Noam Chomsky interview on Language and Knowledge (1977)

Noam Chomsky has made two international reputations in unrelated or apparently unrelated fields the widest is as one of the national leaders of American resistance to the Vietnam War the deepest is as a professor of linguistics who before he was 40 years old had transformed the nature of his subject he's something of a joker in the pack as far as philosophy is concerned many professional philosophers would insist quite sincerely that he isn't a philosopher at all that linguistics is simply a different discipline albeit a neighboring one well I'm not going to argue about that it's little more than a question of definition anyway the fact is he was trained as a philosopher his work has enormous implications for philosophy and in the writings of philosophers today I should say his name probably occurs as often as that of any living person the central point really is this if one problem more than another has dominated much of twentieth-century philosophy it's that of the relationship between language and the world Vidkun Stein to give no more than a single instance was in thrall to this problem throughout his life well now along comes the linguist Chomsky and argues that the way we actually acquire the use of language and therefore its relationship to experience and therefore its relationship to the world are radically different from what the anglo-saxon tradition in philosophy has always maintained he pursed he first put his ideas forward in the late 1950s as part of the critique of behavioral psychology it's not too unfair to say that the behavioral psychologists attended to talk as if the human individual came into the world as an undifferentiated lump of malleable stuff which was then molded and shaped by its environment through processes of stimulus and response they said penalty and reward the reinforcement of rewarding responses and the association of ideas the individual developed and learned including the learning of language now Chomsky argued that this could not possibly explain how virtually all human beings regardless of their intelligence do something as fantastically difficult as master the use of a language even when they're not deliberately taught it as most people probably aren't and they do this at such an extraordinary young age and in such an extraordinary short space of time he argued that for this to happen at all we must be genetically pre-programmed to do it and therefore that all human languages must have in common a basic structure that corresponds to this pre programming now this also has some very important negative implications the chief of these is that anything that can't be accommodated to this structure anything so to speak that can't be caught in the mesh of this particular network is linguistically inexpressible and unintelligible to us so the general principles common to all languages set vital limits to our capacity to understand the world and communicate with each other put like that it sounds like a translation into linguistic terms of some of the basic ideas of Immanuel Kant and I must say that's always how its looked to me but even if so it's Chomsky has carried it out and no one else and it's proved an enormous Lee stimulating and fruitful thing to do a professor Chomsky one of the difficulties about discussing your ideas is that in an obvious sense they are hybrid in part their linguistics in part their philosophy and in part their biology and in fact you yourself first put them forward in what was really a dispute with biologists with with behavioral psychologists how did you come to start at that starting point well the reason was the that this picture of the nature of language and the way in which language is acquired was of such enormous prevalence over quite a wide spectrum of thought including not simply psychology but but philosophy and linguistics as well the view that was dominant say at the time when I was a student 2530 years ago the dominant picture of language was that it is essentially a system of habits or skills or dispositions to act and that it is acquired through extensive training over training through repetition perhaps through procedures of induction or generalization or Association and that one's knowledge one's system of the system of habits the one developed simply grows through accretion incrementally as experience is subjected to these processes of generalization and analogy and in fact this this picture which plainly is a factual assumption was presented as if it were virtually an a priori truth which it certainly is not I mean it's obviously not necessary that language is a system of that sort or that it's acquired and anything like that way one thing that you pointed out which is in fact very obvious once it's pointed out is that most people probably aren't actually taught language at all that is to say that most parents don't give any systematic instruction of any kind to their children yet the children nevertheless learn well I wouldn't want to even go beyond that I think it's certainly the case that languages in only the most marginal sense is taught and the teaching is in no sense essential to the acquisition of language but in another in a certain sense I think we might even go on to say that language isn't even learned at least if by learning we mean any process that has those characteristics that are generally associated with learning for example the process of the the the characteristics that I mentioned it seems to me if we want a reasonable metaphor we should talk about growth language seems to me to grow in the mind rather in the way that familiar physical systems of the body grow we begin our interchange with the world with our mind in a certain genetically determined state and through an interaction with experience with an environment this state changes until it reaches a mature state which we call a state of knowledge of language this sequence of changes from the genetically determined initial state to the final