Chomsky in retrospect – 1
by pieterseuren
Now that Avram Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) is approaching his 85th birthday, it is perhaps fitting to look back at his unique career as a theoretical linguist and as a political writer and activist. The combination itself is at least extraordinary, if not unique. But what makes this man truly unique is the huge influence he has had in both fields. He dominated linguistics for four full decades, from 1960 till 2000 and since 2000 his influence has still been reverberating in many ways. As a political writer and, to some extent also, as an activist, he has gathered an enormous following, especially in anarchist circles. What is the secret behind all this?
Many will say that the secret lies in the fact that the man is a genius. That would indeed be an explanation, but I don’t think it is, not in this case. There are too many indications to the contrary. Geniuses, by the sheer force of their vision or ability in some specific area—intellectual, artistic or organizational—leave an imprint on future generations that will prove of lasting value to mankind as a whole or at least to a specific culture, science or form of art. To say of a person who is still alive that he or she is a genius is to draw a cheque on the future, and in Chomsky’s case, this cheque does not seem to be covered. His political activities have all been geared to events of the day. They are, if anything, critical journalistic commentaries on current events, not the expression of anything approaching a new vision, though clearly driven by a genuine indignation regarding the wickedness of the political powers that be and a genuine compassion with their victims—that is, in so far as the powers are American and the victims are not. In linguistics, it looks very much as if his influence is rapidly declining, and with good reason, because his theoretical approach has been shown to be flawed in too many ways by a large variety of critics. For all we know, his reputation may turn out, sub specie humanitatis, to have been a momentary flare.
He has always been, and still is, an extremely hard worker and a meticulous correspondent, so much so that some have wondered if this man ever sleeps (Geoff Pullum, ‘Does this man ever sleep?’, Nature, vol. 386, issue 6627, 1997, p. 776). During the 1950s, he engaged in hard, even feverish, work at a fairly elevated level of generality, though hardly at the level of empirical detail, which has never really interested him. He thought deep and hard about the implications of the concept of an algorithmic generative grammar for the theory of language, penning down his thoughts in the form of a voluminous manuscript, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, which he did not want to see published. (Chomsky has often asserted later that no publisher wanted it, but Mouton, for one, was keen on having it, after the success of Syntactic Structures, and he had even, as he wrote to Cornelis van Schooneveld and to Peter de Ridder, both of Mouton, signed a publication contract with North-Holland Amsterdam. But Chomsky backed out. The book was not published until 1975, by Plenum Press, with a great many unacknowledged post hoc omissions and modifications.) While at Harvard during the early 1950s, and later at the MIT department of machine translation, he engaged—as an amateur—in some intensive mathematical work regarding the formal properties of natural language grammars, whereby the notion that a natural language should be seen as a recursively definable infinite set of sentences took a central position. One notable and impressive result of this work was the so-called Chomsky hierarchy of algorithmic grammars, original work indeed, as far as we know, but which has now, unfortunately, lost all relevance (see Chapter 6 in my From Whorf to Montague, to appear this month with OUP).
One conspicuous feature of the work he did during the second half of the 1950s was his attempt to forge a break between his work and American structuralism, the brand of linguistics he had been brought up in, trying to show that his new approach opened totally novel and far-reaching perspectives which structuralism was unable to encompass, without ever admitting that his work was demonstrably less a break with than a natural sequel to structuralism, once this was placed in the context of the mathematics of the day—a direction taken earlier by his teacher Zellig Harris (1909–1992) in Philadelphia and inexorably leading to the notion of an algorithmic generative grammar. This was moderately revolutionary, as it placed American structuralist linguistics in a new, wider, perspective.
The most notable result of this period was the publication, in 1957, of the little book Syntactic Structures, number 3 in the series Janua Linguarum (Mouton, The Hague), a succinct and relatively non-technical statement of the new ideas. At the expense of other authors following the same lead, notably his teacher Zellig Harris, and with a little help from his friends Bernard Bloch, Morris Halle, Roman Jakobson and Robert Lees (who published a lengthy promotional review article in Language of September 1957), this booklet quickly acquired a well-nigh legendary status, conferring a halo of genius upon its author, and is now regarded as the starting point of a revolution in linguistics and adjacent disciplines.
Chomsky subsequently tried to reinterpret the notion of an algorithmic generative grammar in realist terms, that is, as a theory of how the human mind deals with language, and no longer in the purely instrumentalist terms current in the brand of structuralism that he had been taught and according to which all that counts is to provide a precise and concise statement of the facts of each language, regardless of how they are implemented in human brains. This move from instrumentalism to realism was brought about by his contacts with a small group of young Harvard psychologists, headed by Jerome Bruner and George Miller, who were in the process of creating the new cognitive science in opposition to behaviourism. The incorporation of the concept of a generative grammar into the new paradigm of cognitive science provided him with the opportunity of being part of a much more general and more profound revolution affecting the whole of society, the passing from ‘inhuman’ behaviourism to ‘human’ cognitive science and thus the reinstatement of human values in the modern world, giving impetus to a new and wide-ranging emancipatory movement.
In this context, Chomsky wrote his famous (1959) review article in Language of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957), where he subjected behaviourism to a fierce critique, which, however, was based on empirical arguments that were largely taken, without proper attribution, from the work of the American psychologist Karl Lashley, who died in 1958. Lashley had convincingly argued that humans, in displaying serial behaviour, as when pronouncing a sentence, do not follow behaviouristic principles according to which each new element in the series is restricted by the preceding elements, since experimental results show that humans anticipate elements that will occur later—an essential link in Chomsky’s chain of argument.
Since behaviourism was a direct offshoot of Anglo-Saxon empiricism and its extreme modern version known as (neo)positivism—which wants to reduce all reality to physical matter and all knowledge to sense data—he developed an overall aversion to this entire philosophical complex and took to what he saw as European rationalism, which posits innate ideas to help explain the content and form of human knowledge. Given this wider philosophical perspective, he developed an interest in history, hoping to find a pedigree. This made him land at the figure of the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, which resulted in his Cartesian Linguistics of 1966 (Harper & Row, New York) and other writings produced during that period. These historical excursions came to an abrupt end after the traumatic experience of being crushed by real historians, such as Hans Aarsleff, Vivian Salmon or Keith Percival, who exposed his abysmal lack of knowledge and expertise in matters historical. The only credit Chomsky got for his quasi-historical work was that he had at least given a new impetus to the study of the history of linguistics. In the final paragraph of his devastating article ‘On the non-existence of Cartesian linguistics’ (in R. J. Butler (ed.), Cartesian Studies, Blackwell, Oxford, 1972, pp. 137–45), Keith Percival wrote: “[I]t is greatly to Chomsky’s credit that he has boldly advanced historical hypotheses which more pedestrian scholars would not have had the courage to publish.” It does indeed take some courage to venture into history the way Chomsky did. … to be continued
The Seuren Blog 
This is an interesting post, but it would be useful to have some references regarding the more specific claims here, particularly those regarding Chomsky’s relationship to contemporaries such as Bruner, Harris, Lashley, and Miller.
Dear Mark, your question is totally justified. I am on vacation right now, so I can’t help you straight away. But as soon as I am back, which will be on September 25th, I’ll make sure you get your references. (I will have to ask a colleague, who has a complete documentation and is writing a little book on the rise of Chomskyanism, especially in Europe. He has all the references immediately at hand.) By the way, I don’t think Chomsky and Lashley knew each other, but I may be wrong.
Chomsky often spoke favorably of Karl Lashley, for instance, in the first and third lectures of Language and Mind (1968).
That would be much appreciated; thank you. I’m familiar with the historiographical criticism, which has always seemed on the money (particularly Salmon’s piece, which I’ve linked to below, along with some other historiographical work – positive and non-positive – that might be of interest); but I am less sure about Chomsky’s relationship to his contemporaries. Indeed, my impression, at least with respect to Miller, is that the influence goes in the other direction (though I would have to see if I can remember where that impression comes from).
