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September 11, 2009 Noam Chomsky 1 of 1 37:02 Keyser_Chomsky

KEYSER: My name is Jay Keyser. Today is September 11, ominous date. And Im interviewing Noam Chomsky. And Noam I wanted to ask you a question that actually was brought to me by Sylvain Bromberger, and Sylvain, and Morris and I often sit around and talk about the state of linguistics, and Sylvain made a comment which actually surprised me. He was saying that he thought that linguistics today was roughly at the same stage that physics was at the time of Kepler and Galileo, and Huygens, and he said, in order to back up that point he said look, you talk about movement and merge, but what does that mean in terms of the brain? He said its really just marks on a piece of paper, just the way youre forced to do it. And I wondered, he said in the same way that these guys, Galileo and company needed a Newton in order to make sense of their calculations. He thinks that thats what linguistics needs, and what do you think about that? CHOMSKY: Well, Im a little hesitant about analogies because the topics are so different, and the level of achievement is so different and so on, but theres something to it, and in fact Kepler and Galileo and Newton did, this is part of the Galilean revolution, tried to provide an explanatory basis for the theoretical analyses that they were giving of the tides and the motion of planets and so on. And Galileo pretty much formulated it. It was sharpened later in the century. It was essentially a mechanical model, the world as a machine. And by machine they meant in the common sense understanding of machine, had gears and levers and things pushing each other and so on. And they even had concrete models in mind, its worth remembering that at that period there was tremendous fascination with a comet. In fact someone was making the models that were adopted, digested, there were these incredible sounds in the royal palaces and so on. KEYSER: Yes, I remember that. CHOMSKY: There were complicated clocks. KEYSER: The ducks would eat and then would actually defecate and emit a foul smelling odor. CHOMSKY: Thats right. But there was the same, in fact its kind of like today in some respects, there was kind of an obsession and fascination with complex machines, and the Galilean concept later developed was, OK, the world is just a machine, just like the kind of complex machine that Jacques de Vaucanson develops except more complicated, and theyre made by a much greater master, you know perfect master. But thats the explanatory model. So yes, they did have a response to Sylvains comment. They actually had an explanatory basis. Trouble is, it was wrong. KEYSER: Uh-huh. Right.

CHOMSKY: And Galileo already recognized that somethings wrong here. Toward the end of his days he said, I think were never going to understand, explain anything because I cannot construct mechanical models to deal with say, the tides and the planetary motions and so on. So he kind of left in despair. Descartes came along and felt that he had created a mechanical model. Descartes, what people read in philosophy classes is not what Descartes was interested in. And his main work was his physics, then called philosophy, philosophy meant physics. And his -KEYSER: Is this, this business of psychophysical parallelism? CHOMSKY: Well he ran into a problem. Thought that he could develop a pure mechanical model for everything that happened in the world, in an organic world, or most of everything, or most of everything that happened with animals, even for most of humans up to sensation in fact. But when he considered certain aspects of humans, and strikingly the most dramatic for him was the way language is used. He said theres no way to construct a mechanical model for this, the way and whats nowadays sometimes called the creative use of language. Which he observed, the ability of every person to produce and understand and indefinite number of expressions new to the person, that to do it with, not in ways that were appropriate to situations but not caused by the situations. So its not like a reflex response. And as far as anyone can tell independent of internal stimuli. So theres some capacity which is true action generally, human action he thought, but is most striking in the case of language. And these expressions that we produce, so sentences that producing others may not have thought of them but they can understand them, and they know that they could have expressed that thought the same way. This capacity, he argued, is beyond the range of a machine. And thats where the mind, body dualism comes from. Theres machines that deal with everything, and in the case of humans, all the way up to sensation and certain aspects of perception, but it hits a limit. And the creative use of language was his most striking example of the limit. Actually that led to interesting work in the 17th century by his disciples, trying to develop experimental tests that would determine whether some other creature who looks like us is in fact, has this special capacity with the mind, and so you try this experiment and that experiment, and the conclusion was, well if they pass every experiment we can devise, it would be unreasonable for us not to conclude that they have a mind like ours. And these experiments are straight science, theyre like a litmus test for acidity. Theres a property that he claimed was in the world, namely mind, and we have to see if some entity, another creature has it, so we do tests.

