The Science of Language (36 page)

Any identity conditions on things to which a person refers that are imposed by the concepts expressed at SEM by natural languages – and those that come about as results of complex interactions
between language and other cognitive systems – are unlikely to be well defined and characterizable independent of context, unlike what one would be likely to find – or rather, what scientists strive to maintain – in the concepts for objects and events of mathematics and the natural sciences. Chomsky's brief discussion of the
traditional Ship of Theseus thought experiment later (pp. 125–6) illustrates this. When Theseus rebuilds his wooden ship by replacing over time one plank and beam after another and throwing the discarded planks and beams in the dump where his neighbor gathers them and builds a ship that has the same planks and beams in the same configuration as the original ship, we do not assume that the ship built with the discarded parts is Theseus’, even though its composition is the same as the one with which he began. That is because ships and other artifacts portrayed in this kind of way have ownership by specific individuals or quasi-persons such as corporations built into their descriptions. Under other descriptions, telling different stories, we are not sure, or we have
different intuitions.

Philosophers in recent years have constructed thought experiments in which persons – or their bodies or their minds – are fissioned or fused and placed in varying circumstances to explore intuitions about when “we” would say that person P at time t is the same or different from person P’ at a different time. Nothing is settled: intuitions can be pushed one way or another and someone can be persuaded to give a firm answer at one time under one story, and persuaded in another way with a different story. This should be no surprise;
commonsense concepts are rich and flexibly used, but still have limitations. The richness and complexity of the commonsense concepts expressed in our natural languages allow them to serve human interests and reach reasonable resolutions to practical
problems in a variety of circumstances. But not all: there is no reason to think that a commonsense concept should be able to offer answers to every question posed. There is clear evidence of this in the obvious failures found in trying to put commonsense concepts to use in the sciences. However, they reveal their limits in other ways too, such as the thought experiments mentioned above. There is no disadvantage in any of this. Because of their richness and complexity, commonsense concepts can support the
extraordinary degree of flexibility displayed in their application by persons when they use language – a flexibility that has proven very advantageous in the practical domain, although not at all in the scientific and mathematical. And while they yield answers to only some kinds of questions and not others – because, presumably, they are innate products of acquisition mechanisms ‘devoted’ to yielding what they can – this too is an advantage. For if innate, they are readily available even to the young and can thereby enable the child to quickly develop an understanding of people and their actions and things and what they can be expected to do.

The illustrations of the richness and complexity of commonsense concepts – and Chomsky offers many in his writings – do not say how the conceptual/meaning resources brought to SEM ‘work.’ A compelling naturalistic answer requires a science, one that does not exist and, for various reasons explored elsewhere in the discussion, may never exist. Given the extent to which externalist intuition can distort and mislead an account of perception and thought ‘about the world,’ however, it is worthwhile developing an internalist alternative picture of how they ‘
do their job.’ Chomsky makes some suggestions when he speaks of (internal) sentences yielding “perspectives,” cognitive ‘tools’ with which a person can comprehend the world as portrayed by other mental systems. I add some suggestions in
Appendix XII
.

Page 28, On what the “semantic interface” provides

That is, the language system provides what its ‘design’ (a term that must be treated cautiously, as indicated on pages 50ff.) allows for with regard to the use of language in thought, understanding, and the like. To scotch a possible misunderstanding: does language (the language system) assert and declare? No. It offers the opportunity to do so; it provides the means for individuals to express an assertion – as we would say in the commonsense domain. This is, I think, the way in which one should understand Hinzen's (2007) view of a syntactic, internalist approach to truth.

Page 30, Chomsky on representation, computational theories, and truth-indications

When
Chomsky calls his derivational theory of linguistic syntax a “computational theory” and offers by means of it a compositional account of
linguistic meaning that is not only internalist, but focused on operations in the language
faculty, it is obvious that he is not – unlike Rey and Fodor – adopting a computational theory of a re-presentationalist sort. This point is connected to his effort to avoid reference (and truth) in constructing an account of linguistically expressed meanings.

That said, he does say of SEMs – of language's contributions at the “conceptual-intentional” interface – that they can be seen as offering “
truth-indications.” The relevant quotation appears in Chomsky (
1996
) immediately after pointing out that what he calls the “referentialist thesis” (that words like
water
refer by some kind of ‘natural’ relationship to a substance ‘out there’) must be rejected, because “language doesn’t work that way.” It does not, we have seen, because people make reference to things; language does not ‘directly refer.’ Indeed, even if someone does use a word to refer, and succeeds for an audience in doing so, no referential relationship comes to be established in a way that makes it of interest to the empirical and naturalistic science of language. What he has to say about truth and truth conditions seems to parallel this:

We cannot assume that statements (let alone sentences) have truth conditions. At most they can have something
more complex: “truth-indications,” in some sense. The issue is not “open texture” or “family resemblance” in the Wittgensteinian sense. Nor does the conclusion lend any weight to the belief that semantics is “holistic” in the Quinean sense that semantic properties are assigned to the whole array of words, not to each individually. Each of these familiar pictures of the nature of meaning seems
partially correct, but only partially. There is good evidence that words have intrinsic features of sound, form, and meaning; but also open texture, which allows their meanings to be
extended and sharpened in certain ways; and also holistic properties that allow some mutual adjustment. The intrinsic properties suffice to establish certain formal relations among expressions, interpreted as rhyme, entailment, and in other ways by the performance systems associated with [the] language faculty. Among the intrinsic semantic relations that seem well established on empirical grounds are analytic connections between expressions, a subclass of no special significance for the study of natural language semantics, though perhaps of independent interest in the different context of the concerns of modern philosophy. Only
perhaps
, because it is not clear that human language has much to do with these, or that they capture what was of traditional interest. (1996: 52)