I would also suggest that your criticism of Chomsky’s “genius” is a little on the harsh side; not that I particularly like the use of that particular word. Whatever the ultimate merits of an individual’s body of work in terms of its ultimate truth value (Saussure’s langue/parole distinction springs to mind), I think it is hard to deny the impressive nature of his work; and certainly his early work . Whilst it would be obviously silly to argue that Chomsky came ex nihilo, his early work is a very original synthesis, not to mention “going beyond”, of the ideas at the time, which has pushed linguistic theory in new and highly productive directions that still resonate today. And I say this, for instance, as someone who is extremely sceptical about the current “biolinguistic” turn.
I would further argue that his early work was also very detailed, both in its analysis of the specific details of English and in the way he was able to build upon the detailed empirical work of others (as in the Sound Pattern of English). It is true, of course, that much of his work of late has been much less detailed and muddied with data, which to my mind has been a real loss; but that is a much more specific and less broad criticism.
Related Historiographical Work:
(1) Salmon: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2717728
(2) Harris: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linguistics-Wars-Randy-Allen-Harris/dp/019509834X
(3) Tomalin: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linguistics-Formal-Sciences-Generative-Cambridge/dp/0521066484/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379356962&sr=1-1&keywords=tomalin+generative
Thank you for the very interesting history ‘lecture’. I am looking forward to the further elaborations you promised Mark. I have a few comments about Cartesian Linguistics [CC] that are meant to supplement, not challenge what you say.
One of the real historians you mention, Keith Percival, told me that he had discussed the errors contained in SS with Chomsky and urged him to correct them before publication. Chomsky ignored the advice, and published what he had been told contained non-trivial errors. So, presumably, the final comment in Keith’s article [which was written in 1968 but only published in 1972 conference proceedings] referred to the project as such, not the execution by Chomsky. [Here is a link to an early 21st century update to Percival’s paper: http://people.ku.edu/~percival/CartesianLinguistics.pdf%5D
Further, Chomsky never accepted the rejection of his interpretation by historians. He justified his approach in a 1971 debate with Foucault:
“I should say that I approach classical rationalism not really as a historian of science or a historian of philosophy, but from the rather different point of view of someone who has a certain range of scientific notions and is interested in seeing how at an earlier stage people may have been groping towards these notions, possibly without even realising what they were groping towards.
So one might say that I’m looking at history not as an antiquarian, who is interested in finding out and giving a precisely accurate account of what the thinking of the seventeenth century was-I don’t mean to demean that activity, it’s just not mine-but rather from the point of view of, let’s say, an art lover, who wants to look at the seventeenth century to find in it things that are of particular value, and that obtain part of their value in part because of the perspective with which he approaches them.” [Chomsky, 1971, http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm ]
This “justification” is cited by his editor, philosopher James McGilvray, in the 2002 and 2009 edition of CC and it has been accepted in certain circles that Chomsky’s ‘history studies’ are superior to the ‘antiquarianism’ of Aarsleff [for a particularly unscholarly ‘rebuttal’ you may want to look at Barsky, R. (1997). Noam Chomsky: A life of discent. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press., p. 91 – I think]
Other defences of Chomsky, the historian, can be found in
Bracken, H. (1982). Chomsky’s Variations on a Theme by Descartes. History of Philosophy, 181-192.
Bracken, H. (1984). Mind and Language: Essays on Descartes and Chomsky. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Hi Mark and Christina,
Thanks for your comment. I am familiar with all the literature both of you quote, even with the specfiic quotes given by Christina. What I did not know is that Keith Percival warned Chomsky about his historical mistakes before the publication of Cartesian Linguistics and that Chomsky went on regardless. Of course, the justification given in the Foucault debate is nonsense, academically speaking, and an insult to proper historians. History is a serious discipline, not an non-committing sort of art critique. How deep can one fall!
As regards Mark’s point that Chomsky’s early work was “impressive” and “also very detailed, both in its analysis of the specific details of English and in the way he was able to build upon the detailed empirical work of others (as in the Sound Pattern of English)”, I would say the following. When you just take a cold look at the historical facts (not as an art critic but as a real historian), unimpressed by haloes or other glorifying mystifications, what you see is a group of brilliant and highly motivated young scholars, united around Chomsky and working hard at actually developing a detailed transformational grammar model for English, mostly, but also for other languages. These people were interacting intensively among themselves (hours long telephone conversations, as they told me), inventing names for transformational rules and trying them out in different ways. They discovered the transformational cycle (I believe it was Charles Fillmore who did). Chomsky’s own role in this is not entirely clear but it is clear that he was not a prime mover in this respect, rather one who approved or disapproved of what the younger people did. Ross, Postal, McCawley, George Lakoff, and a few others were the prime movers. Later, these young scholars went ahead without Chomsky’s approval—and got punished. Chomsky’s phonological work (“Sound Patterns” of 1968) was largely Morris Halle’s doing: Chomsky himself never did any original work in phonology.
So what we see is that Syntactic Structures (1957) introduced the notion of a generative (i.e. an algorithmic) grammar with (algorithmic) transformations to the general public of linguists, without adequate attribution to Harris’s major role in this respect. Whatever little actual description there is in SS came directly from Harris. This is what Bob Lees told me during a conference in Paris in, I believe, April 1970. (There was an excursion on a bus, one afternoon, as we visited Versailles and other Parisian treasures, and Bob Lees was sitting in the back of the bus, surrounded by a group of young linguists, including myself. He told us explicitly that all the examples in SS came straight from Harris’s blackboard!) What stunned the world, as I remember very well, being a budding linguist back in 1957, was the fact that a grammar was seen as a mathematical machine—unheard of in those days, and very exciting. Then came the years between 1957 and 1965, during which period Chomsky published a few more little Mouton books, none of which were very consequential, plus, of course, his 1959 Language article against Skinner. No descriptive work in those publications. But, as I said, Chomsky’s younger followers, such as Paul Postal, Haj Ross, Jim McCawley, Robin Lakoff, George Lakoff, Carl Leroy Baker, to mention only the most prominent ones, were hard at work writing actual grammatical descriptions and analyses. They introduced the rules of Equi-NP-Deletion (what an awkward name!), Subject Raising, Tough-Deletion, etc. When McCawley presented his rule of Predicate Raising, that was rejected by Chomsky, because it doesn’t occur in English (well, actually it does, in the construction “let go”, but Chomsky didn’t know that), and in particular because it was presented in the context of “prelexical syntax”, which Chomsky didn’t want because it smacked too much of generative semantics. That Predicate Raising is fully alive and productive in French, Italian, Dutch, German and a whole lot of other languages (see, for example, my 1972 paper “Predicate Raising in French and sundry languages”, published eventually in my “A View of Language”, OUP 2001) was simply ignored, and is still being ignored by fundamentalist Chomskyans.
Anyway, the actual descriptive work, which is what gave substance to what is often called the “Chomskyan revolution” during the years 1957 to 1965, was due not to Chomsky but to the circle of his followers, most of whom did really brilliant work, which I consider to be of lasting value. But where was Chomsky himself? He came up with his 1965 lame and immature “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax”, which was both descriptively and theoretically inadequate and inconsistent, yet had to be praised as the work of a genius (the first really clear instance of Chomsky posing as beautifully dressed emperor but in fact going about in his underwear, if that). It was not for nothing that he later called this “Aspects” book the “standard theory”! This was the background to Chomsky’s venomous and at the time desperate resistance to what would soon become “Generative Semantics”, which was the work of his followers and which SHOWED THE INADEQUACY OF “ASPECTS”—the worst that could happen. Chomsky had thus simply been overtaken by those who had been doing the real work anyway. The halo was about to be blown away.
It thus seems to me, Mark, that when you praise Chomsky for his early work, you are still under the influence of the current mythology about the man that I am working hard to disperse.
One more comment on the antiquarian vs. art-lover issue. Maybe in response to criticisms like yours Chomsky later elaborated the selective history approach of the art-lover [who “picks out” what he considers valuable but ignores what he does not] into the rewrite history approach:
“The first [question], the actual sequence of events, is not in itself very interesting in my opinion; it’s a story of chance events and personal accidents, accidents of personal history. The second question, namely, how it should have happened, is far more interesting and important, and that certainly has never been told or even investigated.” (Chomsky, N. (1997). History and Theory Construction in Modern Linguistics. In: Chomsky no
Brasil / Chomsky in Brazil: Revista de documentação de estudos em lingüistica teórica e aplicada (D. E. L. T. A.), vol. 13) – I owe this reference to Keith.
