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On Noam Chomsky: Critical Essays
Book by Harman, G.
- GenresLinguisticsPhilosophy
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 18, 2008
Awesome book. It's got loads of articles written by many contemporary thinkers, such as John Searle, Hilary Putnam and Thomas Nagel, about Chomsky's revolution in linguistics. Even though the book is a bit outdated now, I was surprised to find out that it's out of print.
June 3, 2013
This book on Chomsky is similar to other collections of critical essays on particular philosophers that I have read, even though Chomsky is not primarily a philosopher. The most ground-breaking linguist of our times, Chomsky is like scientists such as Darwin or Freud or Einstein, whose work is so far-reaching that it must be taken into account by philosophers.
Chomsky’s thesis, in an extremely oversimplified nutshell, is that humans have an innate grammatical knowledge that enables them to learn their first language rapidly and to create correct sentences that they have never heard before. There are essays in this collection that examine putative rules in this innate grammatical knowledge and argue for or against them. This is linguistics itself, and while I can follow the intent of the arguments, I cannot really argue with them.
Often there is an appeal to what a native speaker would regard as grammatical, but the “grammatical” sentences sometimes seem forced to me, while the “ungrammatical” sentences often make sense to me. I have confidence in my own feel for grammaticality, but I often think I need to be following the thought patterns of the professional linguists to understand their points completely.
What interests me more are the philosophical issues raised. Chomsky largely talks about syntax (the grammatical structure of sentences), and has formalized syntactical transformations to the point where they resemble an axiomatic system. This is an amazing scientific achievement. But the dependencies of syntax on semantics (how sentences relate to the world, the meaning of sentences) seem inevitably to come up in his work. Semantics is more akin to the work of traditional philosophers, such as Russell or Wittgenstein, and is more problematical than Chomsky’s syntactical transformations. I have learned from this volume that Chomsky himself regards the connections between syntax and semantics as problematical, and that some of his followers are working to develop a Chomskyan semantics.
Another interesting issue is the nature of Chomsky’s innate grammatical knowledge. I speculated in reading Steven Pinker that grammatical knowledge might be similar to logical knowledge. This position is discussed, with both similarities and differences pointed out. But a sentence with an unambiguous grammatical structure may have an ambiguous logical structure. (The example given is “Someone loves everyone.” The grammar is straightforward. But logically is there one someone, or are there many someones?) Another essayist argues that grammar depends on phonology (sound) and syntax, while logic depends on syntax and semantics.
Also discussed is whether grammatical transformations correspond to a psychological (thinking) process. Sometimes grammatical rules seem to be like implicit rules of which we are not conscious. But sometimes, for example if we transform a sentence from active voice into passive voice, we are able to be consciously aware of what we are doing. One essayist likened grammatical knowledge to unconscious knowledge, in that it is something of which we can be led to become aware.
I have offered a mere sampling of ideas from these essays, but I have found them stimulating and exciting in understanding what Chomsky’s scientific achievement is all about.
Chomsky’s thesis, in an extremely oversimplified nutshell, is that humans have an innate grammatical knowledge that enables them to learn their first language rapidly and to create correct sentences that they have never heard before. There are essays in this collection that examine putative rules in this innate grammatical knowledge and argue for or against them. This is linguistics itself, and while I can follow the intent of the arguments, I cannot really argue with them.
Often there is an appeal to what a native speaker would regard as grammatical, but the “grammatical” sentences sometimes seem forced to me, while the “ungrammatical” sentences often make sense to me. I have confidence in my own feel for grammaticality, but I often think I need to be following the thought patterns of the professional linguists to understand their points completely.
What interests me more are the philosophical issues raised. Chomsky largely talks about syntax (the grammatical structure of sentences), and has formalized syntactical transformations to the point where they resemble an axiomatic system. This is an amazing scientific achievement. But the dependencies of syntax on semantics (how sentences relate to the world, the meaning of sentences) seem inevitably to come up in his work. Semantics is more akin to the work of traditional philosophers, such as Russell or Wittgenstein, and is more problematical than Chomsky’s syntactical transformations. I have learned from this volume that Chomsky himself regards the connections between syntax and semantics as problematical, and that some of his followers are working to develop a Chomskyan semantics.
Another interesting issue is the nature of Chomsky’s innate grammatical knowledge. I speculated in reading Steven Pinker that grammatical knowledge might be similar to logical knowledge. This position is discussed, with both similarities and differences pointed out. But a sentence with an unambiguous grammatical structure may have an ambiguous logical structure. (The example given is “Someone loves everyone.” The grammar is straightforward. But logically is there one someone, or are there many someones?) Another essayist argues that grammar depends on phonology (sound) and syntax, while logic depends on syntax and semantics.
Also discussed is whether grammatical transformations correspond to a psychological (thinking) process. Sometimes grammatical rules seem to be like implicit rules of which we are not conscious. But sometimes, for example if we transform a sentence from active voice into passive voice, we are able to be consciously aware of what we are doing. One essayist likened grammatical knowledge to unconscious knowledge, in that it is something of which we can be led to become aware.
I have offered a mere sampling of ideas from these essays, but I have found them stimulating and exciting in understanding what Chomsky’s scientific achievement is all about.
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March 15, 2016 Some of these essays are frankly a little too technical for me, and I may not finish them all.
However, a couple are really excellent and I'd like to highlight them:
Hilary Putnam on the grammar of deviant sentences. Deviance exists, you can't pretend that it doesn't, yet no norm is ever absolute. There are circumstances under which bizarre sentences will be said and understood. This then becomes an extremely vexing issue for anyone trying to formulate a descriptive grammar of a natural language.
Thomas Nagel on epistemology. Chomsky claimed to have rehabilitated the rationalist tradition in philosophy by showing that language learning is innate. This would then seem to be a case for a priori knowledge. However, Nagel convincingly argues that language, as Chomsky conceives it, really does not count as knowledge at all. Even if grammar is innate, it is simply an innate tendency to agree to and follow certain arbitrary rules; it lacks the power to justify and ground knowledge. In terms of epistemology Chomsky has always been a strict empiricist.
As a side note, I would recommend Nagel's own recent book Mind and Cosmos, as well as Alvin Plantinga's Where the Conflict Really Lies; both have been extremely controversial, but at least in part that's due to the small-mindedness of many evolutionary psychologists. Both books represent the possibility of a mini-revival of rationalist epistemology today.
However, a couple are really excellent and I'd like to highlight them:
Hilary Putnam on the grammar of deviant sentences. Deviance exists, you can't pretend that it doesn't, yet no norm is ever absolute. There are circumstances under which bizarre sentences will be said and understood. This then becomes an extremely vexing issue for anyone trying to formulate a descriptive grammar of a natural language.
Thomas Nagel on epistemology. Chomsky claimed to have rehabilitated the rationalist tradition in philosophy by showing that language learning is innate. This would then seem to be a case for a priori knowledge. However, Nagel convincingly argues that language, as Chomsky conceives it, really does not count as knowledge at all. Even if grammar is innate, it is simply an innate tendency to agree to and follow certain arbitrary rules; it lacks the power to justify and ground knowledge. In terms of epistemology Chomsky has always been a strict empiricist.
As a side note, I would recommend Nagel's own recent book Mind and Cosmos, as well as Alvin Plantinga's Where the Conflict Really Lies; both have been extremely controversial, but at least in part that's due to the small-mindedness of many evolutionary psychologists. Both books represent the possibility of a mini-revival of rationalist epistemology today.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews