Chomsky 1992 (part 3)

Previously, Chomsky was discussing whether the fact that people communicate with one another successfully required a notion of a ‘common language.’ As a common language would not be something ‘in the head’ of an individual, this would presumably show that lingusitics should not restrict itself to the study of I-language (i.e. mental grammars). Or rather, to repeat a quote made by Chomsky in a previous passage, that Chomsky’s linguistics is forced to “[deny] that the basic function of natural languages is to mediate communication between its speakers.” Now, Chomsky is skeptical about the coherence of speaking teleologically about biological and psychological kinds (as noted previously), but he doesn’t want to be forced to deny the relevance of linguistics qua cognitive science to communication. He outlined a story of how successful communication between humans can work without being mediated by a common language. This story basically amounts to each of us forming a mental model of our interlocutor, initially assuming that they have our exact I-language, and based on our experience with them figuring out how they differ from us.1 Chomksy also notes that even locutions like ‘improving one’s Italian’ can be made sense of solely in terms of I-language, without appeal to a ‘common language.’ He makes one last comment:

Questions remain – factual ones, I presume – as to just what kind of information is within the lexicon, as distinct from belief systems. Changes in usage, as in the preceding cases, may in fact be marginal changes of I-language, or changes in belief systems, here construed as (narrowly described) C–R systems of the mind, which enrich the perspectives and standpoints for thought, interpretation, language use and other actions (call them I-belief systems, some counterpart to beliefs that might be discovered in naturalistic inquiry). Work in lexical semantics provides a basis for empirical resolution in some cases (particularly in the verbal system, with its richer relational structure), keeping to the individualist–internalist framework.

It seems like there is some explanatory overlap between I-language and belief with regards to explaining how our language use changes. As I acquire more knowledge of the difference between elm trees and beech trees, it seems I could account for my increasing sophistication either by changing my lexical entries for these two terms, or by keeping the lexical entries the same and changing my beliefs (or some mixture of the two). If linguistics is on the right track (i.e. we really have a mental grammar) then this is presumably an empirical question. Chomsky notes that the field of lexical semantics is relevant to this question.

Continuing with belief and concepts:

Little is understood about the general architecture of the mind/brain outside of a few scattered areas, typically not those that have been the focus of the most general considerations of so-called “cognitive science.” There has, for example, been much interesting discussion about a theory of belief and its possible place in accounting for thought and action. But substantive empirical work that might help in examining, refining, or testing these ideas is scarcely available. It seems reasonable at least to suppose that I-beliefs do not form a homogeneous set; the system has further structure that may provide materials for decisions about false belief and misidentification. Suppose that some I-beliefs are identifying beliefs and others not, or that they range along such a spectrum, where the latter (or the lesser) are more readily abandoned without affecting conditions for referring. Suppose, say, that Peter’s information about Martin van Buren is exhausted by the belief that he was (1) the President of the United States and (2) the sixteenth President, (1) being more of an identifying belief than (2). If Peter learns that Lincoln was the sixteenth President he might drop the nonidentifying I-belief while using the term to refer. If he is credibly informed that all the history books are mistaken and van Buren wasn’t a President at all, he is at a loss as to how to proceed. That seems a reasonable first step towards as much of an analysis as an internalist perspective can provide, and as much as seems factually at all clear. Further judgments can sometimes be made in particular circumstances, in varied and conflicting ways.

An I-belief is whatever is in my head, it is what we usually think of when we think of a belief.2 Chomsky is saying that we don’t know much about the cognitive science of (I-)beliefs, although there has been much philosophizing thereabout. He gives a quick example of how some I-beliefs seem more relevant for our concepts than others,3 noting that if you only have a very hazy knowledge of someone, say Martin van Buren, associating with the name only the two(?) beliefs:

  1. MvB was a president of the USA
  2. MvB was the 16th pres of the USA

That if you learn later that belief 2 was wrong, you will be ‘ok’, but if you learn that 1 was wrong (and thus that 2 was also wrong), you will no longer know who you are talking about. This is not so obvious to me, but he is really only claiming that this is a way to study beliefs from a perspective like the one he is advocating for linguistics.

