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John R. Searle
1.
Almost three decades ago I reviewed in these pages a striking development in the study
of language that I called “Chomsky’s Revolution in Linguistics.” 1 After such a long
time it would seem appropriate to assess the results of the revolution. This article is not
by itself such an assessment, because to do an adequate job one would require more
knowledge of what happened in linguistics in these years than I have, and certainly
more than is exhibited by Chomsky’s new book. But this much at least we can say.
Judged by the objectives stated in the original manifestoes, the revolution has not
succeeded. Something else may have succeeded, or may eventually succeed, but the
goals of the original revolution have been altered and in a sense abandoned. I think
Chomsky would say that this shows not a failure of the original project but a
redefinition of its goals in ways dictated by new discoveries, and that such redefinitions
are typical of ongoing scientific research projects.
The research project of the revolution was to work out for each natural language a set
of syntactical rules that could “generate” all the sentences of that language. The sense in
which the rules could generate the infinite number of sentences of the language is that
any speaker, or even a machine, that followed the rules would produce sentences of the
language, and if the rules are complete, could produce the potentially infinite number
of its sentences. The rules require no interpretation and they do more than just generate
patterns. Applied mechanically, they are capable of generating the infinite number of
sentences of the language.
Syntax was regarded as the heart of linguistics and the project was supposed to
transform linguistics into a rigorous science. A “grammar,” in the technical sense used
by linguists, is a theory of a language, and such theories were called “generative
grammars.” Stated informally, some rules of English are that a sentence can be
composed of a noun phrase plus a verb phrase, that a verb phrase can consist of a verb
plus a noun phrase and that a noun phrase can be composed of a “determiner” plus a
noun, that nouns can be “woman,” “man,” “ball,” “chair”…; verbs can be “see,” “hit,”
“throw”…; determiners can be “the,” “a”…. Such rules can be represented formally in
the theory as a set of instructions to rewrite a symbol on the left side as the symbols on
the right side. Thus,
S ! NP + VP
VP ! V + NP
NP ! Det + N
Det ! a, the…
This small fragment of an English grammar would be able to generate, for example,
the sentence
Such rules are sometimes called “rewrite rules” or “phrase structure rules” because they
determine the elementary phrase structure of the sentence. Chomsky argued that such
rules are inadequate to account for the complexities of actual human languages like
English, because some sentences require that a rule apply to an element not just in
virtue of its form, but in virtue of how it got that form, the history of how it was
derived. Thus, for example, in the sentence
even though the words are not ambiguous, the sentence as a whole is syntactically
ambiguous depending on whether “chicken” is the subject or the object of “eat.” The
sentence can mean either the chicken is ready to eat something, or the chicken is ready
for something to eat it. To account for this ambiguity it seems, Chomsky argued, that
we have to suppose that the sentence is the surface expression of two different
underlying sentences. The sentence is the result of applying rules that transform two
different underlying, or deep, structures. Such rules are called transformational rules,
and Chomsky’s version of generative grammar was often called “transformational
grammar” because of the argument for the necessity of transformational rules. In the
classical versions of the theory, the phrase structure rules determined the “deep
structure” of the sentence, the bearer of meaning; the transformational rules converted
deep structure into surface structure, something that could be uttered. In the example of
the chicken above, there is one surface structure, the sentence I have quoted, and two
deep structures, one active, one passive.
It was a beautiful theory. But the effort to obtain sets of such rules that could generate
all and only the sentences of a natural language failed. Why? I don’t know, though I
will suggest some explanations later. But seen from outside a striking feature of the
failure is that in Chomsky’s later work even the apparently most well-substantiated
rules, such as the rule for forming passive sentences from active sentences, have been
quietly given up. The relation between “John loves Mary” and “Mary is loved by
John” seemed elegantly explained by a transformational rule that would convert the
first into the second. Apparently nobody thinks that anymore.