Now thats a little bit like whats now called the Turing test, except much more reasonable. The Turing test makes absolutely no sense, but Turing was quite aware of that. Theres a brief paper on the subject that opens by saying that the questions whether machines think is too meaningless to deserve discussion. And then he goes on to talk about other things thats led to a huge and in my view [a most?] [complex? pointless?] industry. But the 17th century analogues made perfectly good sense. And there was a conception of the world based on machines, and thats the basis for explanation that Sylvains talking about. And it ran into the limit, something was [probably?] beyond that limit, so there we have to develop another principle. And then you do experiments to see where that principle holds. And of course Descartes wrestled with the idea of how these two substances in his metaphysics interacted. Is it through the pineal gland, is it some other way? Thats what the huge debates about philosophy of mind were about. Well, it collapsed. Newton showed it didnt work. He showed that the world is not a machine. And so there is action at a distance which an artisan cannot construct. An artisan cannot construct something in which two things that have no connection between them affect one another. But Newtons discoveries were that the Cartesian mechanics didnt work, and the fact that no mechanics would work, and he had to have some other kind of system which had [abstract?] courses in it. Now Newton regarded this as an absolute absurdity, and he said no person with reasonable scientific intelligence can contemplate this [but for a moment?]. And he spent most of the rest of his life trying to get around it. And the great scientists of his day like Christian Huygens and Leibnitz and others just mocked it. They said, hes reintroducing occult ideas like the neoscholastics, you know sympathies, antipathies, everything that science was trying to get away from. And Newtons answer which was important was to concede that he was introducing mystical ideas, but theyre not like the occult ideas of the neoscholastics, because he had a mathematical theory from which he could make predictions, making use of these ideas. So theres no basis for it. The basis had been kicked out from under them. But of course machines [can?] work, nevertheless they were, it was an explanatory model. And thats where science went on from there. And then actually if you look at the details, for centuries great scientists tried to show that there is some mechanical basis, but finally recognized thats not the way to look at it. You have to, what in fact it meant was lowering the levels of expectation for science. An explanation will be intelligible to us, Galileo and Newton thought, if we can get a mechanical model for it. But it was finally recognized we cant get mechanical models. That means the world is not intelligible to us, so we do the best we can. We get the best kinds of theories we can and try to explain things as best as we can, recognizing that there are ultimate mysteries.

In fact David Hume has a history of England, a section on Newton who describes this, one of the greatest thinkers the world has ever seen, but who, and he said Newtons most significant legacy to us is to show that there mysteries of nature which are beyond our comprehension. And he didnt mean the nature of the meaning of life, he meant the motion of the planets. The rolling of a ball down an incline plane, and so. KEYSER: So do you think that -CHOMSKY: So I dont think in a sense that the, the comment is correct that theres no basis known, neural basis known for the theoretical constructions. But in a sense thats the nature of science. KEYSER: Yes. Now this case is a little different because I think theres every reason to expect that there will be a neural basis, versus as Newton showed theres not going to be a machine, a mechanical basis. So this is not a mystery of the Humean type, its just lack of knowledge. However, there may be mysteries there, I mean -KEYSER: I understand. CHOMSKY: -- what Descartes called, or what has been called the creative aspect of language use, these Cartesian observations. And no one has any idea what the physical basis of that might be. KEYSER: Why do you think that theres reason, that there might be reason to believe that therell be some neural basis for movement, or merge, or traces? CHOMSKY: Theres no reason to doubt it. And if theres no reason to doubt it, look for it. Just as Galileo, it was perfectly sensible for Galileo to look for mechanical explanations. KEYSER: Do you have any idea what it might look like? CHOMSKY: Not really. Even for insects the neural basis for what they do is essentially unknown. KEYSER: Yes. CHOMSKY: Theyre not trivial questions.