It may be that a kind of public (or interpersonal) character to thought and meaning results from uniformity of initial endowment, which permits only I-languages that are alike in significant respects, thus providing some empirical reason to adopt some version of the Fregean doctrine that “it cannot well be denied that mankind possesses a common treasure of thoughts which is transmitted from generation to generation” (Frege 1892/1965: 71). And the special constructions of the science-forming faculty may also approach a public character (more to the point, for Frege’s particular concerns). But for the systems that grow naturally in the mind, beyond the instantiation of initial endowment as I-language (perhaps also I-belief and related systems), the character of thought and meaning varies as interest and circumstance vary, with no clear way to establish further categories, even ideally. Appeals to a common origin of language or speculations about natural selection, which are found throughout the literature, seem completely beside the point.

To the extent that thoughts or meanings are in fact common to us (i.e. to the extent that it looks like we do in fact have a common or shared system of thought), this could be partially accounted for if our initial state at birth (or before, given all the work on learning in the womb) partly determined the thoughts and beliefs we started out with. Maybe even our mental ability to do science (perhaps a ‘noticing/explaining patterns’ ability) is like this.

Consider the shared initial state of the language faculty of the brain, and the limited range of I-languages that are attainable as it develops in early life. When we inquire into lexical properties, we find a rich texture of purely internalist semantics, with interesting general properties, and evidence for formal semantic relations (including analytic connections; see references on p. 22). Furthermore, a large part of this semantic structure appears to derive from our inner nature, determined by the initial state of our language faculty, hence unlearned and universal for I-languages. Much the same is true of phonetic and other properties. In short, I-language (including internalist semantics) seems much like other parts of the biological world.

Chomsky: It seems that many aspects of the ‘meaning’ of lexical items can be studied in linguistics, and that a lot of this seems to be shared across languages, making us think that we must be predisposed to assigning certain kinds of meanings to lexical items.

We might well term all of this a form of syntax, that is, the study of the symbolic systems of C–R theories (“mental representation”). The same terminology remains appropriate if the theoretical apparatus is elaborated to include mental models, discourse representations, semantic values, possible worlds as commonly construed, and other theoretical constructions that still must be related in some manner to things in the world; or to the entities postulated by our science-forming faculty, or constructed by other faculties of the mind.

Chomsky is often thought of as maligning semantics. He thinks of the things that linguistic semanticists do as a form of syntax, and when he ‘maligns’ semantics, he is talking about the study of how language relates to the external world. Here he says: everything in the mind I will call syntax, to distinguish it from the relation between those things in the mind and the external world, which I will call semantics.

The internally-determined properties of linguistic expressions can be quite far-reaching, even in very simple cases. Consider again the word house, say, in the expression John is painting the house brown, a certain collection of structural, phonetic, and semantic properties. We say it is the same expression for Peter and Tom only in the sense in which we might say that their circulatory or visual systems are the same: they are similar enough for the purposes at hand. One structural property of the expression is that it consists of six words. Other structural properties differentiate it from John is painting the brown house, which has correspondingly different conditions of use. A phonetic property is that the last two words, house and brown, share the same vowel; they are in the formal relation of assonance, while house and mouse are in the formal relation of rhyme, two relations on linguistic expressions definable in terms of their phonological features. A semantic property is that one of the two final words can be used to refer to certain kinds of things, and the other expresses a property of these. Here, too, there are formal relations expressible in terms of features of the items, for example, between house and building. Or, to take a more interesting property, if John is painting the house brown, then he is applying paint to its exterior surface, not its interior; a relation of entailment holds between the corresponding linguistic expressions.

Chomsky lists a few properties of linguistic expressions that are determined by their mental representation. Some of these, the phonological properties, are obvious (perhaps just to us, in retrospect?), but he also points out that many ‘semantic’ properties are purely formal (‘syntactic’), like that if you paint a house brown you are painting the outside of the house, not the inside.

Viewed formally, relations of entailment have much the same status as rhyme; they are formal relations among expressions, which can be characterized in terms of their linguistic features. Certain relations happen to be interesting ones, as distinct from many that are not, because of the ways I-languages are embedded in performance systems that use these instructions for various human activities.