state in which we really have a quite complex system of mental computations this series of changes seem to me very much analogous to growth of organs and in fact I think it's not inappropriate to regard the mind as a system of mental organs the language faculty being one each of a structure determined by para biological endowment with interactions also generally determined by the nature of our biological endowment growing through the triggering effect of experience which shapes and articulates the organs as they develop in the individual through the relevant period of his life so as I said it seems to me that the not only is it wrong to think of languages being taught but it's at least very misleading to think of it as being learned if we carry with the notion learning the association's that generally go along with it in other words we are pre-programmed to learn a language in the same way as we are pre-programmed to grow arms and legs and reach puberty in our early teens and all sorts of other sometimes delayed processes of growth yes and reaching puberty is a good example since that's a case of biological development of auto genetic development that's plainly pre-programmed in its essence but takes place after birth and in fact we might say that something that even death for that matter is genetically determined that is it's we are biologically constructed so that at a certain time our life processes stop but and in fact the fact that some development takes place after the organism has begun an independent existence in the world has nothing to say it tells us nothing about whether it's a genetically determined development or not now one thing that follows from your view is that if if we set out as you have done in the course of your professional life to investigate the language Faculty of human beings then what you are investigating is as much a biophysical system I mean something that actually exists in matter in stuff in human tissue as would be the case if you were investigating human vision or human digestion or the circulation of the blood well I think that that's certainly true in at least we believe it to be true in principle we are not at a stage now where in the study of the neural basis for higher cognitive processes where it's possible to identify the physical structures that are involved in these operations correspondingly the the actual study of this organ remains at an abstract level that is we can try to investigate the principles by which it functions but there's very little to say right now about the ways in which these principles are physically realized in structures of the brain quite correspondingly one might study the visual system let's say as was done for a very long period knowing say nothing about how it's physically how the principles that we are led to attribute to this system the let's say analyzing mechanisms that we are led to attribute to the system knowing nothing about how these may be physically realized in our neural structures and I think it's quite appropriate to think of the contemporary study of language as being analogous to a study of a vision at a period when it's remained impossible technically or through the limitations of understanding technique and so on it was impossible to determine the actual physical elements that entered into these systems which could be studied only in an abstract fashion there seems to be a special difficulty yeah I mean we accept the fact that I can't by introspection however hard I try say observe the workings of my own liver I can't observe it in the act of secreting bile or whatever it does and similarly presumably I can't observe these these language formation faculties of mine at work but nevertheless there is an important difference because if we want to if we want to investigate the workings of the liver we can observe other people's I mean you can bits of live peoples or the whole of dead people's or animals livers you can experiment with different inputs and see what difference they make to the output and so on and so forth but we can't do that with animals as far as their language using faculty is concerned because they haven't got which using faculties now doesn't that shut off from us what is in fact the chief mode of investigation with all the other biological faculties that we have it does very definitely set a stop a very natural mode of Investigation that is we are not for ethical reasons we do not conduct intrusive experiments with human beings so for example there are very natural modes of investigation that suggests themselves at once suppose for example I propose that language has some general property and that every human language must have this property as a matter of biological necessity if we were dealing with a defenseless organism that we were allowed to study say the way we study monkeys or cats what we would do is employ the method of concomitant variation that is that we would design an artificial environment let's say in which this principle was violated and asked whether the system develops in a normal way under those conditions first to take one case well that we can't do in the case of humans we can't design artificial contrived environments and see what happens to an infant in them just as we don't conduct ablation experiments with humans and this it's important to recognize that this limitation imposes no raises no philosophical issue it what it means is that we have to be clever in the kind of work we do because a number of modes of inquiry are simply excluded there being as far as we know nothing analogous to the language faculty in the case of other organisms but that doesn't mean that we can't study the problem we can have to study it more indirectly we often can't directly move to the experiments that would give us clear and precise answers the questions that we raise but if you think about the model that I put forth that is that the model of a of an organ beginning in a genetically determined initial state and growing to a mature state