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The Language of Science and the Science of Language:
Chomsky’s Cartesianism
David Golumbia
diacritics, Volume 43, Number 1, 2015, pp. 38-62 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2015.0004
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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/597508
Accessed 15 Jun 2017 02:07 GMT
THE LANGUAGE
OF SCIENCE AND
THE SCIENCE OF
LANGUAGE
CHOMSKY’S
CARTESIANISM
DAVID GOLUMBIA
Almost from its inception, among the most notable features of Noam Chomsky’s “revolution in linguistics” has been his insistence that linguistics, or language itself, or at least
the most interesting and important aspects of linguistics, must be understood as parts of
natural science.1 Its status as natural science is frequently posited as a critical distinction
between Chomskyan linguistics and all (or almost all) other approaches to the subject.2
Much of the seriousness of the reception of Chomsky’s work can be attributed to this
claim, and one finds frequent reference to it in Chomsky’s writings and those of his more
ardent supporters. The implied, though rarely stated, assumption appears to be that for
linguistics to be serious or truthful it must be “scientific.”
While Chomsky is among the first to admit that the word “language” is ambiguous
and polysemous—a fact he often directly references in his work—he rarely reflects on any
parallel polysemy in the word “science,” usually writing as if its meaning is transparent
and even univocal. Science thus comes to serve as an ideological anchor for Chomsky’s
thought in the broadest sense, revealing as much about the foundations of his belief system as it does about the study of language. In turn, despite the explicit and (by his supporters) widely accepted scientific character of Chomsky’s research program, it remains
possible to view that program in a different set of historical and contextual frames than
the ones on which he insists. Rather than proving, that is, that the study of language
now must be seen in a new and “objective” light, Chomsky’s specific formulations can
be shown to implicate his work in a set of deep historical-cultural tensions in which no
formula is likely ever to emerge as decisive, and in which the pursuit of decisive formulations itself is burdened with more cultural, philosophical, and political baggage than
Chomsky can or will admit.
>> The Structure of the Chomskyan Revolutions
Several recent developments in Chomsky’s work make these issues clearer than they
may have been in the past. These include a shift of emphasis in Chomsky’s writing, or
perhaps a new emphasis on a persistent topos, namely the alignment of Chomsky’s project with what he calls the “biolinguistic program”; his late-career adoption of a position
he calls the Minimalist Program, which involves, as the name suggests, drastically reducing the number of parts that make up the putative “language organ” of which the study
is Chomsky’s main interest; a set of interviews conducted with one of his main explicators and philosophical acolytes, James McGilvray, under the title The Science of Language, which includes a number of unexpectedly revealing admissions about the nature
of Chomsky’s enterprise; and, finally, Chomsky’s surprising late collaboration with two
evolutionary biologists, Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch, on a pair of articles, the
first of which appeared in the journal Science, in which Chomsky directly engages with
biological science in a far more direct way than in his entire career prior to it (despite his
typical insistence on the scientific nature of his enterprise).3
A more distant prompt, but one perhaps no less immediate in importance, stems
from the emergence of certain interesting similarities in, and differences between, the
DIACRITICS Volume 43.1 (2015) 38–62 © 2015 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
David Golumbia teaches in the English
Department and the Media, Art, and
Text PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author
of The Cultural Logic of Computation
(Harvard University Press, 2009) and
more than two dozen articles on digital
culture, language, and literary studies.
He maintains the digital studies blog
http://uncomputing.org. He is currently
working on a book called “Cyberlibertarianism: The False Promise of Digital
Freedom.”
40
DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.1
intellectual trajectories of Chomsky and Edmund Husserl. It is somewhat remarkable
that Chomsky writes almost nothing about Husserl, since Husserl is essentially the only
twentieth-century intellectual to have used the concept of “universal grammar” in anything like the way Chomsky does, prior to Chomsky’s own work.4 It is more remarkable given that, like Chomsky, Husserl also claimed to have been building a scientific
discourse where an improperly metaphysical one had existed before, by drawing firm
lines and boundaries among a variety of phenomena that he argues had been allowed
to blur, specifically with regard to the place of language in the human mind. It is triply
remarkable that Husserl, like Chomsky, draws inspiration from an agonistic relationship with a figure whose formative influence on scientific inquiry in the West is itself
ambivalent, namely René Descartes.5 In a closely argued work devoted to Husserl’s
engagements with Descartes, Paul MacDonald argues that “there is a pervasive and
systematic parallelism between their respective projects” because there is a “profound
congruence in their respective points of departure, methodological procedures, and
idealized destinations.”6 Beyond their parallel but apparently divergent endorsement of
the idea of universal grammar, Husserl’s and Chomsky’s projects are more similar than
they may appear on the surface, and it is no surprise, and even typical of Chomsky, that
this close resemblance would occupy one of his blind spots regarding his own intellectual heritage, or that he would align himself more closely with Gottlob Frege than with
Husserl, thus choosing a somewhat counterintuitive side in the signal bifurcation that
defined much of Anglo-American and Continental philosophy from the late nineteenth
century forward.7
Husserl’s project itself deserves sustained examination with regard to Chomsky’s,
but it is particularly worth viewing Chomsky’s recent work in light of Jacques Derrida’s
close engagement with Husserl in the earliest parts of his career.8 Derrida’s work on Husserl is among his deepest and most sustained writing, and interestingly, even in the mid1960s, Derrida recognizes some homologies between the work of Chomsky and Husserl specifically with regard to Chomsky’s then newly announced Cartesianism.9 While
Derrida did not engage with Chomsky’s linguistics substantively after this early work,
Chomsky’s career turns out to follow a shape that reflects the fundamental tensions
that Derrida locates at the heart of Husserl’s project. In “‘Genesis and Structure’ and
Phenomenology,” one of his densest texts, Derrida focuses on the tension in Husserl’s
project between “different irreducible types of genesis and structure: worldly genesis
and transcendental genesis, empirical structure, eidetic structure, and transcendental
structure.” Derrida asks: “what is the historico-semantic relationship between genesis
and structure in general?” and indicates that Husserl cannot ask this question because
he cannot “interrogate that which precedes the transcendental reduction.”10 Despite his
claim to have escaped metaphysics—thus moving philosophy into a secure position as
a “science”—Husserl “accomplishes the most profound project of metaphysics.” This
admission, or revelation, occurs in Husserl’s work precisely around his agonistic engagement with Descartes.11 A similar dynamic occurs in Chomsky’s research; Chomsky turns
out to be preoccupied no less than Husserl is with questions of genesis and structure, but
The Language of Science and the Science of Language >> David Golumbia
to demonstrate less explicit awareness of the inevitable tension between them. Perhaps
it is not going too far to call it the same dynamic: though it would require a wide-ranging
cultural inquiry to demonstrate, Husserl’s engagement with Descartes may well in an
important sense be something like Chomsky’s, with the curious addition of Chomsky’s
willful blindness to Husserl’s project.