He clarifies that some ‘semantic’ relations like the one given above are determined by I-Language, not by relations between our mental constructs and the world. Those relations determined purely on the basis of our mental representations are appropriate objects of lingusitic (or generally internalistic) study. Not every relation between mental representations is interesting, because not every relation is actually made use of; for example, that a sentence has a prime number of words is purely a property of a mental representation, but it is not one that is made use of by any cognitive mechanism.

Some properties of the expression are universal, others language-particular. It is a universal phonetic property that the vowel of house is shorter than the vowel of brown; it is a particular property that the vowel in my I-language is front rather than mid, as it is in some I-languages similar to mine. The fact that a brown house has a brown exterior, not interior, appears to be a language universal, holding of “container” words of a broad category, including ones we might invent: box, airplane, igloo, lean-to, etc. To paint a spherical cube brown is to give it a brown exterior. The fact that house is distinguished from home is a particular feature of the I-language. In English, I return to my home after work; in Hebrew, I return to the house.

I blush to confess I didn’t know that the vowel of ‘house’ was shorter than the vowel of ‘brown’ (is it because of the voicing of the coda?), nor do I know what makes that a univeral phonetic property (presumably when the same phoneme ‘ou’ is followed by a voiced vs unvoiced coda, our production mechanisms universally make the former longer than the other). That the vowel in Chomksy’s lexical entry for house is a front vowel is an idiosyncracy of his I-language. That ‘container’ words, when colors are predicated of them, are universally interpreted with the colors describing their outsides is something I didn’t realize (even for English). The point is that by identifying which formal properties of expressions are shared across (I-)languages we can identify properties of the initial linguistic state (as we have learned).

When we move beyond lexical structure, conclusions about the richness of the initial state of the language faculty, and its apparently special structure, are reinforced. Consider such expressions as those in example (2): (2) a. He thinks the young man is a genius.

  1. The young man thinks he is a genius.
  2. His mother thinks the young man is a genius.

In (2b) or (2c), the pronoun may be referentially dependent on the young man; in (2a) it cannot (though it might be used to refer to the young man in question, an irrelevant matter). The principles underlying these facts appear to be universal, at least in large measure; again, they yield rich conditions on semantic interpretation, on intrinsic relations of meaning among expressions, including analytic connections. Furthermore, in this domain we have theoretical results of some depth, with surprising consequences. Thus, the same principles appear to yield the semantic properties of expressions of the form of example (1), on page 27.

Chomsky: While lexical structure is pretty cool, it is in syntax that things get really super awesome. Less tongue-in-cheek-y, if you were impressed about the apparent universality of painting container nouns (as was I), your mind should be blown at this syntax stuff. Here is a wealth of rich and detailed relations between expressions that moreover seems to be cross-linguistically stable. Given that Chomsky states that he is primarily interested in understanding the initial state of our minds (because the end states are accidents of our experiences and therefore not amenable to scientific study), it is perhaps no wonder then that he does so much work in syntax.

Given the performance systems, the representation at the interface level PF imposes restrictive conditions on use (articulation and perception, in this case). The same is true of the LF representation, as illustrated in examples (1) and (2), or at the lexical level, in the special status of the exterior surface for container words. A closer look reveals further complexity. The exterior surface is distinguished in other ways within I-language semantics. If I see the house, I see its exterior surface; seeing the interior surface does not suffice. If I am inside an airplane, I see it only if I look out the window and see the surface of the wing, or if there is a mirror outside that reflects its exterior surface. But the house is not just its exterior surface, a geometrical entity. If Peter and Mary are equidistant from the surface – Peter inside and Mary outside – Peter is not near the house, but Mary might be, depending on the current conditions for nearness. The house can have chairs inside it or outside it, consistent with its being regarded as a surface. But while those outside may be near it, those inside are necessarily not. So the house involves its exterior surface and its interior. But the interior is abstractly conceived; it is the same house if I fill it with cheese or move the walls – though if I clean the house I may interact only with things in the interior space, and I am referring only to these when I say that the house is a mess or needs to be redecorated. The house is conceived as an exterior surface and an interior space (with complex properties). Of course, the house itself is a concrete object; it can be made of bricks or wood, and a wooden house does not just have a wooden exterior. A brown wooden house has a brown exterior (adopting the abstract perspective) and is made of wood (adopting the concrete perspective). If my house used to be in Philadelphia, but is now in Boston, then a physical object was moved. In contrast, if my home used to be in Philadelphia, but is now in Boston, then no physical object need have moved, though my home is also concrete – though in some manner also abstract, whether understood as the house in which I live, or the town, or country, or universe; a house is concrete in a very different sense. The house – home difference has numerous consequences: I can go home, but not go house; I can live in a brown house, but not a brown home; in many languages, the counterpart of home is adverbial, as partially in English too.

