Noam Chomsky: The Stony Brook Interviews Part Two

Noam Chomsky is the principal architect of generative linguistics and has been the driving force in recent evolutions of a theory including in the development of the principles and parameters framework which one commentator has described as quote the first really novel approach to language in the last two-and-a-half thousand years professor Chomsky has also been a key figure in the development of the cognitive sciences generally indeed the most important figure in the development according to Harvard's Howard Gardner he is perhaps most famous for his writings and lectures on international politics and in media theory it is less well known however that professor Chomsky has been an important figure in anglo-american philosophy over the last 50 years and that he has been a key interlocutor with all the leading philosophers of language in mind within that tradition he's had lively exchanges with for example willard van orman quine hilary putnam donald davidson saul kripke john searle michael dumb --it and now a new generation of philosophers and i guess the first question has to be the following given everything that's on your play why do you bother with the Philosopher's that's the most fascinating topic of all so they grew up with still I'm obsessed with why do you think other linguists are not or in general other scientists don't seem to be as engaged with the philosophical community scientists tend I think to be involved in their own technical problems and often don't think much about you know what it's about so like I mean I've had for many years taught courses in these questions and would have students read sake wines papers in which he argues that everything they're doing is complete we called folly you know the gives argument saying can't possibly do it this way the students will read the papers but then go back to doing and saying and interesting then go back to doing exactly the same work but they've just read is folly and and so on and so forth and I think that's not unusual if you read the scientific literature there's a lot of expressed contempt for what philosophers have to say about this so you'll read somebody working on the neurophysiology of consciousness hot topic and there'll be an obligatory first couple of paragraphs saying well the philosophers have muddled this up for centuries but now we'll show how it's done but with no engagement in the arguments that have been given or the thinking behind it does it trouble you that say most other linguists don't engage philosophers on these issues it troubles me because not so much that I mean this is sick connected to a deeper problem it I think it should trouble us that we're not thinking about what we're up to and those questions happen to be the domain of what philosophers pay attention to right let's let's turn to some of these philosophers and some of the things that they've said and the first one I want to look at is the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam in the mid 70s he wrote a paper called the meaning of meaning which is very influential and I guess the key slogan that came out of that is that meanings just ain't in the head agree disagree or just is that just incoherent its incoherent without further explanation first you have to tell us what meanings are you can't decide whether they're in the head or not until we know what they are if by meanings we have in mind what people have in mind when they're using the word in English then sure they're not in the head they're all over the place talk about the meaning of life it's not in the head if you have some more technical notion in mind you've got to explain what it is if the technical and there it's a matter of choice you can define the technical notion so that's in the head or so that it's not in a hit when you define technical notions you have a choice the way it's done in the sciences and the way it ought to be done is you define a technical motion in the context of an explanatory theory you know just definitely a technical notion out in space so let's ask what's the explanatory theory in which we're going to give a technical notion which will pronounce meaning or pronounce its own other way and then we'll ask whether in that theory is a sensible theory and does it place this technical concept in the head or not but all that extra work hasn't been done why can't we say there's just a pre theoretical notion of meaning and what we want to do is try and elicit a torus if I it in some way or other now you could do that but the million ways of doing it so what about the meaning of life for example that's part of the pre theoretical notion it yes it is it sure guys I mean I thought people talk about the meaning of what's the meaning of life yeah and you think that's the same notion of meaning as when I say what's the meaning of the word now this thousand you know it's a huge range of things what did he mean by saying so and so usually has to do with what was it intention you know or something like that right so part of the pre theoretical meaning has to do with people's intentions in fact when you talk about the meaning of a word that's a rather English specific location and we could focus on that if we like but and if you want you can try to clarify it but again to try to clarify a pre theoretical notion make sense within the framework of an effort to understand something to explain explanatory account well suppose we go with the following attempt to clarify or at least introduction of a piece of technical terminology which is the top philosophers will talk about the content of a mental state or the content of some sort of expression hmm is that helpful no because content is a technical notion it's not being used in the sense of the ordinary concept content right and it used by now analysts since Putnam in fact and crooky and others it's typically used to refer to something out there so the content of expression is not in the head by definition because we've defined it to be non head right all right then the question is well does that have anything to do with our notions of this item eating through their understanding of the way language works and is used okay that's the question and you can certainly do I think it is very little to do it well suppose we thought of it this way we suppose we thought of the enterprise being sketched in the following way there are two ways in which you might study primates for example you might study primate Anatomy in which case you're just concerned about you know bones and muscles and