Day at Night: Noam Chomsky, author, lecturer, philosopher, and linguist

noam chomsky of one word a judge by his books is not one but two people there's no much um ski professor of linguistics probably the most famous expert in the world on the nature and structure of language whose contributions to this esoteric science have not only been original they've been revolutionary and then there's Noam Chomsky the polemicist and political philosopher whose articles and books on American political policy in general and the war in Vietnam in particular have aroused intellectuals and given support to both the anti-war and draft resistance movements both Noam Chomsky's a resident at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where his professor of modern languages and linguistics dr. Chomsky what is the relationship between thought and language you know I have the idea that when I think and when I dream I'm doing it in words does this mean that if a person didn't know a language he couldn't think abstract thoughts well I don't want to pretend to give any expert answer to that but on the basis of my own introspection I I'm sure I think in language but I'm also sure I I think in visual imagery and in other symbolic forms as well I would think that clearly if you don't have a language you can't express a very rich range of thought and I assume that that contributes although does that suggest that I think in words because the words are available if they weren't available of that would there would be a thought process that went on in other kind of symbols well I think for example you'd have no difficulty imagining a scene let's say and imagining something taking place in that scene even without a verbal comment but how would I deal with such things as truth and beauty and all the wonderful certainly would be so sharp limits on the range of thought if language were not available but I wouldn't go so far as to identify them mm-hmm what about the language in which a person does think I suppose it's the language which is most natural to him I asked one guest in what's language he dreamed and because he spoke six or seven languages and his answer why is it a dependent upon the character he was talking with used a language which was appropriate his language tied to does what can one think more fasoli in one language or another for example well I certainly there it's it's difficult and as an adult let's say to acquire another language so readily and with such facility that one can't really think in it fluently and easily there are rare individuals who can do this but children on the other hand probably can master quite a number of languages and deal with them all essentially as native languages think in them dream in them so on really almost be unconscious of what language they're using any given moment I suppose eternally I didn't grow up this way myself but friends who've grown up in multilingual environments say that as very young children they were even unaware that they were speaking different languages clearly they knew that you spoke one language in the street and another language your grandparents and another language to someone else but they didn't really identify them as different languages just different ways of speaking to print individually so a person who it - a person who is not multilingual and particularly one that didn't grow up in a multilingual family would almost seem that would be more difficult to think in another language because of its structure than it would to think in this language for example whose structure seems to be easier to work with well unless you're lucky enough to be able to acquire a language in a natural setting whatever that means exactly it's extremely difficult to really internalize it to make it really part of yourself in the way in which your native language is and I suspect there's little doubt in fact that that's just the property of human brain not that there's a way of developing a system which is really part of our thought and life and there is another way of acquiring a system that remains at a certain distance from us we can handle it intellectually but but there is a barrier to as you say internalizing it easily as a great barrier and in fact it apparently gets much more severe as and probably after I'd say in adolescence or later than that it's almost it's extremely difficult if not impossible to pick up a a new language as really an integrated internalized language does the the nature or the structure of language tell us anything about how the human mind works I think it tells us a good deal in fact my own feeling is that's for myself at least that's the major interest in the study of languages that I think this length use of language is plainly a very distinctive human property and one which is it is distinctive that is the fact we can teach a bird to say words means nothing and well you can teach I think the most interesting work recently has been with with chimpanzees who've been taught extensive symbolic systems as far as I can see these are complicated associational systems and I think very different from language in the way they function in my opinion though there's much controversy Asus's and I think by pursuing that kind of line of investigation in fact one may in fact discover and were precise detail what are those unique I'm sure they are unique properties of language that make it possible for a human child so readily to acquire the system of vast complexity and to use it is vastly complex incredibly complex and that does contribute immensely to the possibility of creative thought and expression in a way which is totally unique to human beings and I think that by looking at the detailed structure of language one can we have any almost incomparable way of gaining some insight into the specific nature of the human mind as a as a unique biological structure existing nowhere else as far as we know so what we discover will be transferable probably to other areas of learning beyond language well I think it's that going to be very interesting to try to in fact there are there's a good deal with can modern cognitive psychology so-called does try to use linguistic models and investigating other domains of intellectual competence and that's I think very fruitful and rewarding path to follow it's really difficult in other domains to gain such insight into the complexity of structure as in the case of language recently its language is not only uniquely human but it's also uniquely easy to study among the various kinds of intellectual achievements that a person develops for example it's you know you also have a very complicated theory of