Hud955
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OK, lets get the ball rolling, LB."Chomsky is an individualist, and assumes that the answer to social questions lies in 'biological tissue'. He has an ideology, and that provides the basis for his research. As Lakatos called it, 'negative and positive heuristics': 'what' to look for, and 'what' to ignore. We all do it, we all wear ideological blinkers, and that's the human condition."I didn't have the energy to reply to all the misinterpretation you made of other poster's views in your last long post LB but let's just pick up on one here. If the reason for the failure of Chomsky's linguistics lies in his politics, then we need to look at his politics. Chomsky has a keen class analysis, not fundamentally an individualistic one. You might argue that his class analysis comes not out of a direct identification with the working class but a rationalist sense of duty to aid those who are suffering, yet, it is nevertheless the case that in a class society, he recognises suffering is confined to the working class, and the reason for their suffering is related to their class politics of capitalism. He therefore gives his support to working class movements against the interests of the capitalist class. Chomsky is a strong supporter of the actions of labour unions around the world, for instance, but also of revolutionary action – if that action is taken by a mass of the working class and not just a minority elite. The methodological individualism that lies at the root of his linguistics is a different beast. This is an analytical tool, not a social or political statement. What is interesting about this is that methodological individualism is often at the root of theories proposed by those with pro-capitalist sympathies (often but not always). And it is not difficult to see why that should be so. It can certainly be linked with the political ideology of bourgeois individualism. But while it has political implications, methodological individualim itself makes no value judgements and has no political content. If you are to show that Chomsky's lingustics are invalid because they are underpinned by his politics, you will need to explain how someone with a commitment to working class politics can also base his linguistics upon such a methodology. That may not be impossible, but calling him bourgeois is not sufficient.
LBird wrote:Hud955 wrote:His methodological individualism, his Cartesianism and his biological determinism are the intellectual foundations on which his linguistic theories rest. These are intellectual positions usually associated with capitalist or propertarian ideologies, political viewpoints very different from Chomsky's own.[my bold]I'm just going to have to be happy with what you've publicly said here, Hud, and leave it at that, because I'm going to get banned (yet again) for asking questions about our proletarian method. My warnings from the moderator are stacking up.Hopefully, either you or another poster will deepen these insights into Chomsky's ideological foundations, upon which are built his parameters of selection for 'evidence'.Our selection parameters will be very different, because we have different 'foundations/positions/ideologies/viewpoints' , as you call them, from Chomsky's 'capitalist/propertarian' ones.Put simply, he's a bourgeois academic, and workers should be aware of this, when reading his necessarily biased work.
Don't be happy with this LB, respond to my challenge to give a coherent account of how and in what way you believe Chomsky's linguistics are informed by his political ideology and how this invalidates them from a socialist perspective. I'm sure the moderator would be very happy for you do that without giving you another warning. It would open up the discussion and be of value to the rest of us. But by 'a coherent account', I don't just mean labelling Chomsky as 'bourgeois' without telling us why you believe that (as was the habit of Soviet idealogues and is still the habit of 'vulgar Marxists' everywhere) or of simply associating one piece of data with another and crying 'see!', as though the multiple circumstances of the material world did not exist. For instance, you refer obliquely here to Chomsky's capitalist/propertarian values, so tell us what you think they are, and, again so long as you relate that to the question of the validity of Chomsky's linguistics you will not be going off topic. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be a line of argument anticipated by ALB when he started this thread, but it would still fall squarely within the terms of the title he set for it. You can always check with the moderator if you are uncertain of this – or start another thread.This is my issue with your position, LB: as soon as you are asked to put some flesh on your ideological obsessions, you back out and simply resort to repeating them, over and over, endlessly critiquing others without ever making a real positive contribution to the discussion yourself.
Hi SPThat, in two words, is what most linguists now believe – and have believed for quite some time. I posted earlier about the way in which Chomsky has been able to retain his pre-eminent position though Pentagon and other funding, while never managing to provide a theory which makes sense to the majority of his colleages, so I won't repeat it here. I'm not sure it is a subject that many people do find riveting. I only got involved with it by accident.