I am confident your own research confirms what I have found: Chomsky has made use of the ‘rewrite history approach’ [attributing to others what, in his opinion, they should have said] frequently [also when referring to events in the very recent history].
This is a somewhat red-faced p.s. to my earlier post. CC may seem a confusing acronym for Cartesian Linguistics. It stands for Chomsky’s Cartesianism [a term used by a very small group of philosophers, when we refer to the book]. Even worse, when I used SS, I also meant Cartesian Linguistics. Sadly, this format does not allow error correction within the text…
Hi Cristina and Professor Seuren,
Thank you both for your responses. I will reply to these in two parts, beginning with Cristina’s and then to yours in a separate response. My apologies for the latter delay, but I am in the middle of a lot of work and need to divide out the labour a little.
So, ok. Well, not sure I posted a “lecture”, rather than a blog post reply; but ok! And please don’t worry about pitching your response: whether you want to challenge or supplement or support is entirely up to you, and challenges are generally welcome with this sort of thing (at least from me); so please don’t worry about my feelings (this isn’t Faculty of Language blog, after all!).
What I would say, generally, is that I am in agreement with your points, which do supplement my own highly brief comment about Chomsky’s historiographical work. To be clear, I think Cartesian Linguistics (CL) a very poor piece of historiography, something comprehensively pointed out by various scholars well-versed in the actual histories of the times. In fact, the only interest I think you could legitimately have in CL is for what it might tell you about Chomsky’s own thought; which is fine if you are into that sort of thing, but a very different enterprise.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if Chomsky’s own responses to the criticisms have been less than praiseworthy. I guess that side of it just doesn’t interest me very much, and I’d be wary of overly focusing in on that. Not because it isn’t true, but because I get the feeling that these kind of discussions can get very ad hominem (and, dare I say, cliquey) very quickly. All that matters is whether CL is accurate or not. It isn’t, near enough as I can tell; and that’s that. The man himself is very much by-the-by.
Regarding the Miller elaboration, I will have to beg a bit of a delay in this. I’m currently living on campus and have access to only a fraction of my library, but I will look into this as soon as I can, and either post here or email you direct.
Best,
Mark
Dear Mark,
Thank you for your comment – and apologies for a misunderstanding: ‘history lecture’ referred to Pieter’s post, not to your comment, and my comment was in reply to what he said.
But since you addressed an issue let me reply. There are two reasons that make me disagree with you (that one should only focus on what CL actually was [some kind of ‘art-collecting activity by Chomsky] and forget about whether or not it has anything to do with actual history).
First, Chomsky decided to add the subtitle “A chapter in the HISTORY of rational thought”, and he criticized contemporary linguists harshly for ignoring the insights that had been achieved during the Cartesian period; he claimed his work “has led to a rediscovery of much that was WELL UNDERSTOOD in this [Cartesian, CB] period” [Chomsky, 1966/2009, 57]. So he clearly claimed he was doing history and, unsurprisingly, historians like Aarsleff got fooled by the quite explicit claims and treated the work as historical treatise.
Second, Chomsky criticizes contemporaries also harshly for using terminology in non standard ways: “description in these [=generalization, habit, conditioning, CB] terms is incorrect if these terms have anything like their technical meanings, and highly misleading otherwise” (Ibid., 65). Now if this is so, certainly calling the activity Chomsky engages in re-constructing a “history of linguistics” is either incorrect or highly misleading…
Still, had there been only the 1966 edition of CL, I might agree with you: the errors have been pointed out so why should we still care about water under this ancient bridge. Alas, there are 2 new editions [2002 had all French and German quotations translated into English, 2009 is essentially just a reprint]. Neither even so much as acknowledges that previous criticism was justified. Both have massive forewords by James McGilvray that repeat the allegations against contemporary linguists and add new ones [based to a large degree on similar distortions of actual work of computational and developmental language acquisition researchers as Chomsky’s original was of work by ‘Cartesians’].
Maybe the 1966 edition can be “excused” as the overly hasty work of a hyper-busy scholar who had ventured too far in an unfamiliar field. But after the flaws have been pointed out, and after he himself admitted that the Cartesians “may have been groping towards these notions, possibly without even realising what they were groping towards” [Chomsky, 1971], the 2009 edition still talks about Chomsky’s rediscovery of what was WELL UNDERSTOOD”. May I ask you: if you had a student who, in his first year handed in a term paper with as many errors as CL – would you award a passing grade? You seem a nice person, so maybe you would. Now, if the same student, after all the errors had been pointed out to him, handed in the same term paper as his master’s thesis – would you still say, aww well, those errors don’t ‘really’ matter?
I noticed that you also say that you are less than thrilled by Chomsky’s recent work, especially after the biolinguistic turn. I assume that even though Pieter is less impressed than you or me by Chomsky’s early work, he will agree that there is a dramatic difference in quality between Chomsky’s early work and his post 1995 publications. One can, of course, put all the blame for this development on Chomsky. But I have often wondered whether the ongoing acceptance of work that does not meet the criteria we apply to student term papers by the linguistic community [and beyond] has contributed to this decline. In other words, have we been doing Chomsky a favour by constantly ‘looking the other way’?
Hi Cristina,
Yes, sorry, that was my bad – I got confused by the embedding levels of the reply and thought the “lecture” thing was in direct response to my own reply.
With regard to your CL comments, I really don’t think we disagree. All of what you say seems to me covered by my “that’s that” remark. In your terms, CL would simply get a bad mark for inaccurate claims and poor understanding of the period. Those who cite it favourably as an insight into the times are just wrong; and that’s that.
My comment about approaching it from the perspective of Chomsky’s own thought was that I do think it had value from that perspective. So, if you were a “Chomsky scholar”, as I believe some are, CL would have some value for you as someone interested in his general thought and understanding where he was coming from. After all, a book can clearly have value beyond that intended by its author.
As for the Biolinguistics stuff, well, it’s partly that much of the work seems to be making claims way beyond what can be justified, partly a total lack of interest, a recognition of my own lack of competence in venturing into non-linguistic fields (keeping afloat in linguistics is hard enough as it is), partly a difficulty in making out what the claims are, and partly just the fact that I can’t see where you could get any substantive evidence for it all (as Richard Lewontin has pointed out in his 1988 The Evolution of Cognition piece – see Scarborough & Sternberg (eds) An Invitation to Cognitive Science, vol.4: Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues). But that is by-the-by here.
In terms of your last point, I simply don’t know; as I was basically saying, I try not to worry too much about the “sociology” of the field. At times, linguistics feels quite a cliquey discipline, with distinct tribes talking past each other rather than engaging with the substance of each other’s claims (obviously, this isn’t true across the board). But, regardless, there’s not that much you can do about other people’s responses, surely: you just make up your own mind, doing the best you can with what you’ve got. Occasionally, you might want to engage, and ideally get something back; but if not, you’ve said your piece.
Dear Mark,
no problem, (as you say, this is not the FoL blog, and besides, I find the embedding levels somewhat confusing myself 🙂 Since I have ‘said my piece’ I won’t elaborate further.
Instead, I offer, in response to an earlier [unrelated] inquiry, a [fairly recent] quote from Chomsky about how he recollects the relation between SS and LSLT. It ends with a remark about Lashley [I think you inquired about him?]. possibly Pieter feels inclined to comment?
