Philosophy E156: Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy E156: Philosophy of Mind

Week 3: The Chomskyan Revolution (cont.) &

Nativism

Interlocking Parts of the New Paradigm

• (1) Formal limitations of standard grammars • (2) Transformational generative grammar – could say things not sayable

before, existence of discoveries, and rigor• (3) Methodological change – intuitions vs. corpora• (4) Conception of science – explanatory adequacy, etc.; behaviorism;

description vs. explanation• (5) Mentalism• (6) Autonomy of syntax, eschewing explanation use (the Bloomfield sort)• (7) Creative character of language• (8) Deep structure and surface structure• (9) “Uniting the best parts of universal grammar and structuralism”• (10) Making linguistics part of psychology & biology• (11) Cognitive science• (12) Nativism

Interlocking Part (3): Intuitions in Chomsky’s Theory

• The ordinary language philosopher’s reliance on intuitions – what we say – may have influenced Chomsky’s reliance on intuitions

• Examples: In Sense and Sensibilia, for instance, it matters for Austin that A. J. Ayer says that “a coin which looks circular from one point of view may look elliptical from another.” – We have intuitions about what to say here. – Austin correctly points out that nobody takes the coin to be elliptical.

• Another example (Cavell’s “Must We Mean What We Say?”): – Austin writes, “Take ‘voluntarily’...: we may... make a gift

voluntarily….”– Ryle (The Concept of Mind, p. 72): “In their most ordinary employment

‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ are used ... as adjectives applying to actions which ought not to be done. We discuss whether someone's action was voluntary or not only when the action seems to have been his fault….”

Two More Sociological Speculations about Chomsky’s Use of Intuitions

• Let me suggest that not only was Chomsky perhaps influenced by ordinary language philosophy here, but that his influence among philosophers might well have been increased by his using a technique familiar to them

• A further point: The recruitment of linguists by Chomsky for the new science of linguistics might have been made easier by the fact that now, in a certain sense, linguistics was easier: no longer did linguistics require field work to collect corpora or lab work to collect evidence but could be done a priori

Intuitions Independent of Semantics

• An example from in LSLT (p. 241): Chomsky relies on our intuitions that (1), for instance, is grammatical and (2) not:

(1) I don’t like to see people be intimidating(2) *I don’t like to see people be intimidating others

–Use of intuition differs from Bloomfield’s use of corpus• Chomsky judged relevant intuitions (see Selected Readings, p. 19) at

least to be independent of meaning (“significance”)(11) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.(12) Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

–Chomsky regards (11) as “grammatical”–He says, correctly, that we recognize that (11) is grammatical and (12) not even though they are “equally nonsensical”

Why the Subject Is Intuitions Rather than Corpus Sentences

• A corpus can never be complete – in fact, most grammatical sentences are not in it (Selected Readings, p. 20)

• Creative character of language• Focus on corpora operationalistic – restrictive of evidence• Focus on corpora part of larger project eschewing explanation• We can test a speaker’s selection of sentences she has never heard

before by looking for a “bizarreness reaction” (LSLT, p. 95)• The speaker’s ability to select is described as an “intuitive sense of

grammaticalness” – This is later called “competence” (Selected Readings, p. 7)– The set of grammatical sentences linguistic theory generates corresponds

to the “intuitive sense”– The “goal of linguistic theory” is an account of “linguistic intuition”

Interlocking Part (4): Conception of Science – Port-Royal vs. Modern

• Description vs. explanation• Chomsky believes that Port-Royal explanations have some

substance– I.e., “the tradition of ‘universal’ or ‘philosophical grammar’, which

flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries … [p]articularly in France” (Selected Readings, p. 1)

• He rejects the modern criticism that they are overly rational and a priori and disregard fact

• He levels a different criticism: that they were too ad hoc, without a systematic basis– No underlying hypothesis about acquisition, just as with the modern

critics– “The problems posed were beyond the scope of the technique and

understanding then available” (Selected Readings, p. 4)

