This book is a collection of seven essays based on lectures and articles by Noam Chomsky from 1992 to the present, together with a foreword by Neil Smith. Chomsky has published a number of books like this one over the years, which attack the empiricist philosophy of language of Quine, Putnam, Davidson, and others, and which defend his own 'naturalist' and 'internalist' views. This book also traces developments in the philosophy of language from the time of Sir Isaac Newton, and thus picks up where Cartesian linguistics (1966) leaves off. Chomsky points out that the problem of reconciling the 'mental' with the 'physical' was fundamentally altered by Newton's demonstration that Cartesian mechanism is untenable. The ultimate solution to the 'mind-body problem', if it is found at all, is not likely to involve a reduction of the mental to the physical. Rather, the mental should be studied just like the physical, using whatever tools, methods, and insights are available, without arbitrary stipulations such as those of the philosophers mentioned above who limit the study of language in particular to correlations with observable behavior. Many, if not most linguists, Chomsky observes, ignore the strictures of these eminent philosophers, so that their efforts amount to nothing more than the harassment of the practitioners of an emerging science.
Since 'natural language' is what develops naturally in the course of language acquisition without instruction, the internalist and naturalist study of language does not consider those aspects of language which result from the imposition of community norms, nor does it consider specialized uses which must be explicitly taught. For example, the common mass noun water does not mean 'H2O' in any natural language (thus rendering irrelevant to the study of natural languages such thought experiments as Putnam's 'twin earth' scenarios), and the consideration of what water does mean in a natural language leads to the conclusion that its reference cannot be determined extensionally. The same is true for every referring expression in a natural language, including proper nouns. Further, Chomsky maintains that the meanings of most lexical items in a natural language are far more elaborate than what is normally recorded in dictionaries, and suggests that lexical structure is best explored within a decompositional framework such as that of Moravcsik (1990) or Pustejovsky (1995), as a kind of abstract syntax.
In the first essay, Chomsky traces the evolution of his own conception of grammar, beginning with transformational-generative grammar in its various forms; continuing with the 'principles-and-parameters' framework, which he considers a more significant 'revolution' than transformational-generative grammar, the latter being a continuation of both traditional and structuralist ideas; and culminating in the 'minimalist program'. In the principles-and-parameters framework, an internalized grammar (an I-language) is considered, in the words of the fifth essay, to be 'an instantiation of the initial state [with the parameters fixed], idealizing from the actual states of the language faculty', which are 'the result of the interaction of a great many factors, only some of which are relevant to the inquiry into the nature of language' (123). The development of the minimalist program was motivated by two closely related questions. First, 'to what extent [can] the principles themselves ... be reduced to deeper and natural properties of computation' (123); and second, 'to what extent [is] language ... a "good solution" to the legibility conditions imposed by the external systems with which it interacts' (9)?
As the name 'minimalism' suggests, Chomsky seeks a theory which is stripped to bare essentials. A language must contain phonetic and semantic features, a way of bundling these together into lexical items, and a way of combining lexical items together into larger expressions. It must also interact with other systems of the mind/brain which are responsible for producing and recognizing its expressions both phonetically and conceptually. An ideal or 'perfect' I-language is one whose computational apparatus consists only of entities and operations that are necessary to insure that the expressions it generates are 'legible' to the relevant sensorimotor and conceptual systems, and that the latter gets what it needs to carry out its tasks of thought and action. Chomsky states that 'there are ... indications that the language faculty may be close to "perfect" in this sense; if true, this is a surprising conclusion' (9), and one that would require us to discard most of the theoretical apparatus that has been developed (much of it by Chomsky himself) over the past fifty years.
Chomsky identifies two potential imperfections in the design of language: the existence of features that lack both phonetic and semantic value, such as structural case; and the 'displacement property', that 'phrases are interpreted as if they were in a different position in the expression' (12). He then observes that '[o]n the assumption of optimal design, we expect them to be related, and that seems to be the case: uninterpretable features are the mechanism that implements the displacement property' (12). However, it turns out that the latter is not an imperfection at all, but is 'motivated by interpretive requirements that are externally imposed by our systems of thought' (13). But then the existence of uninterpreted features is not an imperfection either, since they are needed to implement the displacement property.
If all this seems to be too good to be true, it probably is. First, since the displacement property is not an imperfection, the expectation that it should be related to a real imperfection, namely the existence of uninterpreted features, vanishes. Second, the attempts to formally relate displacement operations to the existence of uninterpreted features have resulted in such highly intricate and arcane systems of analysis that we seem to be no closer to the goal of eliminating conceptually unnecessary entities and computational devices than we were before.
However the goal is laudable, and Chomsky is to be congratulated for leading us down the path of seeking the conceptually simplest theory that is adequate to the task of explaining natural language. Let us hope that we can discover it.
Chomsky, Noam. 1966. Cartesian linguistics. New York: Harper and Row.
Moravcsik, Julius. 1990. Thought and language. London: Routledge.
Pustejovsky, James. 1995. The generative lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.