KEYSER: Yes. CHOMSKY: In the case of humans its especially difficult because of ethical reasons, we dont permit ourselves to do the kinds of experiments that would shed light on it. So if you did invasive experiments, even if its, say the visual system. And we know a lot about the human visual system, and the neural basis and which cells do which things and so on and so forth. But the reason is because we allow ourselves to torture cats and monkeys, and they have approximately the same visual system, so if you do experiments with, highly invasive experiments with monkeys and kittens, youd learn a lot about how it works. We assume that the human visual system must be more or less the same. As far as we know it is, but theres no other organism to work on in the case language. Itsin all of its essential characteristicsits a unique human possession. And you cant do controlled experiments. Like for example, theres a lot of, if were to investigate whats called poverty of stimulus, its just a name for everything that happens in growth and development. And its given a name in the case of language, just for mystical reasons as, holds for everything. So the fact that a human grows a mammalian visual system but not an insect visual system, is not determined by the visual environment. The fact that we have arms and not wings doesnt depend on the food we eat you know, and so on. So yes, theres a huge gap between the external information if you like it, general sense coming in, and the way the organism develops. And thats true of language like everything else. Since language is looked at kind of mystically for cultural reasons, this is considered a problem, in fact its not a problem, its just same language just like everything else. But theres a lot of study of it, so like exactly what kind of data is required to, for the infant to gain the capacity that were now using. Well there would be ways of studying this. Namely raise children in isolation. Or with deprived stimulation, or you know, were not going to do that. So there are natural experiments, but no controlled experiments. So many questions that could be settled with straightforward experiments just cant be carried out. And the same with the neurological basis. Instead of doing invasive experimentation on the brain, trying to figure out what particular cells do and so on, whats done is, you know, fMRI and studying things that you can look at from the outside without invasive procedures. So its much harder to do than for insects. But even for insects the answers are not known. These are not trivial scientific questions. Insects do incredible things. KEYSER: Yes. CHOMSKY: And the neural basis for it, even the neural basis for the most elementary calculations that enter into insect behavior is only really speculating. Randy Gallistel is one, famous neuroscientist whos written about this, these are hard topics. And the expectation that were going to have a neural account

for thought, language and so on is, its just not realistic. Even in physics. If questions get too complicated, physicists dont even try to solve them. They give them to chemists. And so if some molecule is too big for a physicist to deal with, he tells the chemist that thats your problem. And if it gets too complicated for the chemist, they give it to the biologist. And too complicated for the biologist, they give it to the historian. But thats just the problem. So part of the reason why the hard sciences make deep discoveries is that they artificially restrict the domain of inquiry. And incidentally thats another contribution of Galileo, I mean sort of understood before. But he sharpened the understanding that if you want to gain any insight into some system you dont have to move away from phenomena and towards abstraction, towards idealization. So instead of studying a leaf blowing in the wind, study a ball rolling down a frictionless plane, even though that doesnt exist. KEYSER: Right. CHOMSKY: That way maybe you can gain some understanding that you can use for complicated topics. Well to be concrete, suppose that you wanted to predict whats going on outside the window. The only way to do it would be brute force. Take thousands of video tapes of whatevers happening outside the window, do some statistical analysis, and probably get a pretty fair prediction of whats going to happen next. You dont go to the physics department. Now they cant say a thing about whats going on outside the window. Hilary Putnam once made an analogy. He said a [cramped?] quantum physicist cant explain why a round peg doesnt fit into a square hole. Its just way too complicated. But if you want to understand phenomena theres only two ways, one is brute force which would be some weak correlations, the rest just abstract away from them and study ideal cases. And thats called the Galilean style, attribute more reality to the ideal case even in a nonexistent system like a frictionless plane, than we do to the phenomena that are just too complicated because theres too many variables and too many interacting sort of things. And thats quite important for the study of language. In fact its a live battle in the study of language. Should we just study the massive phenomena and use brute force methods to try to model them somehow. Or should we abstract away from the complex phenomenon, and try to find ideal cases that well be able to investigate and maybe find some principles. In fact, thats the first step depicts the notion of language. And theres an intuitive common sense notion of language in which for example, Chinese is a language, and romance isnt a language. But the factors that enter into that are historical colors on that, the continuity of empires. Its not a linguistic distinction. KEYSER: Right. CHOMSKY: And if you try to study that, youre studying all of human life. So you wont find anything.

