Noam Chomsky

American linguist
Alternative Title: Avram Noam Chomsky


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philosophy of language: Chomsky

” The views common to Quine and the hermeneutic tradition were opposed from the 1950s by developments in theoretical linguistics, particularly the “cognitive revolution” inaugurated by the American linguist Noam Chomsky (born 1928) in his work Syntactic Structures (1957). Chomsky argued that the characteristic fact…

Life and basic ideas

Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Chomsky attended an experimental elementary school in which he was encouraged to develop his own interests and talents through self-directed learning. When he was 10 years old, he wrote an editorial for his school newspaper lamenting the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe. His research then and during the next few years was thorough enough to serve decades later as the basis of “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (1969), Chomsky’s critical review of a study of the period by the historian Gabriel Jackson.

When he was 13 years old, Chomsky began taking trips by himself to New York City, where he found books for his voracious reading habit and made contact with a thriving working-class Jewish intellectual community. Discussion enriched and confirmed the beliefs that would underlie his political views throughout his life: that all people are capable of comprehending political and economic issues and making their own decisions on that basis; that all people need and derive satisfaction from acting freely and creatively and from associating with others; and that authority—whether political, economic, or religious—that cannot meet a strong test of rational justification is illegitimate. According to Chomsky’s anarchosyndicalism, or libertarian socialism, the best form of political organization is one in which all people have a maximal opportunity to engage in cooperative activity with others and to take part in all decisions of the community that affect them.

In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania but found little to interest him. After two years he considered leaving the university to pursue his political interests, perhaps by living on a kibbutz. He changed his mind, however, after meeting the linguist Zellig S. Harris, one of the American founders of structural linguistics, whose political convictions were similar to Chomsky’s. Chomsky took graduate courses with Harris and, at Harris’s recommendation, studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Nathan Salmon and mathematics with Nathan Fine, who was then teaching at Harvard University. In his 1951 master’s thesis, The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, and especially in The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT), written while he was a junior fellow at Harvard (1951–55) and published in part in 1975, Chomsky adopted aspects of Harris’s approach to the study of language and of Goodman’s views on formal systems and the philosophy of science and transformed them into something novel.

Whereas Goodman assumed that the mind at birth is largely a tabula rasa (blank slate) and that language learning in children is essentially a conditioned response to linguistic stimuli, Chomsky held that the basic principles of all languages, as well as the basic range of concepts they are used to express, are innately represented in the human mind and that language learning consists of the unconscious construction of a grammar from these principles in accordance with cues drawn from the child’s linguistic environment. Whereas Harris thought of the study of language as the taxonomic classification of “data,” Chomsky held that it is the discovery, through the application of formal systems, of the innate principles that make possible the swift acquisition of language by children and the ordinary use of language by children and adults alike. And whereas Goodman believed that linguistic behaviour is regular and caused (in the sense of being a specific response to specific stimuli), Chomsky argued that it is incited by social context and discourse context but essentially uncaused—enabled by a distinct set of innate principles but innovative, or “creative.” It is for this reason that Chomsky believed that it is unlikely that there will ever be a full-fledged science of linguistic behaviour. As in the view of the 17th-century French philosopher Réne Descartes, according to Chomsky, the use of language is due to a “creative principle,” not a causal one.

Harris ignored Chomsky’s work, and Goodman—when he realized that Chomsky would not accept his behaviourism—denounced it. Their reactions, with some variations, were shared by a large majority of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists. Although some linguists and psychologists eventually came to accept Chomsky’s basic assumptions regarding language and the mind, most philosophers continued to resist them.

Chomsky received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 after submitting one chapter of LSLT as a doctoral dissertation (Transformational Analysis). In 1956 he was appointed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to a teaching position that required him to spend half his time on a machine translation project, though he was openly skeptical of its prospects for success (he told the director of the translation laboratory that the project was of “no intellectual interest and was also pointless”). Impressed with his book Syntactic Structures (1957), a revised version of a series of lectures he gave to MIT undergraduates, the university asked Chomsky and his colleague Morris Halle to establish a new graduate program in linguistics, which soon attracted several outstanding scholars, including Robert Lees, Jerry Fodor, Jerold Katz, and Paul Postal.