tendons and so forth and then you might also study primate ecology in which case you're studying the relation between the primate in its environment and I take it that what these philosophers are talking about here when they talk about external content is that they're saying a part of talk about meaning has to be analyzed in terms of thinking about the organism the human organism in relation to its environment right so it has to if you want to study the relation between the human organism and its environment but if that's fine there's nothing wrong with studying the human organism in its environment that's what sociologists are doing all the time right but if do it seriously if you want to do it seriously you ask first of all you if let's go back to primates when you study primates in their ecology you don't just look at the anatomy of primates you look at the physiology of primates the what you might call mental processes of primates um in the way they seem to be interpreting the world the perceptual perceptual abilities of primates in fact what you try to do is exploit to the extent you can of what we know about an individual ape you know chimpanzees you want to know where we understand about that ape and that information we will bring to bear in the study of how the ape interacts with other Apes with the rest of the environment and so on that's the way it's done with primates or with ants or anyone else I think that's where our young with unions so we should ask okay well what do we understand about the internal nature of the creature that's doing all these things and to the extent that we understand something about that we can ask sensible questions about how it interacts with the external world with other people and so on and so forth do you think that could potentially inform the sort of internalist investigation as sure goes the other there's no order you can study the sociology of ape communities and I'll tell you something good days only important about the internal thinking processes of Apes or even their internal anatomy and vice-versa presume the pasture science goes always here's another technical term that's been used reference you consider that to be incoherent as well or until it's explained I should go here once it's explained and it becomes non in it you see one thing I've never quite understood is is exactly what the problem is with reference because I mean I can say ok now I'm referring to this coffee that's different okay I could quote different ok you're talking about an action of referring right that we that's a common sense notions right of English and every language I know of there's some way to talk about such actions but what philosophers have introduced is in different notion a notion that's supposed to hold between a linguistic entity and something in the world now that's not referring referring is an act that people do yes the first point they could i Saros fifty years yeah but i'm it goes way back but and it's just a fact okay so let's take money if you want to make up a technical term which you pronounce the same way yeah first of all it's questionable but you should pronounce it the same way because it's misleading but if you do let's at least keep clear that it's a technical term kind of like physicists use energy you know they don't mean it the way we do in ordinary language they mean it the way they say they mean it so let's take the technical term refer denote or whatever you want to call it and tell us what it's supposed to what what you tell us what you mean by it and tell us what explanatory theory it enters into so when a physicist defines energy you know it in the definition you're interested in the set of principles and assumptions and so in problems and so on within which that technical concept is introduced and then you look and see how good the theory is well here we don't have any theory and we don't even have an explanation what the technical notion is so it's impossible to talk about it yeah I think it might be a mistake to think of it as a technical notion I mean I think it's just a sort of persisted way of describing certain basic core level facts right so for example I might say well once you understand that people refer to things and so forth it's not a hard step to say well okay I kept certain names are canonically used to refer to certain things in certain individuals so the name Noam Chomsky I mean I can ask the people I can ask the audience here what person in this room does that term refer to where you could ask dribble what what do you what do you use that term when you refer to something in the world that you can ask but when you ask what the term refers to you're assuming that there is a relation between terms and things and they have to explain what that relation is because that's a new one we don't have that in ordinary language and in fact I think it's leading us off into a wrong picture as Vic and Stein would have called it and it's leading us to a picture of language which is we know what it's based on I mean it's based on things like frege's you know the theory of arithmetic and it's just the wrong picture for language I think let me I want to change directions briefly we may actually end up being sucked back into this issue Donald Davidson in a paper called a nice derangement of epitaphs habitats said or basically argued that there's no such thing as language and I've always sort of thought that you probably you may not want to admit it but on some level or other you probably agree with that right no in fact I think he ended up contradict name so I think there's some discussion of it in here or somewhere if you look at the end of the paper turns out he's proposing that there is a notion of language in the technical sense technical sets of an internal generative procedure that relates sounds and meanings and so on he says there's no notion of language in another sense the sense of some community property or whatever well okay first of all I don't think that's true it's just it's not a scientifically useable sense but I think the paper is just rife with confusions I've written about so you think there are such things as languages yeah like there's such an informal it's like there's such things as the meaning of life you know I understand it when people ask what's the meaning of life so yeah there's such a thing as the meaning of life there's such a thing as the financial crisis in Argentina you know they're all kind of things in the world but if you want to proceed to understand what you and I are doing those notions just don't help you've got