Not coincident to the lack of that awareness is the emphasis Chomsky characteristically places on critical oppositions, in which paired ideas present themselves as
urgent and of profoundly unequal importance. In some cases, both of the opposed terms
are visible; in others, perhaps even more
suggestively, only one term is brought into
view. Many of these oppositions are familiar to all students of Chomsky’s linguistics:
there is performance vs. competence, where
Chomsky is interested only in competence, and where competence represents
“real” linguistic knowledge, as opposed
to the “defective” data of performance;
I-language (where “I” stands for “internal,”
or sometimes “intensional” or “individual”
language) vs. E-language (where “E” stands for “external”), where only I-language is of
interest, and perhaps actually is language itself, despite what many other researchers
think when erroneously focusing on E-language; Deep Structure vs. Surface Structure,
a distinction from early phases of generative grammar, where only Deep Structure is of
interest; the Narrow Faculty of Language (FLN) vs. the Broad Faculty of Language (FLB),
a distinction from Chomsky’s recent work with evolutionary biologists, where despite
possibly being “empty,” only FLN is the obvious target of interest for linguistics as a science; and many others.
It’s notable that along with this unusual emphasis on binary oppositions, Chomsky
also rejects the philosophical methods that make oppositions a central focus, namely all
methods that call themselves “dialectics.” Despite the various forms of dialectic found in
philosophers as various as Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, at least two of whose writings
(Plato and Marx) Chomsky endorses to some extent in any number of works, Chomsky
claims he “hasn’t the foggiest idea” what “dialectics” is and declares that “when words
like ‘dialectics’ come along, or ‘hermeneutics,’ and all this kind of stuff that’s supposed to
be very profound, like Goering, ‘I reach for my revolver.’ ”12 In keeping with his disdain
for trying to hold opposing viewpoints in mind, Chomsky vigorously and emphatically
dismisses the arguments of critics who suggest that his foundational distinctions might
be flawed.13 Further, he very often posits these distinctions as methodological, scientific,
or ontological priors, so that he need not entertain serious investigation of their validity;
instead he tends to frame them with some of his characteristic statements of authority,
declaring them “virtually (conceptually) necessary” or “obvious” on the one hand, or
unavoidable procedural gambits on the other.14
41
Chomsky turns out to be preoccupied
no less than Husserl is with questions of
genesis and structure, but to demonstrate
less explicit awareness of the inevitable
tension between them.
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DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.1
As followers of dialectical philosophical practices will suspect, and as readers of Derrida in particular will intuit, what tends to happen in Chomsky’s writing is that critical
argumentative and philosophical material ends up lodged precisely in the distinctions
about which he won’t argue, so that certain characteristics of Deep Structure turn out
to be necessary if Deep Structure exists, for example, and since we have to assume Deep
Structure exists, those characteristics come along “of necessity.” But since part of the
onus of Chomsky’s work has to be, at some level, to convince us that the Deep Structure/
Surface Structure distinction actually is a valid one to apply to language, there is a profound circularity in then relying on the logical entailments of Deep Structure’s existence
as support for the view that it must exist and be part of a valid theory.
While the roles of overt distinctions like Deep/Surface Structure are frequently discussed by Chomsky’s followers and critics alike, somewhat less immediately apparent is
his reliance on categorical distinctions where the disfavored member of the opposition
rarely occurs in direct argumentation. Science is among the chief examples of this pattern. Chomsky’s assertions regarding science often take something like the form: the
study of language is a science; approaches that do not follow the Chomskyan method are
not scientific; ergo those approaches are invalid according to something close to a priori
reasoning. These matters are complicated by the specific form of Chomsky’s intellectual
and methodological intervention. Chomsky positions his science directly in the midst of
one of the central distinctions in Western philosophical history, and one most relevant
to scientific inquiry and method: empiricism versus rationalism. Surprisingly for the
nature of his research program, Chomsky sides not with the empiricists, whose work is,
as the name suggests, often taken to be not just harmonious with but constitutive of the
scientific program itself.15 Instead, Chomsky reaches into the paradigm typically associated with Aristotelian, a priori reasoning and an opposition to experiment (usually taken
as the sine qua non of scientific inquiry), although he insists that this characterization is
incorrect.16 Remarkably, Chomsky asserts that methods and conceptual frames common
to the sciences are unscientific (or scientific only within certain proscribed limits) when
applied to language, and that procedures not usually employed in science are the only
proper ones with which to understand such a core human phenomenon as language.17
This tension turns out to be deeply implicated in conceptual issues that Chomsky downplays but that are evident in many ways at the margins of his works.
It is clear that for Chomsky, science means structure; structure is found in the “language organ” and language itself is structure, or linguistics is about the structure of
language—its syntax—rather than language in use, its semantics and pragmatics. The title
of Chomsky’s first book, Syntactic Structures, announces these commitments clearly;
that short book was famously derived from Chomsky’s much longer 1955 dissertation,
“The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.” Generative grammars and grammatical
transformations are structures; the language organ itself is a structure, even if it cannot be located in any specific place in the brain. Structure is what compels attention,
and questions of origin must be put in the background—“‘just-so’ stories,” Chomsky
often calls them, all of relatively equal plausibility and none admitting of the scientific
The Language of Science and the Science of Language >> David Golumbia
rigor available for inquiries into structure.18 Most of Chomsky’s work is devoted to the
description of structures, both in language and in the language organ. Though Chomsky
tells a complex story about his lineage in contemporary linguistics, at various moments
he has identified his work with Saussurian structuralism, then against it, then, as John
Joseph, one of Chomsky’s most trenchant commentators, puts it, the Minimalist Program brings Chomsky “back to something uncomfortably close to what Chomsky in 1962
described as the position of Saussure.”19 Like most true structuralists, Chomsky interests
himself almost entirely in synchronic structures and generally eschews issues of diachrony, especially as they impact the human individual, who in Chomsky’s view brings
to language a determined interior structuring capability or mechanism, a structuring
which just is language and the investigation of which just is linguistics.
Yet it is hard to overlook the fact that at the periphery of Chomsky’s work, issues
of genesis continually arise, posing difficulties for the general architecture of his structural theories, and often requiring modifications that end up informing much more of
Chomsky’s theories than his rhetoric suggests. The name “generative grammar” itself
suggests genesis, though the engine doing
the generating is abstract or mathematical
in nature (or in its own metaphorical origins). Chomsky’s theory is birthed out of
a mathematical, ex nihilo consideration of
abstract issues in language production, but
it results in his occasional efforts to ground
the work in intellectual precursors, even if
those precursors were unknown to him
during the formulation of his theory. In his
early days Chomsky often wrote that questions of the biological plausibility of his
theory were irrelevant, even if psychologists suggested that it was hard to imagine
how the human child’s brain could accommodate the elaborate language organ his
theory required. To answer these challenges, Chomsky theorized a “Language Acquisition Device,” whose relationship to the
rest of his theory remains somewhat unclear.20 In his last, minimalist, phase, Chomsky
has started to indicate that he does imagine there to be an evolutionary-biological component to his theory, something he routinely denied for much of his career. It seems
no accident that this occurs, like the casting-off of so much of his earlier theory, as his
own life and career reach their final phases, when autobiographical questions of genesis
relating to Chomsky himself become more immediate.
