[lit-ideas] Re: [Lit-Ideas} Re: Russian
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2014 15:35:20 +0900
Robert, I am deeply flattered. Thank you.
Paul, I look forward to hearing what you have to say; but please do not
assume that I am defending a position pro or con universal grammar. Truth
be told, I am more interested in intellectual history, the contexts in
which ideas emerged, what the people who advanced them were trying to
accomplish, and what became of them than I am in the Punch-and-Judy games
of those with immovable opinions that have largely replaced conversation
here.
To me, Chomsky is one of several thinkers who were advancing similar ideas
during a particular historical period. Besides Chomsky, I think of Claude
Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralism, he tells us in *Tristes Tropiques, *was
rooted in an idea he described as a "Mendeleevian Table of the Mind," the
notion that there is a small stock of primitive notions, defined by their
contrasts with one another, that define the space in which all human
thought takes place. Both were inspired by Jakobson's phonetics. Both were
writing at a time when Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA, published in
1953, was beginning to transform biology, and digital computers and their
algorithms were beginning to become a new model for thinking about
thinking. All of these developments embody attempts, some more and others
less successful, to apply the notion of a formal system, which, one
source<http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/logic/jrh0103.htm>discovered with
a Google search, describes as follows,
*The idea of reducing reasoning to computation in some kind of formal
calculus is an old dream, surveyed by [marciszewski-murawski]. Some trace
the idea back to Raymond Lull, though this is perhaps dubious. Certainly
[hobbes-leviathan] made explicit the analogy in the slogan 'Reason [...] is
nothing but Reckoning'. This parallel was developed by Leibniz, who
envisaged a 'characteristica universalis' (universal language) and a
'calculus ratiocinator' (calculus of reasoning). His idea was that disputes
of all kinds, not merely mathematical ones, could be settled if the parties
translated their dispute into the characteristica and then simply
calculated. Leibniz even made some steps towards realizing this lofty goal,
but his work was largely forgotten.*
Serendipitously, as a freshman at Michigan State in 1962, I took honours
calculus and learned about the derivation of the real numbers from the five
Peano postulates. I was at the same time taking a year-long logic course
where the text was Quine's *Methods in Logic* and a one-quarter course in
"Philosophy and Literature," for which I read Leibniz' *New Essays on Human
Understanding. *By the time I read Chomsky and Lévi-Strauss in graduate
school in Anthropology at Cornell, I was primed to take them seriously.
Now, when I think of what I learned from Noam Chomsky, I always think first
of a description of scientific method that my not-always-reliable memory
says was found in *Syntactic Structures. *In that book, Chomsky describes
what I would call (and may have stolen the phrase from Chomsky) an
engineering approach to knowledge. He proposes that we consider scientific
method as a black box defined by its inputs and outputs. He then remarks
that early in our education we encounter the notion that science is a
*discovery
procedure**. *In this case the input is Facts, and the output is Truth. As
we grow older and wiser we discard this view and are likely to replace it
with the notion that science is a *decision procedure. *In this case the
input is Facts and a Theory and the output is a decision, Right or Wrong.
When, however, we study the history of science and observe scientists at
work, we learn that scientific method is better described as an *evaluation
procedure.* In this version of the black box, the inputs are data and at
least competing theories and the output is a modest, always tentative,
judgment that given this particular data and the theories in question, one
theory appears to be superior to the other. More data may reverse that
judgment, and a new theory may prove, in the same tentative manner,
superior to both. With all due respect to Donal and Sir Karl Popper, I have
never found a more straightforward and compelling account of how science
actually works, and this is the perspective from which I reflect on
Chomsky's linguistics.
The notion that there is, built into every human infant, the equivalent of
an operating system with the ability to reduce linguistic input to
something that might be reasonably called the grammar of some particular
natural language s not, on the fact of it wrong. In the context in which
this idea was advanced, it was, as indicated above, part of a group of
similar proposals, that could point to serious successes in other areas
based on similar assumptions: Jakobson's phonology, DNA, Turing machines
and IBM 360s were manifestly successful attempts to envision phenomena as
operating like formal systems embodied in some equivalent of computing
hardware. Why was this notion ultimately less successful when applied to
natural languages? One thoroughly pragmatic possibility is that there have
been very few linguists with a polyglot's deep knowledge of multiple
natural languages, the technical chops to develop appropriate algorithms,
and access to the level of computing power that has only become available
within the past decade or so. Another is, as I mentioned before, that human
"wetware" processes information in ways fundamentally different from
computer hardware and software. But advances are occurring on both fronts.
It is an interesting time to keep an eye, as much as one is able, on what
is going on.
So was Chomsky right? Hell, no. Was Chomsky plausible? You bet. For all
sorts of good reasons. Will new generations of scholars equipped with new
tools and techniques come up with better theories? On my view, yes they
will. And as for their successors..... I'd like to be around to see what
they come up with.
Cheers,
John
On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 8:19 AM, Paul Stone <pastone@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Maybe I will take a swing later, since, although, as RP said, it was
> inoffensive and intelligently written, I think there is a tragic flaw in
> his (jm's) argument, and I happen to agree with NC about the concept of a
> "universal grammar". Will reply as weather and other escapades allow.
>
> Pas
> On 2014-01-08 6:13 PM, "Omar Kusturica" <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> I certainly noticed John's post, though somewhat belatedly due to the
>> email problems that I already mentioned. It was an intelligent and
>> elaborate post that would require an adequate reply and I was hoping to
>> provide one but, what with my knowledge of Chomskian linguistics being
>> somewhat rusty (I took several courses in it but didn't like it much, and
>> haven't studied it since), and what with other things coming up, I didn't
>> get to it. Maybe another time.
>>
>> O.K.
>>
>>
>> On Wednesday, January 8, 2014 11:24 PM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>> John McCreery wrote
>>
>> ‘There is obviously an innate ability to acquire language in humans (not
>> shared with hedgehogs, presumably) but to claim the existence of an innate
>> grammar is in effect to claim that we are born with language, or some
>> crucial aspects of it. This seems highly unlikely on logical grounds. We
>> aren't born knowing the words of a language, or sounds, so why should we be
>> born with a grammar?
>>
>> ‘Omar, you have stated that "There is obviously an innate ability to
>> acquire language...," but what is the nature of that ability? That is the
>> question that Chomsky was attempting to answer. He began with a critique of
>> the simple imitation and reinforcement model suggested by B.F. Skinner. If
>> language were learned by imitation alone, it would be impossible to do what
>> speakers of any human language can do, i.e., create new sentences,
>> intelligible to themselves and others, that have never been spoken before.
>> How is that possible?’
>>
>> …and went on to give a brief yet perspicuous elucidation of Jakobson and
>> Chomsky’s views, as they bear on the question of whether, given that humans
>> have an innate ability to acquire language, they also have an ‘innate
>> grammar,’ which somehow facilitates it. (I've snipped the elucidation.)
>>
>>
>> I want to thank John, for having written something so clear and distinct,
>> without rancor or defensiveness.
>>
>> This post (which went completely ignored), is the only post to this list
>> I’ve been able to follow, for some time. A number of people have written a
>> number of things that seem to have only a notional relation to each other.
>> Maybe if I tried harder I’d be able to grasp the relation between Newton’s
>> Second Law of Motion and how Grice in a dream influenced Geach, but for
>> now, I’ll let it pass. I’m sure I’ll sleep better.)
>>
>> Robert Paul
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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