Here he goes back to lexical semantics to point out that the exterior of container concepts does not just play a role in colors, but is exploited throughout our linguistic system. (He also briefly looks at the house-home distinction again, but as I ignored it before, I will continue to ignore it here except at this meta-level.)

Even in this trivial example, we see that the internal conditions on meaning are rich, complex, and unsuspected; in fact, barely known. The most elaborate dictionaries do not dream of such subtleties; they provide no more than hints that enable the intended concept to be identified by those who already have it (at least, in essential respects). The I-variant of Frege’s telescope operates in curious and intricate ways.

Frege uses a telescope metaphor to help understand his distinction between sense, reference, and idea.4 When we view the moon through the telescope, the moon is like the referent - it is the object that we are connected to. The image of the moon on our retina is like our idea - it is ours and ours alone. The image of the moon on the glass of the telescope however is like the sense - it is something that is objective, could be used by others, but is dependent on perspective.

This relates to Chomsky’s example in that the dictionary is the sense that points different people to their individual version of the ‘shared (!)’ concept (the referent). It is sort of amazing that our concepts can be so rich and yet be successfully pointed to by such impoverished dictionary entries.

There seems at first glance to be something paradoxical in these descriptions. Thus, houses and homes are concrete but, from another point of view, are considered quite abstractly, though abstractly in very different ways; similarly, books, decks of cards, cities, etc. It is not that we have confused ideas – or inconsistent beliefs – about houses and homes, or boxes, airplanes, igloos, spherical cubes, etc. Rather, a lexical item provides us with a certain range of perspectives for viewing what we take to be the things in the world, or what we conceive in other ways; these items are like filters or lenses, providing ways of looking at things and thinking about the products of our minds. The terms themselves do not refer, at least if the term refer is used in its natural-language sense; but people can use them to refer to things, viewing them from particular points of view – which are remote from the standpoint of the natural sciences, as noted.

Pustejovsky, pioneer of The generative lexicon, proposes to deal with what he calls the polysemousness of many words by collecting their different senses (using what amounts to a product operator).5 What Chomsky is here calling a perspective corresponds (I think) to one of the many senses of the word, in Pustejovsky’s sense.

What does Chomsky mean with “the terms themselves do not refer”? Note that he qualifies this with “at least if [refer] is used in its natural-language sense.” How do we use the word refer normally? Here are some ways:

  • I was referring to the incident with the dog in the park.
  • I was referred here by my doctor
  • This passage is a reference to the situation in the South Sudan

It appears that refer in ordinary language requires an intent, which of course terms do not have. That’s not such an interesting claim, then, as it appears at first. Chomsky thinks that reference, in the philosophical usage, is so far removed from the ordinary usage of the term, that we should probably not use the same word, so as to avoid confusion.