It is hard to overlook the fact that at the
periphery of Chomsky’s work, issues
of genesis continually arise, posing
difficulties for the general architecture of
his structural theories, and often requiring
modifications that end up informing
much more of Chomsky’s theories than
his rhetoric suggests.
43
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DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.1
>> The Science of the Science of Language
In the mid-1960s, the increasing influence of his work in philosophy and in the burgeoning field of cognitive science inspired Chomsky to try to position his project in the philosophical tradition somewhat more centrally than he had previously been able or willing
to do in linguistics. At the same time that he was developing the linguistic work that
resulted in the highly technical and hugely influential Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
(1965), Chomsky made his first forays into the broader context in which he situates his
work, resulting in the 1966 Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist
Thought. While the latter touched on his linguistic theories it was largely devoted to
situating them in the linguistic and philosophical traditions Chomsky considers relevant
to his work. Somewhat surprisingly, given Chomsky’s insistence on the scientific status
of his project, Cartesian Linguistics is devoted to demonstrating that the two prior centuries of linguistic and philosophical investigation have turned away from science, and
that by contrast,
universal grammarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have made a contribution of lasting value by the very fact that they posed so clearly the problem of changing the
orientation of linguistics from “natural history” to “natural philosophy” and by stressing the
importance of the search for universal principles and for rational explanation of linguistic fact,
if progress is to be made toward this goal.21
There are few more curious aspects of Chomsky’s approach to science than his insistence that science itself emerges not from the empiricist tradition in Western philosophy, but instead from the contrasting rationalist tradition. The figures Chomsky cites
as intellectual forebears—especially Leibniz and Descartes, to say nothing of the
Port-Royal grammarians and Wilhelm von
Humboldt—are not those whose works
have, until recently, been cited for scientific inspiration, while those whose views
he typically disclaims—especially Locke
and Hume—have been. In standard histories of philosophy, “rationalism” is often
considered a holdover of the Neoplatonist
and Aristotelian traditions of a priori reasoning applied to the natural world, where
the experimental approach to natural science and philosophy grounded particularly in the work of Francis Bacon are seen as
launching the project of modern science, so that “empiricist” comes to mean something
very close to “scientific” per se.
A remarkable paradox in Chomsky’s work is that he overturns this hierarchy not for
what he considers philosophical reasons but instead directly because of his understand-
There are few more curious aspects of
Chomsky’s approach to science than
his insistence that science itself emerges
not from the empiricist tradition in
Western philosophy, but instead from
the contrasting rationalist tradition.
The Language of Science and the Science of Language >> David Golumbia
ing of the nature of science: to Chomsky it was the rationalists, rather than the empiricists, whose approach was scientific. Interestingly, neither the experimental tradition
nor figures such as Bacon are frequent topics in Chomsky’s writing, and he does not
discuss how his view of rationalism accounts for the general observation that experiment is the thing that kick-started the project of science from the almost thousand-year
period of modest scientific development preceding Bacon, much of it dominated by the
Neoplatonist and Aristotelian methods Chomsky favors.
In his recent work, Chomsky has intensified his emphasis on the scientific status of
his research program and, accordingly, the biological status of language itself, or what
Chomsky and others following Eric Lenneberg call the “biolinguistic program.”22 In
most introductory and popular treatments of this work, Chomsky is careful to distinguish between the biological ability to use language—which almost no working linguist or evolutionary biologist doubts is some part of the physical endowment of Homo
sapiens—and the nature and study of existing human languages.23 It is this latter question,
though, that provides the most significant site for controversy in the field, as in his more
technical works Chomsky often appears to suggest that human languages themselves are
biological objects first and foremost and should be analyzed in biological terms: thus
a typical formulation is “a language is a state of the faculty of language, an I-language,
in technical usage.”24
Chomsky not infrequently writes that “the study of language is a natural science”;
although Chomskyans typically understand the word “language” in this context to mean
I-language, it is clear that Chomsky intends to generate the controversy that such statements provoke.25 Many linguists and humanists approach natural language as “a social
phenomenon which is part of the natural history of human beings; a sphere of human
action, wherein people utter strings of vocal sounds, or inscribe strings of marks, and
wherein people respond by thought or action to the sounds or marks,” as the philosopher
David Lewis put it in a description of a view crafted to be antithetical to Chomsky’s.26
While Chomsky does not deny that languages are in some sense “out there” (or what he
refers to as E-language, where E stands for “external” or “extensional”), to Chomsky, the
mature human being must have internalized a representational system that in some way
reflects the social one, but is in some sense biologically independent of it.27
It is just here that the central cleavage emerges between Chomsky’s work and that of
both non-Chomskyan linguists and humanists as well, and that the status of linguistics
as a science begins to take on its fundamental importance. Non-Chomskyans, in general,
resist the I-language/E-language distinction; they doubt that the systematicity clearly
evident in languages has much to do with the organization of the brain, but instead with
social, cultural, and historical factors “outside the head.”28 In earlier formulations of generative grammar, this controversy was easier to portray: to Chomsky through the late
1970s, and the first three of his (approximately) five “revolutions in linguistics,” there
was said to be something like a genetically endowed computer program of thousands of
lines (consisting not of actual English grammar, but of “operations” such as the transformation that “turns” passive voice constructions into active voice constructions, and so
45
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DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.1
on). To Chomsky since then and especially with the advent of the Minimalist Program in
the mid-1990s, when the notion of a richly featured genetic program faded, the nature of
the disagreement has become far less clear, despite Chomsky, along with his followers,
insisting on it as a fundamental litmus test for “scientific” linguistics.
The human brain can clearly construct extremely complex formal representations
of systems that not even Chomsky proposes are in any sense genetic (city maps constructed by cabbies, physics as understood by a practicing physicist, sports fandom with
its plethora of statistics, rules, histories, and so on). The contraction of the Chomskyan
program to some set of core formal operations, such as what in the Minimalist Program
is called “Merge,” which may or may not be equivalent functionally to what Chomsky,
Hauser, and Fitch identify as the mathematical operation of recursion—capabilities
which Chomsky himself insists cannot be restricted to language itself, but must be available to other parts of the cognitive system—leaves it not always clear what the disagreement between Chomsky and his critics amounts to. Nevertheless, that disagreement
remains a clear shibboleth in intellectual practice, with “linguistics is a natural science”
on one side, and “the study of language is not, or not entirely, part of the natural sciences”
on the other.29
>> The Problem of Genesis in Chomsky’s Linguistics
Focused on structures within the human mind and in language itself, Chomsky has for
the most part avoided direct engagement with questions of origin, though they appear
more often than one might expect in the margins of Chomsky’s work. These questions of
genesis take two primary forms. First, there is the question of the origin of the language
faculty in Homo sapiens, a topic about which Chomsky has shown little direct interest until recently, when, with the advent of the Minimalist Program in the early 1990s,
Chomsky became more explicit that his project is actually framed around his search for
a single “great leap forward”—“some small genetic modification somehow that modified
the brain slightly” and that gave rise to the human language faculty.30 Second, there is
an area that Chomsky’s critics have pressed on especially hard over the years, the question of language acquisition: why, if so much of language is genetic, do human languages
vary so much, and require so much external stimulus to mature, and even then continue
to vary so much?31 Chomsky today shunts aside most of the acquisition question, typically dismissing it as “the problem of explanatory adequacy (when viewed abstractly),”
although critics continue to insist that having a linguistic theory that integrates with
observed facts about language acquisition is not necessarily the same question as having
an adequate evolutionary explanation for the human ability to use language, and that
the diversity of human languages is prima facie evidence for the limited character of the
biological uniformity of the faculty of language.32
Questions of genesis, of both individual and species development, are those raised
most often by his critics, and Chomsky’s work demonstrates a pattern of shifting the
argumentative burden from one pole of the opposition to the other, often without
The Language of Science and the Science of Language >> David Golumbia
acknowledgment. The Principles and Parameters theory of the 1980s, which suggests
that there are a limited number of “plans” for human languages, subsumes the acquisition problem to one of “parameter setting”—the child learning whether a language
expresses tense through separate words or morphemes, for example. But as critics point
out, this construction puts together two distinct facts: the child’s acquisition of any given
language and the historical development of human languages that obey certain parametric settings.33 Does the fact that a child may be sensitive to whether a language is
organized according to word order as opposed to inflectional morphology mean that
there is some kind of deep program activated every time the child utters an expression
(and therefore “chooses” in which form to express it), or just that certain broad inclinations are available without there being much “in the head,” as is known in the sensitivity infants have to the sounds of whatever language they hear very early in life (but for
which no rich internal program, other than a kind of tuning of available production and
reception mechanisms, is posited)? Either of these constraints could, in fact, be outside
the biology of the child, but to Chomsky they are both the same phenomenon and must
both admit of an exclusively and possibly identical biological explanation.
This insistence on human uniqueness is part of a deeply cultural commitment in
Chomsky’s thought, one that goes on to inform his political thought as well as his philosophy.34 To Chomsky the question is precisely “what is unique to humans as distinct from
other primates”?35 One of Chomsky’s core rhetorical strategies that remains controversial to this day is to postulate a perspective radically outside the human and the animal
both, a perspective he repeatedly identifies with a theoretical “Martian naturalist,” who
“might note that the faculty mediating human communication appears remarkably different from that of other living creatures; it might further note that the human faculty of
language appears to be organized like the genetic code—hierarchical, generative, recursive, and virtually limitless with respect to its scope of expression.”36 This remarkable
difference has always been Chomsky’s main object of interest: “Something about the faculty of language must be unique in order to explain the differences between humans and
other animals.”37 Ultimately, in one of the most controversial formations of his views,
Chomsky writes that “there is only one human language, apart from the lexicon.”38
That these questions point to something deeper than, or other than, what is typically understood as “scientific” becomes apparent when we attend to Chomsky’s own
language, especially in the later years of his career. To Chomsky, that “something” that
distinguishes human capabilities from those of other animals has a mystical quality.
Over time it has become clear that for Chomsky this “something” constitutes the proper
object of linguistic study. In the recent papers with Hauser and Fitch, Chomsky introduces a new addition to his pantheon of binary distinctions: the “faculty of language—
broad sense” (FLB), which roughly includes everything about language that is internal
to a mature language user’s mind, brain, and body; and the “faculty of language—narrow sense” (FLN), “the abstract linguistic computational system alone, independent of
the other systems with which it interacts and interfaces. FLN is a component of FLB,
and the mechanisms underlying it are some subset of those underlying FLB.”39 FLN, of
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DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.1
course, is the object that interests Chomsky, the object that he sometimes refers to without qualification as “language,” the thing that requires scientific study. While he admits
that “many scholars who take the complexity of language seriously”—that is to say, most
non-Chomskyan linguists—affirm that FLB as a whole integrated system is a “derived,
uniquely human adaptation” that incorporates many available cognitive and sensorimotor capabilities, the thesis that interests Chomsky is the one according to which “only
FLN is uniquely human.”40
While there are significant empirical and conceptual issues here whose complexity
should not be overlooked—whether what is uniquely part of the human biological-linguistic system is also exactly that thing that constitutes human biological uniqueness—
Chomsky proceeds with the hypothesis that only FLN is uniquely human, and that FLN
“constitutes” language in some fundamental sense. Further, Chomsky has a candidate
for FLN. Throughout his career Chomsky has identified the signal mystery of human
language facility—the “core property of discrete infinity”—as the ability of humans to
produce and understand an unlimited number of novel sentences.41 For Chomsky, and
this has been true from the earliest phases of his work, the “property of discrete infinity”
requires that “at a minimum, then, FLN includes the capacity of recursion.”42
This minimization of mechanism accompanies Chomsky’s late-career adoption of
rhetoric that is especially confounding when considered in light of his emphasis on the
scientific nature of his enterprise. The words Chomsky uses to describe this faculty do
not sound scientific to contemporary ears: “FLN may approximate a kind of ‘optimal
solution’ to the problem of linking the sensory-motor and conceptual-intentional systems,” he writes, in a typical formulation for his recent writings, the word “optimal”
occupying at the very least an interesting rhetorical space.43 The word occurs frequently
in Chomsky’s writing since the 1990s, along with at least two others: “design” and “perfect.” Titles such as “Three Factors in Language Design” are at least jarring to most
linguists, for outside of certain forms of State-based central planning such as L’Académie
française, notions of language being “designed” are not ones typically associated with
scientific or even scholarly approaches, any more than we expect scientists to talk of the
“design of any biological system” or to “suppose that a super-engineer were given design
specifications for language,” a thought experiment which is followed by a significant
discussion of language itself having “design specifications.”44 It seems fair to wonder
whether any other writer would be capable of using this sort of rhetoric while maintaining a claim not just to be “scientific,” but to have specifically made scientific a discipline
that had failed to live up to scientific standards, despite repeated attestations to the contrary by many of its leading figures.
Repeatedly in Chomsky’s writing, a great deal appears to rest on the distinction
between “the human” and “the animal” and on discovering that “great leap forward” that
makes human beings different from all other animals. In language that echoes certain
aspects of Descartes, Chomsky typically cites the cognitive scientist Randy Gallistel who
“suggests that for every animal down to insects, whatever internal representation there
is, it is one-to-one associated with an organism-independent external event, or internal
The Language of Science and the Science of Language >> David Golumbia
event. That’s plainly not true of human language. So if [what he claims] is in any way
near to being true of animals, there is a very sharp divide there.”45 Other linguists and
biologists frequently see language as humans use it as cobbled together out of many different cognitive and sensorimotor systems, which again Chomsky describes as the “null
hypothesis for many scholars who take the complexity of language seriously”: “FLB is a
highly complex adaptation for language, on a par with the vertebrate eye, and many of its
core components can be viewed as individual traits that have been subjected to selection
and perfected in recent human evolutionary history.”46 To these researchers, FLB is the
object of interest, while FLN, even if it exists, may be so obscure or so tangled up with
other systems as to be impossible to isolate, either empirically or conceptually.