Interlocking Part (4): Conception of science – Leonard Bloomfield

• Structural linguistics• Language (1933)• Chomsky: outgrowth of

comparative study of Indo-European, “concerned with language as a system of phonological units that undergo systematic modification”

• Extended this to “higher levels” of linguistic structure

Interlocking Part (4): Conception of science – Chomsky’s vs. Bloomfield’s

• Bloomfield’s focus was the language corpus• Focus of Bloomfield linguistics was diversity of

languages, not uniformity, not Port-Royal’s “universal grammar”

• Bloomfield was not interested in theory in the way Chomsky was – at least not explanation– Bloomfield focused on description

• Bloomfield less rigorous – certainly not mathematical• Behaviorism – linguistics the study of behavior• Chomsky rejected his goal of “discovery procedure” – an

algorithm for generating a grammar from a corpus

Interlocking Part (5): Mentalism vs. Behaviorism

• The cause of speakers’ judgments – their intuitions – is mental

• A radical shift against the behaviorist orthodoxy and the associated operationalism

• But shift came from outside academic psychology, so it avoided much of the natural institutional hostility

• Chomsky was an outsider in many ways– to linguistics– to academia (MIT no center for linguistics)

Methodological Behaviorism & Logical Behaviorism

• Methodological behaviorists like B. F. Skinner thought that one should do psychology without any reference to the internal states of organisms, focusing only on their behaviors

• Internal states are seen as purely private & not proper for scientific study, or else nonexistent, by those favoring logical behaviorism

• Logical behaviorism is the view that talk of mental states is really just talk of behavioral dispositions, or states that cause behaviors and are caused by external stimuli

The Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior

• His review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior was the first time Chomsky explicitly treated behaviorism in print

• Chomsky (in 2006 interview): “There were a few people, not many, a small group of graduate students—I could actually name them—who just didn't believe the orthodoxy. And Skinner's work was like the core text that was being read all over. It was studied in psychology, in philosophy, and in other fields. That basically solved the problem: There were no more deep problems, it was just a matter of adding more details about reinforcement, stimulus-response and so on. Personally it just looked crazy [to me] … and so did it to a few other people. His book was circulating around 1950. Before that, it had been his William James lectures, and everybody read them before the book appeared. So in the early 1950s this is what the graduate students at Harvard had in philosophy as orthodoxy. I believe it was extremely damaging to the field; it was undermining the possibilities of a scientific work in any of these areas. So I actually wrote the review before the book was published.”

Skinner’s Experimental Work• Operants• Rat will press the bar• Pellet will be released• Pellet release increases strength of operant (rate during extinction)• Stimulus discrimination• Possible to shape response in surprising ways

Chomsky’s Thesis (I)

• Verbal Behavior contains no experimental work• “Stimulus,” “response,” “reinforcement” well-

defined experimentally in other work• If they are to be defined broadly to cover every

event to which organism is capable of reacting, then there is no demonstration of lawfulness in behavior

• If they are used more narrowly in light with experiments, then most of what the animal does “is not behavior”

Chomsky’s Thesis (II)• Argument from analogy: Skinner “utilizes the experimental results

as evidence for the scientific character of his system of behavior, and analogic guesses (formulated in terms of a metaphoric extension of the … vocabulary of the laboratory) as evidence for its scope”

• Illusion of rigor & breadth: This “creates the illusion of a rigorous scientific theory with a very broad scope, although in fact the terms used in the description of real-life and of laboratory behavior may be mere homonyms, with at most a vague similarity of meaning”

• Skinner’s dilemma: “[W]ith a literal reading (where the terms of the descriptive system have something like the technical meanings given in Skinner's definitions) the book covers almost no aspect of linguistic behavior, and that with a metaphoric reading, it is no more scientific than the traditional approaches to this subject matter, and rarely as clear and careful”

The Mozart/Dutch Example• “the response to a piece of music with the utterance Mozart or to a painting with

the response Dutch” (§III)• “These responses are asserted to be ‘under the control of extremely subtle

properties’ of the physical object or event (108).”• “Suppose instead of saying Dutch we had said …

– Clashes with the wallpaper, – I thought you liked abstract work, – Never saw it before,– Tilted, – Hanging too low, – Beautiful, – Hideous, – Remember our camping trip last summer?,

• … or whatever else might come into our minds when looking at a picture (in Skinnerian translation, whatever other responses exist in sufficient strength).”

