Читать книгу A Companion to Chomsky - Группа авторов - Страница 19

Chomsky has often said that what really underlay his interest in linguistics was his desire to understand the mind more generally, and he early on presented his views as a resuscitation of early modern “Rationalist” views of the mind that had been rejected by the eighteenth and then twentieth‐century “Empiricists.” Very roughly: according to Rationalists such as Descartes and Leibniz, crucial parts of our knowledge, for example, logic and mathematics, were “innate” and could be known a priori, justifiable without any essential appeal to experience. Empiricists, particularly the “Logical Positivists,” who flourished first in Europe and then in America from about 1925 through 1960, regarded such claims as virtually mystical, and argued that the only view of knowledge compatible with the striking successes of natural science was that it was wholly based on experience – or, in the case of logic and mathematics, on the social conventions of language; and language was known by reinforced responses to stimuli, along lines studied by the Behaviorists such as Watson and Skinner.

Chomsky (1975) explained that the notions of innateness, UG and explanatory adequacy were in the “immediate background” of his work in the 1950s (cf. fn 5), but they didn't explicitly emerge until his now famous (1959) critique of Skinner's (1957) presentation of a Behaviorist conception of language learning. From then on, particularly in his (1965, 1966, and 1968/2006), Chomsky championed specifically the Rationalist's appeal to innate ideas as a basis of knowledge, particularly of grammar (interestingly, he seldom, if ever discusses a priori knowledge, and certainly never claims that the principles of grammar are knowable a priori; and so that topic is not addressed in this volume). This resuscitation of innate ideas has been tremendously influential not only in linguistics but also in research on infant cognition (e.g., Spelke, 2003), knowledge of arithmetic (e.g., Carey, 2009), the folk theory of mind (e.g., Apperly, 2010), and moral thought (Mikhail, 2011).

In Chapter 28, Georges Rey explores the philosophical issues surrounding Chomsky's nativism, and Stephen Crain, Iain Giblin and Rosalind Thornton in Chapter 29 set out some of the extensive empirical evidence for it. Central to that evidence is what has come to be called the poverty of the stimulus argument: the stimuli presented to small children acquiring language are simply far too impoverished to account for the grammatical competence they acquire in only a few years, a problem Chomsky calls “Plato's problem,” assimilating it to the problem Plato raised in his Meno about how someone untutored could come to appreciate geometry. Again, consider the “WhyNots” mentioned above: What empirical basis could lead apparently all children not to ask questions like *Who will Mommy and feed Fido? It is hard to see an alternative to an account that posits some kind of innate state that constrains them from moving a question word from a conjunction, or, more specifically, from acquiring an internal grammar that would permit it.

A further question, of course, is how a brain with such innate knowledge could possibly have evolved, an issue that Chomsky began to address in detail in the 1990s as one of the motivations for the Minimalist program. In Chapter 30, Anne Reboul discusses Chomsky's views on language evolution, noting that he has long held that the language faculty is a biological endowment, but that it probably arose suddenly and that the core principles of language show no signs of selection pressure. In work in recent decades he proposed that the sudden transition was the arrival of Merge, allowing for the production of hierarchical structures, initially used only in thought, but later externalized in speech. Reboul argues that work on evolution of language (and thought) also needs to account for the fact that human concepts, perhaps uniquely, are “decoupled” from external stimuli and so seem to be innately constrained along the lines of a Chomskyan theory.

Behaviorists such as Skinner and (more forcefully) the influential philosophers Nelson Goodman and Willard van Orman Quine were not only skeptical of the Rationalist's appeal to innate ideas; they were even more skeptical of what they called “the idea idea” itself, and thought serious science should avoid traditional appeals to internal (“private”?) mental states and properties of the sort that were presumed in Rationalist accounts that Chomsky seemed to want to revive (but see John Collins and Rey's contribution in Chapter 31 for complexities here). They were particularly dismissive of the explanatory utility of talk of so‐called “propositional attitudes,” or talk that typically involves mental verbs, such as “believes,” “prefers” that take a “proposition” or “that…” or “to…” clause as a direct object; thus, one believes that it is raining and prefers to not get wet – i.e., that one not get wet, which is ordinarily supposed to explain someone's avoiding the rain.

All such talk involves a curious property that Franz Brentano (1874/1995) had called “intentionality,” or the “directedness” or “aboutness” of such attitudes on things real and often unreal, such as beliefs about Zeus and ghosts. Particularly for Chomskyans and other cognitive scientists, it would appear that the almost‐ubiquitous term representation is intentional in this way: representations are always “of” something, which can be real or nonexistent as in the case of illusory triangles and unuttered words and sentences. But what determines what a representation is “of”?

What has been particularly worrisome about this and other issues regarding intentionality is that Brentano plausibly argued that it was not “reducible” to a physical phenomenon (after all, how can a physical phenomenon involve a relation to something that doesn't exist?), and many have tried, but no one has yet quite succeeded in proving him wrong. In an influential discussion, Quine (1960/2013:221) claimed these failures revealed “the baselessness of the intentional idiom and the emptiness of a science of intention.”

Now, one might have thought that Chomsky's resuscitation of innate ideas and appeals to “mental” processes had given the lie to Quine's view. However, beginning in the 1990s, Chomsky himself began to defend similar claims: “We can be reasonably confident that ‘mentalistic talk’ will find no place in attempts to describe and explain the world” (Chomsky 1996, 74‐7). Indeed:

[I]ntentional phenomena relate to people and what they do as viewed from the standpoint of human interests and unreflective thought, and thus will not (so viewed) fall within naturalistic theory, which seeks to set such factors aside. (Chomsky 2000, 22–23; see also p. 132)

But this seems incompatible with the many apparently intentionalistic appeals to the “representation” and “knowledge” of grammar that seem ubiquitous in Chomsky's other writings (and, indeed, in most cognitive science generally). How is Chomsky in this regard different from Quine? In their entry, Collins and Rey try to sort this issue out.

The problem of intentionality is only one of many mind–body problems that philosophers have traditionally addressed. Others are, of course, that of the peculiar “privacy” of subjective experience of “qualitative” phenomena (or qualia), such as the smell of roses or the feeling of pain, which it's hard to imagine an account of merely our bodies satisfactorily explaining. Chomsky has been surprisingly dismissive of these problems as well, claiming that, since Newton's theory of gravitation refuted Cartesian mechanics, we have no coherent notion of “body” with which we can even state such problems.¹¹ In Chapter 32, Joseph Levine discusses what he thinks is really driving contemporary discussions of mind and body, arguing that they can be and often are pursued quite independently of Descartes' and any specific notion of body.