The thesis that Chomsky works very hard to reject is one that is probably best put by
the linguists/cognitive scientists Ray Jackendoff and Steven Pinker, each of whom has
at one time been seen as a complete believer in the Chomskyan perspective, and each
of whom, through a variety of controversies and disagreements with Chomsky, some
prompted by Chomsky himself, has found himself arguing against Chomsky’s interpretations of the arguments and facts he puts forward. One of the curious facts about this picture is that both Jackendoff and Pinker have commitments to experimental science (i.e.,
empiricism), whereas Chomsky has almost rigorously avoided any direct contact with
experimentation during his entire career, although in later years he does sometimes cite
the work of experimental scientists, usually when their conclusions bolster his theories.
Jackendoff and Pinker together wrote the most detailed response to the Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch paper.47 Jackendoff and Pinker, perhaps surprisingly to outsiders, critique
Chomsky for not being scientific enough, and for abstracting too far away from known
biological and evolutionary evidence. Specifically, they worry about Chomsky’s insistence on there being some abstract entity “language” (or in Chomsky’s terminology,
“I-language”) that can somehow be distinguished usefully from what they and other linguists know as language, and therefore that it is useful to think about FLN as something
that can be meaningfully partitioned off from everything about language.
What becomes culturally interesting about this debate is that it involves issues of
hybridity and mixing, even of religious interpretation, that take us right back to Descartes, the “rational animal,” and the question of the body as entirely mechanical.48
Pinker and Jackendoff insist that whatever the “great leap forward” was that caused
the cultural and cognitive explosion we associate with modern humans, it emerged in
a matrix of animal capabilities that are too entangled to be analyzed at the atomic level
proposed by Chomsky. Jackendoff and Pinker argue that “the language faculty, like other
biological systems showing signs of complex adaptive design, is a system of co-adapted
traits that evolved by natural selection.”49 This has the effect of drawing attention to the
starkness of Chomsky’s proposal: one thing happened suddenly, one thing separates us
from them, one thing emerged that “had to have happened in a single person.”50
To Jackendoff and Pinker this is not merely a theoretical idealization of evolution,
but a claim contrary to any number of observed points of evidence, including the various
physiological changes well known between pre–Homo sapiens (whose capacity for lan-
49
50
DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.1
guage remains controversial) and the primate ancestor from which we and modern apes
both descend. “Language evolved piecemeal in the human lineage,” they argue, “under
the influence of natural selection, with the selected genes having pleiotropic effects that
incrementally improved multiple components.”51 This thesis which, as Chomsky admits,
is favored by the majority of evolutionary biologists, stresses what can be understood as
hybridity and mixing at the origin; as such it counters Chomsky’s apparent investment
in a pure, Platonic, “perfect” site of origin, a rupture rather than a graded continuity, a
digital rather than analog distinction. Whether or not this thesis turns out to be correct
(if such a proposition can ever be finally determined), it is clear enough that Chomsky
puts that Platonic perfection on the side of science, thus contrasting it to the messier and
more analog forms of genesis that many scientists consider completely unexceptionable
as method. This effort on Chomsky’s part to keep such conjectures out of linguistics as
a methodological proposition can be seen in this light as a part of his general project to
naturalize stark conceptual distinctions, despite their typical lack of fit with the worlds
of not just biological but humanistic and social-scientific methods of inquiry.
>> The Language of the Science of Language
Like Jackendoff and Pinker, some of Chomsky’s most outspoken critics were at one point
or another his students or colleagues. Two of Chomsky’s earliest collaborators—the linguist Paul Postal and the philosopher Jerrold Katz—were instrumental in the development of the Aspects model in the early 1960s, so much so that an important part of the
machinery of earlier forms of generative grammar is still called by Chomskyans the
“Katz-Postal principle.” Yet by the 1970s both Katz and Postal, having risen to major
prominence in their respective fields, found themselves outside of the Chomskyan circle. With the rise of the Minimalist Program in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Katz and
Postal became two of Chomsky’s most vocal critics, specifically questioning the scientific basis of Chomsky’s proposals and his methods.52
Postal, in particular, thinks Chomsky is playing games with language when he suggests that recursion, and/or Merge, can be part of a “biological organ.” Postal observes
that such formal operations—both of them involving set theory—are fully abstract, much
as all of formal logic and mathematics can be said to be. They do not “exist” anywhere;
they are outside of time and space. In this sense they resemble the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist intuitions about the world that experimental and empirical science are thought
by most to have unseated. Postal argues that Chomsky’s insistence on “language” being
a biological organ that performs set-theoretic operations requires natural languages to
be abstract objects that are somehow manifested biochemically in the brain. Despite
Chomsky’s claims that a natural language is “a biological thing, the nature of natural
language sentences has always forced Chomsky to describe them in a way incompatible
with their being biological.”53
Chomsky asserts that it is possible to reconcile empirical science with methodology
derived from Cartesian and Aristotelian methods of introspection, and that, in fact, this
The Language of Science and the Science of Language >> David Golumbia
51
is the natural or obvious way for the sciences to proceed. But while Chomsky points at,
for example, the mathematical abstractions that characterize physics as models for his
approach to the study of language, Postal argues that this comparison cannot hold:
Physicists use abstract formal structures to characterize physical things, not abstract ones.
The objects of description have temporal, spatial, causal, etc., properties. But within Chomsky’s set-theoretical-based linguistics, not just the descriptive statements are set-theoretical.
The objects described, natural language sentences themselves, are invariably (rightly) taken
as set-theoretical.54
Despite Chomsky’s “incredibly numerous repetitions of his foundational doctrine claim
that he has been pursuing linguistic research as part of the natural scientific study of
human biology, his actual statements about linguistic structures deal exclusively with
elements in the realm of abstract objects.”55
One way of cashing out these observations would be to say that Chomsky wants to
have it both ways: he wants the mind to be abstract and therefore non-biological, and
at the same time to be entirely biological. He wants language to be the result of logical or formal operations taking place in
the brain (or mind?), but simultaneously
to be entirely contained within physical
biology. One linguist has recently termed
this position “biolinguistic Platonism,” a
perspective she deems “an oxymoron.”56
This follows a line of criticism established
with the introduction of Minimalism by
the linguists Shalom Lappin, David Johnson, and Robert Levine in a long series of
articles and exchanges with Chomsky in
the late 1990s and early 2000s; they argue
that Chomsky “does not clarify the notion
of perfection or optimality as a property
of grammar”—in other words that Chomsky relies on Platonic, ideal objects even
as he insists on the biological nature of
his enterprise, so that despite his unusual
claims to make linguistics a science, in fact
Minimalism is profoundly “unscientific.”57
Katz has articulated this position in its
most refined philosophical form. Katz, who identifies himself as a Platonist, says that
Chomsky refuses to accept the Platonist implications of his own thought, and that the
“failure of Chomskyan linguistics to solve the problem of the abstractness of grammatical structure” entails Chomsky’s own psychologism itself being a species of the Bloomfieldian structuralism Chomsky appeared to have overthrown.58
One way of cashing out these observations
would be to say that Chomsky wants to
have it both ways: he wants the mind to
be abstract and therefore non-biological,
and at the same time to be entirely
biological. He wants language to be
the result of logical or formal operations
taking place in the brain (or mind?), but
simultaneously to be entirely contained
within physical biology.
