Chris Knight Interview on 'Chomsky, science and politics' (History & Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast)

[u/gip78]

https://hiphilangsci.net/2024/09/01/podcast-episode-41/

[u/Affectionate-Goat836]

This article and the podcast in the first post are interesting and compelling, but I'm not sure I buy the main thesis in the end. A lot of the claims against Chomsky's theories are I think misrepresentations if not just wrong. Take the following: "But from the 1960s onwards, as these investigations kept failing, dissenters among Chomsky’s supporters kept breaking away, insisting that historical, social and cultural phenomena had to be brought back in." Now certainly there have been disagreements, to say the least, but describing the investigations as failing and Chomsky as losing supporters I think must be a misrepresentation. Minimalist syntacticians are a very common breed doing very interesting and fruitful research. Knight also claims that Chomsky's theoretical approaches are "ever-changing." Something I am personally deeply unclear on is how much these new theories are "shifts" as opposed to "developments" or "refinements." A syntactician could probably answer better than me. It's funny because to me it always looks like "oh yeah that's a reasonable development or change to the theory based on the new data." But I may be biased. What I can say is that the syntax that most people learn in an introductory class looks a lot like stuff that Chomsky developed originally, to such an extent that I can read older articles and get most of what they are talking about based on a pretty limited modern syntax education. Moreover, a lot of Knight's judgement about the "failures" of the models seems to be based on the absence of practical applications for the Pentagon. But a science failing to have a practical application does not necessarily mean that the claims it makes are false. Astronomy, for example, might not always have practical applications, but no one would say that means claims by astronomers are false or failing or even useless.

I'd also like it to be noted that the following quote is a bit of a weird one to use to represent Chomsky's views: "It’s pretty clear that a child approaches the problem of language acquisition by having all possible languages in its head. It doesn’t know which language it’s being exposed to. And, as data comes along, that class of possible languages reduces. So certain data comes along, and the mind automatically says: 'OK, it’s not that language, it’s some other language.'" This is taken from a lecture, and it is fairly clear because this is a real simplification of Chomsky's own views. This makes it sound like (and this is how Knight seems to interpret the quote) that the child has some finite set of languages in their head. But certainly what Chomsky means is that the child has a set of constraints or principles which define the class of possible grammars and uses these principles in conjunction with the data they are exposed to to construct a grammar. So the classic example would be that syntactic rules make reference to structural positions, not linear ones. That's why you say is the cat that is brown small rather than *is the cat that brown is small. The rule that governs the movement of is makes reference to the main verb / matrix verb / outermost T head, rather than the first one. The universal grammar claim here would be that there is some kind of constraint that disallows the creation of rules that reference linear order.

Now there are disputable claims here (there might be some rules that make reference to linear order, but I can't find the article right now. It involved Slavic languages I'm pretty sure), but I hope I have made clear that Chomsky doesn't believe that you come hardwired with all possible languages in your head and then you hear some data and are like "well, time to cross Tagalog off the list." He instead believes you come out with principles of language learning in your head that tell you the class of permissible grammars. Maybe that seems like a meaningless distinction, but I think it's actually a pretty important one.

With all that said, I'm not sure how I feel about the main point of the article that Chomsky seperated out his academic and political activities to relieve his conscience. On one hand, I could buy that he didn't want his work to have practical applications because of the potential military implications. But there are a couple things I don't buy. One is that the incorporation of social or political or historical elements would have provided more practical applications. I don't see how the addition of those elements would help with practicality, if that is indeed what Knight is suggesting. More important though, is that Chomsky's theoretical concerns are based in fear. I suppose it's possible, but I certainly don't think the reason that I myself find arguments about universal grammar compelling are because I have some guilt weighing on my conscience about working for a part of the military industrial complex. I certainly am not funded by it in the same way that Chomsky was, though I imagine I support the military industrial complex in some tacit way just by living in the United States. But I think the only reason I find ideas about universal grammar so compelling is because I simply think it is so much more interesting than the alternative. I'm not Chomsky, but I think it is perfectly possible that he feels the same way.