“Information theory was taken to be a unifying concept for the behavioral sciences, along the lines of Warren Weaver’s essay in Shannon and Weaver’s famous monograph. Within the engineering professions, highly influential in these areas, it was a virtual dogma that the properties of language, maybe all human behavior, could be handled within the framework of Markov sources, in fact very elementary ones, not even utilizing the capacity of these simple automata to capture dependencies of arbitrary length. The restriction followed from the general commitment to associative learning, which excluded such dependencies. As an aside, my monograph Syntactic Structures in 1957 begins with observations on the inadequacy in principle of finite automata, hence Markovian sources, but only because it was essentially notes for courses at MIT, where their adequacy was taken for granted. For similar reasons, the monograph opens by posing the task of distinguishing grammatical from un- grammatical sentences, on the analogy of well-formedness in formal systems, then assumed to be an appropriate model for language. In the much longer and more elaborate unpublished monograph LSLT two years earlier, intended only for a few friends, there is no mention of finite automata, and a chapter is devoted to the reasons for rejecting any notion of well-formedness: the task of the theory of language is to generate sound–meaning relations fully, whatever the status of an expression, and in fact much important work then and since has had to do with expressions of intermediate status: the difference, say, between such deviant expressions as (1) and (2).
(1) *which book did they wonder why I wrote
(2) *which author did they wonder why wrote that book
Empty category principle (ECP) vs. subjacency violations, still not fully under- stood.
There were some prominent critics, like Karl Lashley, but his very important work on serial order in behavior, undermining prevailing associationist as- sumptions, was unknown, even at Harvard where he was a distinguished professor. Another sign of the tenor of the times. (Chomsky, 2009, 15)
And, as it goes, Chomsky does indeed reference Lashley at several points in the original 1959 critique of Skinner. For example,
“Lashley recognizes, as anyone must who seriously considers the data, that the composition and production of an utterance is not simply a matter of stringing together a sequence of responses under the control of outside stimulation and intraverbal association, and that the syntactic organization of an utterance is not something directly represented in any simple way in the physical structure of the utterance itself. A variety of observations lead him to conclude that syntactic structure is ‘a generalized pattern imposed on the specific acts as they occur’, and that ‘a consideration of the structure of the sentence and other motor sequences will show … that there are, behind the overtly expressed sequences, a multiplicity of integrative processes which can only be inferred from the final results of their activity’. He also comments on the great difficulty of determining the ‘selective mechanisms’ used in the actual construction of a particular utterance.” (p.55)
And here is Miller himself, acknowledging the influence of Chomsky on his own work:
“While experimental psychologists were rethinking the
definition of psychology, other important developments
were occurring elsewhere. Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics
was gaining popularity, Marvin Minsky and John
McCarthy were inventing artificial intelligence, and
Alan Newell and Herb Simon were using computers to
simulate cognitive processes. Finally, Chomsky was
single-handedly redefining linguistics.”
“In 1951, I apparently still hoped to gain scientific
respectability by swearing allegiance to behaviorism. Five
years later, inspired by such colleagues as Noam Chomsky
and Jerry Bruner, I had stopped pretending to be a
behaviorist. So I date the cognitive revolution in psychology to those years in the early 1950s.”
“I was therefore ready for Chomsky’s alternative to
Markov processes.”
“We assembled a group of bright young graduates and a few senior scholars who shared our interests. Peter Wason, Nelson Goodman and Noam Chomsky had the most influence on my thinking at that
time.”
“His 1956 paper contained the ideas that he
expanded a year later in his monograph,
Syntactic Structures, which initiated a cognitive revolution in
theoretical linguistics.”
(http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rit/geo/Miller.pdf)
This also might be of interest:
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k69509&pageid=icb.page334500&pageContentId=icb.pagecontent698262&view=watch.do&viewParam_entry=35358&state=maximize#a_icb_pagecontent698262
Hi Mark,
Good to have the Miller quotes (which were not new to me). On the few occasions I met Miller he also said more or less the same. But that is the story from Miller’s point of view. What I said is that Chomsky’s “move from instrumentalism to realism was brought about by his contacts with a small group of young Harvard psychologists, headed by Jerome Bruner and George Miller, who were in the process of creating the new cognitive science in opposition to behaviourism”, which is seeing things from Chomsky’s perspective. The psychologists were realists anyway and began having difficulties with behaviourism as a realist theory of the mind (or, rather, of whatever causes human behaviour). To oversimplify: Chomsky benefited from the psychologists’ realism. The psychologists benefited from Chomsky’s (Harris’s) algorithmic view of grammar. The two together gave realism in linguistics. In reality, of course, the matter is not as simple as that (as has been pointed out repeatedly by Jerry Fodor), since real hardware realism wants to see the implementation of linguistic competence and linguistic activity in actual brain structures and processes. Anyway, to falsify my statement regarding Chomsky’s (never really wholehearted) move to realism, one would have to show that he was already a realist BEFORE he met the angry young Harvard psychologists. I don’t think that can be upheld. The crucial year is 1956, when he finished his LSLT and when, in September of that year, he gave his presentation to a psychologists’ symposium at Harvard (see Randy Harris, 1993, p. 55, quoted in my “Western Linguistics” ca p. 250). In the text of the 1975 edition of LSLT one finds clear indications that Chomsky was an instrumentalist regarding the theory of grammar, but in the introduction to that 1975 edition Chomsky states repeatedly that “the issue was not discussed” but that he was already a realist at heart—an obvious falsity (one of many) given the text itself (for more commentary and documentation, see my “Western Linguistics”, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 250 ff.). This does not affect Miller’s statement that Chomsky’s input from the grammatical side was a great stimulus for the young anti-Skinner, anti-behaviourist psychologists at Harvard. Apparently, Chomsky opened up to realism between finishing his LSLT and his presentation in September 1956. And that can only have been the result of his contacts with the angry young psychologists. (Note that Chomsky’s 1956 paper “Three models for the description of language” was already heavily influenced by his contacts with Miller and other ‘computational’ psychologists.)
Thank you for your detailed response, Professor Seuren.
Perhaps I was mistaken, but my impression of your original response was that the historical portrait you were painting was one in which Chomsky was essentially reactive with the direction of influence being decidedly one way. To the extent he was original, it was because he took “X” and “Y”, the real achievements, and put them together to make “Z”.
My own response was to suggest that Chomsky was as much a driving force as his peers, and certainly more so when it came to the field of linguistics. You only have to read the breadth of linguistic work being done at that time to see the wide-eyed response to his work on Transformational Generative Grammar. None of which, of course, undermines the also brilliant work by what was a jaw-droppingly great bunch of next generation generative grammarians (e.g. Jackendoff, Ross, Postal, McCawley).
So, I wouldn’t doubt that his realism, such as it was, was cultivated in particularly conducive surroundings, or that he took much from peers like Bruner and Lashley and Miller. His work is certainly not ex nihilo. I would be surprised if anyone’s was. To make a comparison, Descartes is lauded for his sceptical philosophy, often pitched to me by my old Philosophy teachers as the father of modern philosophy. Yet, read in context (see Popkin’s History of Scepticism) it is clear that scepticism was very much in the air and a clear influence on Descartes work: in a sense, everyone was doing it. So he was doubtless highly influenced, but in itself this does not undermine the work itself (were I to think much of that work, of course!).
Which is to say of Chomsky that whatever influences he was drawing on are not such as to undermine his own contributions. Indeed, one of the impressive features of his early work is the way he drew on range of distinct disciplines (Psychology, Philosophy, Linguistics, Mathematics, &c) and yoking these together in a novel and intellectually exciting way. Much of that is evident in, for example, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, which is brimming with ideas and insights.
I would also query your remark “Chomsky benefited from the psychologists’ realism”. Whilst this is likely true, it doesn’t quite address Miller’s own comment, for example, that “Five
years later, inspired by such colleagues as Noam Chomsky
and Jerry Bruner, I had stopped pretending to be a
behaviorist”, which clearly puts Chomsky centre stage, if not as a soliloquiser. They seem to have been genuinely (and enviably) heady times for all concerned.
Further, I’d like to return to your original remarks about both Lashley and Harris. For example, you suggests that Chomsky used Lashley’s work without attribution in his 1959 Skinner demolition; but this isn’t true, and Lashley is clearly referenced at several points in the review. The same applies to Harris in that, if you read Chomsky’s early work, he references to Harris loom all over the place (e.g. his 1964 Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, which enthusiastically references Harris, along with Jakobson and Halle). So there doesn’t seem to have been any attempt on his part, at least in those days, to hide his influences.