of knowledge then it's obvious that that mature state of knowledge will be determined by really by two factors one the initial genetic endowment and secondly the the impinging experience so when and as far as the final state of knowledge is concerned what's called the grammar the language the system of rules and principles that determines what is a sentence and what it means and how it sounds and so on that's as far as that system is concerned we really can get tremendous amounts of evidence in fact every utterance that's produced is an experiment if you like every reaction of a person to an utterance is an experiment so there's no shortage of information concerning the mature state of knowledge achieved if we can wicket if we can then discern in the mature state of knowledge principles and properties which are in no way presented in the experience that is present that is available it's very plausible to propose those as properties attributable to the initial state the main thing I want to do in this discussion professor Chomsky is go into the implications of your work for philosophy I don't want to go pursue you into the nature of the work itself because that's highly technical obviously and it's not really feasible to discuss it in a in a television program of this kind let us now as it were assume the truth of your theories and start looking at the wider implications of them because this I'm sure is what will interest our audience most one consequence of your theories is that we are as human beings very very rigidly pre-programmed there are certain things we can understand certain things we can communicate and anything that falls outside that we simply can't is that so that's certainly correct so I mean in a way this is a rather alarming doctrine I mean it it certainly contravenes the way we want to feel about ourselves well that may be an immediate reaction but I think it's it's not the correct reaction in fact well it's true that our genetic program rigidly constrains us I think the more important point is that the existence of that rich of that rigid constraint is what provides the basis for our freedom and creativity and the reason I mean it's only because we have pre-programmed that we can do all the things well and exactly the point is that if we really were plastic organisms with an extensive pre-programming then the state that our mind achieves would in fact be a reflection of the environment which means it would be extraordinarily impoverished fortunately for us we're rigidly pre-programmed with extremely rich systems that are part of our biological endowment correspondingly a small amount of rather degenerate experience allows a kind of a great leap into a rich cognitive system essentially uniform in a community and in fact roughly uniform lism which would have developed over campus evolutionary ages through a solution represents the basic system itself developed over long periods of evolutionary development we don't know how it really but for the individual its present as a result the individual is capable of with a very small amount of evidence of constructing an extremely rich system which allows him to act in the free and creative fashion which in fact is normal for humans we can say anything that we want over an infinite range other people will understand us though they've heard nothing like that before we're able to do that precisely because of that rigid programming but short of that we would not be able to at all what account are you able to give of creativity if we are pre-programmed in the way you say then how is creativity and possibility for us well here I think one has to be fairly careful I think we can say a good deal about about the nature of the system that is acquired the state of knowledge that is attained we can say a fair amount about the biological that the basis the the basis in the initial state of the mind for the acquisition of this system but when we turn to a third question namely how is this system used how are we able to act creatively how can how do we decide - how can we decide to say things that are new but not random that are appropriate to occasions but not under the control of stimuli when we ask these questions we really enter into a realm of mystery where human science at least so far and maybe in principle does not reek we can say a fair amount about the principles that make it possible for us to behave in our normal creative fashion but as soon as questions of will or decision or reason or a choice of action when those questions arise human science is at a loss it has nothing to say about them as far as I can see these questions remain in the obscurity that in which they were in classical antiquity would you also accept this or not that that having arrived at our present situation across millions of years of evolution we must have been going through us a continual process of innovation and new adaption and development of new abilities dispositions organs etc might we not still be as it were plastic at the edges might we not still be developing and evolving genuinely evolving if only on the margin well I think one has to be again very cautious here because well it's true at a very in a very vague sense to say it's correct to say that the systems that we now have have developed through evolution through natural selection it's important to recognize how little we are saying when we say that for example it is certainly not necessarily the case that every particular trait that we have is the result of specific selection that is that we were selected for having that trait in fact there are striking examples to the contrary at least apparent examples to the contrary say take for example our capacity to deal with abstract properties of the number system now that's a distinctive human capacity as distinctive as the capacity for language any normal human effect of found of pathological levels can comprehend the properties of the number system and can move very far and understanding their deep properties