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 gonna 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 20th century
philosophy, it's that of the relationship between language and the world. Wittgenstein, to
give no more than a single instance, was enthralled in 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 first put his ideas forward in the late 1950s as part of a critique
of behavioral psychology. It's not too unfair to say that the behavioral psychologists
had tended 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 extraordinarily young age and in such an
extraordinarily short space of time. He argued that for this to happen at all, we must be
genetically pre-programmed 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 it's
looked to me. But even if so, it's Chomsky who's carried out and no one else. And it's proved an
enormously stimulating and fruitful thing to do. Professor Chomsky, one of the difficulties
about discussing your ideas is that in an obvious sense they're hybrid. In part,
they're linguistics, in part they're philosophy, and in part they're biology. And in fact, you
yourself first put them forward in what was really a dispute with biologists, with behavioral
psychologists. How did you come to start at that starting point? Well, the reason was
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 philosophy and linguistics as well. The view that was dominant, say, at the time when
I was a student, say, 25-30 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, the system of habits that one develops
simply grows through accretion, incrementally, as experience is subjected to these processes of
generalization and analogy. And in fact, 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
in 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 would want to even go beyond
that. I think it's certainly the case that language is, in only the most marginal sense,
taught and the teaching is in no sense essential to the acquisition of language. But 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 characteristics that I mentioned. It seems to me that if 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, the series of changes seems 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 our biological endowment, with interactions also generally determined by the nature of
our biological endowment, growing through the triggering of active experience which shapes
and articulates the organs as they develop in the individual through the relevant period
of his life. So, as I say, it seems to me that not only is it wrong to think of
language as being taught, but it's at least very misleading to think of it as being learned
if we carry with the notion of learning the associations that generally go along with it.
In other words, we are pre-programmed to learn a language in the same way as we're 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 ontogenetic 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, we are biologically constructed so
that at a certain time our life processes stop. And in fact, the fact that some development
takes place after the organism has begun an independent existence in the world, tells us
nothing about whether it's a genetically determined development or not. Now, one thing that follows
from your view is that 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 bio-physical 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's certainly true,
at least we believe it be true in principle. We are not at a stage now 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 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 the 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 the principles that we are led to attribute to this system, 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 here. 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
language formation faculties of mine at work. But nevertheless, there is an important difference
because if we want to investigate the workings of the liver, we can observe other people's.
I mean, you can--bits of live people's or the whole of dead people's or animals's
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 language-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, stop a very
natural mode of investigation. That is, for ethical reasons, we do not conduct
intrusive experiments with human beings. So, for example, there are very natural modes
of investigation that suggest themselves at once. Suppose, for example, I propose that
language has some general property and that every human language must have this property
as 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 common variation. That is, that we would design an artificial environment,
let's say, in which this principle was violated and ask whether the system develops in a normal way
under those conditions, for instance, 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 it's important to recognize that this
limitation raises no philosophical issue. What it means is that we have to be
cleverer 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 have to study more indirectly.
We often can't directly move to the experiments that would give us clear and precise answers
to questions that we raise. But if you think about the model that I put forth. That is, the
model 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
two factors: One, the initial genetic endowment and secondly, the impinging experience.
So as far as the final state of knowledge is concerned--what's called the grammar of 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. 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 then discern,
in the mature state of knowledge, principles and properties which are in no way
presented in the experience 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 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 television program of this kind. Let us now, at 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. I mean, in a
way, this is a rather alarming doctrine. I mean, it certainly contravenes the way we
want to feel about ourselves. Well, that may be an immediate reaction, but I think it's
not the correct reaction. In fact, while it's true that our genetic program rigidly constrains
us, I think the more important point is that the existence of that rigid constraint is what
provides the basis for our freedom and creativity. And the reason--What you mean is it's
only because we are pre-programmed that we can do all the things we can do? Exactly.
The point is that if we really were plastic organisms without 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 for
the species. Which would've developed over countless evolutionary ages through
the biological evolutionary process. The basic system itself developed over
long periods of evolutionary development. We don't know how, really, but for the individual,
it's 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. 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 a possibility for us?
Well here I think one has to be fairly careful. I think we can say a good deal about the
nature of the system that is acquired, the state of knowledge that is obtained. We can say
a fair amount about the biological basis, 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 the
system used? How are we able to act creatively? 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 reach. 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 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 in which they were in classical antiquity.