Chomsky’s 1959 review of Verbal Behavior, by B.F. Skinner, the dean of American behaviourism, came to be regarded as the definitive refutation of behaviourist accounts of language learning. Starting in the mid-1960s, with the publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Chomsky’s approach to the study of language and mind gained wider acceptance within linguistics, though there were many theoretical variations within the paradigm. Chomsky was appointed full professor at MIT in 1961, Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1966, and Institute Professor in 1976. He retired as professor emeritus in 2002.


Plato’s problem”

A fundamental insight of philosophical rationalism is that human creativity crucially depends on an innate system of concept generation and combination. According to Chomsky, children display “ordinary” creativity—appropriate and innovative use of complexes of concepts—from virtually their first words. With language, they bring to bear thousands of rich and articulate concepts when they play, invent, and speak to and understand each other. They seem to know much more than they have been taught—or even could be taught. Such knowledge, therefore, must be innate in some sense. To say it is innate, however, is not to say that the child is conscious of it or even that it exists, fully formed, at birth. It is only to say that it is produced by the child’s system of concept generation and combination, in accordance with the system’s courses of biological and physical development, upon their exposure to certain kinds of environmental input.

It has frequently been observed that children acquire both concepts and language with amazing facility and speed, despite the paucity or even absence of meaningful evidence and instruction in their early years. The inference to the conclusion that much of what they acquire must be innate is known as the argument from the “poverty of the stimulus.” Specifying precisely what children acquire and how they acquire it are aspects of what Chomsky called in LSLT the “fundamental problem” of linguistics. In later work he referred to this as “Plato’s problem,” a reference to Plato’s attempt (in his dialogue the Meno) to explain how it is possible for an uneducated child to solve geometrical problems with appropriate prompting but without any specific training or background in mathematics. Unlike Plato, however, Chomsky held that solving Plato’s problem is a task for natural science, specifically cognitive science and linguistics.

Principles and parameters

Chomsky’s early attempts to solve the linguistic version of Plato’s problem were presented in the “standard theory” of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and the subsequent “extended standard theory,” which was developed and revised through the late 1970s. These theories proposed that the mind of the human infant is endowed with a “format” of a possible grammar (a theory of linguistic data), a method of constructing grammars based on the linguistic data to which the child is exposed, and a device that evaluates the relative simplicity of constructed grammars. The child’s mind constructs a number of possible grammars that are consistent with the linguistic data and then selects the grammar with the fewest rules or primitives. Although ingenious, this approach was cumbersome in comparison with later theories, in part because it was not clear exactly what procedures would have to be involved in the construction and evaluation of grammars.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Chomsky and others developed a better solution using a theoretical framework known as “principles and parameters” (P&P), which Chomksy introduced in Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) and elaborated in Knowledge of Language (1986). Principles are linguistic universals, or structural features that are common to all natural languages; hence, they are part of the child’s native endowment. Parameters, also native (though not necessarily specific to language, perhaps figuring elsewhere too), are options that allow for variation in linguistic structure. The P&P approach assumed that these options are readily set upon the child’s exposure to a minimal amount of linguistic data, a hypothesis that has been supported by empirical evidence. One proposed principle, for example, is that phrase structure must consist of a head, such as a noun or a verb, and a complement, which can be a phrase of any form. The order of head and complement, however, is not fixed: languages may have a head-initial structure, as in the English verb phrase (VP) “wash the clothes,” or a “head-final” structure, as in the corresponding Japanese VP “the clothes wash.” Thus, one parameter that is set through the child’s exposure to linguistic data is “head-initial/head-final.” The setting of what was thought, during the early development of P&P, to be a small number of parametric options within the constraints provided by a sufficiently rich set of linguistic principles would, according to this approach, yield a grammar of the specific language to which the child is exposed. Later the introduction of “microparameters” and certain nonlinguistic constraints on development complicated this simple story, but the basic P&P approach remained in place, offering what appears to be the best solution to Plato’s problem yet proposed.