Another feature of the early days was the conviction that human beings were born with
an innate brain capacity to acquire natural human languages. This traditional view—it
goes back at least to the seventeenth century—seemed inescapable, given that a normal
infant will acquire a remarkably complex system of rules at a very early age with no
systematic teaching and on the basis of impoverished and even defective stimuli. Small
children pick up a highly competent knowledge of a language even though they get no
formal instruction and the utterances they hear are limited and often not even
grammatical.
Just as a child does not follow a rule of “Universal Visual Grammar” that prohibits it
from seeing the infrared or ultraviolet parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, so the
child does not follow rules of Universal Linguistic Grammar that prohibit it from
acquiring certain sorts of languages but not others. The possibilities of vision and
language are already built into the structure of the brain and the rest of the nervous
system. Chomsky attempted to answer my arguments in a number of places, including
the book under review. But in the case of UG he has given up the idea that there are
rules of universal grammar.
In his recent book, as well as in other works (most importantly, The Minimalist
Program 2 ), Chomsky advances the following, much more radical, conception of
language: the infant is indeed born with an innate language faculty, but it is not made
up of any set of rules; rather it is an organ in the brain that operates according to certain
principles. This organ is no longer thought of as a device for acquiring language,
because in an important sense it does not so much acquire as produce any possible
human language in an appropriate environment. Chomsky writes,
We can think of the initial state of the faculty of language as a fixed network
connected to a switch box; the network is constituted of the principles of
language, while the switches are the options to be determined by experience.
When the switches are set one way, we have Swahili; when they are set another
way, we have Japanese. Each possible human language is identified as a particular
setting of the switches—a setting of parameters, in technical terminology. If the
research program succeeds, we should be able literally to deduce Swahili from
one choice of settings, Japanese from another, and so on through the languages
that humans can acquire. [my italics]
According to this view, the possibility of all human languages is already in the human
brain before birth. The child does not learn English, French, or Chinese; rather, its
experiences of English set the switches for English and out comes English. Languages
are neither learned nor acquired. In an important sense they are already in the
“mind/brain” at birth.
This “Principles and Parameters” approach, as it has been called, rejected the
concept of rule and grammatical construction entirely: there are no rules for
forming relative clauses in Hindi, verb phrases in Swahili, passives in Japanese,
and so on. The familiar grammatical constructions are taken to be taxonomic
artifacts, useful for informal description perhaps but with no theoretical standing.
They have something like the status of “terrestrial mammal” or “household pet.”
What about words and their meanings? Well, Chomsky speculates, maybe all possible
concepts are also in the brain and what we call learning the meaning of a word is really
just learning a label for a concept we have always had. “However surprising the
conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and
that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open
few other possibilities.” So, to take two examples discussed by Chomsky, on this view
every human child that ever lived had at birth the concepts of “bureaucrat” and
“carburetor”; indeed children born to the cave men twenty thousand years ago had
these concepts, and all of us would still have them even if carburetors had never been
invented and bureaucrats had never existed. In the face of the sheer implausibility of
this claim Chomsky likes to appeal to the example of the immune system. Nature has
provided us with the capacity to produce a huge stock, literally millions, of antibodies,
even antibodies against antigens that have been artificially synthesized. So why not a
huge stock of innate concepts, ready for any word we could conceivably invent? On
this view, the only part of language that depends on stored conventions is the sounds
of the words used to label the innate concepts.
2.
To people who take the study of language seriously I think all this ought to seem more
disquieting than it does to Chomsky. For all those years he was telling us that we had
overwhelming evidence that speakers of a language were following certain types of
rules, and that we even had evidence about which rules they were following. What
happened to all that evidence? If the rules are all thrown out, what was the “evidence”
evidence for?
Let us start with Chomsky’s idea of a neutral Martian scientist arriving on Earth and
finding our languages an object of study for “natural science.” The point of imagining
a Martian, he said, is to free us of our local prejudices. The scientist will find that we all
speak the same language, except “at the margins,” and that the I-language with its
variations is the proper object of study for natural science. Does that sound right to
you? It doesn’t to me. First, any such scientist has to have a language of her, his, or its
own. No language, no science. So the scientist’s first step is to compare our languages
with her own. How are they like and unlike Martian? The only way I can imagine the
scientist doing this is to imagine that she learns one of our languages, say English. She
does that as anyone, scientist or otherwise, would, by figuring out how to translate her
expressions into English and English expressions into Martian.