Hi RobinLOL I keep getting drawn back into these discussions whenever I realise how much I have yet to do and it all becomes overwhelming. I'd pretty much agree with all of that. If I recall the Nuer have had quite a lot of 'dealings' with colonial powers. And I suspect they would have been subject to slave raiding over a long period as well. If Evans Pritchard is correct and they have retained an egalitarian form of social organisation in the sense that it is currently understood by hunter gatherer specialists, then that, rather than their proclivity for making war would be the real anomaly in need of explanation. My money would be on the fact that when EP was using the term (in the 1940s was it?) it meant something somewhat looser. If not, then we have a real puzzle on our hands.I spoke to Douglas Fry about a month ago when he was in London, and he mentioned that his latest book, currently only available in an expensive academic hardback, is soon to be given a paperback edition. I think that would be very worth getting hold of when it comes out. Cheers
I don't think Chomsky's theory would have a problem with this, Alan. It does not predict the actual sounds we use to convey the underlying concepts, only the underlying concepts themselves. In his terminiology, the sounds of our languages are part of our 'communication' systems, not 'language'. He uses the term 'languge' to refer to the concepts and the structures which are, he believes, embedded individually in our brains from birth.The Hadza in the north-west of Tanzania, in the rift valley also have a click language, which as far as we can tell is completely unrelated to the language of the Bushmen/San. It is thought that the Eastern and Western Pygmies of the sub-saharan forests once had click languages too, but they now speak tongues related to those of their Bantu farming neighbours. If you think about it, click languages are remarkably practical, the clicks carry across considerable distances, and would be useful for communcation between spread out hunting bands. The actual sounds we make can be explained in historical or practical terms like this without creating a problem for Chomsky.What is problematic for Chomsky's theory are the grammatical structures of the world's 'communication systems'. Chomsky claims that underneath all the superficial differences of actual grammars, there is a single underlying universal grammatical structure which was installed in our brain through genetic mutation some time in our ancestral past. The problem is, he has never been able to identify a single rule belonging to his underlying universal grammar which all languages have in common. I am no linguist, but I am also aware that languages divide the observable world up in different ways. One particularly obvious example is the way they divide up the colour spectrum. Colour words in Welsh for example do not map on to colour words in English. Welsh has a single word to cover what in English we would distinguish as dark blue and grey, for instance. This would seem to be fatal to Chomsky's assertion that we have a stock of fixed concepts with which we are all born and which our various languages merely reproduce.
LBird wrote:Hud955 wrote:You have to start with evidence … and then , applying a general theoretical understanding to it, see where that takes you.This is not the scientific method, Hud. One does not start with 'evidence'.
LB, you are confusing the testing of a theory with the application of a theoretical principle to the analysis of a situation. When conducting an investigation, Marx always started with the evidence, and so should we, because anything else is dogma.The ideology of a researcher is not the only determinant of truth. If that were the case, then socialists would have nothing to say to anyone except that we didn't agree with them, and Marx could have saved himself a great deal of time and trouble researching data/evidence for Capital in the British Museum. Moreover, the idea that we can understand how Chomsky's linguistics are influenced by his politics while ignoring 99.9% of the information we have about him and his institutional setting strikes me as even more absurd than the man's lingustic theories.
LBird wrote:What counts as evidence is tied to one's theory. Even bourgeois philosophers of science have got that far – so why are we here ignoring the scientific method, as pointed out by Marx, of 'theory and practice'? You are employing a method of 'practice and theory'. Even you will admit that 'facts' are 'theory-laden', so how can you argue that one 'starts with the evidence'? The 'evidence' is tainted by theory from the start. Why not be open about our theories, which point to 'evidence'? Chomsky's theories point to 'evidence' that we wouldn't accept; the sooner we examine Chomsky's ideology, the sooner we'll understand why his 'evidence' is flawed, from our socialist perspective. There is no simple evidence. You are making a methodological error. It's not science.If you think that Chomsky's linguistics are influenced by his politics, then you will have to show how this is so. His methodological individualism, his Cartesianism and his biological determinism are the intellectual foundations on which his linguistic theories rest. These are intellectual positions usually associated with capitalist or propertarian ideologies, political viewpoints very different from Chomsky's own. So, right from the start we already have an unusual situation. And it is that appartent contradiction that you need to explain in order to substantiate your claim, that his linguistics derive in some coherent and intelligible way from his political ideology. Personally I think Chomsky was very wrong in his linguistic theories, but I think the reasons for that are far more complex, more interesting and much more systemic, than your simplistic and, indeed, individualistic account has so far managed to produce. And you have failed, I think, largely because you have ignored huge swathes of the evidence, including – and this seems odd for someone who calls himself a socialist – the institutional and economic framework within which Chomsky is embedded.