to look at it differently the way we look at primates other primates and say well let me read a quote from something you wrote recently okay we say I doubt that people think that among the constituents of the world are entities that are simultaneously abstract and concrete like books and banks or that have the amalgam of properties we discover when we explore the meanings of even the simplest words like river person City etc you think the average person take leave and this is a technical question okay it's a question if you try to figure out what a person's folk science is you know how people think the world is actually constituted of entities which is not do I talk about books of course we talk about books we talk about the meaning of life and so on but if you ask people well you know how do you think the world really works that's problem that's my science right like you go to some other community to try to figure out what what's their idea about how the world works like maybe the classical Greeks thought Apollo who pulls the Sun through the sky or something that's their folk scientific picture of how the world works that's a hard topic you can't just do armchair philosophy about it that's why ethno scientists have to work you know and when they work what they thought if I think if they worked on people like us instead of just talking about it in a you know in the common room they would discover that our folk science yours and mine does not include entities that are simultaneously abstract and concrete and does not include entities like the meaning of life that doesn't mean we can't talk about I'm sure we talk about them all the time but we don't at least I don't and I presume other people don't think of them as constituents of the way the world operates these are we don't do that when we're talking to each other informally now that sounds a little bit more moderate than than what you've said elsewhere here's a passage from I believe this is from new horizons we say in the domain where questions of realism arise in a serious way in the context of the search for laws of nature objects are not conceived from the peculiar perspectives provided by the concepts account that's absolutely right see but there's several different enterprises you have to distinguish here and I don't I don't think it's more or less moderate it's about a different topic when you're trying to understand something about the nature of the world you and I anybody you start with some kind of what's called folk science almost every society we know has some picture of the way the world works which is more or less commonly shared if you try to do this more reflectively and carefully and you know bringing in other criteria and probably being bringing in other cognitive faculties we don't know that for sure but I suspect it then it becomes the enterprise of science which is a different enterprise and a peculiar one that's not folk science it's science that works in other ways this comment has to do with our culture in which the enterprise of science is understood right our you know intellectual culture and in that when we try to find out how the world works we discard the concepts of common sense very quickly but it sounds to me here like what you're saying is that the only things that are real right are the things that science tells us so real so it sounds like what you're saying here is that well this table isn't real but maybe you know who are real isn't the honorific term okay you can use anyway like I mean to say that if I say something it's true and then I add well it's the real truth I'm not saying there are two different kinds of truth the truth and the real truth I'm just emphasizing what I said and the term real is basically used honorific ly so yeah you can use it honorific ly in various ways if we're trying to find out the way the world works and to really understand it in the manner of the sciences that we very quickly give up common sense notions if we're carrying out folk science you know less reflectively probably using different cognitive faculties we also give up common sense notions but in different ways well you can sail a lot of them in claims about something being honorific like Rio being honorific I mean Alan gibbard for example has argued that terms like a rational are honorific or moral or honorific no I don't agree with it I think real is quite do what's the difference in these cases then because I think rationality is something that we can understand and morality is something real and it's part of us and we can try to figure out what it is we can try to figure out what our moral faculties are we understand something about what rational action is but about reality we have to ask what we're talking about right and if we're talking about reality in the enterprise of trying to discover the way the world works in a physics department or a linguistics department or whatever common sense notions are irrelevant if we're trying to explore our intuitive understanding of the way the world works common the common sense notions are relevant but we discard them if you have if you're using it in a more informal way like is the meaning of life real yes okay well look there's there's a sort of space between ethno science and science right and common sense and all of those and it's been explored by philosophers for for 2,500 years and it's called metaphysics right no it's different okay so yeah that is a question about whatever science is a branch of science right ethno science is the branch of science that tries to figure out what people's beliefs are about the way the world works right metaphysics is not I understand that but do you think that metaphysics is impossible science is metaphysics okay good let's talk about what the world is made of all right so but then the question is why do you think that science gets to claim what's real now let me give you an example so in the scientific image bas land frozen is a scientific anti-realist so he says the things posited by science quarks it said are not real but midsized earthbound objects are real now you've got the flip side of that right I don't have any side because I don't think the word real is sensible enough to use on their old wheel in different senses if you're trying to understand the way the world actually works whether you're a bus when frozen or are you or me we're going to go to the scientists because they tell us how the world really works if we're interested in exploring people's common-sense beliefs we'll go to the ethno scientists let us see what they describe we're