I guess, overall, what I find slightly sad about discussions of Chomsky’s work is that he either has to definitely be a genius or definitely not be a genius; as opposed to a complex, nuanced and highly innovative linguist who has made substantial contributions to linguistic theory, and whose work should be appreciated as such.
Best,
Mark
Dear Mark,
It’s good to have a forceful devil’s advocate around, and I don’t feel like quibbling over details of when who influenced who and to what extent. I can concur with much of what you say about those heady days of the mid-fifties. In fact, I doubt that I would have been so anxious to debunk Chomsky if it had only been for those years. During that early period there was nothing particularly objectionable about Chomsky’s behaviour, not as far as we know anyway. It is what happened later that put up my hackles, starting with his ruthless and dishonest way, around 1970, of eliminating those second generation linguists, who did the actual analytical and descriptive work and who in total integrity and with enormous zeal and intelligence developed ideas that were opening up fantastic new horizons, but who he felt were threatening his superhuman position—all that without even the shadow of an academic argument. So I try to detect signs of that pernicious attitude in his early work, probably leaving him too little credit. But in his “Current Issues” of 1964 and in his “Aspects” of 1965 one does see that he begins to put himself above the rest of mankind. You will see that when you read carefully what he writes about levels of adequacy. There he distinguishes three adequacy levels: observational, descriptive and explanatory adequacy. Now the latter of these three is a bit strange: a description or a theory achieves explanatory adequacy “when it corresponds with reality”, or words to that effect. But that means that no-one will be able to say that that level is achieved until “reality” has been revealed before our eyes, when we no longer see ‘through a glass darkly’, as we all do in science. Yet Chomsky falls back on “explanatory adequacy” all over the place, from 1965 onward, thereby implicitly claiming a direct line to God (a point also repeatedly made by Geoff Pullum). At the time this struck me as a little worrying and later developments have proved me right: it wás worrying. So let’s wait for my further instalments.
I will return to the issue of inadequate referencing next week, when I am back at base and have access to my books.
Thank you both for a very interesting discussion. I had another look at Randy Harris’ “Linguistic Wars” [to refresh my ‘memory’ re the early years] and noticed a quote attributed to Chomsky that might be relevant to part of your discussion:
“I was told that my work would arouse much less antagonism if I didn’t always couple my presentation of transformational grammar with a sweeping attack on empiricists and behaviourists and on other linguists. A lot of kind older people who were well disposed toward me told me I should stick to my own work and leave other people alone. But that struck me as an anti-intellectual counsel.” [Chomsky, quoted by Harris, 1993, 51]
Randy does not give a date but it seems to concern the time around the late 1950s [maybe early 60s?]. I find this quote interesting for two reasons. First, Chomsky talks about ‘a lot of kind older people’ well disposed toward him. That sounds quite different from the more recent claims that he always had to battle against everyone and their dog and received no support in the beginning [I know Pieter has commented on this issue and also recall some commentary in Kibbee, D. (Ed.) (2010) Chomskyan (R)evolutions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins].
The second, even more remarkable point is that Chomsky calls the advice he got ‘anti-intellectual counsel’. What an odd thing to say. Yes, an intellectual ought to point out the flaws in the work of others [just that by now it seemingly has become a crime to do that with Chomsky’s work]. But going out of one’s way to antagonize others does not seem to be a trait in intellectuals should cultivate.
And, just a few pages later, Bruner is cited [commenting on the Skinner review] “Electric, Noam at his best, mercilessly out for the kill, daring, brilliant on the side of angels…in the same category as Saint George slaying the dragon” [Bruner, 1983, 159-60/Harris, 1993, 55]. This open admiration for the merciless attack [to which, as far as I know, Chomsky never objected] and Chomsky’s own words would indicate that even in the early years there was already an element in Chomsky’s contribution that had little to do with genius but is more reminiscent of the fanaticism of religious wars.
All of this seems to have been erased from Chomsky’s memory when he wrote in his unscholarly attack on Margaret Boden:
“Boden’s account of my “relentless” battle with behaviorism opens with a section entitled “Political agenda,” in which she asserts that I “saw [behaviorism] in political terms” and was driven by “political passion.” That is another serious charge, based as usual on zero evidence. The 1959 article has not even the remotest hint of any political concern. Boden’s evidence about a “political agenda” comes from a more general article on psychology and ideology many years later [11] that dealt in part with Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Since Skinner’s book had a very explicit “political agenda,” my review, like every other one, saw it “in political terms.” The charge that my linguistic work reflects a “political agenda” is repeated throughout, on the basis of her usual source: quotes from a hostile critic, backed by no evidence. Readers may judge for themselves the intent of these fabrications.” [Chomsky, 2007; http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20071011.htm ]
So I think I have to agree mostly with Pieter: looking critically at the early work of Chomsky does not imply one is out to deny he made any worthwhile – even ingenious contributions. But his contributions did not end in 1960, so the ‘nuancing’ has to be done ‘all the way’, i think. And, it probably is also worth reflecting on the fact that those who have criticized the work of Chomsky [based on careful analysis of this work] are often accused of harbouring hatred [usually no evidence is given that criticizing work of a quality that would be rejected by any serious researcher in other fields, is based on hatred of Chomsky] – when according to Chomsky anything short of a merciless attack [or to put it in contemporary Hornsteinian terms ‘evisceration’] is anti-intellectual.
Dear Cristina,
Yes, in that sense, what is good for the goose is most likely good for the gander.
A quick couple of points.
I would actually read the “anti-intellectual” line in a much simpler manner. Surely what an academic does is criticize where criticism is warranted; not to say something, when one feels there is a case to be made, for fear of antagonising, would genuinely be “anti-intellectual”. Note that you are assuming he went out of his way IN ORDER TO antagonise others, rather than just happening to antagonise them as an artefact of the discussion (imagine how Skinner must have felt when it was cogently pointed out to him that he was basically being an idiot; or Quine to realise that he has been talking claptrap for much of his working life). Academic criticism is hardly a nice thing to experience, to be pushed into feeling one is wrong; but the point is to value whatever it is we claim to be studying and so that takes prominence.
And the “antagonising” criticism still seems to me to be very much an ad hominen (well, he’s just a bit of a bastard, isn’t he?). Again all that matters is the work, the stuff, which should always be the focus, and there is surely much there to criticise rather than worrying about the man.
Moreover, note that the substance of Chomsky’s criticism of Boden is really that she is attempting to dismiss his work by politicising it, which if true is a rather sad state of affairs (haven’t read it, so couldn’t make a substantive claim either way): “Oh, well, we don’t have to take it seriously because it’s the kind of thing an anarchist would say” really doesn’t cut it.
That said, I think there is probably a case to be made for Chomsky not adequately responding to his critics, certainly these days, which often (though hardly always) get dismissed out of hand, rather than with more detailed and open engagement. That’s a distinctly unadmirable way to go about things, whoever does it.
Finally, and whilst I am looking forward to Professor Seuren’s comments on the calibre and provenance of the post-70s, I do feel it important to make sure that I salvage what seems to be the core of Chomsky’s work: which is simply that he is always pushing at fundamental questions. Really, the excitement of reading Chomsky is that he is someone who is always asking “look, what is this stuff. no. really. the fucking fuck is this stuff?!”, and that has almost always been a stimulating experience.
Dear Professor Seuren,
Agreed. I’ve found it an interesting and useful discussion; certainly a nice diversion from trying to adequately operationalize “t-units”. I can also hardly claim any particular moral high ground when it comes to referencing, since much of my earlier claims still warrant substantiating (bloody t-units!).
I’ll be very interested to hear your thoughts about the work post-70s. Hopefully I will have had the time to get some of my own referencing together.