The phonological, or sound-yielding, features of languages are also parameterized, according to the P&P approach. They are usually set early in development—apparently within a few days—and they must be set before the child becomes too old if he is to be able to pronounce the language without an accent. This time limit on phonological parameter setting would explain why second-language learners rarely, if ever, sound like native speakers. In contrast, young children exposed to any number of additional languages before the time limit is reached have no trouble producing the relevant sounds.

In contrast to the syntactic and phonological features of language, the basic features out of which lexically expressed concepts (and larger units of linguistic meaning) are constructed do not appear to be parameterized: different natural languages seem to rely on the same set. Even if semantic features were parameterized, however, a set of features detailed enough to provide (in principle) for hundreds of thousands of root, or basic, concepts would have to be a part of the child’s innate, specifically linguistic endowment—what Chomsky calls Universal Grammar, or UG—or of his nonlinguistic endowment—the innate controls on growth, development, and the final states of other systems in the mind or brain. This is indicated, as noted above, by the extraordinary rate at which children acquire lexical concepts (about one per waking hour between the ages of two and eight) and the rich knowledge that each concept and its verbal, nominal, adverbial, and other variants provide. No training or conscious intervention plays a role; lexical acquisition seems to be as automatic as parameter setting.

Of course, people differ in the words contained in their vocabularies and in the particular sounds they happen to associate with different concepts. Early in the 20th century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted that there is nothing natural or necessary about the specific sounds with which a concept may be associated in a given language. According to Chomsky, this “Saussurean arbitrariness” is of no interest to the natural scientist of language, because sound-concept associations in this sense are not a part of UG or of other nonlinguistic systems that contribute to concept (and sound) development.

A developed theory of UG and of relevant nonlinguistic systems would in principle account for all possible linguistic sounds and all possible lexical concepts and linguistic meanings, for it would contain all possible phonological and semantic features and all the rules and constraints for combining phonological and semantic features into words and for combining words into a potentially infinite number of phrases and sentences. Of course, such a complete theory may never be fully achieved, but in this respect linguistics is no worse off than physics, chemistry, or any other science. They too are incomplete.

It is important to notice that the semantic features that constitute lexical concepts, and the rules and constraints governing their combination, seem to be virtually designed for use by human beings—i.e., designed to serve human interests and to solve human problems. For example, concepts such as “give” and “village” have features that reflect human actions and interests: transfer of ownership (and much more) is part of the meaning of give, and polity (both abstract and concrete) is part of the meaning of village. Linguists and philosophers sympathetic to empiricism will object that these features are created when a community “invents” a language to do the jobs it needs to do—no wonder, then, that linguistic meanings reflect human interests and problems. The rationalist, in contrast, argues that humans could not even conceive of these interests and problems unless the necessary conceptual machinery were available beforehand. In Chomsky’s view, the speed and facility with which children learn “give” and “village” and many thousands of other concepts show that the empiricist approach is incorrect—though it may be correct in the case of scientific concepts, such as “muon,” which apparently are not innate and do not reflect human concerns.

The overall architecture of the language faculty also helps to explain how conceptual and linguistic creativity is possible. In the P&P framework in its later “minimalist” forms (see below Rule systems in Chomskyan theories of language), the language faculty has “interfaces” that allow it to communicate with other parts of the mind. The information it provides through “sensorimotor” interfaces enables humans to produce and perceive speech and sign language, and the information it provides through “conceptual-intentional” interfaces enables humans to perform numerous cognitive tasks, ranging from categorization (“that’s a lynx”) to understanding and producing stories and poetry.