Let us suppose she is so good at it that soon she is bilingual. Then she will discover an
interesting fact. Knowledge of English is not much use to her when she is confronted
with monolingual Finnish speakers. For example she will eventually find out that the
Finnish single-word sentence, “Juoksentelisinkohan,” appropriately pronounced,
translates into English as “I wonder if I should run around a little bit without a
particular destination.” So to learn Finnish she has to start all over again. And the same
sequence repeats itself when she tries to converse in Arabic, Swahili, or Japanese. Is
there really only one language on earth? Not in her experience.
Worse yet, she will soon discover that language is not an object of “natural” science
and could not be. The distinction, rough as it is, between the so-called “natural”
sciences and the “social” sciences is based on a more fundamental distinction in
ontology, between those features of the world that exist independently of human
attitudes, like force, mass, gravitational attraction, and photosynthesis, on the one hand,
and, on the other, those whose existence depends on human attitudes, like money,
property, marriage, and government. There is a distinction, to put it in very simple
terms, between those features of the world that are observer-independent and those that
are observer-relative or observer-dependent. Natural sciences like physics, chemistry,
and biology are about features of nature that exist regardless of what we think; and
social sciences like economics, political science, and sociology are about features of the
world that are what they are because we think that is what they are.
Where, then, do language and linguistics fit in? I think it is obvious that a group of
letters or sounds can be called a word or a sentence of English or Finnish only relative
to the attitudes of English and Finnish speakers. You can see this quite clearly in the
case of linguistic changes. Pick up a text of Chaucer and you will find sentences that
are no longer a part of English, though they once were, and you can produce English
sentences that were not part of Chaucerian English. Of course, Chomsky is right to
insist that “English” is not a well-defined notion, that the word has all sorts of
looseness both now and historically. I am a native English speaker, yet I cannot
understand some currently spoken dialects of English. All the same, the point remains:
a group of letters or sounds is a sentence, or a word, or other element of a language
only relative to some set of users of the language.
The point has to be stated precisely. There is indeed an object of study for natural
science, the human brain with its specific language components. But the actual
languages that humans learn and speak are not in that way natural objects. They are
creations of human beings. Analogously humans have a natural capacity to socialize
and form social groups with other humans. But the actual social organizations they
create, such as governments and corporations, are not natural, observer- independent
phenomena, they are human creations and have an observer- dependent existence. As
their speakers develop or disappear, languages change or die out.
There is a deep reason why languages like English or Finnish must be rule-governed.
The sentences and other elements only exist as part of the language because we regard
them as such. Language is in an important sense a matter of convention. But if so,
there must be some principles by which we regard some strings as sentences of English
and others not. Being a sentence of English is not a natural fact like being a mountain
or a waterfall; it is relative to the observer. Functional phenomena that are relative to an
observer divide into two kinds, those like knives, chairs, and tables, which can
function as such because of their physical structure, and those like money, language,
and government, which function the way they do because we assign to them a certain
status and with that status a function that can only be performed because of the
collective acceptance of the entities as having a certain status and with that status a
function. 5
The second class, the status functions, require systems of rules (conventions, accepted
procedures, principles, etc.). Human languages, like money, property, marriage,
baseball games, and government, are constituted by certain sorts of rules that, years
ago, I baptized “constitutive rules.” 6 Such rules do not merely regulate existing
activities, like the rules of driving, but they create the very possibility of such activities.