Best wishes,
Mark
Mark, I think you misunderstood 2 points I made, so let me clarify. First, I said nowhere that Chomsky [or anyone] should suppress justified criticism out of fear to antagonize others [or hurt their feelings as we call it now]. But there is a difference between pointing out the flaws in someone’s argument and destroying the opponent [‘slaying the dragon’ in Bruner’s terminology]. The basic points made in ‘that review’ were probably correct [though there is some debate about Chomsky intentionally taking Skinner literally when the latter clearly was speaking metaphorically]. But did they have to be made in the way Chomsky did? Regardless of how you answer the question; the advice Chomsky rejected seems very similar to a suggestion you made earlier: say your piece [of criticism], hope the others listen, but then move on. Chomsky certainly had made his point in the review. Yet, in virtually every publication up to this day you find “sweeping attack[s] on empiricists and behaviourists and on other linguists”. By now Skinnerian behaviourists are a virtually extinct species, so in most cases it is unclear who the contemporary intellectual opponents are. We can agree to disagree but I think linguistics would be a massively more pleasant field had Chomsky taken the excellent advice he had been given in the way it was likely meant (after you have made your point of criticism and it has been heard [as Postal says, the generativists quickly had ‘won the war’ with the behaviourists], focus on your own work and show us why that is superior).
Second, without having read Boden’s books you cannot possibly know how far off the mark [no pun intended] Chomsky’s ‘evisceration’ is. He takes quotes out of context (you’d be quite surprised by what she actually wrote re ‘political agenda’), neglects to mention that Boden is giving him a lot of credit for his contributions to linguistics, and commits the very sins he is accusing her of: providing no textual evidence supporting some of his most severe criticisms, [or even page references for the quotes he gives], and using blatant ad hominem to dismiss her evidence [Boden cites more than one critic and that a person is allegedly ‘hostile’ does not turn what s/he says into a falsehood – Chomsky certainly was a ‘hostile critic’ of Skinner…]. It might be a good use of your leisure time to read Boden’s books [or at least the chapters about Chomsky’s contributions]. Like me you may find some points of disagreement. But, I predict you will find little in her work that justifies Chomsky’s “review”.
Hallo Mark,
I am now back at home, with my books at hand. I reread Chomsky’s 1959 review in Language of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, and found that you are completely right with regard to Karl Lashley. On the pages 55 to 58 of this review Lashley is referenced clearly and in the proper way. No-one can say that Chomsky is at fault here. So I was misled by a faulty memory, and should have consulted the original text before making my allegation. Mea culpa.
However, as regards the injustice done to Zellig Harris in Syntactic Structures of 1957, I believe I am one hundred percent right. I won’t elaborate on that now, but intend to devote a blog posting to that once the Chomsky series is finished (still two instalments to go). In that posting I will admit my mistake re Lashley and provide full documentation of the extent to which Harris is not mentioned in Syntactic Structures.
Best regards,
Pieter
The problem emerging from these discussions (“Chomsky’s character”) is complicated by the behavior of his followers over the years. Cults thrive on both leaders and their following. To keep everyone honest, it should be remembered that Paul Postal (and Pieter Seuren in The Netherlands) were among Chomsky’s earliest attack dogs, displaying the same antagonizing style as the master. That only changed as a result of the Generative Semantics trauma, which turned Chomsky’s erstwhile allies into bitter enemies. This is a way for the “rejected” disciples to continue the aggressive, antagonizing style from a –now– anti-Chomskyan perspective. Followers and ex-followers of Chomsky (like Pieter and myself) should do some honest soul searching once in a while, asking themselves why they were ever attracted to superman and related aggressive discourse in the first place. Believe it or not, it is possible to do linguistics on the basis of calm, rational discussion and without thinking about Chomsky all the time.
Hallo Jan,
I see your point and I concur in general terms. However, was I an early “attack dog” of Chomsky’s? I don’t think so. In the 1960s, I attacked Anton Reichling and Simon Dik, not because they weren’t Chomskyans but because of their own work, which was no good, and partly also because of the corrupt university politics going on at the time in Amsterdam. Later I attacked Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, again only because of their work. Did I attack Chomsky bitterly after the “Generative Semantics trauma”? My 1972 article “Autonomous versus semantic syntax”, in Foundations of Language 8.2: 237-265, is a composed and equanimous attempt at an intellectual assessment of the issue. In my book “Discourse Semantics” (Blackwell, Oxford 1985) Chomsky is not mentioned. In my book “Semantic Syntax” (Blackwell, Oxford 1996) Chomsky plays no significant role: it is just a (rather successful) technical elaboration of the kind of syntax that would implement the Generative Semantics programme—and it was totally ignored by the world of linguistics, which was then still mostly Chomsky-oriented. In my book “Western Linguistics” (Blackwell, Oxford 1998) Chomsky gets a great deal of attention, inevitably, for historical reasons. Only, I admit, my account of the same “Generative Semantics trauma” in that book shows clear signs of resentment. It wasn’t until my book “Chomsky’s Minimalism” (OUP, New York 2004) that I attacked Chomsky fiercely and openly—mainly because of the claptrap of his “minimalist program”. And the present blog postings are not so much a criticism as a retrospect—a very unfavourable one, that’s true. So I don’t think I am “thinking of Chomsky all the time”. The very explosion of reactions to my first Chomsky posting this week shows that Chomsky himself is a highly inflammatory issue. And that is a good thing: this way the issue will burn itself out.
Meanwhile, we should all heed your admonition to “do some honest soul searching once in a while, asking [our]selves why [we] were ever attracted to superman and related aggressive discourse in the first place.” I myself know exactly why I was “attracted to superman in the first place”. It was because it made grammar, and syntax in particular, empirically accessible in precise, mathematical terms and with full respect of the data—something unheard of in European linguistics (except in Hjelmslev’s “Glossematics”, which was, on the whole, not understood and ignored). I had been attracted to Bloomfield and Harris earlier for the very same reason. In March 1957 I read Harris’s 1951 book “Methods in Structural Linguistics” in its entire dreadful entirety and saw, at the end, how he formulated the principle of generative grammar, still in a dark and nontransparent terminology (I believe it is on p. 367 or thereabouts: I don’t have the book here). This was back in 1946, when the manuscript of that book was finished (see the Preface to the book). When I saw the transformational extension of that in Chomsky’s “Syntactic Structures” of 1957, I was understandably mesmerized (you, Jan, will remember how incredibly helpful my now deceased friend Rudy de Rijk was in making me understand the mathematical background to it all), but I didn’t know that Harris himself had already been advancing well on that track. It was a let-down to find out later what had really happened—the first of many subsequent let-downs with regard to Chomsky. So indeed, let’s do linguistics “on the basis of calm, rational discussion and without thinking about Chomsky all the time.” I fully agree, and it would do our dear discipline a whole lot of good. But first I have to finish my retrospect.
Hi Cristina,
Yes, that’s my preference, though you should of course make the best case you can. Whatever Chomsky’s preference is is really his concern.
Sometimes, though, it is entirely appropriate to, as it were, go for the throat. I think the Skinner example is a case in point here (not to mention Quine and Kripke!), a dominant and unproductive paradigm that needed a good kicking. Moreover, I think it partly needed a good shake because it relied so much on wider philosophical packaging (as in the close link with empiricism) which was more dogma than anything actually empirical. Dogmas are pretty resistant to civil criticism. Isn’t that, after all, the very point many people make about Chomsky nowadays?
I am also not sure I agree with your point about the contemporary opponents. You could, in fact, make a decent case for the old “enemy” (Behaviorism and Empiricism) being alive and well, having taken on the form of Connectionism, for example. Such wider philosophical assumptions are, I would suspect, more at work in our work than we would like to think. (see Russell, J. 2008. What is Language Development? Oxford:OUP). You might also, of course, add contemporary Pragmatists such as Tomasello to the massed ranks…
I will add Boden to my reading list, but it’s an ever-increasing list!