"no-one else will declare which ideology tells them what to say." Where did you get this idea from, LB? It is maybe true in academia, at least generally, but I'm not aware of it here. If SPGBers don't declare their ideology with every post, I think that is because they wear their Marxian thinking quite openly. It's why they are posting here, not writing letters to The Telegraph."Ahhh… the 'get-out clause'. Lip service to 'theory', then return to 'facts' and 'individuals'. Which 19th century ideology stressed facts, individualism, and 'amateur experts'? Liberalism, perchance?"I think this is why I find your views so unpalatable, LB. Marx never attempted to shoehorn selected historical or other data into a rigid theoretical straitjacket. He was never a crude or mechanistic thinker. His theories are investigative tools, not statements of meta-historical necessity. You have to start with evidence – in this case evidence about Chomsky, and there is a lot of it – and then , applying a general theoretical understanding to it, see where that takes you. Historical materialism becomes a mockery of itself when it merely play lip-service to the wide ranging evidence available and then returns to 'theory' to provide a crudely undetailed account of the world "Let's see. Chomsky stresses 'individuals', their 'biology' (not their socially-produced thought) and the role of 'elite experts' like himself, in the production of social knowledge. Chomsky would shit himself at the very idea that a vote by workers should determine whether his ideas have any 'truth' or not. Some here would, too. So much for socialism being workers' power.But you apparently can't see this, Hud. You can't see how Chomsky's political ideology plays, not only a massive role in his views on linguistics, but also a massive role in his so-called 'Anarchism'. We have quite a few here who also subscribe to 'free individuals', rather than 'democratic control of production'."What a crude mash-up! It seems that in your hands, the sole purpose of this analytical principle is make the thinnest attempt at providing 'evidence', apply to it the merest ghost of a thought, and then bludgen your way through to your second, and equally crude obsession. To an outsider like myself, it seems the world you inhabit consists of these two projected ideas and little else. If historical materialism were ever to be reduced to this caricature of itself in the wider world, then we might all as well pack up our bags and go home.Chomsky's position is complex, his situation and role are complex, there are many complex ideological and material influences on him. His views have many complex social and ideological consequences. Without consideration of this we can't begin to get an idea how the man's political ideology might influence his linguistics. You may be right. I doubt whether Chomsky would accept that workers outside his field should be allowed to determine the truth of his theories (in fact, I could give you quotes to demonstrate it), but then that is also true of other academics who stress neither 'individuals' nor their 'biology', but the very opposite. Drawing crude lines between these 'facts' as you have just done, does not constitute either a sound application of theoretical principle, or even much in the way of actual thought.
Cheers, Robin. EP was writing before many of the terms we use today to describe hunter gatherers were very precisely fixed in the minds of many anthropologists. It may be that we would not use the same labels today. But who knows? I'd need to do some reading. I don't think the subject is going to go away for me. (Though I'm not sure we can say the same for hunter gatherers. Many believe we might be seeing the last decades of their way of life). One aim I have when I get back is to give some serious study and thinking time to it. Take care.
"I'd like to support mcolome1's view that Chomsky's political ideology plays a massive role in his views about linguistics. It could not be otherwise."I'm sure it has occurred to you, LB, that your own political ideology is playing a massive role in your insistance on this claim, but it might be worth considering the implications of that.In general, I would agree with you. In the individual instance, though, the influence of a political idieology on a train of thought may presumably be greater or less. It may also be influenced by the swirl of ideological currents other than political ones. I've put this challenge to you before. Show us exactly how Chomsky's political ideology plays a massive role in his views about linguistics and you will have made a substantial contribution to the discussion. Merely wave the claim like an ideological banner above our heads and it is simply meaningless. Generalisations whose feet never touch the ground are no more than ideological bludgeons, and provide us with no insight into the actual world. As a matter of fact I do think Chomsky's politics have a bearing on his linguistics and vice versa but perhaps not in the direct way that I think you are insisting on here. As I have already said, although my conclusions are not exactly the same as Chris Knight's they are heavily influenced by the contents of his forthcoming book, and I don't want to take advantage of the massive amount of work he has put into it or his resulting insights by commenting on that now. But watch this space.
