Abstract:

In this paper I would like to outline the basic philosophical and methodological assumptions behind Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar and the main objections to the theory from within the Marxist tradition. My argument is that the biological determinist framework of Chomsky's theory is an unsound philosophical and methodological foundation for the scientific investigation of human affairs in general and language in particular. There is an alternative in the tradition of materialist investigation of language and mental phenomena associated with the name of Vygotsky and others, which allows us to give full due to our material, biological natures without at the same time preventing us from appreciating the essentially socio-cultural determination of our activity and thinking.

         One may usually have some powerful assumptions about the nature of humanity and of human mental activity to be willing to accept the formalist methodology as well as the innatist conclusions of Chomskyan linguistics. As we find, the assumptions Chomsky makes, on which his whole research programme rests, are biological determinist, which in philosophy means idealist. If we judge this ideological framework to be untenable, then the viability of the linguistic theory is called into question. And if we cannot find at once all the answers to the structural puzzles Chomsky's theory purports to solve, we would do better to be cautiously sceptical about the data than to be bounced into embracing a set of assumptions which have devastating consequences for the human sciences.

Over the years, Chomsky has employed a rather effective expository and rhetorical device which consists in imagining how a super-intelligent extra-terrestrial being would go about the study of human language and its grammatical structure. Chomsky's Martian gets to the bottom of things very quickly, unencumbered by the parochial earthbound attitudes, ideological distortions and downright stupidity that humans are prone to. The superorganism attacks language - this "curious biological phenomenon"  - with natural scientific methods ("the methods of rational inquiry"), quickly discovering beneath the apparent chaos of surface forms, highly abstract principles of syntactic organization, principles which are inviolable and yet have no functional motivation in the exigencies of social communication. Accordingly, the Martian attributes the human capacity for language to our biological make-up, to the workings of an innate language faculty. This faculty contains a "Universal Grammar”, a "mental organ" which provides a grammatical blueprint for the "growth" of the grammars of particular languages in interaction with the linguistic (and general social) surroundings. Here we have, in a nutshell, the general framework of assumptions and the methodology within which Chomskyan theoretical syntax, often referred to as "autonomous syntax" has taken shape.

Key Words

Chomsky, Universal Grammar, Biological Determinism, Formalism, Rationalism.

Paper

In this paper I would like to outline the basic philosophical and methodological assumptions behind Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar and the main objections to the theory from within the Marxist tradition. My argument is that the biological determinist framework of Chomsky's theory is an unsound philosophical and methodological foundation for the scientific investigation of human affairs in general and language in particular. There is an alternative in the tradition of materialist investigation of language and mental phenomena associated with the name of Vygotsky and others, which allows us to give full due to our material, biological natures without at the same time preventing us from appreciating the essentially socio-cultural determination of our activity and thinking.

         Onemay usuallyhave some powerful assumptions about the nature of humanity and of human mental activity to be willing to accept the formalist methodology as well as the innatist conclusions of Chomskyan linguistics. As we find, the assumptions Chomsky makes, on which his whole research programme rests, are biological determinist, which in philosophy means idealist. If we judge this ideological framework to be untenable, then the viability of the linguistic theory is called into question. And if we cannot find at once all the answers to the structural puzzles Chomsky's theory purports to solve, we would do better to be cautiously sceptical about the data than to be bounced into embracing a set of assumptions which have devastating consequences for the human sciences.

Chomsky proposeda kind of plausible theory of language. The different approaches he had between E-language and I-language may be similar to the Brahe and other's observational astronomy, which collected a vast body of data, and Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler's model of planetary motion, even though the details of the model might be questionable. Chomsky's first generalization is also a legitimate step. But his proposal of "innate ideas" has been resisted by some empiricists, and he is characterized as rationalist. In our view, those empiricists make a mistake. In order to clarify this issue we will cite Chomsky's statements in spite of somewhat redundancy.