Would you also accept this or not: that having arrived at our present situation across millions
of years of evolution, we must've been going through 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 changing, and
genuinely evolving if only on the margin? Well I think one has to be, again, very
cautious here because while it's true, 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's 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 or at least apparent examples
to the contrary. Take for example, our capacity to deal with abstract properties of the
number system. And that's a distinctive human capacity, as distinctive as the capacity
for language. Any normal human, in fact down to pathological levels, can comprehend the
properties of number system and can move very far in 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 are 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--in fact, essentially all of human evolution--it would've been
impossible to know that this capacity even 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 increase in brain size was a factor in differential reproduction,
hence in evolution. And it may be that for physical law--physical laws that we presently
don't know--that an increase in brain size under the specific conditions of human evolution
simply leads, necessarily, to a system which has the capacity to deal with properties of
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 selection. Now, I think it's at least likely that something of this sort is true
of human language. I mean, surely, if it were dysfunctional, it wouldn't have been maintained.
It's obviously functional. But it's a long leap to claim 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 though about the limitations that this imposes on
us prompts, in me, the following thought. We're 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, 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 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 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
to 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 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 limits us, as you say, but by
the same token, provides the possibility of creating explanatory theories that extend so
vastly far beyond any evidence that's available. It's very important to realize that--it
should be obvious, say, but it's worth saying that 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 hopes that somebody else will take care of it some day and we can forget
about it. So at every stage in the history of science there's--even in normal science, not
Kuhnian revolutions--there's a high degree of idealization that goes on. So there's selection
of evidence, distortion of evidence, creation of new theory, confirmation, or refutation, 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. It doesn't look like some random act of the imagination. And where that's possible
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 a once or at least it's
reasonable to assume, that this very faculty which enables us to construct extremely rich
and successful theories in some domain may lead has very far astray in some other domain.
For example, there may be a martian scientist looking at us and observing our successes and errors
from a higher intelligence, let's say, might be amused 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 intellectually leap that's required; we can't formulate the concepts,
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
result 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, let's
say, which might be more efficient. Similarly here, I think, if we ever did gain a real
comprehension of the mental organs, that might help us in cases of pathology, marginal cases
in other words, but I wouldn't see how that could give any way, at least with out present
science, or plausible science, of modifying these capacities. What we might do, however,
is gain--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 the question of... Well if you go back to the early 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 sources 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 false scientific theories about it. We simply have nothing to say
when we ask the question: How does a person make a decision in a certain manner and not
some other matter, when it's a free decision? 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
it's very likely, I think, that that massive difference in progress in one domain and an
absolute blank wall in another, reflects the specific properties of our science-forming
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.
Music is one that appeals to me very much. If you get a composer like Stravinsky, composing
a fantastically complicated and original, and indeed revolutionary score, like that
of the Rite of Spring for an enormous orchestra, then he's cerebrating at an original and
complicated, and very sophisticated level. And he's probably cerebrating in as elaborate
a way as anybody else is 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 can gather. Does that fact and other facts like it, pose any
threat to your theories? Well, not really. 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. 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, 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 musical creation of the 20th century, I think, is qualitatively different from
that of, say, the 18th century in that it lacks that immediate access, or short-term access,
that was true of the past. One would have to do an experiment to prove it, but I have
no doubt that if we took two children of today, two groups, and taught one of them, say, Mozart,
Haydn, and Beethoven, and taught the other one Schoenberg and post-Schoenbergian music,
that there would be a 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 our innate musical capacities. Points of this nature have been discussed for some
time. I remember Paul Hindemith, about 25 years ago, I think, in lectures argued that
to violate the tonal principle in 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--we might say,
an innate property. I don't want to pursue the musical analogy too far because I was
using that only as an illustration. What it illustrates is the fact that you think
we are pre-programmed, in fact, to a whole lot of things, don't you? I mean, no doubt to
use gesture or recognize faces or develop a commonsense 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 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 caution is necessary. For example, take
games. I'm speculating, obviously, but it seems to be 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 in which we are as skilled as we are at using words, let's say.