physical space and that you've developed somehow everything that has or a theory of human interaction or a theory of personality and so on but we don't externalize these as we external eyes there which is there to be seen measured therefore we have lots of possibilities of studying it and through studying it gaining I think considerable insight into into the nature of mental capacities and cognitive structures and the human electoral achievements and in general there are good many people specialists in the field as you know who believe that language is simply a matter of training that that a child can be trained to speak and that there's nothing unique about this you I know feel that there's something more than simply training why do you feel that there's something more to learning language than simply training well first of all it's it's worth mentioning that most overwhelmingly people learn language without training I mean if you simply immerse a child in a situation which language is spoken he acquires the system instead but is more than a response to the stimuli of the most person around him speaking well well the the the most obvious and sort of gross fact about language which shows that I think is the innovative creative character of it and every child is capable of the understanding and producing very complex structures which have no simple relationship no point-by-point relationship no no relationship on the basis of analogy let's say we be experienced that he's written generative creative structures of language just that that you can as we're talking we say new things which we may not have said before we hear new languages as we talk there's vital repetition and what we say well if you really were to to see how little repetition there is you can let's say take a book or a newspaper or a library for that matter and search for repetitions of phrases or sentences and so on they writ they occur but rarely so there are particular sub parts of language they read greetings or conventional utterances of one sort or another that do repeat frequently but these are incidentally often marginal in their structure for example a sentence like how do you do has a structure which is in fact unique it's not the structure of any English sentence the and we don't create new sentences of that type that's just a ritualized utterance but most of our linguistic interchange is in fact highly innovative and of course it's not just random I mean its innovative but somehow appropriate to situations it doesn't necessarily follow the rules that we're all taught in school of a subject in a predicate or a noun and a verb I mean I would have the impression that somehow in my schooling I was taught to do what it is that I do now well people have that impression but the reason is that the actual rules of language which certainly are not taught in school because in fact nobody even knows them for this they are totally unconscious I mean what you're taught in school is some relatively superficial set of generalizations about some of the products the important is it important to know that well I think it'd be important to know it but the the point that has to be stressed is that when first of all that everyone knows you know speaks the language very fluently in a very rich language before ever goes to school and furthermore even if you wanted to teach somebody the rules of language you wouldn't be able to do it because the rules are largely unknown we're just barely beginning to discover them it seems to us that there's no problem in speaking just as it seems to us but there's no problem and what's a walking but if we were tricked to try to design an automaton let's say that would walk or ride a bicycle or identify a person I mean for example you look at me from one point of view and if I turn my face you could still recognize yeah that's not so easy to do I mean we can do it because we have some special unknown capacities for a perceptual identification well in case of language 2 we have this whole totally unconscious set of intricate mechanisms made something's built into them to their system well I have no doubt that most of the richness of the structure of language is just the biological property the organism can't be can't be taught any more than you can be taught theft but it doesn't do they've got no way that you can x-ray it or or well put our finger on it at the moment neurophysiology is not in a state where one can detect the physical structures that underlie linguistic use I mean only rather gross things are known for example it's known that that language is controlled by the Dhamma that the brain has two hemispheres and language is controlled by one dominant hemisphere incidentally humans are as far as I know that's right anyone knows the only organism that has lateralization that has specialization of the two hemispheres apes don't for example and this is as is well known this is closely connected with language that and you know areas of the brain are known that have special relevance to various language functions but when you get into the detailed intricate structure of the system it's still a mystery fire mystery one might say the same about learning nobody knows anything about the neurology of learning either for them now one of the most controversial things that you've come up with is the fact that what you're saying is true not only of English but true of all languages the commonality that runs through all languages I would have guessed that some languages we're so rigidly structured that if you learned a set of 20 rules that would take care of all situations well see if what I just said before is true that is if a great deal of the structure of language is just the biological property that you bring to the learning situation not something that you acquire in it and if we further assume as is unquestionably the case that humans are not specifically adapted to learn one language or another that is there's no racial difference that makes it easier to free learn this language of that language or something of that sort from those two assumptions alone it follows that all languages are going to be essentially uniform in that part of their structure which is biologically determined just as there's a they're only gonna be certain the limitations in the kind of gate that you can use when you walk you can't fly you know I know human beings gonna fly we're all gonna walk we may walk in slightly different ways and these may be culturally determined in part and so on well I don't press the analogy too far there's more differentiation in language than that but still I think that there is simply a