Chomsky attempts to develop his theory of linguistics as a discipline of natural sciences or physical sciences, which are empirically based. He specifically objects to 'Abstract-linguistics' (Chomsky,1986) and he maintains that the boundary between linguistics and natural sciences will shift or disappear. The theory of mind aims to determine the properties of the initial state ‘SO'and each attainable state ‘SL’ of the language faculty, and the brain sciences seek to discover the mechanisms of the brain that are the physical realizations of these states. (Chomsky,1986) Eventually, the linguistics and the brain science will converge. Chomsky uses the term 'mechanism', which refers to the physical mechanism. (Chomsky,1986) He says, one task of the brain sciences, is to discover the mechanisms of brain that are the physical realization of the state SL. What he means by physical realization is the physically encoded mental state on the brain. "In contrast to E-language, the steady state of knowledge (I-language) attained and the initial state So are real elements of particular mind/brains, aspects of the ‘physical world’, where we understand mental states and representations to be‘physically encoded’ in some manner." (Chomsky,1986) Chomsky's ‘UG’ is ‘biologically determined’ (Chomsky,1986) principles too. Chomsky seems to use 'physically' and 'biologically' interchangeable. In this aspect Chomsky's universals that are biologically realized and physically encoded in brain, are different from Descarte's ‘innate ideas’.

Chomsky rejects the fictional and abstract objects and, especially, rejects the suggestion that knowledge of language should be taken to be an abstract "Platonic" entity. He says; "Knowing everything about the mind/brain, a Platonist would argue, we still have no basis for determining the truths of arithmetic or set theory, but there is not the slightest reason to suppose that there are truths of language that would still escape our grasp." (Chomsky,1986) He differentiates linguistics from mathematics and emphasizes the empirical aspect of linguistics and its relationship to brain sciences; therefore, the justification of his theory is not only a theoretical matter, but also an empirical that relies on the results of brain science. Based on Chomsky's positions on the nature of his linguistics theory, we conclude that he has been mistaken as a rationalist. In the next section, we will discuss some of the debates on this subjects and other related issues.

The analogies Chomsky draws between mental and physical organs and their growth have a definite philosophical significance which he is keen to develop explicitly. Thus, Chomsky contrasts the "deep and abstract" nature of the grammatical knowledge acquired by the child with the "degenerate quality and narrowly limited extent of the available data" on which the child bases his/her grammar construction (Chomsky,1965). He notes the "striking uniformity of the resulting grammars, and their independence of intelligence, motivation, and emotional state" (Chomsky,1965), all of which leaves little hope that much of the structure of the language can be learned by an organism initially uninformed as to its general character" (Chomsky,1965). It is this argument from the "poverty of the stimulus" (Chomsky, 1986), contrasting the knowledge acquired with its evidential base, which is the central epistemological pillar of his biological determinist edifice. This contrast is held to justify the postulation of highly specific and finely tuned innate principles which "permit the organism to transcend experience, reaching a high level of complexity that does not reflect the limited and degenerate environment" (Chomsky, 1980). In more traditional philosophical language, the argument has to do with the problem of induction (sometimes referred to by Chomsky as "Plato's problem", (Hacker, 1990). The same argument in relation to children's learning of words is used to support a belief in the innateness of all concepts.

Chomsky's philosophical stance has much to do with his approval of the refutation of induction by the 18th century Scottish sceptical philosopher David Hume, entailing the rejection of the empiricist principle that experience is the source of human knowledge. Hume showed that the framing of general scientific laws cannot be justified logically, rationally from experience alone, which led him to "the disastrous conclusion that from experience and observation nothing is to be learnt" (Russell, 1991) and from there to a denial of the possibility of rational belief ‘tout court’. The logical outcome, in fact, was solipsism. Chomsky, however, sees a solution to the Humean problem in a version of the doctrine of innate ideas: if knowledge cannot derive from experience then it must belong to the mind itself; what we call "knowledge" is produced in-house, so to speak, caused by the internal structure and working of the mind - the physical constitution of the brain itself determines what is and what is not thinkable and knowable. Here the influence of the Cartesian and Kantian traditions makes itself felt although the logic of Chomsky's position forces him to sharply distance himself from the Cartesian picture of the mind as a "universal instrument" (Chomsky,1988), able to know anything and everything, since, if it is the structure of the brain itself which determines the content and possibilities of human knowledge, there must necessarily be "sharp limits on attainable knowledge" (Chomsky,1979).