Rule systems in Chomskyan theories of language

Chomsky’s theories of grammar and language are often referred to as “generative,” “transformational,” or “transformational-generative.” In a mathematical sense, “generative” simply means “formally explicit.” In the case of language, however, the meaning of the term typically also includes the notion of “productivity”—i.e., the capacity to produce an infinite number of grammatical phrases and sentences using only finite means (e.g., a finite number of principles and parameters and a finite vocabulary). In order for a theory of language to be productive in this sense, at least some of its principles or rules must be recursive. A rule or series of rules is recursive if it is such that it can be applied to its own output an indefinite number of times, yielding a total output that is potentially infinite. A simple example of a recursive rule is the successor function in mathematics, which takes a number as input and yields that number plus 1 as output. If one were to start at 0 and apply the successor function indefinitely, the result would be the infinite set of natural numbers. In grammars of natural languages, recursion appears in various forms, including in rules that allow for concatenation, relativization, and complementization, among other operations.

Chomsky’s theories are “transformational” in the sense that they account for the syntactic and semantic properties of sentences by means of modifications of the structure of a phrase in the course of its generation. The standard theory of Syntactic Structures and especially of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax employed a phrase-structure grammar—a grammar in which the syntactic elements of a language are defined by means of rewrite rules that specify their smaller constituents (e.g., “S → NP + VP,” or “a sentence may be rewritten as a noun phrase and a verb phrase”)—a large number of “obligatory” and “optional” transformations, and two levels of structure: a “deep structure,” where semantic interpretation takes place, and a “surface structure,” where phonetic interpretation takes place. These early grammars were difficult to contrive, and their complexity and language-specificity made it very difficult to see how they could constitute a solution to Plato’s problem.

In Chomsky’s later theories, deep structure ceased to be the locus of semantic interpretation. Phrase-structure grammars too were virtually eliminated by the end of the 1970s; the task they performed was taken over by the operation of “projecting” individual lexical items and their properties into more complex structures by means of “X-bar theory.” Transformations during this transitional period were reduced to a single operation, “Move α” (“Move alpha”), which amounted to “move any element in a derivation anywhere”—albeit within a system of robust constraints. Following the introduction of the “minimalist program” (MP) in the early 1990s, deep structure (and surface structure) disappeared altogether. Move α, and thus modification of structure from one derivational step to another, was replaced by “Move” and later by “internal Merge,” a variant of “external Merge,” itself a crucial basic operation that takes two elements (such as words) and makes of them a set. In the early 21st century, internal and external Merge, along with parameters and microparameters, remained at the core of Chomsky’s efforts to construct grammars.

Throughout the development of these approaches to the science of language, there were continual improvements in simplicity and formal elegance in the theories on offer; the early phrase-structure components, transformational components, and deep and surface structures were all eliminated, replaced by much simpler systems. Indeed, an MP grammar for a specific language could in principle consist entirely of Merge (internal and external) together with some parametric settings. MP aims to achieve both of the major original goals that Chomsky set for a theory of language in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax: that it be descriptively adequate, in the sense that the grammars it provides generate all and only the grammatical expressions of the language in question, and that it be explanatorily adequate, in the sense that it provides a descriptively adequate grammar for any natural language as represented in the mind of a given individual. MP grammars thus provide a solution to Plato’s problem, explaining how any individual readily acquires what Chomsky calls an “I-language”—“I” for internal, individual, and intensional (that is, described by a grammar). But they also speak to other desiderata of a natural science: they are much simpler, and they are much more easily accommodated to another science, namely biology.

Philosophy of mind and human nature

Human conceptual and linguistic creativity involves several mental faculties and entails the existence of some kind of mental organization. It depends on perceptual-articulatory systems and conceptual-intentional systems, of course, but on many others too, such as vision. According to Chomsky, the mind comprises an extensive cluster of innate “modules,” one of which is language. Each module operates automatically, independently of individual control, on the basis of a distinct, domain-specific set of rules that take determinate inputs from some modules and yield determinate outputs for others. In earlier work these operations were called “derivations”; more recently they have been called “computations.” The various modules interact in complex ways to yield perception, thought, and a large number of other cognitive products.