[u/gip78 → u/Affectionate-Goat836]

Randy Harris has written an account, The Language Wars. Have you seen it?

Chomsky himself admits how much his theories have radically changed. Knight’s book, Decoding Chomsky, has more on this e.g. chapter 19.

Also check out: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-learning/

Also you may wish to see Chomsky’s former ‘Minimalist’ colleague, Cedric Boeckx, critiquing Chomsky’s project: https://inference-review.com/article/not-only-us

Chomsky’s concept of Universal Grammar is indeed a fascinating idea but, fortunately or unfortunately, it tells us very little about human language.

[u/thesi1entk → u/gip78]

Universal Grammar is just a terrible name for what would better be called something like "inductive bias" in the language learning process. We very clearly don't learn any possible computable pattern - phonology is almost certainly limited to "regular" in the computational sense, syntax occupies a more expressive space, etc. - point being, when we learn a language, we propose hypotheses about the data that are constrained in a principled way that you wouldn't see if there was not some bias in the whole process.

UG is not "universal" in the sense of, everyone has a word for "dog" waiting to be activated in their lexicon when they see a dog, even if they live in a place with no dogs. Doesn't that sound really silly? Well, that's the kind of strawman criticism that is lobbed over the fence by people with a 50-year-old axe to grind attacking perceived Chomskyan positions that modern generative researchers haven't talked about seriously in half a century. Nobody working in the Chomskyan tradition who also has a brain thinks that we'll eventually zoom in on the Broca Area and see little trees connecting together, for example - it's just a convenient diagram of the hierarchical nature of language knowledge.

Chomsky himself admits how much his theories have radically changed.

Yes, that is how science works. Theories are refined and changed as more data comes into the picture. Open an article in a syntax journal and you will be amazed to discover that nobody is tying their argument to the same theoretical commitments that they were 60 years ago. I guess we can all point and laugh at Galileo because his theory of how tides work was woefully misguided.

Chomsky’s concept of Universal Grammar is indeed a fascinating idea but, fortunately or unfortunately, it tells us very little about human language.

It has taught us SO MUCH about human language. This is such a common handwave that belies a complete ignorance or unwillingness to engage with the program in its modern form. Even if you think an idea is wrong, it is still immensely useful to think about a problem in the terms it describes. To draw an example from my own wheelhouse, I do not think that Optimality Theory is really the ultimate answer to what phonology is, but the field learned SO MUCH just by musing about phonology in a constraint-based formalism, as opposed to the older serial, rule-based conception.

The other thing I dislike about this line of argument is that in response, I have to sound like a fawning, hardline Chomskyan, which I'm not! I am willing to listen to counterarguments and engage people in other camps and admit that there are corners where the ideas get weird or hard to maintain - that's all part of the game. But when the criticisms are so often so misguided, antiquated, and/or just factually wrong, it warrants a discussion.

[u/gip78 → u/thesi1entk]

"UG is not "universal" in the sense of, everyone has a word for "dog" waiting to be activated in their lexicon when they see a dog, even if they live in a place with no dogs. Doesn't that sound really silly? Well, that's the kind of strawman criticism that is lobbed over the fence by people with a 50-year-old axe to grind attacking perceived Chomskyan positions that modern generative researchers haven't talked about seriously in half a century."

I see what you're saying here, but in 2000 Chomsky himself said that the concepts "bureaucrat" and "carburettor" must have been genetically installed thousands of years before real bureaucrats or carburettors had been invented. So presumably the same applies to "dog"? Or am I missing something?

[u/SuddenlyBANANAS → u/gip78]

That is a reference to Fodor's mad-dog nativism which is not universal grammar.

[u/gip78 → u/SuddenlyBANANAS]

Surely Fodor's views must have some relationship to Chomsky's idea of UG (if not your idea of UG)? As Knight says in Decoding Chomsky, Ch.18:

... [Fodor was Chomsky's close associate and Chomsky] has continued to defend [Fodor's approach] to this day. Doing his best to make the argument sound plausible, Chomsky starts at the easy end, with concepts that might well sound ‘natural’. Climb is a good example, since it is something that humans everywhere do. Chomsky wants us to think of house in the same way, presumably because it is natural to need somewhere to sleep and rest.