And so to the main epistemological conundrum at the heart of the Chomskyan doctrine: if knowledge is some kind of physical substance grown in the brain, what, then, of truth? In Chomskyan parlance, what of "the relation between the class of humanly accessible theories and the class of true theories" (Chomsky,1980) On Chomsky's premisses, truth can only arise via a coincidence or intersection of mental (ie brain) properties with properties of reality: "Where such an intersection exists, a human being can attain real knowledge. And, conversely, he cannot attain real knowledge beyond that intersection" (Chomsky, 1979). However, Chomsky has already argued that "we're not going to find that one system has the same structural properties as other systems" (Edgley et al, 1989) from which it follows that "there is no particular biological reason why such an intersection should exist" (Chomsky, 1979). He is forced to conclude that there "is no particular reason to suppose that the science-forming capacities of humans or their mathematical abilities permit them to conceive of theories approximating the truth in every (or any) domain, or to gain insight into the laws of nature" (Chomsky:1980). In other words, there is no reason for believing that any "knowledge" we have is true knowledge, and good reasons for believing that none of it is - a radical scepticism foreign to Descartes but acceptable to Kant who believed that the world of real things outside the mind ("Things-in-themselves") was in principle unknowable.

But now the twist. Instead of denying, with Kant, the possibility of real knowledge of things, Chomsky gives the epistemological screw an extra turn, professing a Cartesian faith in the power of human knowledge. For Descartes, the worlds of thought and matter, despite having diametrically opposed properties, nevertheless corresponded exactly, because God made them coincide. Chomksy, too, believes that true knowledge exists, with physics being the prime example (Chomsky, 1979). But God, apparently, is not responsible; it is, instead, "just blind luck if the human science-forming capacity, a particular component of the human biological endowment, happens to yield a result that conforms more or less to the truth about the world" (Chomsky,1988). Physics, then, may indeed be such an instance of a "lucky accident" (Chomsky, 1979), of "a remarkable historical accident resulting from chance convergence of biological properties of the human mind with some aspect of the real world" (Chomsky, 1979). Truth depends, then, on a "kind of biological miracle" (Chomsky, 1979).

Chomsky's linguistic theory is based on the following empirical facts: "child learns language with limited stimuli", or the problem of poverty of evidence. (Chomsky, 1986) The input during the period of a natural language acquisition is circumscribed and degenerate. The output simply cannot be accounted for by the learning mechanism only, such as induction and analogy on the input. The output and input differ both in quantity and quality. A subject knows linguistic facts without instruction or even direct evidence. These empirical facts, "knowledge without ground", (Chomsky, 1968) are expressed: "Knowledge of language is normally attained through brief exposure, and the character of the acquired knowledge may be largely predetermined." (Chomsky, 1969)

This predetermined knowledge is some "notion of structure", in the mind of the speaker , which guides the subject in acquiring a natural language of his own. For a subject to know a natural language is for him to have a certain I-language. Language acquiring, in terms of I-language, corresponds to the change of a subject's mind/brain state. To know the language L is for the subject's (H's) mind/brain, initially to be in a state So, to be set to a certain state ‘SL’. (Chomsky, 1986) One task of the brain sciences will be to explain what it is about H's brain (in particular, its language faculty) that corresponds to H's knowing L.

He makes an important hypothesis that universal grammar (UG). UG is a characterization of these innate principle of language faculty, I-language. (Chomsky, 1986) He then postulates some detailed structure of UG. It is a system of conditions on grammars, constraints on the form and interpretation of grammar at all levels, from the deep structures of syntax, through the transformational component, to the rules that interpret syntactic structures semantically and phonetically. The study of linguistic universals, which is classified as formal or substantive, is the study of the properties of UG for a natural language. (6) Substantive universals concern the vocabulary for the description of language and a formal linguistic universal involve the character of the rules that appear in grammars and the ways in which they can be interconnected. Language-acquisition device uses primary linguistic data as the empirical basis for language learning to meet explanatory adequacy that is defined in UG, and to select one of the potential grammars, which is permitted by UG.