52
DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.1
While Chomsky rarely discusses and does not endorse phenomenology, there is an
interesting parallel between his attempts to identify a realm of ideas purely internal to
human perception that can be usefully segregated off from discussions of the external
world, and Husserl’s project. When reading interchanges between Chomsky and his followers with his critics, it is not hard to get a feeling similar to the one Derrida invokes in
the reader of Husserl: despite the initial plausibility of the thesis being offered that posits a clean distinction between things inside and outside the mind, the more one presses
on the distinction the more one enters a mise en abyme. Chomsky’s reliance on Descartes as one of the most important antecedents for the scientific character of his work
is suggestive in many different ways, not least because of its unexpectedness. In potted histories of philosophy and science, Descartes’s writing is typically seen as the last
gasp of an untenable spiritualism: Cartesian dualism, taken to indicate that there are two
entirely different kinds of stuff that make up physical reality, one called “body” and one
called “mind” (but usually taken to tie directly to Descartes’s religious commitments,
so as to mean something like what we refer to as “soul”), is deeply unpopular (though
not entirely without adherents) in contemporary analytic philosophy. In fact Chomsky’s
work is often taken as opposed to dualism: whatever “mind” is, it must be made up of the
same physical stuff as is the rest of the world, a position typically referred to as “physicalism” or “materialism.”
Despite having in common a fair number of philosophical and methodological dispositions, Edmund Husserl’s name rarely occurs in Chomsky’s work. As with Chomsky,
Descartes occupies a privileged and yet unlikely place in Husserl’s philosophy. And for
Chomsky the origin of knowledge resembles what James Street Fulton writes of Descartes and Husserl: “knowledge must start, on pain of not being knowledge, with something indubitable and logically underived, that is to say, self-evident.”59 Chomsky’s rhetorical invocations of self-evidence are often noticed by skeptical commentators, who
suggest that he uses such constructions precisely to close off logical and empirical challenges to his theories.60
In several of his earliest works, Derrida interrogates the foundations of Husserl’s
project, focusing in particular on the ongoing tension between what, following Husserl’s terminology, he calls issues of genesis and structure. Derrida, Christopher Norris
writes, “insists on the continuing necessity of thinking through the genesis/structure
relationship as raised to a high point of critical consciousness in Husserl’s writings.”61
“It is chiefly for want of such epistemo-critical resources,” Norris continues, that AngloAmerican analytic philosophy
engendered a series of well-known problems that were strictly insoluble on its own terms,
among them problems concerning the relation between theory and evidence, the status of
empirical or observation data, the validity of generalized (covering-law) statements, and the
question as to what should count as scientific progress given the lack of any sure criterion
for evaluating theories in point of observational accuracy or conceptual-explanatory power.62
The Language of Science and the Science of Language >> David Golumbia
Norris’s goal is to explain the apparently hard limits of skepticism and the social
construction of scientific knowledge represented by figures as various as W. V. Quine,
Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and by the Strong Programme in the sociology of science. At their most extreme, in Norris’s opinion, these
figures provide no way to account for scientific theory change, for the variability with
which some experimental data and observations result in shifts in the Quinean “web of
belief” of scientific theory, while other parts of scientific theory remain intact despite
recalcitrant data.
This is not to discount the accomplishments of Quine, Rorty, and the others, but
instead to note—in a Kantian vein—that the contribution of human cognition to scientific
knowledge provides only one part of the story, a part that threatens to collapse into skepticism if we are unwilling or unable to acknowledge the contribution of the noumena that
Kant insists we can think about, but never know with certainty. Kant’s name does not
occur here randomly; not only is Kant’s method properly and often explicitly dialectical,
but Kant joins Husserl in being one of the figures with whose thought Chomsky’s might
very reasonably be said to intersect, but with whom Chomsky rarely if ever engages.63
What Kant offers is the ability to see that we are always trying to get our heads around
two sides of these problems at once: science is socially constructed and it is about an
objective world that escapes human cognition in unpredictable ways. Derrida’s work
embraces this dialectical awareness, a shuttling back and forth between perspectives
that appear just quite but not entirely reconcilable, suggesting that this captures something essential about human cognition that is difficult if not impossible to put directly
into words. The world is objective, and yet our perceptions of and knowledge about it
are so structured by our particular cognitive apparatus that our knowledge of that objectivity can be treated with skepticism so far down the virtual rabbit hole of facts that
we can, and to some extent should, doubt the very objectivity on which the scientific
project is predicated.
Understood as partly a commentator on science—a point of view that has attracted
growing attention recently—Derrida can be said to have crafted observations about how
human knowledge itself functions.64 If we fail to heed the unavoidable propensity to
advance either genesis or structure as sufficient in itself, we will almost inevitably end
up privileging the oppositional pole we seem to be ignoring altogether. This is not to say
that the result cannot be useful, but too often focuses that are inveterately structural will
make possible larger and larger lacunae around issues of genesis, and vice versa. This is
especially true when we approach phenomena in which human interaction is central,
among which language is both unique and representative, in that it is nearly impossible
to untangle its structural from its genetic features.
The result of such non-dialectical investigations would appear, on a Derridean
account, inevitably to reinstall not just the oppositional problems out of which we
may have crafted our research questions, but even the most problematic aspects of all
epistemic investigation that fails to reflect on the epistemological dialectic at the heart
of Kant’s project. In Husserl’s case, at the limit, we find that despite his disdain for
53
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DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.1
metaphysics, his project turns out to be in essential ways metaphysical. Descartes’s project, cast by Chomsky as the origin point for a science that is the mirror image of science as it is typically understood, manages to retain its theological core, even as it also
launches important aspects of the scientific project.
Chomsky, resolutely on the side of structure throughout his career and notably resistant to questions of genesis, nevertheless finds himself repeatedly forced to address
issues of genesis by his critics, and these answers are among the least satisfying and
most mystifying aspects of his work. As
his career comes to a close, then, it is
remarkable how the parallel with Husserl plays out. But Chomsky is much less
a dialectician than was Husserl, and so the
metaphysical blind spots of which Husserl was at least partly aware appear to
escape Chomsky’s notice almost entirely.
The language of “design,” “perfection,”
and “optimal solution” begins to haunt
his discourse more and more, despite the
opacity of such terms to ordinary scientific inquiry, despite their imbrication in
contemporary culture in the language considered profoundly unscientific: so-called
creation science, or the religious opposition to the scientific investigation of questions of
genesis. For advocates of “creation science,” the phrase “intelligent design” is a hallmark
of which Chomsky cannot be ignorant, and which provides nearly the only conceivable
cultural locus for his use of the same word “design,” despite its apparent incompatibility
with scientific inquiry.
Eschewing dialectical modes of inquiry, such efforts nearly always devolve into considerations of their own methodological presumptions, whatever their scientific value
(and I am not here disputing, in the most general sense, the proposition that Chomsky’s
work has scientific value; it surely does, in no small part by pushing one side of the genesis/structure opposition to its absolute limit). Those considerations emerge as the Derridean figure of the mise en abyme, the abyssal repetition of a figure within itself, interestingly reminiscent of the recursion itself that Chomsky ultimately admits, according to
his perspective, may be “all” of language. Postal finds in The Science of Language what he
calls “the most scandalous comment in linguistic history,” wherein Chomsky admits that
he really has no account of how FLN can be both biological and set-theoretic.65 I invoke
this judgment only to note that there is something final about Chomsky’s recent work, as
if he finally peers into the dialectical abyss whose existence he has generally worked so
hard to deny.