biologically determined rich framework which we can learn a lot about in that way I think we can find out a good deal about it and they're interesting theories about it that predispose us to acquire a system of great complexity of a very specific sort on the basis of a very slight familiarity very slight exposure to data and one of the most remarkable things about acquisition of language is that Whitledge in the child or for that matter an adult has had very few seconds in his lifetime and very and the total range of data available to him is about as small as compared with the with his ability to express himself and to produce and understand sentences and utterances and discourses as he does in his normal life and that again indicates that that there's a rich biologically determined structure which therefore must be uniform across languages not as far good to get back to your original point you know whether there are languages with a small number of rules that would suffice to explain everything certainly nothing of that sort is known I mean - insofar as languages have been carefully studied living languages at least they seem basically - they do differ you know one language is not another language but they don't differ differ as far as we know it's less creative aspect in all languages that is so that it's absolutely you know that's not just a human property I mean which is true of every language how did you become interested in linguistics I know you grew up in Philadelphia your father was a Hebrew scholar and it's been written about you that you proof read here's a book on medieval Hebrew grammar at the age of what 10 something like that did you have a kind of genetic fate that you were gonna go into to language as a result of it well I was undoubtedly influenced by my father's working medieval Hebrew grammar which I did was extremely interested in and read his work and so on it then lapsed for a while and I I actually came back to it in college from a totally different point of view did you and your father talked a good deal about this was it a matter of family conversation that well the nature of languages it was one of his he was this major scholarly interested is and I picked up a good deal about it so often a sudden tends to go in opposite direction rather than the same direction well I don't know if one would really call this the same direction I mean his my own interests in linguistics developed from a very rather different point of view and although there is convergence and I suppose influenced that's the still it's it's a different rather different area of linguistics I mean the kind of linguistics that I began to study in college had developed in virtual in a totally separate intellectual tradition from the one in which I had I thought I'd in which I had this kind of informal access was that useful incidentally to have had that informal background and studying technical scientific linguistics later on I think the merger of the two is for me at least very useful I gather your interest in college grew out of an association with one of your professors who apparently persuaded you not to leave college as a matter of fact yeah I was sort of planning to drop out of college considering it the mother bore by by about sophomore year I guess just not challenging enough well yeah I found nothing interesting in it really in them took one course after another and then killed my interest in one field after another and yes by the time I was a sophomore I had sort of had it until I met two zellig harris who turned out to be an outstanding linguist I met him in totally different contact nothing do with linguistics but I liked him was impressed with him there is the first really intellectually interesting person was the context in which you did meet him politics radical politics radical politics which is your other interest of course which was a major interest of my effect the overwhelming interest at that stage of my life I met him in that connection actually it had to do with left-wing what was then called Zionists I guess would now be called anti Zionist activities that I was deeply involved in and he was engaged in we had many he was very significant influence on my thinking in that area as well but through that contact I became gradually interested in the work he was doing he finally got back into it and ended up was the source of your rather revolutionary theory the one you've just been discussing up to the point where you enunciated this theory linguistics was a somewhat different study and when you did enunciate it it caused a considerable furor so it was a it was certainly an original approach do you know what set you off on that from the more conventional studying of linguistics that you had done at college well it's you know one can never be certain about that the other thing it I mean there were I think in part it was due to the fact that I approached language at once from a point of view which was related to what I had what I was more or less immersed in informally before I ever got to college the kind of linguistics that I had that I began to know about informally had to do largely with historical change and with efforts to explain the facts as they now exist on the basis of changes that had taken place through a sequence of historical stages the linguistics that I was studying in college was very anti explanatory it was very descriptive it was in a sense you might almost say quasi behavioristic it was interested in this is what happened but no explain just why well it was an effort to give accurate descriptive accounts of languages and it was often done in a very sophisticated way to me that seemed inadequate largely because I knew of how explanation would appear in a historical context and I was encouraged to try to develop an explanatory theory in part also by the fact that I was fortunate enough to be studying logic and mathematics and hence had some grasp of the kinds of formal systems that in fact were hired to attempt to give a an account of this ultimately of this creative ability understanding all these things together but you came to Harvard as a junior fellow and you did much you work at that time that one you did produce your first publications on this at 8:00 they weren't published yeah my first three certainly weren't accepted well in fact the first the only really extensive work that I did on it a long long book is fact its impress now but it was finished in 1955 and it couldn't be published at that time and it was turned down fact by publishers not unreasonably actually it was unrecognizable nobody could even tell what field it was in and I was unknown