I had written this reply to Jan Koster, and then noticed that Pieter has by now responded [making at least in part a similar point – so apologies for some overlap and my inability to post this directly under Jan’s comment]
The point about Chomsky’s critics having questionable motives is of course not new. i reject the term ‘Chomsky’s former attack dogs’ for Postal and Seuren on the same grounds as i reject the attribution ‘Chomsky’s current attack dogs’ for say Pesetsky or Hornstein. We are talking in each case about competent linguists who defend their own views and not about the pets of someone else. Further, the accusation that Postal and Seuren are now attacking anything Chomsky just because it is said by Chomsky is simply not true. When I was criticized that I cited in my PhD thesis uncritically “hot-headed authors with a personal animus to Chomsky (e.g., Postal, Pullum, Sampson)”, i did some research in the matter. I do not rely on hear-say but on what the alleged hotheads have put in print. Here are a few samples [cited from my thesis]:
“I should like to dedicate this study to Noam Chomsky. The present work is highly critical of some of his recent grammatical proposals. But… none of this kind of work would ever have been possible without the many fundamental and groundbreaking insights and the radical reorientation of the goals and methods in linguistic inquiry which he has played such an enormous role in bringing about” (Postal, 1974b, p. iii)
Postal states here that he has some factual disagreements with Chomsky. But he also clearly acknowledges the positive impact of Chomsky’s groundbreaking work on linguistics. Similarly, another linguist who disagreed with Chomsky on several fundamental issues, stated, “…[my] book will strongly support Chomsky’s novel way of looking at language” (Sampson, 1975, p. 9).
The value of Chomsky’s initial contribution has been acknowledged by others linguists as well; both on a personal level: “My indebtedness to the work of Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT, Cambridge, Mass. will be evident on almost every page of this book” (Seuren, 2010/1968, p. x) and as contribution to the field: “Chomsky’s exposition of how in principle the syntax of a language can be brought within the purview of scientific linguistic description is a great positive contribution to the discipline” (Sampson, 1980, p. 134). Similar praise for Chomsky’s early contribution is expressed here: “Chomsky [1957]… issued what is still the finest and most cogent defense of the formalist position that linguistics has ever had…Never was it put better before or since” (Pullum, 1991, p. 50). It has been also acknowledged that Chomsky’s work had impact beyond linguistics: “[Chomsky’s work can help] developing psychology to incorporate the sophisticated formal insights that generative grammar has produced” (Pullum, 1972, p. 64). Others add that Chomsky’s early work also made a valuable contribution to computer modeling: “Chomsky’s influence on cognitive science was beneficial in many ways…He offered a vision of theoretical rigor that inspired linguists and non-linguists alike. And…his work encouraged others to attempt the computer modeling of mind” (Boden, 2006, p. 591).
So maybe we should accept that the individuals you name [and others you gained a similar “reputation”] are criticizing Chomsky not based on some ‘attack dog mentality’ [or out of ‘revenge’ as you seem to imply] but because his work, subject of their praise in the 1960s and even 1970s, is now deserving of criticism and because he has refused to respond to justified criticism for decades?
Dear Christina,
You don’t quite understand my intentions, so, perhaps I was not clear enough. One problem with our field, as I see it, is that it often showed the features of a cult. Among other things, cults are characterized by charismatic leaders and by a strong polarization between “friends” and “enemies”. Identification with the leader is an empowering experience that, in this case, led to aggressive and arrogant polemics against people of other persuasions. My first point was that in the early days, Paul Postal, Pieter and I were part of that and that some *mea culpa* is in order here.
My second point was that some of us, as ex-members of the club (narrowly defined), show signs of resentment and great anger. That’s obvious in the tone of Paul Postal’s more recent articles and Pieter’s work is not entirely free of that either (Pieter relativizes it, but does not deny it entirely either, if I understand him correctly). At this point, you conclude that I attack the motifs of critics rather than their arguments. Sorry to say, but that is nonsense because I have said nothing whatsoever about the quality of the critical arguments. Some are well-taken and others are not, as is how it goes with arguments. What I wanted to say is that resentment weakens the position of the critics, no matter the quality of the arguments. If a critic sounds resentful, his or her arguments remain unanswered and can easily be dismissed. So, I am advocating a more business-like, detached style of criticism, unless we want to continue preaching to the choir.
Dear Jan,
Thank you for the clarification. It seems I understood your comment a lot better than you give me credit for. But before making further assumptions let me ask you: How do you know what Paul’s or Pieter’s motives are? Did you ask them and they told you? If not, how can you be so sure that your interpretation is the only possible explanation? Even if you were correct [but see below], I am perplexed that you would say: “If a critic SOUNDS resentful, his or her arguments remain unanswered and can easily be dismissed.” Is not the content of the criticism what counts? If the criticism is justified, how could it be dismissed because it ‘sounds resentful’? The allegations re Marc Hauser’s academic misconduct [first brought forward by some of his students] ‘sounded resentful’ – did that stop psychologists from listening to them and acting once they were confirmed? Linguistics must be a strange field if you [pl] decide whether to listen to a criticism based on what it sounds like, not what its content is [And just out of curiosity; what should a criticism of “Science of Language” sound like? Is a critic expected to show admiration for an author who clearly shows no respect for his audience?]
Now, since you made specific claims about the frame of mind and motivation of Chomsky’s critics and named two, let me share some facts. I do not know Pieter that well but he has advised me twice not to spend so much time on researching Chomsky but pursuing other interests instead. Hardly the kind of advice someone obsessed with Chomsky would give. I have worked for about 3 years with Paul. His initial advice (repeated several times) was in essence the same as Pieter’s; don’t worry about Chomsky, there are better ways to spend your time. It took some persistence on my part to elicit his help for my dissertation [and subsequent projects]. His help was extremely valuable because of countless comments [concerning a criticism of Chomsky’s work] that read like “You are probably right but WHERE IS YOUR EVIDENCE? You cannot say this unless you find a quote to support your claim”. This has resulted in the elimination of many criticisms for which I could not provide the kind of evidence Paul requested. [I should also add that I have written a couple of papers [concerning Chomsky’s work] that have not been posted on LingBuzz for the sole reason that Paul convinced me not to, even though several other linguists thought they were just great]. In all this time I have detected no trace of the anger and resentment you are so sure of. If there is a way to get Paul angry I failed to discover it.
Now, even if the tone of Paul’s criticism is not angry or resentful, maybe it is ‘non-business like’. I am not really sure what you mean by that term, so maybe you can direct me to a criticism of Chomsky you consider ‘business like’ that had the desired effect on Chomsky? Margaret Boden did not sound the least angry or resentful to me, yet Chomsky’s reply hardly qualifies as scholarly response to justified criticism. So whatever Boden did was not right [by your standards] either. Ray Jackendoff published recently a few pieces critical of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program and evolutionary speculations. They do not sound angry or resentful to me. Yet, the only effect on Chomsky I could detect was that the number of invitations Ray got to talk at MIT went to zero and that his name almost entirely disappeared from the reference section of recent Chomsky publications (He is mentioned by Higginbotham and cited by Hauser in the 2009 volume ‘Of Minds and Language’ and discussed briefly by McGilvray in ‘Science of Language’. But Chomsky does not even mention [let alone address the criticism of] someone who has worked as long and as hard as Ray for ‘the cult’ [as you call it]).
So, besides the work you dismiss because of its tone [as you say yourself, the content is justified in at least some cases], there has been criticism of Chomsky that should have been responded to. Yet, it fell on equally deaf ears [or elicited a character assassination of the critic but zero factual reply to the content of the criticism]. So possibly the best way to educate me would be if you could publish a criticism of Chomsky’s recent work, that has the qualities to make the difference: is business-like and ‘detached’ AND elicits a calm reply from Chomsky. (I think we agree that there is no poverty of material that deserves criticism).