KEYSER: I was struck by your comment that if you eat one thing youll grow arms; if you eat another youd grow wings. Theres a book that has recently appeared by Richard Wrangham about the role of food in evolution, and his argument is that theres a correlation between brain size and gut size, and the smaller the gut the larger the brain. And thats precisely because of what kind of food you eat. CHOMSKY: Its because he claims, because of cooking. KEYSER: Right. CHOMSKY: What he claims is that around, its kind of speculative, but that roughly two million years ago you get the emergence of a new kind of protohuman fossil, Homo erectus. KEYSER: Right. CHOMSAKY: And it started having a much smaller digestive system from the mouth and the jaw, to the gut, and everything else. And in fact its true if you look at a monkey, you know huge jaw, big stomach and so on and so forth. And he said well speculation is well this happened because humans started eating cooked food, which is much easier to digest, you get much more energy from it and so on. So they didnt, you could evolve to a creature which had a much smaller digestive system and the kind of spare energy that was around, could go into the developing of your brain. KEYSER: Yes. What do you think about explanations like that? CHOMSKY: Well its plausible. Like, and like most evolutionary explanations its a kind of a, you try to make a plausible construction of what might have happened. And that you could give a real explanation in terms of natural selection is no trivial matter. KEYSER: Yes. CHOMSKY: And in fact there arent many cases. It makes sense, nobody doubts that natural selection takes place, but to try to nail it down is not easy. And in fact its now known that its only one of many factors in evolution. Like about maybe, I forgot the numbers, but I think close to half of our genes, something very high, come from whats sometimes called transposition. They come from other species, in fact even thats true even of the cells and mitochondria, it's kind of like a bacteria, and it gets into the cell. So theres all kind of complicated processes going on in evolution of which natural selection is truly one. And these explanations are kind of plausible, well stories of more or less plausibility. And theres

some complications with this one too, because apparently theres no archeological evidence for the use of fire that early. The archeological evidence is several hundreds of thousands of years later. It does seem to make sense. KEYSER: The explanation rang a bell with me. I think Charles Lamb wrote an essay about how a pig got caught in a hut that caught on fire, and that was his explanation for how he acquired it. CHOMSKY: [Humanately?]. Thats pretty much the same thing that hes saying. KEYSER: Yes. [LAUGHTER] But tell me now, am I wrong, my feeling was that several decades ago you thought that evolutionary explanations were really part of the mystery would never have really existed, was something we could never understand. But now it seems to me that youre more willing to consider the possibility of making progress there, and Im just wondering A, is that true, and if it is true, whats caused the change? CHOMSKY: Well first of all, you dont have to cite me. There are very distinguished evolutionary biologists that take this position. KEYSER: Yes. CHOMSKY: Richard Lewontin was best known case. KEYSER: Richard -CHOMSKY: Lewontin. KEYSER: Oh sure. CHOMSKY: In his, in the MIT Invitation to Cognitive Sciences, now a four-volume book in its latest edition. KEYSER: Yes, hes really good. CHOMSKY: He had the article on evolution of cognition. In the first edition, it was fifteen or so years ago, he wrote a very pessimistic article explaining why he thought were never going to learn anything about the evolution of cognition, not because it was a mystery in Humes sense, in Humes sense, but