but it's extremely difficult to believe that this capacity was the result of specific selection that is it's hard to believe that people who were a little better at proving theorems of number theory had more children let's say that didn't happen in fact through most of human evolution if I can accentuate all of human evolution this capacity wasn't it would have been impossible to know that this capacity existed the contingencies that allowed it to be exercised never arose nevertheless the trait is there the capacity is there the mental organ if you like has developed presumably it has developed as a concomitant of some other properties of the brain which may have been selected for example we can speculate say that you know that the increase in brain size was a factor in differential reproduction it's an evolution and it may be that for physical law because of physical laws that we presently don't know that an increase in brain size under the specific conditions of human evolution simply leads necessarily through a system which has the capacity to deal with properties the number system well then that's a matter of physics ultimately and then the mind that evolves the brain that evolves will have this capacity but not because it was achieved through a selection now I think it's at least likely that something of the sort is true of human language and I mean surely if it if it were dysfunctional it wouldn't have been maintained it's obviously functional but it's a long leap to claim that that the specific structures of language are themselves the result of specific selection and it's a leap that I don't think is particularly plausible what you say there about the limitations that this imposes on us prompts in me the following thought we are all very used I think to the idea that in social life each one of us as individuals tends to construct a picture of the world around his own experience and indeed we it's difficult to see how we could do anything else we're bound to do that we've got no alternative but it does mean that each one of us forms a systematically distorted view of the world because it's in because it's all built up on what accidentally happens to be the particular and really rather narrow experience of the individual who does it now do you think that something of that kind applies to man as a whole because of the reasons implicit in your theory that is to say that the the whole picture that mankind has formed of the cosmos of the universe of the world must be systematically distorted and what's more drastically limited by the nature of the particular apparatus for understanding that he happens to have well I think that is undoubtedly the case but again I would question the use of the word limited which carries unfortunate suggestions that is I assume that one of our faculties one of our mental organs if you like is let's call it a science forming capacity a capacity to create intelligible explanatory theories in some domain and if we look at the history of science we discover that time after time when particular questions were posed at a particular level of understanding it was possible to make very innovative leaps of the imagination two rich explanatory theories that presented an intelligible picture of that sub domain of the universe often wrong theories as we later discovered but there's a course that's followed and this gives this could have been the case only because we do have and we in fact share across the species a kind of a science forming capacity that is that limits us as you say but at the same in the same but same token provides the possibility of creating explanatory theories that extend so vastly far beyond any evidence that's available I mean it's it's very important to realize that there should be some obvious say but it's worth saying that when when it's when a new theory is created and I don't necessarily mean Newton I mean even a small theory what the scientist is typically doing first of all he has very limited evidence the theory goes far far beyond the evidence secondly much of the evidence that's available is typically disregarded that is it's put to the side in the hope that somebody else will take care of it someday and we can forget about so at every stage in the history of science there's even normal science not you know kuhnian revolutions there's a high degree of idealization that Joe's own so their selection of evidence and distortion of evidence creation of new theory a confirmation or or modification of that theory further idealization these are all very curious steps and we're capable of nevertheless we can often make them and make them in a way which is intelligible to others doesn't look like some random act of the imagination and where that's possible we can we can develop intelligible theories we can gain some comprehension of the nature of this aspect of the world now this is possible only because we are rigidly pre-programmed again because we have somehow developed through evolution or however the specific Faculty of forming very particular theories of course it follows at once sir please follow it's reasonable to assume that this very Faculty which enables us to construct extremely rich and successful theories in some domain may lead us very far astray and some other domain for example there may be some you know again I'm a Martian scientists looking at us and observing our successes and errors from a higher intelligence let's say might be being used to discover that whereas in some domains we seem to be able to make scientific progress in other domains we always seem to be running up against a blank wall because our minds are so constructed that we just can't make the intellectual leap that's required we can't formulate the concept we don't have the categories that are required to gain insight into that domain do you think that if our study of our language forming capacity and hence our cognitive capacities as you call them our abilities to know and understand and learn if these studies that