That wouldn't be an interesting game. Everybody can do too much. What we do, we make up games
like, say, chess, which is an extraordinarily simple game. That is, its rule system is utterly
trivial. But nevertheless, we're just not, we're not very good at it. In the case of using language,
we're all extraordinarily good and we're essentially undifferentiable, one from another. But when
we get to something like chess which, I assume, is at the borders of our cognitive capacity,
then individuals of very similar intellectual makeup will nevertheless diverge very significantly
in their ability to deal with these exotic problems. 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 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, say 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 capacity. So we do proceed by trial and error, by induction
and so on. But centrally, your whole approach represents a rejection of the empirical tradition
in philosophy, doesn't it? Because 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 being the central problem in whole empirical tradition
of philosophy. Well, the classical empiricist tradition, which I think was the tradition
that's 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,
in fact, of the science of human nature, in Hume's phrase, was put forth. An empirical
theory, and I think Hume, for example, would've regarded it as an empirical theory--he did regard
it so. When we investigate it, 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 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 my mind. And the ideas may be connected and associated. And in fact,
he went on to say there isn't even any theater, there's just the ideas. In that respect, the
image of is misleading. Well, that's a theory. And in fact, it's a theory that has had an
enormous grip on the imagination throughout most of, to my knowledge, most of the history
of Western thought. For example, 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 clear 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 evocation of the unconscious, still I think that a careful reading suggests that
he regarded the unconscious as in principle 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
radically wrong, I mean, even wrong as a point of departure. There's no reason at all that
I can see for believing that the principles of metal computation that enter so intimately
into our action or our interaction or our speech-- to believe that those principles are at
all accessible to introspection anymore than the analyzing mechanisms of our visual system
or, for that matter, the nature of 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 writings you mention many
others--are in fact theories about physical processes. They are therefore open to checking by
investigation. And when you check by investigation, you find out that the theories are wrong.
And therefore you are, as it were, radically subversive of lot of a 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 does parallel the rationalist tradition. I said
in my introduction to this program that what I'm always reminded of by your
work is the theories of Kant. You seem to me to be almost re-doing, in terms of modern
linguistics, what Kant was doing. Do you accept any truth in that? Well, I 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 Kant, but rather to the, primarily, to the 17th century tradition of
the Continental Cartesians and the British neo-Platonists, who developed many of the
ideas that are now much more familiar in the writings of Kant. For example, the idea of
experience conforming to our mode of cognition or the--well particularly in the British
Platonists, Cudworth, for example, there, 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's
some of the richest sources of psychological insights that I know. And it's this tradition
that, I think, 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 that the contents of the
mind are open to introspection. Similarly, 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 follow. We have other ways of approaching that question.
Another thing that I mentioned in my introduction was the fact that you made two international
reputations. The other one, besides linguistics, being as a political activist. And it does
seem to me that there's 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 battle cry, 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, Humboldt's limits of state action which inspired Mill and is a true libertarian,
liberal classic, if you'd like. 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-feudal but pre-capitalist world. That it was a world in which there was no
great divergence among individuals in the kind of power that they had, and what they
command, let's say. But there was a tremendous disparity between individuals, on one hand,
and the state on the other. Consequently, it was the task of a liberalism that was concerned
with human rights, and the quality of individuals, and so on. It was the task of that liberalism
to dissolve the enormous power of state, which was such an authoritarian threat to individual
liberties. And from that, you develop a classical liberal theory in, say, Humboldt's or Mill's
sense. Well, of course, that is pre-capitalist. He couldn't conceive of an era in which a
corporation would be regarded as an individual, Or in which enormous disparities in
control over resources and production would distinguish between individuals in a
massive fashion. Now, in that kind of society, to take the Humboldtian 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 of resources, which leads to
such divergence as among individuals. In fact, I think, one might draw a direct line between
classical liberalism and a kind of libertarian socialism, which I think, can be regarded
as a kind of adapting of the basic reasoning of classical liberalism to a very different
social era. Now if we come to the modern period, here liberalism has taken on a very strange
sense, if you think of its history. Now liberalism is essentially the theory of state capitalism.
Of state intervention in a capitalist economy. Well, that has 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, in 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 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 actual distribution of powers, 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. It's superficial and erroneous to accept the conclusions
which were reached for different society and not to consider the reasoning that led to
those conclusions. The reasoning, I think, is very substantial. I'm a classical liberal
in this sense. But I think it leads me to be a kind of anarchist, an anarchist socialist.
Well I'd love to pursue you down that road, Professor Chomsky, but that would be a new
discussion, and a new program. So I think we must, alas, end there. Thank you very much.
Abstract
"Bryan Magee interviews Noam Chomsky about his work in linguistics and the philosophical implications regarding the limits of language and thought, the mind, freedom of choice, and political theory. This interview is from 1978." --Philosophy Overdose
Ah, I remember Chomsky from his talk about the deaths of languages.