The language module seems to play a role in coordinating the products of other modules. The generative—specifically, recursive—properties of language enable humans to combine arbritary concepts together in indefinitely many ways, thereby making the range of human thought virtually unlimited. When concepts are paired with sounds in lexical items (words), humans can say virtually anything and cooperate and make plans with each other. The fact that the language faculty yields this kind of flexibility suggests that the emergence of language in human evolutionary history coincided with the appearance of other cognitive capacities based on recursion, including quantification.

In a 2002 article, “The Language Faculty,” Chomsky and his coauthors Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch divided the language faculty in a way that reflected what had been Chomsky’s earlier distinction between competence and performance. The faculty of language in the “narrow” sense (FLN) amounts to the recursive computational system alone, whereas the faculty in the broad sense (FLB) includes perceptual-articulatory systems (for sound and sign) and conceptual-intentional systems (for meaning). These are the systems with which the computational system interacts at its interfaces. Regarding evolution, the authors point out that, although there are homologues and analogs in other species for the perceptual-articulatory and conceptual-intentional systems, there are none for the computational system, or FLN. Conceivably, some cognitive systems of animals, such as the navigational systems of birds, might involve recursion, but there is no computational system comparable to FLN, in particular none that links sound and meaning and yields unbounded sentential “output.” FLN is arguably what makes human beings cognitively distinct from other creatures.

As suggested earlier, UG, or the language faculty narrowly understood (FLN), may consist entirely of Merge and perhaps some parameters specific to language. This raises the question of what the biological basis of FLN must be. What distinctive fact of human biology, or the human genome, makes FLN unique to humans? In a 2005 article, “Three Factors in Language Design,” Chomsky pointed out that there is more to organic development and growth than biological (genomic) specification and environmental input. A third factor is general conditions on growth resulting from restrictions on possible physical structures and restrictions on data analysis, including those that might figure in computational systems (such as language). For example, a bee’s genome does not have to direct it to build hives in a hexagonal lattice. The lattice is a requirement imposed by physics, since this structure is the most stable and efficient of the relevant sort. Analogous points can be made about the growth, structure, and operation of the human brain. If the parameters of UG are not specified by the language-specific parts of the human genome but are instead the result of third factors, the only language-specific information that the genome would need to carry is an instruction set for producing a single principle, Merge (which takes external and internal forms). And if this is the case, then the appearance of language could have been brought about by a single genetic mutation in a single individual, so long as that mutation were transmissible to progeny. Obviously, the relevant genes would provide great advantages to any human who possessed them. A saltational account such as this has some evidence behind it: 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, humans began to observe the heavens, to draw and paint, to wonder, and to develop explanations of natural phenomena—and the migration from Africa began. Plausibly, the introduction of the computational system of language led to this remarkable cognitive awakening.


Chomsky’s political views seem to be supported to some extent by his approach to the study of language and mind, which implies that the capacity for creativity is an important element of human nature. Chomsky often notes, however, that there is only an “abstract” connection between his theories of language and his politics. A close connection would have to be based on a fully developed science of human nature, through which fundamental human needs could be identified or deduced. But there is nothing like such a science. Even if there were, the connection would additionally depend on the assumption that the best form of political organization is one that maximizes the satisfaction of human needs. And then there would remain the question of what practical measures should be implemented to satisfy those needs. Clearly, questions such as this cannot be settled by scientific means.

Although Chomsky was always interested in politics, he did not become publicly involved in it until 1964, when he felt compelled to lend his voice to protests against the U.S. role in the Vietnam War (or, as he prefers to say, the U.S. invasion of Vietnam), at no small risk to his career and his personal safety. He has argued that the Vietnam War was only one in a series of cases in which the United States used its military power to gain or consolidate economic control over increasingly larger areas of the developing world. In the same vein, he regards the domestic political scene of the United States and other major capitalist countries as theatres in which major corporations and their elite managers strive to protect and enhance their economic privileges and political power.