you're pioneering results in an enormous amount of increased knowledge of all these human faculties do you think it's at all likely that that increased knowledge will enable us to change and indeed expand the faculties that I think is extremely unlikely because I think the faculties are a biological given we may study the structure of the heart but we don't do so because we think it's possible to replace the heart by another kind of pump would say which might be more efficient similarly here I think you if we ever did gain a real comprehension of the mental organs we would not we might that might help us in cases of pathology marginal cases in other words but I wouldn't see how that could have any way at least with our present science of you know plausible science of modifying these capacities what we might do however is games I mean at least it's in theory imaginable that we might discover something about the limits of our science forming abilities we might discover for example that some kinds of questions simply fall beyond the area where we are capable of constructing explanatory theories and I think we even maybe now have some glimmerings of insight into where this delineation might be between intelligible theories that fall within our comprehension and areas where no such theory is possible well the case that we discussed before may be one take take the question of but if you go back to the you know take back to the early histories of science of history of science early origins of science speculation and people were raising questions about say the heavenly bodies and about the sources of human action well we're asking exactly the same questions now about the source of human action there's been no progress we have no idea how to approach this question within the framework of science we can write novels about it but we can't construct even forth scientific theories about it we simply have nothing to say when we asked the question how does a person make a decision in a certain manner and not some other manner when it's a free decision that we just have no way of dealing with that issue on the other hand the history of physics let's say has had substantial advances and very it's very likely I think that that super massive difference in progress in one domain and an absolute blank wall in another reflects the specific properties of our science warming capacities we might even be able to show that someday if it's true so far we've been rather talking in this discussion as if all organized thinking is done in language but of course that in fact isn't so is it I mean one can take all kinds of examples in music is one that appeals to me very much if you get a composer like Stravinsky conduct composing a fantastic complicated and original and needed revolutionary score like that of the Rite of Spring for an enormous Orchestra then he's celebrating at an original and complicated and very sophisticated level and he's probably celebrating in as elaborate away as anybody else's who's doing anything and what's more he's creating a structure which is publicly articulated and so on and yet words don't come into this process at any point as far as one could gather does that fact and other facts like you lose any threat to your theories well not really I mean I in fact quite the contrary my assumption is that the mind is not a uniform system that it's a highly differentiated system in fact like the body it's essentially a system of faculties or organs and language is simply one of them I don't it we don't have to go to the level of Stravinsky to find examples of thinking without language I'm sure that everyone who introspects who thinks about what he himself is doing will know at once that much of his thinking doesn't involve language or say well the thinking of a cat let's say plainly doesn't involve language there are other modes of thought there are other faculties and I think that the musical faculty is one one which is particularly interesting I think because it's extremely likely in fact here's an area in a sense like physics that is where very rapid and rich development took place in a way which was over a long period of say Western history in a way which was very intelligible to others I mean not immediately but after a short period and strikingly well there is a striking feature of the 20th century in this respect that is that the the the musical creation of the 20th century I think is qualitatively different from that of say the 18th century in that it lacks that that immediate axis or short term access that was true of the past I one would have to do an experiment to prove it but I have no doubt that if we took a child of today to children of today let's say two groups and taught one of them say Mozart Haydn and Beethoven and thought the other one Schoenberg and post Ron Burgundy's 'ok that there would be very substantial difference in their capacity to comprehend it and deal with it and that may reflect in fact if that's correct it would reflect something about err err innate musical capacities points of this nature have been discussed for some time I remember Paul Hindemith the about 25 years ago I think and lectures argued that to violate the tonal principle and music would be something like an effort to violate the principle of gravitation I take it he meant by that that it was an innate property well we might say in his prep I don't pursue the musical analogy too far because I was using that really only as an illustration what it illustrates is the fact that you think we're pre-programmed in fact a lot of things don't you I mean no doubt to use gesture or recognize faces or a common sense view of the world and so on well every area of human existence that's even worth studying is worth studying because rich and complex structures are developed in a uniform way otherwise it's not worth studying and those are precisely the cases where we expect to have wood to discover pre-programming that makes possible these great achievements so in other words you