interested in something like whether there are events or whether there are properties or whether there are neurological sums or something well let's take events we plays a prominent role in modern semantics right so here you can ask a lot of different questions for one thing you can ask whether in say David Sounion cymatics where there's a lot of or anything that developed from an event based semantics whether the things whether what are called events are internal to the mind or outside the hit right but I think they're internal to the mind can't they be both well they could but then we're asking another quiz right if we're asking well how do these things that are internal to the mind relate to something the outside world will say okay let's take a look at what you mean by an event so for example is the American Revolution and event yeah it was a portent event in history does that event include the fact that the man who the indigenous population called the town destroyer took off a little time in the middle of the revolution to destroy the Iroquois civilization is that part of the event called the American Revolution well not when you study in school you know you want to find out about that event you got to probably the Iroquois remember the ones that were left or you've got to look it's a serious scholarly history then you find out that one part of what was going on in the event that we call the American Revolution was a side operation in 1979 to wipe out the Iroquois civilization so that the colonies could expand if they got rid of the British well as that part of the event or isn't it well you know here come hard questions about you what we're really going to call events in the outside world and those questions don't have answers because they are you know they're highly dependent on our interests our perspective our goals you know all kinds of factors so I don't think we're going to find external events in any sense worth pursuing like for investigation will those external events just be complicated object anything you like but it is is what is the town destroyers exploit part of the American Revolution or isn't it well that event it's not your choice but there's no answer yeah but now it sounds like you're saying that well I have representations of events right the representation representation you have representations I have representation I guess there's some which we informally call events right but now one might ask what on earth is a representation it's not a representation of well see that's a mistake that comes from a philosophical tradition the way the term represent is used in the philosophical tradition it's a relation between an internal object and an external object it's not the way it's used either in ordinary speech or in the sciences so when when a perceptual psychologists say that talks about an internal representation of you know the cube or something they don't have any cube there they're talking about something that's going on in the head in fact what they may be studying and usually our study is a relation between things like Kista scopic presentations and internal events there is no queue but nonetheless they talk about it in the internal representation I mean the concept internal representation is used in the sciences and I think that's ordinary speech too in ways which don't involve a relation between an internal thing and an external thing I mean that derives from a particular interpretation of theory of ideas which said well ideas represent something else I should interject is anyway I should say that that's not the interpretation of the theory ideas that were given by the people who used it so let say Hume for example I quote him in there what he ground he raises a serious empirical question he says it's about the nature of the terms uses the identity that we ascribe to things meaning how do we individuate things right and he asks the question well is this a peculiar nature common to the thing or is it what he calls fictitious a construction of the mind right and he says fictitious there is no entity there is no common nature there's no nature common the thing there is a construction of the mind which we used to talk about the world because like real things I mean he was not an ideal he was not an ideal and I'm not here he's saying we interact he believes there's an external world out there there's a coffee cup on the table and so on but he says that the he's talking about the individuation of things how we organize things how we construct our picture of the world right and that involves the way our minds work and that doesn't mean the world in there no it's just what his predecessors called our cognitive powers which use the data of sense to construct an account of the world and he's saying well you want to look at the identity of thing the identity that we ascribe to things like what makes us call something a book or an event and so on he's saying was fictitious in the sense that it's a construction of the mind based on the date of sense that's not an idealist effect that's the position of modern science because people will call you a crypto idealist then they're misunderstanding what ideal is okay let me there's an issue that I wanted I wanted to get to here and this involves the thing we mentioned about representations and whether representation requires there being something that it is a representation of now in a very important and somewhat influential book by saul kripke there's a revival of the sort of vidcon's dhania argument but about rule-following let me just read the relevant passage here so in that book kruky says if statements attributing rule-following or neither to be regarded as stating facts no to be thought of explaining our behavior it would seem that the use of the idea of rules and competence in linguistics needs serious reconsideration even if these notions are not rendered meaningless I know you've written written down that I mean village' fine crucial words if right okay and beyond and the fact is that in the way in the sense in which the term rule is used in for thousands of years in fact in the study of language it's not the kind of rule he had in mind so if somebody if you read a book you know you study Latin let's say or you studied it a thousand years ago they would have a rule that tells you you know when to use the ablative case or some right that's not a rule in vikins time sense it's a description of a part of the language right so the questions about rule following just don't arise but we don't need to get hung up on the rules and sororities