In democracies like the United States, in which the compliance of ordinary citizens cannot be guaranteed by force, this effort requires a form of “propaganda”: the powerful must make ordinary citizens believe that vesting economic control of society in the hands of a tiny minority of the population is to their benefit. Part of this project involves enlisting the help of “intellectuals”—the class of individuals (primarily journalists and academics) who collect, disseminate, and interpret political and economic information for the public. Regrettably, Chomsky argues, this task has proved remarkably easy.

As a responsible (rather than mercenary) member of the intellectual class, Chomsky believes that it is his obligation to provide ordinary citizens with the information they needed to draw their own conclusions and to make their own decisions about vital political and economic issues. As he wrote in Powers and Prospects (1996),


In one of his first political essays, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” (1967), Chomsky presented case after case in which intellectuals in positions of power, including prominent journalists, failed to tell the truth or deliberately lied to the public in order to conceal the aims and consequences of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. In their two-volume work The Political Economy of Human Rights (1979) and later in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Chomsky and the economist Edward Herman analyzed the reporting of journalists in the mainstream (i.e., corporate-owned) media on the basis of statistically careful studies of historical and contemporary examples. Their work provided striking evidence of selection, skewing of data, filtering of information, and outright invention in support of assumptions that helped to justify the controlling influence of corporations in U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics.

The studies in these and other works made use of paired examples to show how very similar events can be reported in very different ways, depending upon whether and how state and corporate interests may be affected. In The Political Economy of Human Rights, for example, Chomsky and Herman compared reporting on Indonesia’s military invasion and occupation of East Timor with reporting on the behaviour of the communist Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. The events in the two cases took place in approximately the same part of the world and at approximately the same time (the mid- to late 1970s). As a proportion of population, the number of East Timorese tortured and murdered by the Indonesian military was approximately the same as the number of Cambodians tortured and murdered by the Khmer Rouge. And yet the mainsteam media in the United States devoted much more attention to the second case (more than 1,000 column inches in the New York Times) than to the first (about 70 column inches). Moreover, reporting on the actions of the Khmer Rouge contained many clear cases of exaggeration and fabrication, whereas reporting on the actions of Indonesia portrayed them as essentially benign. In the case of the Khmer Rouge, however, exaggerated reports of atrocities aided efforts by the United States to maintain the Cold War and to protect and expand its access to the region’s natural resources (including East Timorese oil deposits) through client states. Indonesia, on the other hand, was just such a state, heavily supported by U.S. military and economic aid. Although ordinary Americans were not in a position to do anything about the Khmer Rouge, they were capable of doing something about their country’s support for Indonesia, in particular by voting their government out of office. But the media’s benign treatment of the invasion made it extremely unlikely that they would be motivated to do so. According to Chomsky, this and many other examples demonstrate that prominent journalists and other intellectuals in the United States function essentially as “commissars” on behalf of elite interests. As he wrote in Necessary Illusions (1988):


Some of Chomsky’s critics have claimed that his political and media studies portray journalists as actively engaged in a kind of conspiracy—an extremely unlikely conspiracy, of course, given the degree of coordination and control it would require. Chomsky’s response is simply that the assumption of conspiracy is unnecessary. The behaviour of journalists in the mainstream media is exactly what one would expect, on average, given the power structure of the institutions in which they are employed, and it is predictable in the same sense and for the same reasons that the behaviour of the president of General Motors is predictable. In order to succeed—in order to be hired and promoted—media personnel must avoid questioning the interests of the corporations they work for or the interests of the elite minority who run those corporations. Because journalists naturally do not wish to think of themselves as mercenaries (no one does), they engage in what amounts to a form of self-deception. They typically think of themselves as stalwart defenders of the truth (as suggested by the slogan of the New York Times, “All the news that’s fit to print”), but when state or corporate interests are at stake they act otherwise, in crucially important ways. In short, very few of them are willing or even able to live up to their responsibility as intellectuals to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them.

James A. McGilvray

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