It is hard to pin Chomsky down on exactly what his 'innate concepts' consist of, but there is no doubt that, whatever they are, he believes their boundaries closely map onto the words of our actual languages. He begins to make his case by arguing from 'simple' concrete terms relating to 'things' and 'actions' but soon realises that if his argument is to hold water he must extend it to include all concepts, not only those that were meaningful to the earliest population of language-possessing humans, but also to all future generations in all future cultures as well. Ultimately he supplements his Cartesianism with a form of Platonism. Chomsky: "Acquisition of lexical items poses what is sometimes called ‘Plato’s problem’ in a very sharp form…At peak periods of language acquisition, children are acquiring (‘learning’) many words a day, perhaps a dozen or more, meaning that that they are acquiring words on very few exposures, even just one. This would appear to indicate that the concepts are already available, with much or all of their intricacy and structure predetermiuned, and that the child’s task is to assign labels to concepts, as might be done with limited evidence given sufficiently rich innate structure."It doesn't matter how Chomsky actually understands his "innate concepts" it follows from his theory that, at the moment of mutation and the installation of the 'language module', evolution was able to anticipate all the contingencies of all future human environments and latently provide us with all the innate concepts we would ever need.You suggest that, "once you elimjinate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be da troot, as someone never said."I think this is where I depart from your line of thinking most completely, YMS.Chomsky is very adept at declaring himself in absolutist terms, implying that anything other than his own line of argument is 'impossible' and that therefore his own view triumphs by necessity. But what makes you think there is any need to accept these claims? Undoubtedly we are dealing with very puzzling phenomena (anything to do with the mind sets us a huge conceptual challenge). But there exist a number of approaches to this problem apart from Chomsky's, all of which have their conceptual issues, but none of these are more problematic than Chomsky's own.From my perspective, I think you have this upside down. Rather than accepting that Chomsky has indeed eliminated the 'impossible,' from his premises, as he claims, we should accept that any premises which lead to an impossible conclusion, no matter how closely we argue from them, need to be abandoned and a search made for sounder set of conceptual starting points.
"For example, the question of people born blind who develop a full linguistic range, including concepts of things they have never (and will never) see."You keep bringing this issue up, YMS so let me take a moment to say that I have not the slightest problem with it: it is a quite common and well-understood argument. It is, indeed, a necessary condition for Chomsky's theory of language. But it is hardly a sufficient one. There is a world of difference between the claim, first, that language structures human thought in ways that are different from animal signalling systems, and, second, the Chomskyan claim that every child comes into the world knowing what a "house" is and that for the child to use this knowledge to communicate with others, she only has to learn how to connect her innate concept with the local sound for a 'house'. Interestingly, this view didn't originate with Chomsky, but with Chomsky's student Jerry Fodor (He of recent 'What Darwin Got Wrong' fame, a dense philosophical analysis which attempts – and fails – to undermine the foundation of Darwinian natural selection. If we didn't know before where this line of argument leads, Fodor has made it plain.) Fodor began working on the theory of innate concepts in response to the unravelling, yet again, of a previous less extreme Chomsky position. Chomsky picked it up and ran with it as a way of patching his previous theory. Then, as is his habit, he presented it to the world, not as a hypothesis, but as a species of unchallengeable necessity (he frequently attempts to bomb-proof himself with this kind of language – there is a fair bit of it in the RAG interview link above). Words like 'house' and 'book' are far too 'complex', he claims, to be simply learned. Are they? It hardly needs to be pointed out that unless you believe in alien interventions there were no books around when, according to Chomsky, these innate ideas were first installed in the human brain, so there can be no doubt as to his intended meaning here. So, yes, a blind person in our culture may exhibit a full range of verbalised concepts, YMS, but we still need to ask how and from where that blind person initially acquired them: spontaneously from the depths of her inherited 'mind', or externally from the culture in which she was linguistically raised? Here's another question: What kind of a linguistic tool box do you think a community composed entirely of blind people would generate if they were isolated from the rest of the world at birth? A 'full set'? I wonder. As far as I am aware, Chomsky still holds this view today. Chomsky: "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."