because the methods of inquiry were such that we just wouldnt be able to do it. So if we had tape recordings of what happened two million years ago, OK maybe we could do it. Its not a Newtonian mystery, just a lack of ability. In the second edition he repeats the article and then he adds an epilogue in which he says, well the editors asked me if I could say something a little more upbeat. And he said, you know Id like to, but facts are facts. [LAUGHTER] Thats the way it looked to me too, but kind of for technical reasons they shouldn't be. Contemporary linguistics which sort of took off from the 50s, the first thing it tried to do was to, it tried to satisfy several conditions. First of all it took a narrow view of language, not Chinese, that's hopeless, but whatever happens to be in your brain and my brain, and in fact even idealizing away from that because all of us have many different dialects in our head. So idealized down to a kind of an ideal pure system hoping to account for the complications in other ways as in all the sciences. And then see if you can give first an account of that which will meet several conditions. First has to be descriptively adequate, just has to get the facts straight. Secondly it has to meet a condition of explanatory adequacy, namely showing how an infant given the data it has can attain this system, so then you have a kind, if you could do that which would attribute something to the nature of the infant, genetic endowment, youd have a kind of a, youd have a certain level of explanation of what the person actually does. And that they do it because they have this internal system, they have that internal system because the genetic endowment interacting with the environment led to the growth of this system. So thats the pattern of an explanation. Those are the basic questions, a lot of other ones. But they ran into an immediate contradiction which was a hard problem still by no means solved. But the problem is that if you try to get a descriptively adequate account of a language, it is extremely intricate. It has a lot of complexities, a lot of special rules, special properties, stipulations, different languages look different from one another but Ken Hale's work, fundamental work for a long time, seemed to show that languages differed in such fundamental properties it was called configurationality. KEYSER: Right. CHOMSKY: And do they have structures of a hierarchy, or are they just kind of words organized with other principles acting on the phrases. And that looks like an enormous difference, and there are many other such cases. As you long as you have, as the descriptions are complex and varied, youre not going to be able to deal with the problem of explanatory adequacy. KEYSER: Right. CHOMSKY: Because for explanatory adequacy you have to show theyre all basically the same. And the differences are kind of minor modifications on a kind of fixed mold. So there is kind of a tension that

made it impossible even to meet these conditions let alone to go onto the question of evolution. Because evolution has to do with the question of how this fixed innate element evolved. And if you cant figure out what that is, you cant raise the question of evolution in any serious way. Over time its impossible to a considerable extent to resolve the tension, so it takes a configurationality. Very significant subtle work by quite a number of people showed that it was apparently an illusion, and if you looked more [particularly at?] Kens main case was Walbiri which looked like the extreme case of nonconfigurationality. The work by him and his students, Julie Legate for one, showed that in fact if you looked at the languages the right way, and looked at subtle enough aspects of it you found that it really was configuration, and it even had movement rules and the kind of rules you find elsewhere. And the same was found about Japanese and other languages that were thought to be non-configuration. And the same happened with other properties. So this gradual progress towards showing that the apparent variety and diversity and complexity is superficial, and that in fact there is a fundamental uniformity. Actually the same things been happening in biology. So if you go back, say not very long, a couple of decades you could read by famous, by leading highly reputable biologists that the variety of life forms is so extreme that each case has to be studied on its own without preconceptions. KEYSER: Yes. CHOMSKY: And that was the same for human language. Joseph's famous comment back in the 1950's in his collection of studies on structural linguistics was that he said we have to accept what he called the Boasian perspective. That each language is an object to be studied on its own without preconceptions because they vary so much, and each is complex in so many ways. In neither case that couldn't be true in biology, and it couldn't be true in language, but it looked like that's what the facts were showing. And in both fields, and sort of in parallel and even with some interaction things have moved towards a view where you can see that a large part of the diversity is really superficial. In the case of biological organisms, it's advanced to the point where one reputable biologist, Michael Sherman, has argued that there's in fact a universal genome, that at the prior to the Cambrian explosion a genome was formed, that carried life forms as a minor variant on it, that's 500 million years, but then that's kind of an extreme position but it's not regarded as absurd. And there's enough known of conservation of genes and deep homologies, and master genes and so on to make it look sort of reasonable. Now there has been a development somewhere in parallel in the study of language to the point where we can now speculate there really is something like one language, and that there are minor modifications. KEYSER: And there's one life form.