In brief compass, Chomsky dismisses major features of contemporary philosophy of language as of little or no relevance to the science of language and the science of natural language meaning in particular. He also emphasizes that linguistic meaning (of a sort that can be investigated by the science of language) is intrinsic to expressions themselves and sufficient to establish certain ‘formal relations’ (in effect, those pointed to earlier in the discussion where “relational” expressions were mentioned, and again in the next section); the study of these relations is a “shadow” of syntax. As for open
texture, here is his explanation (p.c. January 2009): “By saying that expressions – say ‘river’ – have open texture, I just mean that their intrinsic linguistic properties do not in themselves determine all circumstances of appropriate use to refer. Such complex human actions as referring can and do take into account all sorts of other features of human life. For example whether I’d call something a river or a creek depends on complex historical and cultural factors. If the Jordan river happened to be displaced, precisely as it is, in central Texas, people would call it a creek (often a dry creek, since most of its water has been diverted into the Israeli water carrier).” This does not deny that it is possible to introduce a technical sense of ‘refer’ for a version of model theory; see in this regard Chomsky (
1986
,
2000
), and particularly the discussion of ‘relation R’ in the latter. But reference in this sense is stipulative. Similar points can be made
about truth-in-a-model.

Page 33, On human concepts, native and artifact, and theories of them

Two remarks. First, as indicated in a comment of mine above, the distinction between truth conditions and truth-indications is an important one, reflecting as it does the idea that the natures of the concepts (semantic information) that the language faculty makes available to “conceptual-intentional” systems at the SEM interface do not determine the ways in which these linguistically expressed concepts can – much less, should – be employed by persons, even arguably by ‘other systems,’ given that the relations between language and them are likely not determinate. The linguistically expressed concepts do, however, ‘instruct’ in their distinctive ways those other systems on the other side of the interface, and by extension, they provide ‘indications’ for how they can be used by people. Note in this respect that English speakers use HOUSE differently than (say) HOME. The differences in the ways in which we use these concepts indicate something about the natures of the concepts themselves – thus, the kinds of ‘instruction’ that they give. Nevertheless, nothing like determination is relevant here. Nor, of course, should anyone be tempted by the idea that the natures of the concepts themselves are fixed by the ways in which they happen to be used – contra the popular “conceptual role” view of (linguistically expressed) concepts found explicitly in the work of Sellars and others, and implicitly among many more. Rather, they have the natures that they do because that is the way they developed/grew in that individual, assuming that the set of concepts that can develop (and the possible ways that they can develop) is (are) more or less fixed. Being fixed, they might be finite in number, but depending upon how they develop, the issue of how many of them there might be remains open.

The concepts expressed in natural languages are not, however, those found in the sciences. In the case of scientific concepts, it makes sense to speak of them as at least in part human inventions, creations, artifacts. No doubt there are innate constraints on the construction of hypotheses and theories, constraints attributable to the natures of our science-formation capacities (about which we know virtually nothing). There are also constraints of a sort set by ‘the world’; science is, after all, an empirical form of study that aims to provide an objective description of the things of the world. But that does not change the fact that they are ‘made.’

Second, it does not follow from the discussion of the atomicity of concepts that Fodor's DOORKNOB (see Fodor
1998
) is an atomic concept, nor even that DOOR and KNOB (and HOUSE and HOME, and so on) are atomic. All the concepts (or more carefully, the “mode of presentation” aspect of a
Fodorian concept) that Fodor takes to be atomic could be composed of more primitive ‘meaning’ elements, where the composition takes place in the automatic operations of some kind of internal system or systems. That way, both elements (atomic, but at a different level) and products would still count as innate, and if the system(s) were distinctively human, one might be able to account for the distinctiveness of human concepts. All that follows is that our minds when doing science are ‘set up’ to seek the most primitive elements, and these are what get seen as atomic – at least until a more primitive set is found. This tendency is likely attributable to the science-forming capacity, a capacity that is unique in the animal kingdom about which we know little, except through its effects and the methodology it appears to demand.

Page 35, Agency; the language faculty and what it provides

Chomsky is not claiming in this discussion, and never has claimed, that there is a homunculus. However, there is no doubt that that is the way we humans think and talk about how the mind works. We apparently need some way to understand what appears to be a fact, that when people act, they manage to bring an extraordinary amount of information from different systems to bear in a coordinated way to produce what we think of as actions that a unified person does.

Chomsky's remark about the ‘global’ nature of fixing intonational patterns is self-explanatory. For those unfamiliar with binding theory and Condition C, an informal discussion appears in
Language and Problems of Knowledge
(
1988
) and a more formal but still readily understood one in
Knowledge of Language
(
1986
). Some informal and also technical definitions and discussions can be found on the internet. Readers should not confuse Condition c of binding theory with what is called “c-command.”
On the latter (an important matter concerning the structure of the
computational system) see
Appendix VII
.

A caveat: since views of binding and of variables are often provided by linguists and philosophers and others who in writings and in semantics, philosophy of language, and logic classes cheerfully speak of pronouns and nouns referring and of binding as binding variables to things, keep in mind that Chomsky takes the working assumption of the theoretician of language to be that binding is syntactic, although (as indicated above in the discussion of global facts involving interpretation) perhaps syntactic in a broad sense. It is explained by what is inside the head, including, among other things, Condition c. Whether this is strictly linguistic, or not, is not clear – as Chomsky indicates. However, it is still syntactic (internal, and intrinsic properties of “signs” or mental representations generally) and requires no appeal to anything outside the head. Taking this seriously, one should speak not of pronouns and nouns referring, but of them being in “referring positions” in sentences. Placing this in a broader context, think of people referring, and of their using what language offers them – including nouns and pronouns in referring positions – to refer.