Marc Miyake of the blog Amritas (on our permalinks) had an article up on FrontPage yesterday blasting Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. His thesis is that UG is just another intellectual virus of the post-modern left. In it he quotes another of our favorite bloggers, Joanne Jacobs, who relates her school-day dissatisfaction with old Noam as well:
Structural linguistics was required for a degree in English at Stanford. I put it off till my last semester; finally I had to take the class. It consisted of uncritical worship of Noam Chomsky. I kept disrupting class by asking questions: Why do we believe this is true? Just because Chomsky says so? How do we know he’s right? Why is this class required?
So how about it, is UG the new Freudism, just another high falutin academic fad, or is the majority linguistic paradigm really deserving of its special regard within university hallways? Marc is adamant that it is the former:
Prior to Chomsky, linguists engaged in a lot of data collection to understand the diversity of human language. I’m vehemently anti-PC, but in this case, I think the word ‘diversity’ is justified. There’s a lot out there, and someone’s got to catalog it.
However, Chomsky rejected this approach. He wanted to look into something deeper’ (academese for ‘pretentious and nonexistent’). So he invented something called ‘universal grammar’ which is somehow programmed into us at birth.
Unfortunately this is all highly misleading. Tailored for a political audience of a certain persuasion[1], Marc would like to convey the story in a way that makes Chomsky out to be the left-wing baddie (that the audience is already prepared to think of him as) who subverts decent American science. In Marc’s moralized version the ‘good’ linguists were going about their proper duties collecting all kinds of data, while the ‘bad’ linguist decides to self-indulgently taint the field with PoMo gibberish (something FrontPage readers already outraged by Chomsky’s radical politics will be eager to accept). But what Frontpage readers won’t know is that the role Chomsky played was exactly the opposite- it was the gibberish he helped to contradict. Despite his poor reputation among modern conservatives, it should be made clear that Noam Chomsky was among the first to raise a serious challenge to the hegemony of the Boas school of thinking which denied the concept of a human nature and taught the infinite malleability of man.
What Marc doesn’t tell you is that all the other linguists, like so many at the time, were radical environmentalists (Skinnerists) who believed in the infinite variety of human language- that there was no form that human language couldn’t deviate from. Chomsky wasn’t being pretentious when he volunteered to “look deeper”, he was looking for the answer to pertinent question: Is language infinitely changeable, or does human language have fundamental commonality? Chomsky is a scientific hero b/c he dared to stand up, at a time when almost no one else dared, and question if an essential part of being human was innate.[2] I’ll let Steve Pinker summarize (far better than I could) the theoretical strength of Chomsky’s theory of language:
Language is a human instinct. All societies have complex language, and everywhere the languages use the same kinds of grammatical machinery like nouns, verbs, auxiliaries, and agreement. All normal children develop language without conscious effort or formal lessons, and by the age of three they speak in fluent grammatical sentences, outperforming the most sophisticated computers. Brain damage or congenital conditions can make a person a linguistic savant while severely retarded, or unable to speak normally despite high intelligence. All this has led many scientists, beginning with the linguist Noam Chomsky in the late 1950’s, to conclude that there are specialized circuits in the human brain, and perhaps specialized genes, that create the gift of articulate speech.[3]
Acquiring language is not a normal mental problem. Everyone sees small children pick up language so effortlessly that they might not realize how impossible a problem it is. No one would expect a three-year old to master calculus, it couldn’t be done! But when a three year old learns grammar he is doing something much more complicated, and w/o effort. Children must learn the rules of their native grammar (whatever it might be) through a limited set of sample sentences that they hear. This limited information is mathematically insufficient for determining grammatical principles (Linguists working on a language for decades cannot figure out what a small child does in a few short years). This is what is called “The paradox of language acquisition”. The normal computational function of the brain is insufficient to explain how children are able to do this- UG is the best current solution. Marc isn’t much interested in providing an alternative in his article though. He continues:
There are innumerable problems with [UG]. For starters:
Where did this ‘universal grammar’ come from, and how did it end up becoming part of our biology? Not many Chomskyans are interested in evolutionary biology. ‘Universal grammar’ simply IS. (I myself suspect that there may be a universal grammar sans scare quotes, but I doubt that it has much in common with Chomskyan ‘universal grammar’.)
The claim that, “Not many Chomskyans are interested in evolutionary biology.” is an utter falsehood. Evolutionary biologists_love_the idea of universal grammar. Evolutionary biologists swear by universal grammar. Tooby and Cosmides essentially developed their evolutionary psychological model off of Chomsky’s idea. Instead of one undifferentiated mass, scientists began, largely thanks to Chomsky, to imagine the brain as a sort of Swiss army knife, with many specialized sub-systems adapted for unique problems; and in many ways this view of the brain has found powerful evidentiary support. Marc confuses viable questions as damning critiques. It isn’t necessary to know any of the things Marc asks before UG can be useful as a theoretical solution (although they would certainly enrich the theory). In fact many evolutionary biologists are searching for those answers, and with progressive success. Theoretical Biologist Martin A. Nowak (Princeton) is one important scientist who is looking into the role of language in human evolution (and the role of evolution in human language). The beginning of the answer to Marc’s questions can be found in Nowak’s 2001 paper in the journal Science titled the Evolution of Universal Grammar.
[Part II later. . .]
[1] Marc got all sorts of props for this article over at the FreeRepublic, which is world-famous for its concern with issues relating to neurological theories of syntax 😛
[2] Similarly, around the same time, it was widely assumed that facial expressions could vary arbitrarily and w/o limit until psychologist Paul Ekman demonstrated that facial emotions had continuity across all cultures. Don’t ask me how, but somehow it’s “programmed into us at birth”.
[3] Seven years after Pinker penned that introduction in The New Republic the first of such language genes was found.
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