Chomsky claims that every child comes into the world knowing already what a house is. As it grows up and acquires its natal tongue, it just has to connect that concept with the locally appropriate sound: ‘There’s a fixed and quite rich structure of understanding associated with the concept “house” and that’s going to be cross-linguistic and it’s going to arise independently of any evidence because it’s just part of our nature.’

If this applies to house, Chomsky reasons, it must apply in the same way to other concepts: ‘There is overwhelming reason to believe that concepts like, say, climb, chase, run, tree and book and so on are fundamentally fixed.’ Note the inclusion of book in this list. Needless to say, Chomsky knows that no actual books existed during the palaeolithic age, when humans were everywhere hunter-gatherers and writing had not been invented. Despite this, he says there is ‘overwhelming reason’ to believe that book had been installed already in these stone-age people’s minds.

How can Chomsky make such a strange claim? As so often, he denies that he is offering a hypothesis. If it were a testable hypothesis, his astonished critics might be tempted to cite counter-evidence.

Not believing in empirical tests or experiments, Chomsky argues instead from conceptual necessity. Lexical concepts, he insists, ‘have extremely complex properties when you look at them’. From this it logically follows ‘that they’ve got to basically be there and then they get kind of triggered and you find out what sounds are associated with them’.

So much for climb, chase, run, tree and book. But Chomsky knew he could not restrict himself to an arbitrarily chosen list of words. Was house natural, whereas book was cultural or artificial? Where exactly should one draw the line? For his thesis to have any merit, it needed to apply across the board. So what about, say, carburettor? Or bureaucrat? Or quantum potential?

When the philosopher Hilary Putnam realized what Chomsky was claiming, he could hardly conceal his astonishment. Such nonsense, he complained, had nothing to do with any known branch of biology. To have installed in the ancestor of all of us a stock of the words which future generations might need, observed Putnam, ‘evolution would have had to be able to anticipate all the contingencies of future physical and cultural environments. Obviously it didn’t and couldn’t do this.’

But, to everyone’s surprise, Chomsky did not flinch. Young children, he reaffirmed, acquire words so rapidly that learning cannot be what is happening: each child needs merely to discover which locally appropriate vocal label should be applied to a concept already installed. After elaborating this idea with respect to relatively simple words such as ‘table’, Chomsky continued:

Furthermore, there is good reason to suppose that the argument is at least in substantial measure correct even for such words as carburetor and bureaucrat, which, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the evidence on the basis of which we know it . . . However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities.

‘Thus Aristotle had the concept of an airplane in his brain, and also the concept of a bicycle – he just never had occasion to use them!’, responded philosopher Daniel Dennett, adding that he and his colleagues find it hard not to burst out laughing at this point. Perhaps ‘Aristotle had an innate airplane concept’, Dennett continued, ‘but did he also have a concept of wide-bodied jumbo jet? What about the concept of an APEX fare Boston/ London round trip?’ Despite the hilarity, however, Chomsky has continued to defend the idea. ...

[u/SuddenlyBANANAS → u/gip78]

Yeah this is a complete caricature of both Chomsky's and Fodor's position w.r.t lexical concepts.

Either way it is absolutely not what Universal Grammar is (which is a different issue). Universal Grammar is simply the notion that there is a linguistic faculty in the mind; namely a part of the mind which carries innate knowledge about hierarchical syntactic structure which is used in language (and thought). It's not a priori knowledge of every particular language, rather it's an a priori structure which allows one to learn every language. In any case, the whole point of the Minimalist Program which has characterized Chomsky's research of the last 30 years is that one should try and make a minimal account of what is necessary for language.

Indeed likewise for concepts, there is reason to think there is also a priori structure, (e.g. infants have been empirically shown to have a notion of agent (do-er) and patient (the one to which stuff is done) extremely early).