The same is true wherever we inquire into I-language. London is not a fiction, but considering it as London – that is, through the perspective of a city name, a particular type of linguistic expression – we accord it curious properties: as noted earlier, we allow that under some circumstances, it could be completely destroyed and rebuilt somewhere else, years or even millennia later, still being London, that same city. Charles Dickens described Washington as “the City of Magnificent Intentions,” with “spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament” – but still Washington. We can regard London with or without regard to its population: from one point of view, it is the same city if its people desert it; from another, we can say that London came to have a harsher feel to it through the Thatcher years, a comment on how people act and live. Referring to London, we can be talking about a location or area, people who sometimes live there, the air above it (but not too high), buildings, institutions, etc., in various combinations (as in London is so unhappy, ugly, and polluted that it should be destroyed and rebuilt 100 miles away, still being the same city). Such terms as London are used to talk about the actual world, but there neither are nor are believed to be things-in-the-world with the properties of the intricate modes of reference that a city name encapsulates. Two such collections of perspectives can fit differently into Peter’s system of beliefs, as in Kripke’s puzzle. (For extensive discussion from a somewhat similar point of view, see Bilgrami 1992.)

This is a halfway worked out example of why the things of common-sense do not really exist; our concept of London is (in Pustejovsky’s sense) a set of different (but related) concepts that don’t have any ultimate coherence.

For purposes of naturalistic inquiry, we construct a picture of the world that is dissociated from these “common-sense” perspectives (never completely, of course; we cannot become something other than the creatures we are). If we intermingle such different ways of thinking about the world, we may find ourselves attributing to people strange and even contradictory beliefs about objects that are to be regarded somehow apart from the means provided by the I-language and the I-belief systems that add further texture to interpretation. The situation will seem even more puzzling if we entertain the obscure idea that certain terms have a relation to things (“reference”) fixed in a common public language, which perhaps even exists “independently of any particular speakers,” who have a “partial, and partially erroneous, grasp of the language” (Dummett 1986); and that these “public-language terms” in the common language refer (in some sense to be explained) to such objects as London taken as a thing divorced from the properties provided by the city name (or some other mode of designation) in a particular I-language, and from the other factors that enter into Peter’s referring to London. Problems will seem to deepen further if we abstract from the background of individual or shared beliefs that underlie normal language use. All such moves go beyond the bounds of a naturalistic approach, some of them, perhaps, beyond sensible discourse.

As most of our concepts are ‘incoherent,’ like London, if our scientific inquiries were to be based on common-sense concepts we would embroil ourselves in contradictions. If we believe in addition that there is a common language, and its words refer to things independently of how we intend to use them, then things will go wonky very quickly.

We have seen previously that Chomsky believes that postulation of a common language is not needed to explain anything, and now that postulating a common language is actually harmful.

They also go beyond internalist limits, which is a different matter. A naturalistic approach does not impose internalist, individualist limits. Thus, if we study (some counterpart to) persons as phases in the history of ideally immortal germ cells, or as stages in the conversion of oxygen to carbon dioxide, we depart from such limits. But if we are interested in accounting for what people do, and why, insofar as that is possible through naturalistic inquiry, the argument for keeping to these limits seems persuasive.

Chomsky: Although studying humans scientifically does not require that we only study individuals, and then only in terms of their mental representations, if we want to study behaviour scientifically, we must.

  1. Perhaps interestingly, this is also what some people claim Chomskyian linguists do when they analyze languages: they assume every language is just like English, with a few bells and whistles. ↩︎

  2. It contrasts with beliefs as we usually use the term, which seems to involve the real world (i.e. not be in our heads) - for example, I believe that water is wet. But this belief report seems to relate my internal belief to something in the world (water). Thought experiments have been proposed (inter alia by Putnam) which suggest that I can have the same mental state, but it can be about something other than water. Imagine that I am magically transported to some other universe where water is not H₂O but some other weird chemical (which quenches thirst, doesn’t kill me, etc). After a while of being there, it would seem that my belief “water is wet” will also be about this weird chemical. But presumably my mental state didn’t change - I still have ‘the same’ belief. There seems then to be a part of my belief which is ‘in my head’ - this is what an I-belief is referring to. ↩︎

  3. He seems to be adopting for the sake of argument a ‘description theory’ of reference. ↩︎

  4. A concept like ‘the moon’ refers to the moon, we have an idea of it which is wholly in our heads (our I-language concept), and somehow this idea is related to the moon, via its sense. ↩︎

  5. For example, book has one sense according to which it is a physical object, one according to which it is a source of information, etc. ↩︎