Noam Chomsky on the Politics of the Essence of the Human Mind

[Ichingcarpenter]

Noam Chomsky is considered one of the pivotal linguists of our time. He follows a long heritage on the nature of language which begins with the ancient Greeks and continues with Giambattista Vico in the 18th century. This heritage is convinced that language is the vehicle of thought and therefore it is there what we need to look for discovering the essence of the human mind. In other words, imagination and the poetical precedes rationality and it is a fallacy to dissociate one from the other or consider one superior to the other as the Enlightenment tended to do.

Chomsky’s seminal work published way back in 1957 is titled Syntactic Structures and defined the field for the rest of the century. In this book Chomsky puts forward the idea of “transformational grammar” in which each sentence in a language has a “deep structure” and a “surface structure.” The deep structure contains properties common to all languages which are mapped onto the surface structure via “transformations.” In 1965 it was followed by Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Language and Mind. Here Chomsky introduces a hierarchy which he calls “levels of adequacy” as a means of judging grammars and “metagrammars” (theories of grammar) according to their elegance and effectiveness.

Chomsky challenges the rationalistic empiricist tradition of Locke which asserts that at birth the mind is a blank slate (a “tabula rasa) on which experience writes. Chomsky, to the contrary asserts that the mind is constrained in its operations by certain innate structures. He observes language learning and the “syntactic structures” which underlie languages and notices that at a fundamental level they all share a universal structure, or grammar which is hardwired in our brains, rather than something learned through teaching and experience. He further observes that there are some 5,000 known varieties of human languages and notices that despite many surface differences they are all constrained by certain parameters and principles that are innate to the human mind.

Chomsky arrives at this conclusion via the “productivity argument.” He notices the speed with which grammatical ability develops in children around the age of two or three and finds confirmation for this in the field of experimental psycho-logism. This ability goes far beyond the slender input of the language that children have been exposed to up to that point. Which is to say, the child has a head-start: the grammatical rules do not need to be learned, they are hardwired in the mind and early exposure to language merely acts as a trigger which initiates a very fast paced linguistic competence. This notion transformed the understanding of language teaching which after Chomsky’s publications began placing less emphasis of teaching grammatical rules and more on a spontaneous natural way of learning and reproducing a foreign language.
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http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/2821

[ananda]

1. thoughts

This is an extremely interesting article. The idea, as I read it, is that humans are hardwired both for language and freedom, so that no matter what an oppressor does to try to brainwash or indoctrinate a people into accepting authoritarian strictures, ultimately it won't work. So of course, it has me wondering why Americans are so accepting of Bushinc, "good Germans all." Still, maybe Chomsky is implying that this is only temporary. At least I hope so!

Sue