frege himself seems to have had serious doubts about applying his picture of a semantics for mathematics to natural languages. It is easy enough to see why. He assumed that within a community, a sign expresses a unique sense (no ambiguity can be allowed), and that each sense “determined” a unique referent (in the case of a sentence, a truth value). Ignoring senses, semantics-as-usual assumes a sign–thing relationship of some determinate sort. Nothing like these one–one mappings of sign to referent(s) is met in the uses of natural languages, even though the conditions for such mappings are reasonably closely honored in the practices of mathematicians.

It is a very different matter with Chomsky's view of natural language syntax and semantics. The basic assumptions about semantics outlined above remain more or less in place, but only with strict qualifications. Natural language syntax deals with properties internal to ‘signs,’ as usually assumed. However, these signs are inside the head, and their syntax is not the syntax of formally constructed systems. Signs have
something
to do with meaning; but it turns out to be non-relational, and meanings and the signs themselves remain inside the head, even ‘inside’ the sign in the form of semantic features. Clearly, the study of signs is not the study of marks on a page (nor those supposed entities, public linguistic sounds), but items in the mind. Their study is not the trivial orthographic study of chosen marks on a page and their invented combinatory operations nor – for that matter – the study of chosen sets of binary codings in a machine ‘language.’ Rather, their syntactic study is a form of naturalistic study of varieties of state/event of the sorts that figure in linguistic computations – that is, of anything that is involved in yielding sound–meaning pairs. Such study reveals that the relevant kinds of signs are found in human heads. Perhaps there are aspects of them in other organism heads, as discussed earlier, but there must also be distinctively human
phonological and semantic features of ‘words’ and/or other elements. Neither phonological/phonetic nor ‘semantic’ features are referential. The standard view of the semantic study of signs invites thinking in terms of intentionality, so that a sign is a sign
of
something and saying what the ‘semantic value’ or ‘content’ of the sign is is saying what its “referent” is, where its referent is distinct from the sign. Chomsky holds instead that it is not only perfectly possible to specify what he calls the meaning of a sign without introducing anything like standard semantics, but that because of all the evidence against the existence of anything like a referential semantics for human languages (see the text and
Appendix VI
), it is the only way to proceed.

A plausible way to conceive of what he proposes is to say that he adopts something like Frege's notion of a sense, but denies that the sense or meaning of a sign/expression is a separate entity – perhaps an abstract entity as Frege seems to have believed. A sense is instead intrinsic to the sign/expression itself, the sign is located inside the head, and the sign and its sense can be studied by naturalistic scientific means. A sign is in fact a mental entity – a state/event located in the head that figures in a linguistic computation and provides ‘information’ with its features to other systems. And meaning features or ‘semantic’ features plus phonological features (and perhaps formal ones) are not just features of internal linguistic signs themselves, but they constitute such internal signs: semantic features are partially constitutive of lexical items. They are the features that as a result of a linguistic derivation/computation end up at the “semantic interface” (SEM or, sometimes, “LF” for “logical form”) and they there constitute the semantic ‘information’ or what can be called “internal” or “intrinsic content” of a sentence/expression. Or to put it in a Fregean way: they serve as modes of presentation.

As for reference of the word–world variety, for Chomsky it becomes a matter of use by people, and thus an issue in
pragmatics, not his version of semantics. Can the study of pragmatics be, or turn into, a science? First, let us agree that pragmatics or the study of language use is part of a general ‘theory of language’ (see Chomsky
1999
) in some broad sense. But that is not at issue; the issue is whether the use of language by humans can be a naturalistic science that one can investigate using the tools of natural scientific research. In the case of language, those tools assume some degree of biologically based regularity. However, with some exceptions, that is not to be found in the linguistic actions of humans; the creative aspect of
language use provides a great deal of evidence to the effect that there are no causal principles that tie environmental or brain stimuli to specific forms of linguistic behavior. It is an empirical question, and cannot be definitely decided now, or ever. But the weight of evidence at the moment is very much against there being such causal principles. For ample discussion, see the main text and Appendices V and VI. However, if one includes under the title of ‘language use’ certain
forms of inference that people draw, one can find cases where
inferences are at least licensed by the structures and semantic information found in SEMs and the computations that lead to them. From assuming the truth of
Jane's brown cow isn’t producing
, one can infer that Jane has a brown cow, and from her having a brown cow that she has a cow. An important ‘
conjunctivist’ view of why this follows is found in
Pietroski (
2005
). And from
you may have cake or ice cream
, there is at least an implicature to your being permitted to have one or the other, but not both; see
Pietroski and Crain (
2005
). Are these inferences determined by narrow syntax, the core system of the language faculty and its output at SEM? That is a stretch; assuming so would include these inferences in the computational resources provided by Merge. Still, they are sanctioned by the computations of the language faculty and by the semantic information these make available at SEM in a way that many inferences that people draw are
not.