think that everything that we do makes manifest our pre programming games institutions the way we dress the way we eat everything well here again I think some cautions necessary for example take games I'm speculating obviously but it seems to me reasonable to suppose that games are designed so as to be in a sense at the outer limits of our cognitive capacities we don't make up games that are in which we are as skilled as we are in using words let's say that wouldn't be an interesting game everybody can do too much what we do it we make up games like say chess which is an extraordinarily simple game that has its rule system it's utterly trivial but nevertheless we're just not we're not very good at it as in the case of using language we're all extraordinarily good and we're essentially undifferentiated the borders of our cognitive capacity than individuals a very similar intellectual makeup will nevertheless diverge very significantly in their ability to deal with these exotic problem that's what makes it an interesting game and in fact I think there are also tasks that can be constructed that are really outside our cognitive capacities and in fact I think there's even a field that's devoted to the developing such tasks it's called psychology much of modern psychology has been concerned to discover tasks which would yield species uniform laws that is laws that are essentially hold across a number of species or to construct good experiments that is experiments that have slow learning curves with regular increments and so on and so forth and there are such tasks a maze running in which rats are about as good as humans and both are quite terrible and these I think are in fact precisely tasks that do lie outside of our cognitive capacities that we do proceed by trial and error and by induction and so on but centrally your whole approach represents a rejection of the empirical tradition in in philosophy it doesn't it because I mean the very fact that you think that the empiricists are wrong about how we learn must mean that they're wrong about knowledge and the nature of knowledge and the nature of knowledge has been the central problem in the whole empirical tradition of philosophy well the classical empiricist tradition which I think was the traditions represented let's say perhaps in its highest form by Hume seems to me to be a tradition of extreme importance in that a particular theory of the origins of knowledge fact of the science of human nature in humans phrase was put forth an empirical theory and I think Hume for example would regard it as an empirical theory did regard it so when we investigated I think we discover that it's just completely false that is that the mechanisms that he discussed are not the mechanisms by which the mind reaches states of knowledge that the states of knowledge attained are radically different than the kinds that he discussed for example for Hume the mind was in his image a kind of a theater in which ideas paraded across the stage and we it therefore followed necessarily that we could introspect completely into the contents of our mind if an idea is not on the stage it's not in the mind and the ideas may be connected and associated in fact he went on and say there isn't even any theater there's just the ideas in that respect the image is misleading well that's a that's a theory and in fact it's a theory that has had an enormous grip on the imagination throughout most of the history of the history of Western thought for example that that same image dominates the rationalist tradition as well where it was assumed that one could exhaust the contents of the mind by careful attention you know you could really develop those clearer and distinct ideas and their consequences and so on and in fact even if you move to someone let's say like Freud with his a vocation of the unconscious still I think that a careful reading suggests that he regarded the unconscious as in principle act accessible that is we could really perceive that theater and stage and the things on it carefully if only the barriers of repression and so on could be overcome well if what I've been suggesting is correct that's just that's radically wrong I mean even wrong there's a point of departure there is no reason at all that I can see for believing that the the principles of mental computation that enter so intimately into our action or our interaction or our speech to believe that those principles have are at all accessible to introspection any more than the analyzing mechanisms of our visual system or for that matter the nature of our liver is accessible to introspection it seems to me that over and over again you come back to the same point that is to say that many of the particular problems discussed and theories put forward by philosophers in the main but also psychologists and you've just mentioned Freud and in your writing as you mentioned many others are in fact theories about physical processes they are therefore open to checking by investigation and when you check my investigation you'll find out that the theories are wrong and therefore you are as it were radically subversive of a lot of very well-established theories in our tradition it seems to me that what you put forward in their place over and over again in fact as parallel a rationalist tradition I said in my introduction to this program that what I'm always reminded on by your work is the theories of Kant you seem to me to be almost redoing in terms of modern linguistics what Kant was doing do you accept any truth in that well right not only accept truth in it but I've tried to bring it out in a certain way however I haven't myself specifically referred to Khan but rather to the primarily to the 17th century tradition of the Continental Cartesians and the British neoplatonist who developed many of the ideas that are now much more familiar in the writings of Conte for example the idea of experience conforming to our mode of cognition or the well particularly in the British platanus Cudworth