talk not I understand that but in a certain sense he's talking about any sort of computational state but there so take take just a computer all right forget about human beings for a second see computers are different story okay what it was like let me just let me get into it yeah okay yeah so what what why aren't these questions asked about insect right I mean insect when you study insects you attribute to them computational stage right is that a problem is it not real like if you say that an insect is doing you know is determining the position of the Sun as a function of the time of year and time of day and here's the computation it's using isn't that why isn't that science uh that would be but the argument would be that the reason you can get away with that is because you're talking about what it's come the representations that you're attributing to the insect our external istic Glee anchor and that is you couldn't do it in less do you see where you had an investment true you could do it in an experimental situation in which you have a light and in fact if you knew how to do it you could do it by stimulating the external sensory organs of the insect it would all be anterior doesn't there's not be a Sun there no it's just that yeah you're talking about it the way it happens actually in the real world but the same thing what you would say the same thing in an experimental setting where you don't have an external world well because you're talking about the internal construct computations of the insect on the occasion of sense notice doesn't matter what's out there notice evening notice to shift there though because you went from saying I you went from saying you don't need the Sun in the experimental setting to say and you don't say you could run the experiment in a world that didn't have the Sun and that's a different story right that's not a different story the point is if you look at what insect scientists are studying they're studying what 17th century philosophers used to call the constructions of the mind on the occasion of sense now it happens that in the world that they're looking at the occasions of sense happen to be related the fact that there's something 93 million miles away but the study could go on as if it's what Hillary called a brain and of that and the studies are internalist right because we know anything else to study but this is disputed right I mean there is this dispute about David Marr right I mean there's two stories on this - Tyler Burge and and Martin Davis for example argue that maras sort of fraught with externalist sort of yeah but they're just miss reading him okay I mean in fact the have to know more personally but I'm not sure if he was here he would say this if you look at the informal exposition in Moore in Mara's vision let's a book vision you look at the informal exposition in order to motivate what he's doing he says well you know imagine you know an elephant or some there anything like a stick figure and you're trying to and you we want to know how that thing out there is interpreted by the visual system as you know some three-dimensional object right however if you look at the experiment experimental procedures of Mar they didn't have elephants out there in fact what they were using was to guess the scopes and if they so were they were having you know dots on screens and if they had known how to stimulate the optic nerve that would been that when you go from the informal exposition to the actual science you see that like everything else it's a study of the internal nature of the beast and in fact you know in they would have loved to get to the point where they could tell you something about how you identify a you know an elephant but they never got anywhere near that however even if they did it wouldn't matter whether the elephant is there or not it would matter what sensory what's the occasion of sense again the 17th century formulation of this was I think quite appropriate on the occasion of sense the cognitive that sounds archaic but the cognitive powers of the mind construct complicated internal structures which have all sorts of properties and Gestalt properties most what Hume later called the identity that we ascribe to things and so on and that looks correct and that's the way modern science looks at it the fact that the informal expositions taught you know to sort of motivate what you're doing talk about identifying objects on the outside that's fine but you have to know how to distinguish in formal expositions from the actual scientific program and if you look at the actual program they never looked at things outside they saw aside from tickets to scopic images because they're as close as you can get to the occasion of sins we're it's but time to move on to our very eager studio audience here so let's turn to them hi how are you um I you mentioned event semantics and how that's sort of been pulled into well or is a part of some linguistic research and I'd like to ask a question about that and just hear more about it and the the way Petrovski uses it in the article and yeah in the book of sitting on your table he'll take a sentence we've been referring to this book I should point out it it's called Chomsky and his critics which just came out from Blackwell's right and the articles by Paul Paul piotrovsky I think and so he'll take the sentence John boiled the water and I'm gonna ignore the sort of the larger context but and and then turn that into something that's something like there was an event of which John was the agent and it was concerning a boiling and the theme was water or terminated in a boiling excuse me and the theme was one or something like that and then and then Petrosky pulley tries to fit that together with a syntactic account of how that can how that formal representation can turn into the the sentence that you hear so you see you recognize in your reply that it's open question whether that is that the subject matter of this whole analysis is in the language faculty or in the cognate it is something it's something cognitive cognitive system system going all internal right that's the assuming that it's all syntax in the sense of its involved with internal computation right fine so the the question then is is is and you say it's an empirical question whether that's it's in the language faculty or in the cognitive system so first of all how what would be some ways to determine empirically what what that is and also what would it even mean for it to be I have a trouble understanding what it would mean for it to be in the language faculty because then