In comments on the discussion in the text, I spoke of concepts as ‘configuring’ experience and imagination; the terminology is repeated in earlier appendices. This puts in a different way views expressed by Chomsky (
1966
/2002/2009): “The strong assumptions about innate mental structures made by rationalistic psychology and philosophy of mind eliminated the necessity for any sharp distinction between a theory of perception and a theory of learning. In both cases, essentially the same processes are at work; a store of latent principles is brought to the interpretation of the data of sense. There is, to be sure, a difference between the initial ‘activation’ of latent structures and the use of it once it has become readily available for the interpretation (more accurately, the determination) of experience” (2009: 102). There is an obvious problem with this statement, apparent in the conjunction of the two sentences. The triggering system that relies on perceptual/sensory input to yield a concept might make a specific concept available, one that is not – however – sensory/perceptual. Whether perceptual or not, it does not fix its employment or use. However, this does not affect the crucial point. The crucial point for present purposes is that innate conceptual, linguistic, sensory, and other forms of internal ‘cognitive’ machineries partially determine experience in that they – not the ‘world outside’ – fix
how
one can see and understand. Taking this seriously, I suggest that
SEMs, which are construed here as complexes of lexically specified innate concepts, do their ‘work’ in an ‘adverbial’ way. They fix – or with other systems contribute to fixing – the ‘hows’ of experience: the various manners or ways in which one can conjecture, understand, imagine, and experience. Interpretation is not a matter of searching for the right concept or right description to fit some ready-formed experience, but a matter of ‘making’ the experience, here understood as participating in a cooperative exercise involving several mental systems, each with its unique form of contribution. This point was anticipated in discussion above, but it needs to be addressed in some detail because it is so easy to start down a hopeless road.

The basic idea comes from discussion several decades ago by philosophers of what was called an adverbial account of
visual sensation. (For the record, it
was ignored more than rejected, in part – I suspect – because it conflicted with the commonsense-driven externalist and anti-nativist intuitions that dominate much philosophical discussion of sensation and perception.) This account of sensation was introduced to undermine the grip held on accounts of sensation and perception offered by two incorrect – according to the adverbialists – views of visual sensation. One was the “sense datum” view, the idea that the visual system (“the mind”/“the brain”) produces things called “sensations” or “sensa,” that these sensations (for example, color sensations) are mental objects of some sort, and that their role is to serve as the “immediate objects” of sensation and perception – not the ‘things outside.’ They in turn – on some views – mediate perception of things ‘out there’ or – on others – even constitute the total content of visual experience. The other was the view that sensations can only be classified and individuated by appeal to what they are of or about, so that to say what a sensation of red is, is to say what it is about – generally assumed to be a property of a surface of things ‘out there.’ The danger that lies in the first, sense datum, view is that it seems to depend on what must surely be an incorrect view of the sensory contents of the mind, one that seems to require that when I have a green sensation, that I (or something) sense something green in my mind/brain. The danger in the second is that it seems to support an externalist view of sensory states and events – suggesting that to say what they are, one must speak of things ‘outside’ and their properties, and making the internal states and events mere “re-presentations” of various things out there, with no evidence that anything ‘out there’ corresponds to the way that sensation portrays it. This is one of the points Locke and others were making when they spoke of “secondary
qualities” – not that I am endorsing their account of them, nor of the difference claimed between secondary and “primary” qualities.