I think it is very typical of Chomsky and characterises his whole approach to language, that he claims it is not necessary to know any language other than your native one to become a linguist. Linguistics for him is not about communication or any actual languages. I think he reveals his intellectual origins there. He was very influenced in his early years by the Russian formalists.
Ah! I'm really glad you said that, Stuart. I've sometimes wondered if it is only me that thinks Chomsky is as slipperty as an eel. Sadly, I don't think he is always very honest either. I followed up a lot of his quoted references about ten years ago and was taken aback to find that in many cases he had distorted or misquoted them to fit his claims. I take no pleasure in that discovery, because I think he has been an important and positive voice in the world.
Under pressure now, so just a quick response. I'll comment in more detail if I have time. This issue has nothing to do with whether we speak to ourselves internally more commonly than we speak to others. This is a red herring. The issue is how did language come into existence. The route by which Chomsky slowly backtracked stage by stage in response to the demolition of each new iteration of his theory until he had pasted himself into a tight corner is fascinating and worth reading. But let me try to give an abstract summary. In the RAG article, Chomsky claims that language begins as a single mutation event in an individual which is then selected for and spreads through the community – there is no drawn out process of evolution whereby a series of mutations are subjected to a variety of selection pressures: there is a single, very remarkable event – particularly remarkable given the complexity of the outcome and the time frame within which occurs. In this conception, language itself (as opposed to its many varieties) arises fully formed and without human communication having played any part in its formation. It must therefore begin as a hermetically sealed internal activity. And here we have the origins of Chomsky's individualism.In the same article Chomsky speaks of this newly emerged language faculty as a symbolic process. The question then arises if 'language' is at this stage an internal process, where did the symbols come from? If they did not emerge by intraspecific agreement between indivuals through a process of communcation, they must have emerged from within the minds of those individuals with this remarkable mutation. It is this conundrum (I'm simplifying, but this is basically the problem Chomsky faced) that eventually forces him in his later work to hold what certainly seems to me to be the bizarre view that specific concepts/symbols together with the structures for relating them to one another to produce meaning are themselves all innate. And not only is this vast apparatus innate, it is the result of a single mutation event in recent human history. Hence his insistence that a symbolic entity like carburetor was already lodged in the mind of these early internally revolving individuals. You seem to be able to accept this withoug demur, YMS. I certainly can't.Talk of recursion is all very well, but recursion has to have something to work on.
stuartw2112 wrote:If you go to the link below, you'll find in the second issue of the journal an interview I carried out with Noam Chomsky on these very issues. I was working under the influence and with the help of Chris Knight. As the saying goes, Chomsky cut us both a new arsehole. He will certainly be very surprised to learn that "biological determinism" has been refuted – you should let the Intelligent Design people know! I'm now more with Young Master Smeet – though like him I am no specialist and have no dog in the fight. http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/journalI'm not sure how you are reading this, Stuart, but I don't see that there is anything here that contradicts what I have so far said. (I was reading it just the other day. Good interview!) Some of Chomsky's responses seem rather disingenuous (or 'exceptionally nuanced') to me – the Avalonian Explosion, for instance, which he cites to confirm his view that 'It's a mistake to suppose that capacities must evolve gradually', took millions of years (about 20-odd million if I recall). In evolutionary terms that is, indeed, an exceptionally rapid evolution, but it is an evolution and hardly what Chomsky has in mind when he later speaks of how the language module appeared from a single mutation or set of mutations in a human individual about 50,000 years ago, spread throughout the population and quickly gave rise to symbolic linguistic culture. Disingenous? But maybe that's just me.Unlike Chris, Chomsky has never been very conscientious about accurate citation of sources.