it seems like our language faculty has certain meta fits a certain event metaphysics built into it event metaphysical it's the well first of all there's no event metaphysics in the ordinary sense of event events or things out there okay and all of this is formal manipulations inside and we're now asking the question what is the architecture of the of the mind which is like asking what's the structure of some benzene molecule you want to know the structure of the benzene molecule he can't just think about it you know you have to have some theory that tells you how you look at such questions well the study of the our concerns to the question what the architecture of the mind is but then I'm easy to find you want to find out what the language faculty is well you know you're going to have at when you talk about any subsystem of an organism say the circulatory system or the immune system or the digestive system or whatever it may be you're kind of proposing that it makes sense to look at a complex organism as as if it has components each component having kind of an integrated character with its own properties it's worth studying in itself it's not separable like you can't cut the immune system out of the body but you're saying there's things it's in every cell you know but you're saying look it has properties you can studying by themselves and learn things about them when you put the whole picture together you hope you'll understand something about the organism well same when you're studying the cognitive architecture we want to see is there a component call it the language faculty we don't know what it is you have to discover it and refine it and change it is there a component which is critically involved in what you and I are doing in some fashion which has its own intrinsic properties so is it going to turn out say that it has a particular interface conditions and then some kind of the internal recursive computational process or if it does then we can the more we understand about that and how it fits into the general cognitive architecture the clearer these questions become about whether something's inside it or outside it and those are very concrete questions and it takes a anaphora you know the what are called referential relation relations of intended referential dependency okay are they inside the language faculty or outside well that's a substantive issue if you'd asked me 10 years ago I would said inside and now I think there's evidence that they're outside right on the edge and the reason for that has to do with beliefs about how the language faculty works so if the language faculty does involve optimal computation that requires cyclic derivation and if an afro books at global properties you know condition C of the binding theory well it's outside but that's a question that you can't ask in advance you have to ask what was it look like what it seemed these faculties are like you know these the more you learn about them the more you can sit you know formulate these questions clearly and that's the kind of question that comes up about the internal notion of event is it in the language faculty the semantic component of the language faculty or is in some other faculty that's linked to it and you can't you know you just can't speculate about that you have to learn about it and I guess that's my question I just just from from ignorance I have a hard time picturing what kind of empirical evidence would count in Judy Kalin between them if I'd known it I would okay I think these are the kind of quest like what is the empirical evidence that bears on whether an Afra is on one or the other side of the border of the language faculty well the empirical evidence in my mind at least turns on whether in fact there is a single cyclic derivational process that goes by called phases stepwise that's an empirical question but you know all kinds of things bear on it coming from everywhere and once that empirical question is sharpened you can ask whether a global property of an afro is inside or outside actually similar questions I might say arise on the phonetic side so Tex a prosody prosody appears to have global properties okay so is it inside or outside the cyclic derivation which is forming bigger and bigger unit well if the properties really are global it's out to it but you can't answer that you know and that the kind of evidence that bears on that comes from everywhere I might come from chemistry for all we know when we try to figure out how these processes work you've made it clear that science plays a primary role in philosophy and I was curious to know what role if any does philosophy play in science here we I think it helps to look at the question a little more historical depth if you had asked Hume are you a scientist or a philosopher he couldn't answer because there was no distinction if he'd asked can't are you a philosopher or scientist he couldn't have answered in fact until the latter part of the nineteenth on the middle of the nineteenth century there was no really clear distinction between science and philosophy I mean some if you study science and Oxford and Cambridge it's that it's the department of natural philosophy or moral philosophy because philosophy was just you know science which is one part of philosophy weren't the sting by the latter part of the 19th century they sort became separated and after that's really a matter of choice you know disciplines don't exist and we construct them so I mean you know Dean's have to have ways of organizing departments because it's too much trouble they very guide to everything but there's no boundary to what's in chemistry you know and there's no boundary to what's in philosophy it just depends with philosophers what people call them so who come out of this tradition when a state and a lot of what they want to study is questions and the foundations of science or this you know or or say the kind of things that Boston Frost is trying to clear up but using the results of science these are all fine questions and people tend the coulomb philosophy you could call them parts of them at least you call thoughtful science or reflective moral theory or you call me anything you want but there's a range of questions which have come to be in the domain of philosophy and they can extend all over the place I mean there are people in philosophy departments who are working on the foundation of quantum theory and making contributions to it you know I'd like to go back to in Zack navigation once more and I take it that we explore insect navigation because we want to find out how