There are no purely physical properties that are sufficient to determine all and only
sentences of English (or money, baseball, US congressmen, married couples, or private
property). But why not, since all these are physical phenomena? Because the physical
phenomena satisfy these descriptions only relative to some set of conventions and of
people’s attitudes operating within the conventions. Something is money, property, a
sentence of English, etc., only relative to the attitudes people have within systems of
rules. That language is constituted by rules cannot be legitimately denied, as now
Chomsky tries to do, on the theoretical ground that it is hard to square with a certain
conception of the innate language faculty.
But why did the attempt by linguists to get descriptively and explanatorily adequate
generative grammars fail? I said I did not know, but here is one hypothesis. They
wanted rules of a very unrealistic kind. They wanted rules for sentence formation that
could be stated without any reference to the meanings of words or sentences and they
wanted rules that generated sentences algorithmically, i.e., according to a set of
precisely statable steps, without any need for interpretation and without any “other
things being equal” conditions. The model was based on the formation rules for
artificially created logical and mathematical systems. But human social rules are almost
never like that. The history of the passive transformation is illustrative. You can
formulate a transformational rule that converts sentences of the form
into
Thus it converts
into
or
or
Why not? I think any child recognizes that the passive does not work in these cases
because of the meanings of the words. Resembling and weighing are not things that
can be done by someone to someone or something in the way that loving, seeing,
hitting, and desiring can be. So you can passivize sentences with “loves,” “sees,”
“hits,” and “desires” but you can’t turn sentences into the passive voice with “weighs”
and “resembles.” Perhaps in other languages sentences with verbs synonymous to these
permit conversion into the passive, but not in English. The point is not that I have
given a correct explanation, but rather that this sort of explanation was not permissible
in generative grammar. The proponents of generative grammar required explanations
using only syntactical rules—no meanings allowed—operating on syntactical entities.
The correct picture seems to me this. There are indeed innate mechanisms in the human
brain for acquiring and using language. That is why we have languages and our close
relatives, the chimpanzees, do not. The mechanisms work according to certain
principles, like any other organ. But it is not a matter of rules, and learning a language
is not a matter of following rules of Universal Grammar, any more than seeing
something is a matter of following rules of Universal Visual Grammar.
There are indeed rules of specific languages, but the effort to find generative grammars
for these languages is bound to fail, precisely because the aim was to obtain rigorous,
strict, exceptionless rules of the sort that you get for constructing formal systems such
as the predicate calculus, or axiomatic set theory, and such rules make no reference to
what the entities were to be used for. The rules were to be stated without any reference
to the meanings or the uses of the sentences generated. Natural human phenomena
almost never have rules like that. There will often be exceptions to a rule; there will
typically be semantic considerations in the formulation and application of the rule; and
there will in general be an “other things being equal” clause understood in the
application of the rule.
When Chomsky suggests that the concepts expressed by words like “carburetor” and
“bureaucrat” must be innately known by every child, and that learning the meanings of
the words is just a matter of applying labels to concepts the child already has, you
know that something has gone radically wrong. He has a very unrealistic conception of
learning. It is as if he supposed that learning the meanings of these words would have
to consist in having one’s nerve endings stimulated by passing bureaucrats and
carburetors, and because there is no way such passing stimuli could ever give us the
meanings of these words, it looks like the meanings must be innate.
This argument is called the argument from the “poverty of the stimulus” and it occurs
over and over in Chomsky’s work. But a more realistic conception is the following: in
order to understand, for example, the word “bureaucrat,” a child has to be introduced
to a culture, a culture that includes governments, bureaus, departments, powers,
employment, and a host of other things. A child does not learn a set of discrete
concepts, but learns to master a culture, and once that culture is mastered, it is not
difficult for him to understand the word “bureaucrat.” Similar remarks could be made
about “carburetor.” This concept only makes sense within the context of some
knowledge of internal combustion engines. Once you have the basic understanding of
how such engines work it is not hard to understand that a carburetor is a device for
mixing air and fuel.
3.