• “Skinner could only say that each of these responses is under the control of some other stimulus property of the physical object.

The Mozart/Dutch Example (cont.)• “responses are asserted to be ‘under the control of extremely subtle

properties’ of the physical object or event”• “if we say chair, it is under the control of the collection of properties (for

Skinner, the object) chairness ([Verbal Behavior, p.] 110), and similarly for any other response. This device is as simple as it is empty.”

• “Since properties are free for the asking …, we can account for a wide class of responses in terms of Skinnerian functional analysis by identifying the controlling stimuli. But the word stimulus has lost all objectivity in this usage.”

• “Stimuli are no longer part of the outside physical world; they are driven back into the organism. We identify the stimulus when we hear the response. It is clear from such examples, which abound, that the talk of stimulus control simply disguises a complete retreat to mentalistic psychology.”

• “We cannot predict verbal behavior in terms of the stimuli in the speaker's environment, since we do not know what the current stimuli are until he responds.”

Skinner’s Treatment of Proper Names

• “[A] proper noun is held to be a response ‘under the control of a specific person or thing’ (as controlling stimulus, 113).”

• Counterexamples:– “I have often used the words Eisenhower and Moscow, which I presume

are proper nouns if anything is, but have never been stimulated by the corresponding objects. How can this fact be made compatible with this definition?”

– “Suppose that I use the name of a friend who is not present. Is this an instance of a proper noun under the control of the friend as stimulus?”

– “Elsewhere it is asserted that a stimulus controls a response in the sense that presence of the stimulus increases the probability of the response. But it is obviously untrue that the probability that a speaker will produce a full name is increased when its bearer faces the speaker.”

– “Furthermore, how can one's own name be a proper noun in this sense?”

Skinner on Reference• “The assertion (115) that so far as the speaker is concerned, the relation of

reference is ‘simply the probability that the speaker will emit a response of a given form in the presence of a stimulus having specified properties’ is surely incorrect if we take the words presence, stimulus, and probability in their literal sense.”

• “That they are not intended to be taken literally is indicated by many examples, as when a response is said to be ‘controlled’ by a situation … ‘stimulus.’… No characterization of the notion stimulus control that is remotely related to the bar-pressing experiment … can be made to cover a set of examples like these, in which … the controlling stimulus need not even impinge on the responding organism.” Some of Skinner’s examples: – when an envoy observes events in a foreign country and reports upon his

return, his report is under "remote stimulus control" (416); – the statement This is war may be a response to a "confusing international

situation" (441); – the suffix -ed is controlled by that "subtle property of stimuli which we

speak of as action-in-the-past" (121)

Interlocking Part (6): Autonomy of syntax

• Competence/performance distinction– No science possible – or at least in the offing – for

“performance”– Science is in the offing only for the rule-governed

behavior that one has and exercise knowledge of in using language

– Called “competence”• Syntax independent of processing • Syntax independence of semantics

Interlocking Part (7): Creative character of language

• In Cartesian Linguistics, p. 60, Chomsky characterizes the notion of the “‘creative aspect’ of ordinary language use” in terms of two conditions:– its being “unbounded in scope”– its being “stimulus-free”

• At CL, p. 65, Chomsky introduces these conditions:– free from stimulus control– does not serve a merely communicative function– instrument for free expression of thought– for appropriate response to new situations

Two More Quotations on the Creative Aspect of Language

• “The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’” – Selected Readings, p. 8.