insects navigate in their natural environment and you're right to point out that in an experiment we can replace the Sun by by an artificial light and so on but I mean it seems like we still in an X in the in the whole explanatory context we cannot just do without the Sun and the actual objects in the real world because otherwise I mean an explanation of insect navigation becomes meaningless and so it seems to me that we have to have the assumption that insects represent the actual Sun and not just dots of light we don't have to have them in fact the way science works of course you know you're interested in the outside world but if you're taking a physics course here they don't use videotapes of what's happening outside the window because it's just useless then let you figure out how the world is working so you disregard that beyond the earliest stages of science I meant the earliest stages you see apples falling from trees and that kind of thing but as soon as you get anywhere you start designing artificial situations called experiment in which you try to refine the evidence so that it will shed light on principles which you believe will ultimately bear on what's going on outside the window but that's not what you're looking at the prints when you're studying an organism say an ant you don't nest are twith noticing that you know the ant is figuring out where the Sun is and as a very strange computation we can't do it as a function of time if they in time of year but as you go beyond you ask well what are the actual computations going on inside that and if you can get far enough you would set up experimental situations and which would with the Sun you'd figure out what those internal computations are you then find that they interact with all kinds of other things you know they're not done in isolation and out of that you expect you're going to shed some light on what's going on when the court when the occasion of sense that the insect is operating on happens to be in a connected to an external object like the one 93 million miles away but that's just the kind of consequence of the investigation of the ant but if I could follow up on this question I mean this seems to be inconsistent with what you say in this reply to Ludlow here where you're quoting gal Estelle right so you say gal Estelle 1990 argues that the representations play a key role in animal behavior in cognition here representation is understood as an isomorphism the one were one one relation between mind being brain processes and an aspect of the environment to which these processes adapt the animal's behavior it's not inconsistent he's making an empirical claim which is a very interesting one and which is is an introduction to a couple of volumes on animal representation and his conclusion which I quote there is that for animals there is in fact a one-to-one relation and isomorphism between an internal event and some property of the external world like an odor see example a deprived so the property the external world was particular odor which is out there in the world or right but you could if you knew how to do it you could just use the sensory organs and he says that's the way animal representation works with this one the one correlation between things that are outside the animal though you can really studying them at the sensory boundary and and the internal representations well if that's correct that's interesting fact about animals and they're very different from humans in that case so then maybe he's right about it it could be that they take the example I mentioned there I think it's taken from him that an ant some species of ants at least will identify a corpse of a conspecific on the basis of a particular odor of course if you give that odor and there's no conspecific around those the same thing because according to this picture that he's saying well it's just triggered by the odor which usually has come from a conspecific but if you could control the odors the way you can control lights you could get the same behavior according him there's no conscious of it yeah but but just one one more clarification question it seems to me that no scientists can claim he has explained any kind of animal behavior if if what we take to be it's its natural environment doesn't play an essential role in this explanation and so I think if there's no if we if the relation between an antenna and the Sun for example it doesn't show up in this theory then we haven't really explained what we wanted to explain well if it depends what you want to explain if you say that the sciences as the SMAW durn Sciences have developed since Galileo this is something of an innovation they really are not trying to account for the phenomena of experience I mean indirectly that's what motivates them but what they're trying to do is discover the principles that enter into the way the world functions and if you ask the guys in the physics department here can you explain what's going to this videotape of what's going outside the window they won't even bother answering and they can't say anything about that we took complicated way too many factors and it's not even their topic their topic is to find out the principles of nature so like when gal at Galileo had a lot of problems with this you go back and look at the history he had a lot of trouble convincing the funders the rich aristocrats who were the funders nosed it convincing them that it's worth studying something as ridiculous as a ball rolling down an infliction 'lest plane not because first of all there's no such thing you know who cares anyway you know and it was a real sight it was a conceptual breakthrough to get to the point where you began to understand that the phenomena of the world are of interest for the sciences insofar as they provide for the principles that of nature and as soon as you proceed very far you find out that the ordinary phenomena of nature is useless for this purpose and you do what are called experiment and sometimes thought experiments like you look back at Galileo there's no reason to believe he ever dropped balls from the top of the Tower of Pisa if you look at the argument he gives a purely conceptual argument convincing one to show that that's what's going to happen and it didn't matter whether he observed it or not in fact you don't observe it but if because his argument was convincing because the logic of it and that's true a lot of his experiments and if you read through them you know scholars have now determined he couldn't have carry out his experiments there was no way for him to do it