for example there are I believe is a rich mine of insight into the organizing principles of the mind by which experience is structured in fact I think that some of the richest psychological source of psychological insights that I know and that's the one it's this tradition that I think that can be fleshed out and made more explicit by the kinds of empirical inquiry that are now possible of course I think we also have to diverge from that tradition in a number of respects I've mentioned one namely the belief with the contents of the winder open introspection similarly we there's certainly no reason to accept the metaphysics of that tradition to believe that there's a dualism of mind and body I mean you can see why the Cartesians were led to that it was a rational move on their part but it's not a move that we have to follow we have other ways of approaching that question another thing that I say I mentioned in my introduction was the fact that you've made two international reputations the other one besides linguistics being as a political activist and it does seem to me that there is a connection between these two careers of yours and I want to put this to you really in the form of a question liberalism grew up in the history of European thought in very close relationship to empirical philosophy and scientific method the battlecry really in all three was don't accept anything on the say-so of established Authority look at the facts and judge for yourself and this was revolutionary in politics science and philosophy and because of this liberalism has always been regarded in the Western tradition as the main anti-authoritarian political Creed but just as you've rejected empiricism you've also rejected liberalism and you now say in your writings that whatever may have been true in the past liberalism has now become the ally of authority would you accept that there is this underlying connection between your work in linguistics and well to put it dramatically your opposition to the Vietnam War well this raises quite a welter of questions let me begin by saying something about liberalism which is a very complicated concept I think it's correct surely that liberalism grew up in the intellectual environment of empiricism and the rejection of authority and Trust in the evidence of the senses and so on however liberalism has undergone a very complex evolution as a social philosophy over the years if we go back to the classics or at least what I regard as the classics say for example unbolts limits of state action which inspired nil and is a true libertarian liberal classic it was like the the world that Humboldt was considering which was partially an imaginary world but the world for which he was developing this political philosophy was a post futile but pre-capitalist world that it was a it was a world in which there is no great divergence among individuals in the kind of power that they have and what they command let's say but there was a tremendous disparity between individuals on the one hand and the state on the other consequently it was the task of a liberalism that was concerned with human rights and equality of individuals and so on it was the task of that liberalism to dissolve the enormous power of the state which was such a an authoritarian threat to individual liberties and from that you develop a classical liberal theory and say Humboldt sir Mills sense well of course that is pre-capitalist he couldn't conceive of an era in which a corporation would be regarded as individual that's it or in which such an enormous in which enormous disparities and control over resources and production would distinguish between individuals on a massive fashion now in that kind of a society to take the Humboldt in view is a very superficial liberalism because while opposition to state power in an era of such divergence conforms to Humboldt's conclusions it doesn't do so for his reasons that is his reasons lead to very different conclusions in that case namely I think his reasons lead to the conclusion that we must dissolve the authoritarian control over production and resources which leads to such divergences among individuals in fact I think one might draw a direct line between classical liberalism and the kind of libertarian socialism which I think can be regarded as the as a kind of an adapting of the basic reasoning of classical liberalism to a very different social Europe now if we come to the modern period here liberalism has taken on a very strange sense if you think of its history now now liberalism is essentially the theory of state capitalism of state intervention in a capitalist economy well that is very little relation to classical liberalism in fact classical liberalism is what's now called conservatism I suppose but this new view I think really is it in my life my view at least a highly authoritarian position that is it's one which accepts a number of centers of authority and control the state on the one hand agglomerations of private power on the other hand all interacting with individuals as malleable cogs in this highly constrained machine which may be called democratic but given the the the actual distribution of power is very far from being meaningfully democratic and cannot be so so my own feeling has always been that to achieve the classical liberal ideals for the reasons that led to them being put forth in a society so different we must be led in a very different direction oh it's superficial and erroneous to accept the conclusions which were reached for a different society and not to consider the reasoning of it led to those conclusions the reasoning I think is very substantially I'm a classical liberal in the sense but I think it leads me to be a kind of an anarchist no I an anarchist socialist and well I'd love to pursue you down that road and professor Chomsky but that would be a new discussion a new program so I think we must alas in there thank you very much

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Published: Fri Oct 06 2017