Chomsky then makes two explicit hypothesis, ‘pure’ speech community and a ‘common’ grammar. A ‘pure’speech community excludes contradictory choices for certain of options permitted by ‘UG’ and the property of mind described by ‘UG’ is a species characteristic, common to all humans.

The second hypothesis implies that the study of one language, such as English, may provide crucial evidence concerning the structure of some other language. Acquisition of language then, is a matter of adding to one's store of UG rules, or modifying this system, as new data are processed. (Chomsky, 1970)

The nature of knowledge of language, which is closely tied to human knowledge in general, makes it a logical step for Chomsky to generalize his theory. The linguistic theory for special 'Plato problem' can be applied to 'Plato's problem' to knowledge in general, providing that an empirical evidence of such problem for a certain knowledge. He says, his innate principle includes syntax, phonology, and morphology, and semantics. By 'semantics' he means the study of the relation between language and the world — in particular, the study of truth and reference. (Chomsky, 1986) At the same time, he also generalizes his idea of ‘UG’, especially the process of parameter determination in acquiring a particular natural language for a subject. "This result of this process of parameter determination and periphery formation is a full and richly articulated system of knowledge. ...The same may well be true of large areas of what might be called 'common-sense knowledge and understanding'". (Chomsky, 1986) The first generalization, generalization of 'Plato's problem' to knowledge in general, is correct. The second generalization, seems to us, is too hasty. The advances in neural science and mathematics have produced new theory on complex systems. For a vast complicated system as human brain, which is tremendously flexible and which processes abstract concepts at many different levels, the theory of parameter determination over-simplifies the problem we are facing.

 Chomsky tries to differentiate himself from the linguistic behaviourism and he emphasizes some of reasonable core of "rationalism" to make a statement that my "sausage-making machines" (Danto, 1969) is not tabula rasa, but has complex, dedicated parts and structure. He somewhat identifies himself with the tradition of the rationalist philosophy of language and with philosophical grammar. (Chomsky, 1970) He is not satisfied with the explanatory power of the descriptive grammar. Philosophical grammar is "typically concerned with data not for itself but as evidence for deeper, hidden organizing principles,..." (Chomsky, 1970)However, it may be surprising, his term 'rationalism' is equivalent to 'natural science', He states that the issue of rationalist philosophy of language "is not between descriptive and prescriptive grammar, but between description and explanation, between grammar as 'natural history' and grammar as a kind of 'natural philosophy' or, in modern terms, 'natural science.'" (Chomsky, 1986) He particularly criticizes the lack of physical, empirical aspects of Cartesian rationalism. (Chomsky, 1986)

Rationalism stressed the power of reason as opposed to empirical facts and used deductive reasoning as the basis for their knowledge system. Chomsky's theory is an empirical science and his method is largely based on linguistic empirical data. Therefore, Chomsky's theory is not rationalist in the classical sense. Some of his opponents (Quine, Wells) confuse what Chomsky is claiming and what he is doing. (Goodman, 1969)

Understanding of Chomsky's position on those issues, some of the objections to his theory become automatically invalid, Goodman (Goodman, 1969)raises a question. How does Chomsky start from some subtle difference in linguistics and then moves on to innate ideas? "I know what a horse with spirit is, but not what the spirit is without the horse." (Goodman, 1969) This UG is not something that "a spirit without a horse" at all.