Another admission in The Science of Language is at least as striking and, on a scientific account, perhaps even more shocking. It occurs when McGilvray asks Chomsky to
Chomsky, resolutely on the side of structure
throughout his career and notably resistant
to questions of genesis, nevertheless finds
himself repeatedly forced to address issues
of genesis by his critics, and these answers
are among the least satisfying and most
mystifying aspects of his work.
The Language of Science and the Science of Language >> David Golumbia
focus in on how the conceptual-intentional system interacts with the sensorimotor system. Chomsky’s response includes the assertion that “we know that, somehow, there’s a
homunculus out there who’s using the entire sound and entire meaning—that’s the way
we think and talk.”66 It is hard to imagine a less scientific and more abyssal statement
than this one (for good measure, Chomsky asserts the existence of the homunculus at
least twice more in the book), nor a more discredited image from the history of science,
one that simply reinstalls the entire intellectual problematic at one remove from the site
at which it is currently lodged. One cannot help wanting to press Chomsky on this point,
asking whether that homunculus has its own FLN and FLB and its own homunculus,
and so on, as well as to reflect on the rich historical and cultural resonances of the figure of the homunculus itself, including its fleeting resemblance to the notorious “evil
demon” Descartes invokes in the Meditations on First Philosophy. Despite Chomsky’s
typically declamatory style in asserting that “we know” there is a homunculus inside
the brain/mind, it is far more certain that any theory that includes such an abyssal
figure as part of science simply cannot be complete. Its presence suggests that Chomsky’s overall framework has become about keeping genesis and structure apart, rather
than recognizing that for both human science and human language, the two cannot be
effectively separated.
55
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DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.1
Notes
I appreciate insightful comments on earlier versions
of this essay from Diane Brown, Laurent Dubreuil,
Brian Lennon, and Christopher Wise, and discussions
regarding some of the material informing it with Lise
Dobrin and Kevin Russell.
1
The conventional sequence of these revolutions includes the Standard Theory, inaugurated in
1957 with Syntactic Structures and continuing until the
1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; the Extended
Standard Theory, beginning to some degree with
Aspects but having its most complete exemplars in
the 1972 Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar
and in a work by Chomsky’s student Ray Jackendoff,
Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar; the
Revised Extended Standard Theory, usually pegged
to the 1977 Essays on Form and Interpretation; the
Principles and Parameters Theory, which emerges at
the same time as the closely related GovernmentBinding Theory, of the 1980s, articulated most
fully in Lectures on Government and Binding and in
the first chapter of The Minimalist Program, “The
Theory of Principles and Parameters”; and The
Minimalist Program itself, described in The Minimalist Program and in essays such as “Beyond Explanatory Adequacy,” “Derivation by Phase,” “Minimalist
Inquiries,” and “Three Factors in Language Design.”
Randy Harris provides a detailed outsider’s account of
these changes, especially those prior to the Minimalist Program in Linguistics Wars. Andrew Radford, in
Transformational Grammar and Syntactic Theory and
the Structure of English, provides a general Chomskyan overview of the theories. While there is no
doubt a great deal of continuity between the theories,
and later versions often incorporate features from
earlier theories, it is also clear that Chomsky’s overall
picture of the language organ has changed dramatically over the course of his career, so that many of the
most important features of the earliest theories have
been abandoned or even directly contravened in more
recent versions.
2
For descriptions of Chomskyan linguistics
as a natural science, see, e.g., Chomsky, “Of Minds
and Language,” The Science of Language, and
New Horizons, chapter 5, “Language as a Natural
Object.” See also James McGilvray’s introduction and
appendices in Chomsky, The Science of Language,
and his introduction to the third edition of Chomsky’s
Cartesian Linguistics; and Smith, “Chomsky’s Science
of Language.”
3
See Chomsky, The Science of Language. The
scientific papers are Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch,
“The Faculty of Language,” published in Science,
and Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky, “The Evolution of
the Language Faculty,” a response to some criticisms
of the original paper that appeared in the academic
journal Cognition. Given the unique status of this collaboration as the only time Chomsky published with
practicing scientists in his career, it seems unavoidable
to mention that Hauser resigned his faculty position
at Harvard in 2011 and lost access to all federal funding after being found guilty of scientific misconduct
(unrelated to his work with Chomsky) in Harvard and
US government investigations; he no longer works in
the field. See Newcomer and Spitzer, “Marc Hauser’s
Fall from Grace,” and US Department of Health and
Human Services, “Findings of Research Misconduct.”
It is worth noting that The Science of Language has
prompted some of the severest criticism directed
at Chomsky from within the linguistics community
over the course of his very controversial career. See
“Chomsky’s Foundational Admission” by Chomsky’s
former collaborator and then long-time adversary Paul
Postal, who claims that the book provides the first
explicit confirmation of the incoherence of Chomsky’s program (see below for a discussion of Postal’s
critique). See in particular Christina Behme, who
writes that Chomsky’s “recent work fails to meet serious scientific standards because he rejects scientific
procedure, inflates the value of his own work, and
distorts the work of others” (“A ‘Galilean’ Science of
Language,” 672).
The Language of Science and the Science of Language >> David Golumbia
4
See Herman, Universal Grammar and Narrative
Form, for a genealogy of pre-Chomskyan, twentiethcentury deployments of the idea of universal grammar. On the similarities and differences in universal
grammar as articulated in Husserl and Chomsky, see,
e.g., Edie, “Husserl’s Conception of ‘The Grammatical’
and Contemporary Linguistics,” and Kuroda, “Edmund
Husserl, Grammaire Générale et Raisonnée and Anton
Marty.”
5
For the relationship between Husserl and
Descartes, in addition to Derrida discussed below, see
Fulton, “The Cartesianism of Phenomenology,” and
MacDonald, Descartes and Husserl.
6
MacDonald, Descartes and Husserl, 4–5.
7
See Norris, “Theory-Change and the Logic of
Enquiry,” and more generally on the Husserl-Frege
split, the work of Michael Dummett, especially his
Origins of Analytical Philosophy.
8
See Derrida, “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology,” Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,”
The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, and
Speech and Phenomena. See Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, for an overview of Derrida’s work on Husserl.
9
Derrida’s closest engagement with Chomsky’s
linguistics, and in particular with Cartesian Linguistics,
is found in “The Linguistic Circle of Geneva.”
10 Derrida, “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology,” 167.
11 Christopher Wise provides a thorough examination of Chomsky’s interpretation of and reliance
upon Descartes’s thought in Chomsky and Deconstruction, especially in the first two chapters.
12 Chomsky, Understanding Power, 228, 230,
quoted in Wise, Chomsky and Deconstruction, 22.
13
See Harris, The Linguistics Wars.