The adverbial account offered an alternative account of sensation – that is, of the mind/brain's role in sensory experience. It suggested that instead of thinking of the mind as a theater populated by green sensations at which some internal homunculus (or the person, for that matter) stares, one should think instead of the mind as ‘containing’ various sensory events – ‘sensings’ – and that these events differ from one another in ways that are determined by the nature of the mind/brain's sensory mechanisms. These events might require stimulation of some sort, either external via impingements on the eye (assumed to be the usual case) or internal, but given that stimulation, they participate in building a visual or imaginative scene populated with what the mind makes out as colored surfaces. Intuitively, where a person might be inclined to say that they
sense green
or
see green
, he or she should when careful resist and say rather that their visual system/mind/brain senses
greenly
– that is, that the relevant mental system functions on an occasion in one of the ways that is characteristic of an organism with the relevant kind of
mental machinery, machinery that constitutes visual scenes. A minimal visual scene can be thought of as a particular assignment to values of coordinates of a retinocentric six-dimensional volume.
¹
Each of the points in this volume has a specific set of ‘spatial’ and ‘color’ coordinate values, the spatial coordinates being (visual) depth, altitude, and azimuth and the color coordinates hue, brightness, and saturation. Think of a specific set of stimulus-derived assignments to these coordinates as a representation in the internalist sense. It does not re-present; the organism as a whole ‘uses’ it to do that, virtually automatically in the case of visual experience. It is a
representation in the way that a linguistic SEM or PHON is a representation, a complex mental event described in theoretical terminology that in the theory of mind is treated as a specific configuration of an interface with other mental systems. The advantage for the internalist to this way of construing the matter is that it
places colors not ‘on’ sensations, whatever they might be, but makes them out to be specific assignments of color values, specific output values of a subsystem of the mind. Think of these 3-D output values as describing particular complex mental events that momentarily constitute a minimal visual space, where the latter is understood as what the mind produces. They are theoretical ‘objects,’ the varieties of which are specified by a theory that offers a way to describe and explain how a system of the mind/brain works, and its contributions to an organism's mental
operations. As for SEMs, a specific assignment in the case of a SEM amounts to a structured set of specific semantic features that help ‘make’ a way to understand and, specifically in cooperation with vision and other relevant systems (for example, object configuration), to perceive things in the world
as
such-and-such.

Looked at from the point of view of the organism as a whole and its experience and actions, the science of vision provides a way to think of how the visual system partially constitutes experience, ‘making’ colored, located visual ‘objects.’ Because visual experience in cooperation with other systems such as object- and facial-configuration systems usually proves reliable to an organism and offers partial but not necessary ‘output’ that with contributions from other systems generally proves sufficient to allow the organism to navigate and identify nutrients and enemies in its efforts to get along ‘in the world,’ the ‘things’ that are assembled (in part) through the contributions of an internal sensory system and many others are treated as ‘really out there,’ even though the properties and surfaces and classifications of such things as people and friends, or apples and food, are created by the
mind. They can be thought of as ‘projections’ of the mind. Returning to color,
the adverbial account claims that from the point of view of the science of color (as opposed to the commonsense conception of color and the entities of the commonsense world), colors are forms of mental event, ways of sensing and perceiving that differ from one another in ways determined by the nature of the visual system. They are not properties of things ‘out there,’ however reliable the objects created in visual experience prove to be for practical purposes, and however tempting the commonsense view of the world with its colored objects might be. Nevertheless, it serves the practical interests of an organism to see and think of the colors as properties of objects ‘out there.’

The visual system typically contributes to ‘experience’ – normally understood as an organism's reaction to distally caused input. Sometimes it contributes to imagined scenes. The language faculty, in contrast, only sometimes contributes ‘online’ to experience – to conceiving of something seen or heard as such-and-such having such-and-such functions, for example, and thereby constituting ‘it’ as a thing with those functions and other properties. It often contributes ‘offline’ to cases of imagining, speculating, proposing, thinking, etc. – ways of understanding and conceiving. It is a competence system, not an input system. Nevertheless, one can think of
SEMs and other forms of mental entities as working in an adverbial way too. So construed, they do not ‘exist in the mind’ as conceptual objects inspected and perhaps manipulated and used as tools by some kind of internal homunculus ‘understander’ and agent, thereby paralleling the way that the sense datum theory construed the entities of the visual system. Rather, they can be seen as specific kinds of ways in which a person can – perhaps with contributions from other systems – understand, imagine, classify, ‘think about’ things and events, and the like. They are mental events that differ from one another in the ways determined by the language faculty and what it provides at SEM. Those ways are described and explained by a theory of the language faculty and its possible SEMs, and given any
specific I-language (that is, parameter settings and lexicon). Assuming they contribute along with other systems in some way, the features of ‘interface values’ that the language faculty and other faculties make available at their interfaces contribute to human cognitive capacities.