On the other hand, Chomsky's theory is empirical, but different from behaviorism linguistics. On the issue of "innate structure", Harman does not accept Chomsky's theory of innate structures. He said: "I view linguistics, it is closer to both anthropology and the behavioural sciences than he would apparently allow." (Harman,1969) Quine argues: "This indisputable point about language is in no conflict with latter-day attitudes that are associated with the name of empiricism, or behaviourism. (Chomsky, 1986) There are two major differences between behaviourism and Chomsky's theory. Behaviourism treats a complex system as a black box, a functional mechanism. If two black box function exact the same, behaviourism and functionalism regards them exact the same. This is Quine's so-called 'enigma doctrine'. He says, "English speakers obey, in this sense, any and all of the extensionally equivalent systems of grammar that demarcate the right totality of well-formed English sentences." (Quine, 1972) However, Chomsky's "theories of grammar and UG are empirical theories" and his systems of grammar is physically encoded in some manner. The development of brain science will discover the very physical structure of human brain, and there can be only one of a set of "extensionally equivalent systems of grammar" is correctly attributed to the speaker-hearer as a property that is the same as that is physically encoded, where some other one merely happens to fit the speaker's behaviour but does not correctly represent the physical facts. The second difference is reflected by the relationship between I-language and E-language. E-language, as the traditional behaviourist linguistics, deals with steady-state language, or mature language; while I-language in Chomsky's theory specifies not only the internal characteristics of language, but also deals with a dynamic process, language acquiring process, from initial state So to the steady state ‘SL’. (Nagel, 1969) E-language is independent of a individual's history, while I-language explains the language aspect of individual's history. This dynamic process puts more constraints on the characteristics of the languages. I-languages may reach the same steady state ‘SL’ and realize the steady state languages that have "extensionally equivalent systems of grammar"; while these I-languages may specify different dynamic processes that reach ‘SL’. These processes differentiate I-languages one another and some of them can be proved to be wrong theories regarding the language acquisition process. Therefore, extensionally equivalent systems of grammar in the traditional grammar sense is not necessarily equivalent in terms of I-language.

Nagel questioned whether the initial contribution of the organism to language-learning is properly described as knowledge. (Nagel, 1869) Dummett questions the concept of unconscious knowledge. (Chomsky, 1986) He holds that there is an extremely important innate capacity but it would not be called innate knowledge in either case. Chomsky introduces "cognize" in trying to resolve the issue. It can easily be understood through an analogy. In computer science, a computation can be either realized through software, which is written in computer language, or through hardware, which is built by the logic circuits composed of physical parts. Both functions exactly the same. If we can do an extrapolation or analogy, ideas might be realized through abstract symbol systems or through neural-network. The two mode of structures may have effects on the recognisability. This is a speculation. But our point is that ‘UG’ is proposed as hypothesis, and if the 'notion of structure' is correct, other hypothesis may be assumed on what kind of structure is and how the structure operates. The final settlement relies on new development of brain sciences.

‘UG’ as a hypothesis raises questions about to what extend the hypothesis correctly captures the structure of brain. Danto says:

"...to what extent does the innate structure of language formation sink into the world, giving it linguistic form, or the form of our language. So far as LA is universal, we live perforce in the same world if the structure of our world reflects the structure of language. Obviously, something produced by means of a different LA would not be recognizably a language, nor would the world correlative with this, if there is this correlatively, be recognizably the world. A wholly different language or a wholly different world would be unintelligible, but is the very idea unintelligible?". (Danto, 1969)

Chomsky treats the innate idea as a fixed form (common grammar hypothesis), which resembles rationalist doctrine of ideas; while his attempts in providing a natural science of language is not consistent with such hypothesis. In this aspect, Herbert Spencer (Principle of Psychology) might be right that innate ideas, such as adopt form of thought, like the perception of space and time, or the notions of quantity and cause, which Kant supposed innate, are merely instinctive ways of thinking; and as instincts are habits acquired by the race but native to the individual, so these categories are mental habits slowly acquired in the course of evolution, and now part of our intellectual heritage. In Spencer's word, "the inheritance of accumulating modifications". If this is correct, chimpanzee and human ability in communication and maybe language can be bridged in principle, and the study of chimpanzee's brain would help to discover the innate structure physically encoded in a certain manner too.