14
See Postal, Skeptical Linguistic Essays, for
pointed analyses of these rhetorical aspects of Chomsky’s writing.
15 That the association of rationalism with a
specifically scientific approach is unusual is noted not
just by Chomsky’s critics but even by his followers.
Norbert Hornstein, one of Chomsky’s longest-standing and most enthusiastic supporters in linguistics, for
example, acknowledges that to most science-minded
philosophers, an “empiricist psychology” might appear
to be “the only way to avoid a ‘miracle’ theory of
knowledge” (“Empiricism and Rationalism as Research
Strategies,” 156).
16 See Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, and The
Science of Language.
17 This leads Chomsky to an unexpected hostility
to probabilistic methods in all the sciences. In The Science of Language he critiques probabilistic approaches
to linguistics for being unscientific, and in an interview
with Yarden Katz, “Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong,” he rejects all probabilistic approaches to cognitive science in similar terms.
18 See the discussion of “just-so” stories in
McGilvray, “Appendix 2,” in Chomsky, The Science of
Language, 170–73.
19 Joseph, From Whitney to Chomsky, 154; see pp.
143–55 for a detailed discussion of Chomsky’s changing relationship to Saussure.
20 See Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
Laura-Ann Petitto reflects on the language acquisition
device in light of recent Chomskyan theory in “How
the Brain Begets Language.”
21
Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, 97.
22 Chomsky typically ascribes the concept of the
“biolinguistic program” to his colleague Eric Lenneberg; see Lenneberg’s Biological Foundations of
Language. In recent years the field has experienced
a significant resurgence; the journal Biolinguistics was
launched in 2007 specifically to explore these
57
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DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.1
questions, and the concerns are reflected in Di Sciullo
and Boeckx, The Biolinguistic Enterprise.
commentary following it, which includes responses by
many Chomskyans as well as critics of Chomsky.
23 The clearest attempt to distinguish between
the scientific status of the study of the capacity to use
language being a part of science, versus that of the
study of language, is found in the philosopher Michael
Devitt’s Ignorance of Language, an extended rebuttal
to Chomsky’s Knowledge of Language.
32
24 Chomsky, “Three Factors in Language
Design,” 2.
25
Chomsky, The Science of Language, 38.
26 Lewis, “Languages, Language, and Grammar,”
253–54.
27 See Chomsky, Knowledge of Language, 19–50,
for an extended discussion of E-language and its relation to I-language.
28 The notion of meanings (and by extension
language in some important sense) being “outside
the head” comes from Hilary Putnam in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ”; Putnam is the philosopher who has
most consistently articulated dissent to Chomsky’s
perspective.
29 On the diminishing distance between Chomsky’s work and that of the linguists he has from his
earliest work depicted as opposed to his approach,
see Golumbia, “Minimalism Is Functionalism.”
Chomsky, “Of Minds and Language,” 14.
33 In The Atoms of Language, Mark Baker
provides an especially thorough and lucid description
of the Principles and Parameters theory, focusing in
particular on the way that parameters might account
for linguistic diversity.
34 In recent years many scholars have attempted
to connect Chomsky’s linguistic and political work
in a variety of different ways. See, among many others, Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation,
chapter 2; McGilvray, introduction to the third edition
of Cartesian Linguistics, and McGilvray, “Meaning
and Creativity”; Smith, Chomsky; and Wilson, “The
Individual, the State, and the Corporation.”
35
Chomsky, The Science of Language, 108.
36 Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch, “The Faculty of
Language,” 1569.
37 Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky, “The Evolution of
the Language Faculty,” 182
38
Chomsky, The Minimalist Program, 131.
39 Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch, “The Faculty of
Language,” 1570–71.
40
Ibid., 1572–73.
30 Chomsky, The Science of Language, 13. Merge
is described at length in The Minimalist Program and
The Science of Language, as well as in many other
publications by Chomsky in the years since The Minimalist Program appeared, such as “Beyond Explanatory Adequacy,” “Derivation by Phase,” “Minimalist
Inquiries,” and “Three Factors in Language Design.”
41
Ibid., 1571.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid., 1574.
31 For a recent example of the debate about
linguistic diversity and its meaning for the Chomskyan program, see Evans and Levinson, “The Myth
of Language Universals,” along with the open peer
45 Chomsky, The Science of Language, 33
(passage in square brackets has been added by the
volume editors).
44 Chomsky, “Three Factors in Language Design,”
9; Chomsky, “Minimalist Inquiries,” 5.
The Language of Science and the Science of Language >> David Golumbia
46 Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch, “The Faculty of
Language,” 1572.
59 Fulton, “The Cartesianism of Phenomenology,” 289.
47 Pinker and Jackendoff, “The Faculty of Language: What’s Special about It?,” responds to Hauser,
Chomsky, and Fitch, “The Faculty of Language.” In
turn, Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky respond to Pinker
and Jackendoff in “The Evolution of the Language
Faculty”; Jackendoff and Pinker reply in “The Nature
of the Language Faculty and Its Implications for
Evolution of Language.”
60 Postal, Skeptical Linguistic Essays, especially
chapters 9 and 12.
48 In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida
discuses at length the figures of the animal and the
machine in Descartes and their intimate relationship
with cognition and language.
49 Pinker and Jackendoff, “The Faculty of Language: What’s Special about It?,” 204.
50
Chomsky, The Science of Language, 14.
51 Pinker and Jackendoff, “The Faculty of Language: What’s Special about It?,” 218.
52 For a detailed history of Katz’s and Postal’s contributions to and subsequent critique of Chomsky’s
research, see Harris, The Linguistics Wars.
53
Postal, “Chomsky’s Foundational Admission,” 5.
54
Ibid., 7.
55
Ibid., 13.
56
Behme, “A ‘Galilean’ Science of Language.”
57 Lappin, Levine, and Johnson, “The Structure of
Unscientific Revolutions,” 665. Also see Johnson and
Lappin, “A Critique of the Minimalist Program,” Katz
and Postal, “Realism vs. Conceptualism in Linguistics,”
and Langendoen and Postal, The Vastness of Natural
Languages.
58 Katz, “The Unfinished Chomskyan Revolution,”
272.
61 Norris, “Theory-Change and the Logic of
Enquiry,” 65.
62
Ibid., 65–66.
63 In Chomsky and Deconstruction, Wise provides
a thorough analysis of several ways in which Chomsky’s work fails to recognize important features of
Kant’s project that intersect with his and the consequences of this resemblance (22–40, 53–56); he also
shows how Chomsky presents an inaccurate description of empirical science and its intersection with the
Cartesian philosophy in both Kant and Locke (70–73).
64 For Derrida in a scientific context, see Barad,
“Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance,” Kirby, “Original Science,” Norris,
“Deconstruction, Science, and the Logic of Enquiry”
and “Theory-Change and the Logic of Enquiry,”
Johnson, System and Writing in the Philosophy of
Jacques Derrida, and Hägglund, Radical Atheism.
65 Postal, “Chomsky’s Foundational Admission.”
Also see Behme, “A ‘Galilean’ Science of Language.”
66
Chomsky, The Science of Language, 37.
59
60
DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.1
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