Incidentally, one can grant that at least some of the ways that the mind configures experience, thought, etc. are provided – at least in the case of sensory systems that are virtually identical to those found in some other primates, not language – by systems that the organism's mind has available to it as a result of receiving it from a common ancestor or ancestors several millions of years ago, perhaps even from a whole class of organisms that employ
rhodopsin in vision, if Gehring is right. One can also grant that the systems that offer these ways to configure experience would not prove as useful for practical purposes as they have without such an origin while,
however, denying that the ways that the mind configures experience somehow map the way things ‘out there’ really are, or rather, how they are from the point of view of sciences of the relevant entities. The science of
color vision provides a useful reminder of how misleading it can be to conclude that since commonsense objects appear to have the properties our minds assign to them (specifically, some of them appear colored), and since the framework proves so useful to serving our practical interests, that commonsense objects and their properties – not the minds that harbor and assign the properties – are both ‘real’ and must be, at least in part, the targets of a science of color. The point should be even more obvious with the concepts and complexes of concepts expressed in the sentences of human natural languages. As Chomsky points out in discussion in the main text, if you want to find out what the
objects of common sense ‘are’ and can be, forget about looking outside. Instead, construct a science of the concepts (here thought of as ways of configuring and constituting thought, imagination, and experience) that we have available and that we employ in our thoughts, speculations, and dealings with the world. To do that, look inside the head. If you want to know what persons are, look at the internal and mental-system-provided concept PERSON with its rich and interest-serving characteristics, characteristics that enable flexible applications by humans when they speak and employ this concept, in a wide range of cases. Do not focus on specific applications of the concept – specific ways in which it configures. The concept, or at least similar versions thereof, may well be universal across the human species because it is fixed by the system(s) involved in bringing it into the mind. However, its uses by
multiple cognitive systems and (seen from another point of view) by humans are anything but fixed. And in looking inside the head, you can also avoid the apparently tempting idea (at least to many philosophers – although not Locke or Hume) that the concept of a person is some kind of re-presentation of a person, or persons.

Why is the idea that our minds represent the world such a tempting view – so tempting that Fodor and others simply default to it, treating it as an axiom that cannot be challenged? An answer is implicit in what is said above: commonsense objects (with their visual-spatial and color properties, all assigned by the mind) prove useful. But they do so for practical purposes only. They do not serve the interests of the scientist.

Before continuing, a comment on the terminology that Chomsky often employs when he speaks of the systems on the other side of SEM. He speaks of them as “conceptual-intentional” systems to which SEMs “give instructions.” That way of putting it can, I think, mislead; see footnote 2 in
Appendix VI
. In the discussion and comments on it, I make SEMs out to be complexes of (lexical) concepts themselves, organized collections of the semantic information offered in lexical items. That is a way to avoid the suggestion in
Chomsky's term, “conceptual-intentional.” His terminology suggests that SEMs, whatever they are, are items that relate to concepts ‘in’ other systems, or perhaps – as Pietroski sometimes says – instructs other systems to build concepts. This way of talking invites taking seriously notions such as a Fodorian language of thought, the locus of concepts. I suggest it be avoided. For good reasons, I believe, Chomsky explicitly rejects Fodor's view in the main text discussion, and implicitly in (
1996
,
2000
) and elsewhere. The
adverbial account offers a way to avoid that suggestion, and to think of SEMs as I suggest, as complexes of lexical concepts – concepts understood as ways of configuring experience, etc. that are articulated in terms of semantic features (here a technical term). More carefully, think of SEMs, as above, as the
language faculty's contribution to a human's conceptual (configurational) capacities. The contribution is partial, as noted: the language faculty's semantic information provides “perspectives” from which to view “aspects of the world as it is taken to be by other cognitive systems” (
Chomsky
2000
). This way of stating it acknowledges that the semantic information that SEMs provide cognition should be seen only as a partial contribution to the ways our minds shape thought, imagination, and direct experience. Occasions on which a single faculty operates in isolation are likely to be rare, at least in actual, not experimental cases. Nevertheless, as the discussion also emphasizes, language's contributions are plausibly unique, and therefore in principle separable – as are the contributions of vision and other faculties. If so, it is possible to divide language's specific contributions to cognition and understanding from those of vision, audition, and so on.