You may reply: we should just ignore Chomsky, do good work and, eventually, the good will prevail. This would be an excellent point, except Chomsky continues to be THE linguist for ‘the rest of us’ who are not professional linguists. We judge your field to a large degree by his work [After all if linguists think this man his the greatest genius ever, they must consider their own work vastly inferior]. Here is a sadly not untypical reaction of the well educated ‘lay-person’
“Not being a professional linguist, I can’t truly evaluate [Chomsky’s] lasting contributions. However, I think he will end up like Freud and Marx – influential, but at the end completely wrong and discarded in the dustbin of history. I am a physicist, and went to one of his lectures at MIT after having heard what a great intellect he was. WHAT A MORON. I have never heard two plus hours of such illogical verbal diarrhea in my life. One unsupported assumption piled upon another with no context for evaluating the possible truth of the statements nor whether the entire thesis was even plausible. Sorry – what passes for God-like in linguistics would be smoked to a charred nubbin in real science. I am sure he, and his antiquated ideas, will be undiscussed 100 years from now. Overrated in the extreme.” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/the-legacy-of-noam-chomsky.html
I distance myself from the tone. But I think the reaction of this academic should give you reason to pause. How many others feel like him after attending a talk by Chomsky? Do the many hard-working linguists not deserve better? How are the deans [or presidents or whatever their title] of the countless universities that continue to issue invitations to Chomsky to represent your field are supposed to know his work is well its ‘sell by’ date when the field remains largely in silence and shoots the few messengers who dare to say the obvious?
Christina,
Either I am a bad communicator or you are a bad listener. I am highly critical of Chomsky and writing as someone sympathetic to several (not all) of the points made by Paul Postal and Pieter. I am not at all saying that their motives, whatever they are, stand in the way of truth. You must confuse me with somebody else. Instead, I am making suggestions for a better common strategy, in order to also convince those that are still uncritically following the master to some degree but are sitting on the fence. I am only saying that a resentful TONE should be avoided in that process –I have nothing to say about MOTIVES. That being said, you must be the only person in the universe who does not see the anger in Paul’s writings. I am an admirer of his linguistic work and I am only criticizing the rhetoric here, not the arguments. I have maintained friendly relations with Pieter for decades and, apart from some Generative Semantics issues, we agree on many other things. Even if I am familiar with Pieter’s feelings, nowhere have I confused his motives with his arguments. So, can you, please, stop such insinuations!
Dear Pieter,
The events in Amsterdam you refer to (late 1960s) were interpreted in terms of moves in a “war” between Chomskyans and anti-Chomskyans. Like it or not, your own contributions were then seen as examples of the new, Chomsky-inspired aggressive arrogance. That’s how I remember it (I am only your reporter here). I agree, of course, with what you say about corrupt university politics in the Amsterdam of those days. As for resentment, see my reply to Christina.
As for more substantial matters, I disagree with the tendency I see here to take early generative grammar as the better part of it. By the 1970s, it became clear that everything that was revolutionary about it was a failure, with the exception of the shift from behaviorism to cognitivism (particularly the idea that forms of knowledge are selected from a restricted hypothesis space). Incidentally, in retrospect, I find the quibbles about Quine and Skinner somewhat provincial (gravitating around Harvard Square), because in Europe, I have never seen a living behaviorist. All kinds of other things were wrong in Europe (think about Heidegger), but Chomsky found an early ally in European ethology, as per his reference to Niko Tinbergen in the Skinner review of 1959. According to Tinbergen’s friend Konrad Lorenz, ethology was strongly influenced by Kant and therefore, one might add, very remote from behaviorism.
So, why was early generative grammar a failure? Consider its two revolutionary ideas: 1) sentence generation by recursive set enumeration, 2) transformationalism (with deep and surface structure). Transformationalism, which goes back to Harris’s “normalization” to kernel sentences, was dead as a doornail by the end of the 1970s. It is interesting how Chomsky tried to hang on to it with notions like “move alpha” and, in minimalism, “internal merge.” I find the arguments for these notions entirely unconvincing. In my opinion, they are (hopefully unconscious) attempts to mask the total failure of transformationalism. This is not a small thing, because transformationalism was the unique selling point of the revolution.
The failure of the algorithmic approach to sentence generation is an even more interesting case. At the beginning of Syntactic Structures (1957) it is clearly stated that a generative grammar is a device to generate a set of sentences of language L. This was worked out in the form of PS-rules (rules of formation) and transformational rules (with “strings underlying kernel sentences” as a precursor of what was later called “deep structure”). All over the world, people started to write grammars in this format and never was there any protest from Chomsky indicating that this is not what he had intended or that he distanced himself from any claim to fame. This is remarkable in the light of Chomsky’s later dismissal of SS as edited lecture notes adjusted to the interests of MIT engineers. This was part of the more general dismissal (since about 1986) of Syntactic Structure’s “set L” as a realistically speaking irrelevant form of “E-language”. The whole world was fooled by Syntactic Structures and for the real thing –“I-language”– one had to go to LSLT, of which Chomsky falsely claimed that nobody wanted to publish it in the 1950s. This is a *mer à boire* for critical historians, but the least that one could say is that the revolution would have been more honest if the later dismissal had been anticipated and received a few clarifying lines in Syntactic Structures!
What really killed the early algorithmic approach to sentence generation was the reinvention of the lexicon in Aspects (1965). Unlike the alphabets in Post’s production systems, the words of a natural language have a rich internal structure: subcategorization features and semantic features, among other things. PS-rules happened to mimic the subcategorization frames (cf. Saussure;s “syntagmatic relations”), thereby introducing a fatal redundancy. Since about 1970 the redundancy was generally recognized, phrase structure was projected from the lexicon, and soon nothing much was left of the revolutionary paradigm beyond X-bar theory. X-bar theory (including recursion) is just a variant of pre-Chomskyan *Wortgruppenlehre*, which meant the end of the revolution.
What remained, nevertheless, was a much energized field, addressing more exciting epistemological questions than before. All of this fed by a wealth of empirical material, as the field attracted, thanks to Chomsky no doubt, many more gifted people than before 1960. However, after 1980 the field gradually sunk into theoretical disarray, where revolutionary rhetoric was more and more replacing substance. I am eagerly looking forward to Pieter’s take on the later stages of our field.
Dear Jan,
I am terribly sorry I misunderstood you. Maybe you can help me to see where I went wrong. In your earlier post you said critics like Pieter and Paul ought to do some soul searching – this sounded like your were concerned about motives. If that is not the case, what would be the purpose of soul searching?
In the post I commented on you said:
“…some of us, as ex-members of the club (narrowly defined), show signs of resentment and great anger. That’s obvious in the tone of Paul Postal’s more recent articles and Pieter’s work is not entirely free of that either”
This again seems to suggests that the 3 of you are angry and show signs of it
Next you say: “At this point, you conclude that I attack the motifs of critics rather than their arguments. Sorry to say, but that is nonsense because I have said nothing whatsoever about the quality of the critical arguments.”
You tell me my suggestion is nonsense re attacking the arguments [because you say nothing about their quality]. You do not deny you attack the motifs and you continue:
… What I wanted to say is that resentment weakens the position of the critics, no matter the quality of the arguments.
Here you do not talk about perceived resentment but you attribute it to Paul and Pieter.
I am sorry but I do not know how from what you said [as opposed to what you might have meant] I should not have concluded you were concerned about motives. It would seem that if your [only?] concern was the mismatch of tone of writing and motive of the writer, you would not have recommended soul searching but maybe taking a writing class?
Now, given that, apparently I managed to misunderstand you profoundly based on what you wrote, do you not consider it at least possible, the same could happen to you? It is obviously difficult for you to understand that I do not see anger in Paul’s writing [sorry, I really don’t]. Possibly you perceive the listing of example after example of problematic work as sign of anger and think one example would have been enough? Possibly Paul writes in a way you would if you were extremely angry? But do you think it is impossible that you are wrong? Do you believe your own, undoubtedly very strong, perception justifies: “you must be THE ONLY PERSON IN THE UNIVERSE who does not see the anger in Paul’s writings”? Flattering as it is to be evaluated as so unique, on calm reflection your statement sounds more like the ‘tone of anger’ I understood you advocating to be eliminated from debates…
Again, I apologize for misunderstanding you. Can I, nevertheless, ask you again to please provide a sample of a criticism of Chomsky’s work that has the qualities you advocate? Thank you.
Thank you for the update, Professor Seuren. I appreciate your taking the time to check up the references, and will be very interested to hear your comments on the relationship with Harris.
[…] Linguistics, a Passing Fancy?, but you can go directly to Seuren’s first post: Chomsky in Retrospect – 1. What’s particularly interesting to me at this moment is that Chomsky had been associated […]