and those but what I did was well in fact it was several it was quite a few years I think before this work had much of an impact in the field and that was largely I think because of some other linguists who became interested in it didn't they I began to work in a man named Robert Lee's in particular or my colleague Morris Halley's MIG what you you teach linguistics at MIT what do you do to keep your students from falling into the same state of indifference that you did when you were in school well I don't know what to say about that I mean first of all I have to do mostly with graduate students who tend to be very highly motivated I do teach undergraduates but I teach them in other domains I teach an undergraduate course in social and political theory and there I think many of the problems of how one relates to intellectual work and an academic commitment and scholarly commitments Masson to arise and that's a very personal matter I I don't think there's any formula nor would I ever try to persuade someone to follow a particular path but something one has to work out from still and there are many difficult you said that your that your original association with zellig harris was in the area radical politics you are identified with the new left whenever that is you certainly have been an activist as well as a writer and anti-war anti Vietnam War and you've said that the course of history may be determined to a very significant degree by what the people of the United States will have learned from the catastrophe meaning of course the Vietnam War what in your opinion have we learned from this experience I would say very little unfortunately at the time I wrote that which I guess was seven or eight years ago what I had in mind was that there are really two different ways of looking at this catastrophe one can look at it as a failed venture a mistake something which was it was a mistake because it failed mistake because it failed but perfectly all right if it succeeded and I think it's probably fair to say that at least among intellectuals people who are who write and speak publicly they let a harsh on the intellectuals yeah I think that totally unprincipled than this I mean I think the dominant view is that if we had gotten away with it a little bit or I but we couldn't get away with it so therefore it was stupid in there but we should get out but you know worse than a crime it was wonder or something of that story now if that's all that's learned from it I think it will have no effect on future history it will have shown that there are limits to American imperialism and your opposition has been on moral grounds that it was wrong from the outset although you said your opposition came fifteen years too late well active opposition Jim fifteen years too late I think the time for active opposition should have been about nineteen fifty or a little later but I didn't become really actively engaged in opposing the war until about nineteen sixty four sixty five at that point the United States was very deeply involved in what if we were honest we would call aggression against South Vietnam that's in fact what it was but I had of course always been opposed to the war in fact I was opposed to the Korean War and may surprise you but it was even skeptical about the second world war are you a pacifist no not a pacifist are the identification for a war under certain circumstance yeah I can see justifications for a defensive war I could interact cutting it all together I think they're justifications for a war against Nazi Germany in the 40s but I felt I was a high school student at the time but felt then and have continued to feel and in fact wrote about it in this book that a good deal of the alleged justification for the war was totally beside the point and that we were engaged in the war for reasons other than opposition to fascism were concerned for people being sent the gas chambers and things of that kind in fact those motivations I think we're virtually non-existent nevertheless despite the hypocrisy and there was plenty I think that that war could have could be justified and I'm not a pacifist in the sense of someone who believes that it is in principle wrong ever and always to undertake violent acts I think you've got strong reason for it very strong the burden of proof is certainly on a person who wants to undertake the use of means of violence but I believe occasionally that burden Jim DeMint the way in which you describe the Vietnam War particularly in your own words is such that one would think that a good American I use it in quotation marks would totally reject the support of the Vietnam War it's it's in your words it's it stands for all that we're opposed to oppression of other peoples and so forth no either you would be wrong in your description well there has to be a reason why the American would accept a war of this sort which is it I guess you would never say was a wrong description of course it's just well vectored well first of all I'm not sure see we don't know what the population that as a whole accepts or rejects because they're inarticulate largely among the people who are articulate intellectuals people who speak and write articles and so on I think they've made it overwhelmingly clear that that they consider the question of right or wrong irrelevant in the case of the United States of course it's relevant if we're talking about some other country for example everyone would agree that it was wrong for the Russians to invade Czechoslovakia that is no one says well it was okay because they got away with it but those criteria are never applied to ourselves and that is totally unprincipled though typical of you know other societies act this way as well and it's that kind of lack of principle that I think has to be overcome and the ideology being about see ourselves as others see us or as we see others I suppose see ourselves by the principles that we occasionally enunciate to apply those to ourselves I want to ask you in 30 seconds whether if we do in fact Piper suing or expanding upon your studies to learn more about mens intelligence and how it functions well that contribute to a better life it may contribute to a better understanding of what the essential needs of human beings are and from that it's conceivable that someday we'll grow a concept of a of how a decent society ought to be organized I think thank you very much

Channel: cunytv75

Views: 37,820

Rating: 4.9718308 out of 5

Keywords: day at night james day cuny tv, Day At Night, James Day, CUNY TV, Noam Chomsky

Id: rH8SicnqSC4

Length: 27min 34sec (1654 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 24 2014