• “The ‘normal creative fashion’ of language use involves unboundedness, novelty, freedom from stimulus control, coherence and appropriateness to situations.” – Noam Chomsky, “A note on the creative aspect of language

use,” Philosophical Review 91 (1982):423-434.

Descartes’s Two Means to Distinguish Humans from Machines & Beasts

• At the end of Part Five of Discourse on Method, Descartes presents two means to distinguish a real human from any human-like machine:– (1) Possession of language. No machine “should produce different

arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do”

– Chomsky links this first means with language’s “creative aspect” – (2) Diversity of action. While machines do some things well, some better

than humans, they fail in other things because they act through the “disposition of their organs,” while humans do everything moderately well, acting through the “universal instrument of reason”

Interlocking Part (8): Deep structure and surface structure

• The term “deep structure” began to be used around 1963/4, apparently as the result of Jerrold Katz and Paul Postal’s An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions

• Chomsky took it up in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965)

• In Aspects, kernel sentences are replaced by deep structures – abstract grammatical objects that “underlie” the phonetic versions of sentences that present themselves to speakers and hearers

Deep Structure/Surface Structure Distinction

• The deep structures are produced by the phrase structure grammar (the “base”) and are mapped by transformations onto surface structures

• The surface structures serve as the basis for phonological interpretation

• The deep structures are said to be what received semantic interpretation by the semantic component

Example: Deep Structures of Passives

• Despite the differences in surface structure, the passive form and the active form are said to have similar underlying deep structures

(1a) The delegate was greeted by the mayor.(1b) The mayor greeted the delegate.

• In the deep structures of both (1a) and (1b), there are said to be two NPs, in the same left-to-right order.

• Surface structure is obtained by passivization.

Deep Structures Underlying Wh-Movement

• Despite differences in surface structure, the declarative sentence (1b) and the question (2b) are said to have similar underlying deep structures, (2a) & (2b) the same underlying deep structures.

(1b) The mayor greeted the delegate.(2a) The mayor greeted which delegate?(2b) Which delegate did the mayor greet?

• In the deep structures of both (1b) and (2b), there are said to be two NPs, in the same left-to-right order.

• Surface structure is obtained by wh-movement.

Deep Structure General Enough for Chomsky to Find It in Past Writers

• Example in Cartesian Linguistics, pp. 79f., drawn from Port-Royal Grammar

Same Deep Structure, Different Surface Structure

What to Make of “Deep Structure”

• We must ask whether there is anything to the notion of “deep structure” that survives the abandonment of the term in later theory

• In later theory, all semantic interpretation occurs from what had been called “surface structure” – or at least, an enriched structure imposed on the phonetic surface structure called “logical form” (LF)

Interlocking Part (9): Uniting the best parts of universal grammar and structuralism

• Accomplishments of structural linguistics– Enriched the factual material about languages– New standards of clarity and objectivity– The idea that language can be studied as a formal

system• Substantive contributions of structural linguistics

to theory of language are few• When problems are clearly formulated, we are

led to conception of language of universal grammar (Selected Readings, p. 5)

Interlocking Part (10): Making linguistics part of psychology & biology

• Draws from the tradition of philosophical grammar the idea that – there are language universals (“grammaire

generale”), and– conditions on the form of language that are not

learned

• Draws in CL not from Port-Royal but from Platonists (Descartes, Herbert of Cherburys, Ralph Cudworth) – though not Plato himself

Interlocking Part (10): Making linguistics part of psychology & biology (cont.)