I do not wish to give the impression that Chomsky’s entire book is concerned with
these issues. On the contrary, most of the book is concerned with debates about current
issues in philosophy. I will discuss one of them, the question of unconscious rules of
human cognition, which is related to the question of language. A standard explanatory
device in Chomsky’s earlier work, and in cognitive science in general, is to claim that
we are unconsciously following rules. The importance of this can hardly be
overestimated. Once we have the possibility of explaining particular forms of human
behavior as following rules, we have a very rich explanatory apparatus that differs
dramatically from the explanatory apparatus of the natural sciences. When we say we
are following rules, we are accepting the notion of mental causation and the attendant
notions of rationality and existence of norms.
So, for example, if we explain my driving behavior by saying that I am following the
rule “Drive on the right- hand side of the road,” even when I am following this rule
unconsciously, we have a mode of explanation that is quite different from saying that
the car follows the rule “Force equals mass times acceleration.” Both “rules” describe
what is happening, but only the first actually is a case of following a rule. The content
of the rule does not just describe what is happening but plays a part in making it
happen. In order to make an explanation of behavior as following rules work, we need
to be able to distinguish cases which are guided by a rule from cases which are merely
described by a rule. One condition of rule-guided explanations is that the rules have to
be the sorts of things that one could actually follow. If you spell out those conditions,
you find that unconscious rules have to be the sort of things that at least could be
conscious. So, for example, I can follow the rule “Drive on the right” unconsciously,
but it is the sort of rule I could bring to consciousness. For a number of reasons rules
may be unconscious, and in some cases, such as brain damage or repression, a person
may be unable to bring the rule to consciousness. But an unconscious rule has to have
the kind of content which could be consciously understood, interpreted, followed, or
violated.
Chomsky’s rules do not meet that condition. For him the rules of language are
“computational” rules, but what exactly is the definition of computation, according to
which these rules are computational? On the standard definition of computation, we are
to think of computations as reducing to vast sets of zeroes and ones zapping through
the computer. Is that how we are to think of unconscious rule-following on
Chomsky’s model? Lots of zeroes and ones in the child’s head? That can hardly be
right because the zeroes and ones are in the mind of the programmer. In actual
commercial computers, the only reality independent of the observer consists of rapid—
millions per second—transitions in complex electrical circuits. Commercial computers
don’t literally follow rules because they do not have the mental apparatus necessary for
rule-following. We program the computers to behave automatically as if they were
following rules, and thus we can get the same results as human rule-following
behavior.
Chomsky has now given up on the idea that there are rules of particular languages, but
the difficulty about computation remains. This is an absolutely crucial point at issue
and I want to make it completely clear. Chomsky insists that the study of language is a
branch of natural science and the key notion in his new conception of language is
computation. On his current view, a language consists of a lexicon plus computations.
But my objection to this is that computation is not a notion of natural science like
force, mass, or photosynthesis. Computation is an abstract mathematical notion that we
have found ways to implement in hardware. As such it is entirely relative to the
observer. And so defined, in this observer-relative sense, any system whatever can be
described as performing computations. The stone falling off a cliff computes the
function “The distance I fall has to equal half the square of gravity multiplied by the
function “The distance I fall has to equal half the square of gravity multiplied by the
time I fall”: S = 1/2(gt2). The water flowing over a dam at the rate of one gallon per
second computes the addition function 2 + 2 = 4 every four seconds, and so on with
everything else in the world. Unlike, say, electrical charge, computation is not
discovered in nature, rather it is assigned to physical processes. Natural processes can
be interpreted or described computationally. In this observer-relative sense there cannot
be a natural science of computation.
In any case, as I noted above, Chomsky has now given up on the idea that Universal
Grammar is a matter of unconscious rule-following. But he also dismisses the idea that
real human languages are governed by rules. That, I believe, cannot be right.
5. For more on this point see John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (Free
Press, 1995). ↩
6. See "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is,'" Philosophical Review , Vol. 73 (January 1964),
pp. 43–58. ↩
7. Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind , Vol. 59 (1950), pp.
433–460. ↩
8. I wish to thank Stephen Neale, Barry Smith, and Dagmar Searle for criticisms of an
earlier version of this article. ↩