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CHOMSKY: And maybe one life form. You know, things are moving in that direction. Actually these are old debates, so in biology it goes back to the famous controversy between, around 1830 between, what's his name, I can't remember the names, but two famous biologists, Cuvier and Geoffroy, one of whom argued that life forms are essentially the same, and the others are different. And it was assumed that the diversity won, and Darwin seemed to be leading in that direction, but now it looks like the pendulum is swinging back the other way. KEYSER: There's this book by a man named Carroll. CHOMSKY: Sean Carroll. KEYSER: Yes. CHOMSKY: That's called The Evo Revolution. And that's kind of a review of a lot of the work that's showing how things are tending towards uniformity. KEYSER: [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Noam, I think we're going to have to wrap it up. CHOMSKY: [OVERLAPPING VOICES] just a word about evolution. KEYSER: Oh yes. CHOMSKY: If it's the case that we can, to the extent that we can show that there are basic principles that account for a substantial part of the nature of language, and that those principles are given to the organism, we can then ask a deeper question of what's given to the organism, how much is genetic, and how much is laws of nature? Of course remember what's given kind of a priori from the organism's point view is two categories. What's in the genes, and what nature tells you has to happen. So in the biological case, when cells divide, they divide into spheres, not cubes. And that's not because there's a gene that says divide into spheres, that's because that's the way physics works. You want to minimize energy, you'll divide into spheres. KEYSER: Absolutely. CHOMSKY: And it turns out there's quite a lot like that. KEYSER: [OVERLAPPING VOICES] [Like always good to know?].

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CHOMSKY: And the same appeared, apparently is true is language. So there are principles of efficient computation which are probably laws of nature, which is polled for nature generally. And a lot of recent work has, here I'm expressing a minority view, but I think a lot of recent work has indicated that nontrivial parts of the language are attributable just to the functioning of principles of efficient computation. Well that pares away what has to be explained by an illusion head count. It reduces it to the extent that you can show that laws of nature end or we have less to account for in dealing with evolution. And by now I think you can make some reasonable guesses. KEYSER: I've always been struck by the fact that the simplest organism is, at the cell level, always takes the shape of a kind of a sphere. And if you take a sphere and you put two holes in it, you get a tube. And that's what we are. CHOMSKY: That's what we are. KEYSER: We're tubes. So either a sphere or a tube. CHOMSKY: Oh by now it's gone well beyond that. There's quite exciting work by Chris Cherniak, a mathematical biologist in Maryland who's attempting to show and has arguments that the sort of a wiring diagram, the structure, the way neurons are laid out, neuromaps are laid out, for very simple organisms like nematodes, is optimal. That it's the best way you can do it, like if an engineer were trying to do it he would try to reach that ideal but probably couldn't make it. And he goes on to argue that that's also the reason in this tube why the brain is always at one end, and not in the middle, which is a universal property of animals. He tries to argue that that's optimal minimization of wiring basically. KEYSER: So to bring this to an end, unfortunately we have to, it sounds like you're pretty optimistic about the field and where it's going. CHOMSKY: Partially. On the other hand there are countercurrents which I think are very harmful. So if you look at the amount of money spent in the field, or the number of people working on things, I think you find that most of them are trying to figure out what's going on outside the window by taking videotapes and doing statistical analysis of it. The fundamentally Galilean concept that you have to try to discover ideal cases and see if you can develop principles that'll then ramify to account for the world, that's a very much a minority position.

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KEYSER: I think it's probably human nature that we want to look out the window, and you have to fight it. CHOMSKY: Maybe. You can also get more money from the NSF. It's human nature too. KEYSER: That's human nature too. [LAUGHTER] Thank you very much, this has been great. [END]

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