The famous linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, a passionate critic of the propaganda machine of the media and of American imperialism, gave an interview to Philosophie magazine in Paris. Fragments.
In all areas, his vision goes against our intellectual habits. Since the time of Levi-Strauss, Foucault and Derid, we have been looking for signs of freedom in the plasticity of man and the multiplicity of cultures. Chomsky, on the other hand, defends the idea of the immutability of human nature and innate mental structures, and it is in this that he sees the basis of our freedom.
If we were really plastic, he makes it clear, if we didn’t have natural hardness, we wouldn’t have the strength to resist. And in order to focus on the main thing, when everything around is trying to distract us and scatter our attention.
You were born in Philadelphia in 1928. Your parents were immigrants who fled Russia.
My father was born in a small village in Ukraine. He left Russia in 1913 to avoid the conscription of Jewish children into the army — which was tantamount to a death sentence. And my mother was born in Belarus and came to the US as a child. Her family was fleeing the pogroms.
As a child, you went to a progressive school, but at the same time lived in an environment of Jewish immigrants. How would you describe the atmosphere of that era?
My parents’ native language was Yiddish, but, oddly enough, I didn’t hear a single word of Yiddish at home. At the time, there was a cultural conflict between the proponents of Yiddish and the more «modern» Hebrew. My parents were on the Hebrew side.
My father taught it at school, and from an early age I studied it with him, reading the Bible and modern literature in Hebrew. In addition, my father was interested in new ideas in the field of education. So I entered an experimental school based on the ideas of John Dewey.1. There were no grades, no competition between students.
When I continued to study in the classical school system, at the age of 12, I realized that I was a good student. We were the only Jewish family in our area, surrounded by Irish Catholics and German Nazis. We didn’t talk about it at home. But the strangest thing is that the children who returned from classes with Jesuit teachers who delivered fiery anti-Semitic speeches on the weekend when we were going to play baseball completely forgot about anti-Semitism.
Any speaker has learned a finite number of rules that allow him to produce an infinite number of meaningful statements. This is the creative essence of language.
Is it because you grew up in a multilingual environment that the main thing in your life was learning the language?
There must have been one deep reason that became clear to me very early: language has a fundamental property that catches the eye immediately, it is worth thinking about the phenomenon of speech.
Any speaker has learned a finite number of rules that allow him to produce an infinite number of meaningful statements. This is the creative essence of language, what makes it a unique ability that only people have. Some classical philosophers — Descartes and representatives of the Port-Royal school — caught this. But there were few of them.
When you started working, structuralism and behaviorism dominated. For them, language is an arbitrary system of signs, the main function of which is to provide communication. You do not agree with this concept.
How is it that we recognize a series of words as a valid expression of our language? When I took up these questions, it was believed that a sentence is grammatical if and only if it means something. But this is absolutely not true!
Here are two sentences devoid of meaning: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” The first sentence is correct, despite the fact that its meaning is vague, and the second is not only meaningless, but also unacceptable. The speaker will pronounce the first sentence with normal intonation, and in the second he will stumble on every word; moreover, he will remember the first sentence more easily.
What makes the first sentence acceptable, if not the meaning? The fact that it corresponds to a set of principles and rules for constructing a sentence that any native speaker of a given language has.
How do we move from the grammar of every language to the more speculative idea that language is a universal structure that is naturally «built into» every human being?
Let’s take the function of pronouns as an example. When I say «John thinks he’s smart,» «he» can mean either John or someone else. But if I say «John thinks he’s smart,» then «him» means someone other than John. A child speaking this language understands the difference between these constructions.
Experiments show that starting from the age of three, children know these rules and follow them, despite the fact that no one taught them this. So it’s something built into us that makes us able to understand and assimilate these rules on our own.
This is what you call universal grammar.
It is a set of immutable principles of our mind that allow us to speak and learn our native language. The universal grammar is embodied in specific languages, giving them a set of possibilities.
So, in English and French, the verb is placed before the object, and in Japanese after, so in Japanese they don’t say “John hit Bill”, but only say “John hit Bill”. But beyond this variability, we are forced to assume the existence of an «internal form of language», in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt.2independent of individual and cultural factors.
Universal grammar is embodied in specific languages, giving them a set of possibilities
In your opinion, language does not point to objects, it points to meanings. It’s counter-intuitive, isn’t it?
One of the first questions that philosophy asks itself is the question of Heraclitus: is it possible to step into the same river twice? How do we determine that this is the same river? From the point of view of the language, this means asking yourself how two physically different entities can be denoted by the same word. You can change its chemistry or reverse its flow, but a river will remain a river.
On the other hand, if you set up barriers along the coast and run oil tankers along it, it will become a «channel». If you then change its surface and use it to navigate downtown, it becomes a «highway». In short, a river is primarily a concept, a mental construct, not a thing. This was already emphasized by Aristotle.
In a strange way, the only language that directly relates to things is the language of animals. Such and such a cry of a monkey, accompanied by such and such movements, will be unequivocally understood by its relatives as a signal of danger: here the sign directly refers to things. And you don’t need to know what’s going on in a monkey’s mind to understand how it works. Human language does not have this property, it is not a means of reference.
You reject the idea that the degree of detail in our understanding of the world depends on how rich the vocabulary of our language is. Then what role do you assign to language differences?
If you look closely, you will see that the differences between languages are often superficial. Languages that do not have a special word for red will call it «the color of blood.» The word «river» covers a wider range of phenomena in Japanese and Swahili than in English, where we distinguish between a river (river), a stream (brook) and a stream (stream).
But the core meaning of «river» is invariably present in all languages. And it has to be, for one simple reason: children don’t need to experience all the variations of a river or learn all the nuances of the term «river» in order to have access to this core meaning. This knowledge is a natural part of their mind and is equally present in all cultures.
If you look closely, you will see that the differences between languages are often superficial.
Do you realize that you are one of the last philosophers who adhere to the idea of the existence of a special human nature?
Undoubtedly, human nature exists. We are not monkeys, we are not cats, we are not chairs. It means that we have our own nature, which distinguishes us. If there is no human nature, that means there is no difference between me and the chair. This is ridiculous. And one of the fundamental components of human nature is language ability. Man acquired this ability in the course of evolution, it is a characteristic of man as a biological species, and we all have it equally.
There is no such group of people whose language ability would be lower than the rest. As for individual variation, it is not significant. If you take a small child from an Amazon tribe that hasn’t been in contact with other people for the past twenty thousand years and move him to Paris, he will speak French very quickly.
In the existence of innate structures and rules of language, you paradoxically see an argument in favor of freedom.
This is a necessary relationship. There is no creativity without a system of rules.
A source:
1. John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher and innovative educator, humanist, supporter of pragmatism and instrumentalism.
2. Prussian philosopher and linguist, 1767-1835.