some of them he probably did you know some of they was thinking about but the point is almost none of them had to do with observations of you know what you just a casual look at the world the same with the theory of perception so for example take an example of Descartes which I'll adapt to this situation but it's a Cartesian example is if you look at a if I look out there what I see is a lot of people sitting in a you know in a room well their cart points out you know literally that's not what's hitting your eye what's hitting your eye is you know some something that's coming from that guy's head and that guy's foot but there's nothing about people sitting in a room nevertheless what you see is people sitting in a room and then he says well how does this happen and then comes the whole story about on the occasion of sense the cognitive powers make these complicated constructions which include imposing the structure of people sitting in a room of these fragmentary sense sensations that are coming to me but you don't in for sexual psychology as it proceeds you don't study phenomena like people sitting in a room that's just way too complicated but this isn't fair to the questioner though because he's not he's not arguing against idealization I mean you could have a perfectly controlled experiment and still talk about for example in a simple take an old sort of skinner type experiment with a pigeon pressing a bar I mean you describe that behavior as the pidgin going moving it's whatever claw whatever we could describe it as bar pressing behavior right now so I mean this is not if he's not an issue about idealization Eichner could easily yeah but we're asking - he was at least understood on the Basking something different if the scientist cannot give an account of my seeing people in a room they're not giving an explanation that's far too strong I mean the scientists are giving explanations even if they can't get anywhere near describing real-life situations and in fact that's about all of modern science the bar pressing is an interesting case because skinner did impose on at the interpretation bar oppressing and that turns out to be wrong it turns out with closer look that the pigeon pecking which is what I was doing actually incorporates different instinctive behaviors the behavior of pecking for a seed and pecking for water turn out to be different instinctual behaviors which happen to converge in this experiment just mislead yourself if you could isn't that isn't that Skinner's mistake is that he he was an internal estándar feed been an externalist then you would see them pressing for a seed and pressing for watering through a difference these are dif this and I do the externalism and internal ISM I mean the motivation for distinguishing seed from water comes from observing pigeons but if you want to really carry it out further you'll find out what's going on in the pitchers pigeons head on the occasion of sense and if you could carry out the programs far enough you'd forget about the seed in the water just like David Marr does he doesn't talk about external things because he's trying to really discover what the principles are so as I knew the internal ISM and external ISM what it has to do with is giving the right idealization or the wrong idealization and we're always doing that I mean every experiment involves you know all kinds of interpretation is that what you're going to think about this thing and that thing as the Sciences get more refined you try hard to not to cut it out because you can't but at least be conscious consciously aware of what you're putting in so you can sort of compensate for it if it's the wrong thing to put in okay next question hi I think I have a much less sophisticated question than the previous one but you have characterized an eye language generally as interface of sound and meaning and at the same time here you've also been very critical of the various senses of the term meaning and reference so I just wanted to ask if you could clarify what do you mean by meaning well I know that's again like David Marr saying I'm trying to figure out how you see an elephant we start with the intuitive notions of sound and meaning whatever they are and you know you go back to Aristotle and he describes language is a pairing of something like sound of meaning saying in Greek the end yeah that's where we start with but as we proceed we're going to have to refine both of these notions so sound as it's used here it doesn't have to do with what you and I call sound and ordinary expert awk and meaning will be something very special so like maybe it will be you know David Soni and event semantics ok maybe it'll be something built on that and maybe sound will be something built on Mars my colleague Mars Haley's conception of instructions for articulatory gestures or it will be whatever it turns out to be is the sciences progress and it will have end up having some loose relation to what we call sound of meaning but you know no more so than energy or work or life or any of the other concepts that are dropped in the sciences although they often keep the sounds when they talk about their new so that's to be answered you know not to start with okay thank you okay I guess that's I guess that's it thanks a lot appreciate it you

Channel: Stony Brook University

Views: 82,755

Rating: 4.8443112 out of 5

Keywords: Noam Chomsky, Stony Brook, linguistics

Id: CHS1NraVsAc

Length: 54min 25sec (3265 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

While I've enjoyed his work on generative grammar, it's sad he denies any evolution of such grammar. And his libertarian-socialism. That I can't stand. But I never knew he worked on the philosophy of mind before. Thanks for the (very droll) video.

Edit: Woah. After listening to this video, being lulled into boredom - at approximately the 27-minute mark Chomsky goes off on Wittgenstein's rule-following, says that it's clear such rules are "real" in a sense, but misses the central point of Wittgenstein: no rule-following system is to be favored over any other, for Wittgenstein doesn't see these rules as arising through a selective process. They may be real, but they're then all real!

So, according to Wittgenstein, no definition of a word can be favored as "better" over another. (I must add that I don't agree with Wittgenstein; I think that Munz's work shows where he went wrong when Wittgenstein sees all systems as equal, but that's not the point - Chomsky was talking some serious hooey.)

[u/Mythrilfan]

Lots of upvotes indeed, but is it actually worth watching?