• Assimilates the development of language not to learning but to growth

• Analogy to the growth of a bird’s wings, enabling the bird to fly

• Stresses the neurological and genetic basis of human language, although we know virtually nothing about either

• The term “biolinguistics”

Interlocking Part (11): Cognitive Science

• Puts it in the more general context of “cognitive psychology,” or what is now called “cognitive science”– “… What is more, universal grammar developed as part of

a general philosophical tradition that provided deep and important insights, also largely forgotten, into the use and acquisition of language, and, furthermore, into problems of perception and acquisition of knowledge in general. These insights can be exploited and developed. The idea that the study of language should proceed within the framework of what we might nowadays call ‘cognitive psychology’ is sound….” (Selected Readings, p. 3.)

Cognitive Science (cont.)

• “There is much truth in the traditional view that language provides the most effective means for studying the nature and mechanisms of the human mind, and that only within this context can we perceive the larger issues that determine the directions in which the study of language should develop.” (Selected Readings, pp. 3-4.)

What Is the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument?

• Remember that when Chomsky presents the “argument from poverty of the stimulus” in Rules and Representations, he does not explicitly give a definition although he does link it to “the vast qualitative difference between the impoverished and unstructured environment … and the highly specific and intrinsic characters that uniformly develop”

• Perhaps this vagueness has contributed to a common vagueness in presenting the argument since then

Properties of Child’s Accomplishment Cited in POS-Type Arguments

(from Pullum & Scholz, 2002)


(from Pullum & Scholz, 2002, with an addition)

h. ERROR-FREEDOM: Children learn language free of natural errors.


(from Putnam’s “Innateness Hypothesis” article)

• (a) The ease of the child’s original language learning – “without explicit instruction” and with “Mere exposure to the language, and for a remarkably short period”

• (b) The fact that reinforcement “in any interesting sense” seems to be unnecessary – children who learned to speak without talking

• (c) Not to depend on intelligence level

Properties of the Child’s Environment Cited in POS-Type Arguments

POS Arguments Differ from One Writer to the Next

• Pullum & Scholz point out that the POS differs from writer to writer, each picking and choosing from these characteristics.

Another Example

Putnam’s Reservations

• Nothing surprising in the universals proposed• Universals accounted for on the simpler

hypothesis of common origin of languages• Ease of language learning not clear – college

student exposed to less• No learning requires reinforcement – straw

man argument• Independence of intelligence an artifact

Chomsky’s First Sort of Response

• Putnam “enormously underestimates, and in part misdescribes, the richness of structure, the particular and detailed properties of grammatical form and organization that must be accounted for by a ‘language acquisition model,’ that are acquired by the normal speaker-hearer and that appear to be uniform among speakers and also across languages.”

Chomsky’s Second Sort of Response

• “This proposal [the hypothesis of common origin of languages] misrepresents the problem at issue. As noted earlier, the empirical problem we face is to devise a hypothesis about initial structure rich enough to account for the fact that a specific grammar is acquired, under given conditions of access to data. To this problem, the matter of common origin of languages is quite irrelevant.”

Putnam’s Alternative Approach

• Putnam suggests as an alternative approach to innateness the idea of a “general multipurpose learning strategy”

• “The theorems of mathematics, the solutions to puzzles, etc., cannot on any theory be individually ‘innate’; what must be ‘innate’ are heuristics, i.e. learning strategies.”

Chomsky’s Response• On Putnam’s view it is “general multipurpose learning

strategies” “that must be innate, not general conditions on the form of the knowledge that is acquired.

• “Evidently, it is an empirical issue. It would be sheer dogmatism to assert of either of these proposals (or of some particular combination of them) that it must e correct.”

• “Putnam is convinced, on what grounds he does not say, that the innate basis for the acquisition of language must be identical with that for acquiring any of form of knowledge, that there is nothing ‘special’ about language.”

The “Little Scientist” Objection

• A different objection from any Chomsky sets out here (although it is suggested by something he writes later) is that Putnam’s “general learning strategy” approach would make the child language learner into a “little scientist.”

• But there is a vast difference between language learning and doing science.

• Doing science at best results in consensus. • But language learning results in uniformity –

every language learner arrives at the same thing.

Philosophy E156: Philosophy of Mind

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