Over the years, Chomsky has employed a rather effective expository and rhetorical device which consists in imagining how a super-intelligent extra-terrestrial being would go about the study of human language and its grammatical structure. Chomsky's Martian gets to the bottom of things very quickly, unencumbered by the parochial earthbound attitudes, ideological distortions and downright stupidity that humans are prone to. The superorganism attacks language - this "curious biological phenomenon" (Chomsky,1988) - with natural scientific methods ("the methods of rational inquiry")(Chomsky,1988), quickly discovering beneath the apparent chaos of surface forms, highly abstract principles of syntactic organization, principles which are inviolable and yet have no functional motivation in the exigencies of social communication. Accordingly, the Martian attributes the human capacity for language to our biological make-up, to the workings of an innate language faculty. This faculty contains a "Universal Grammar, a "mental organ" which provides a grammatical blueprint for the "growth" of the grammars of particular languages in interaction with the linguistic (and general social) surroundings. Here we have, in a nutshell, the general framework of assumptions and the methodology within which Chomskyan theoretical syntax, often referred to as "autonomous syntax" (Newmeyer, 1986) has taken shape.

Facts aside, this is, on first encounter, a persuasive and plausible picture of the nature of language and its structure. It appears to have the merit, not least, of reconciling the study of language with already established and respectable sciences, thereby helping to promote a thorough-going scientific and philosophical realism, a materialistic monism (or "scientific monism", (Salkie, 1990). On the other hand, one may have doubts. Of course, one can hardly object to rational methods of enquiry, or to the demand for the same standards of rationality in linguistics as in the "hard" sciences. And yet, to assume in advance that linguistic facts are biological facts is hardly in keeping with the finest standards of terrestrial thought, something that might lead us to temper our enthusiasm for contact with other worlds. Why does our Martian superorganism not entertain the possibility that language is, say, a cultural form? I will return to the argument below.(Chomsky, 1986)

Chomsky's rational methods entail drastic consequences for the human sciences as a whole, for every sphere of human mental activity, subjected to such enquiry, turns out to require a mental organ of its own. To each domain Chomsky allots a dedicated biological substratum allowing species- specific mental activity to flourish over a certain highly restricted field "accessible" to the innate faculty while denying access to areas which "lie beyond the reach of our minds, structured and organised as they are" (Chomsky,1979). Syntax is the province of one such organ, word meaning is another, to the surprise, perhaps, of those who think that Chomsky's innatism is restricted to the form of language - as if form and content could so easily be dissociated. Thus, Chomsky believes that the speed and precision with which children pick up new words "leaves no real alternative to the conclusion that the child somehow has the concepts available before experience with language and is basically learning labels for concepts that are already part of his or her conceptual apparatus" (Chomsky,1988). The same applies, he claims, "even for the technical concepts of the natural sciences" (Chomsky ,1988). The very method of scientific thought is also fixed a ‘priori’ in a "science-forming capacity" (Chomsky,1980) which permits, again, only "accessible" theories, i.e. those which conform to biologically determined specifications. As regards activity in the literary or musical spheres, Chomsky is similarly convinced that "a certain range of possibilities has been explored to create structures of marvellous intricacy, while others are never considered or if explored, lead to the production of work that does not conform to normal human capacities" (Chomsky:1988). He also believes that "the moral and ethical system acquired by the child owes much to some innate human faculty" (Chomsky:1988).

The outcome of this grandiose reductionism is the marginalisation of the effective domain of the historical, the social and the cultural in human affairs. Indeed, the very concept of "society" as a coherent systemic organism becomes problematic, and in fact Chomsky makes no secret of his scepticism about the possibility of a genuine social science (Chomsky, 1979). On occasion, Chomsky has considered extending his innatist approach to the sphere of social interaction itself, speculating that we might have "a sort of 'universal grammar' of possible forms of social interaction, and it is this system which helps us to organize intuitively our imperfect perceptions of social reality" while adding that "it does not follow necessarily that we are capable of developing conscious theories in this domain through the exercise of our 'science-forming faculties'" (Chomsky, 1979).

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