New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (review)

This is a collection of seven essays based on lectures and articles by Noam Chomsky from 1992 to the present, together with a foreword by Neil Smith. C has published a number of books like this one over the years, which attack the empiricist philosophy of language of Quine, Putnam, Davidson, and others and which defend his own ‘naturalist’ and ‘internalist’ views. This book also traces developments in the philosophy of language from the time of Sir Isaac Newton, and thus picks up where Cartesian linguistics (1966) leaves off. C points out that the problem of reconciling the ‘mental’ with the ‘physical’ was fundamentally altered by Newton’s demonstration that Cartesian mechanism is untenable. The ultimate solution to the ‘mind-body problem’, if it is found at all, is not likely to involve a reduction of the mental to the physical. Rather, the mental should be studied just like the physical, using whatever tools, methods, and insights are available, without arbitrary stipulations such as those of the philosophers mentioned above who limit the study of language in particular to correlations with observable behavior. Many, if not most linguists, C observes, ignore the strictures of these eminent philosophers, so that their efforts amount to nothing more than the harassment of the practitioners of an emerging science.

Since ‘natural language’ is what develops naturally in the course of language acquisition without instruction, the internalist and naturalist study of language does not consider those aspects of language which result from the imposition of community norms nor does it consider specialized uses which must be explicitly taught. For example, the common mass noun water does not mean ‘H₂O’ in any natural language (thus rendering irrelevant to the study of natural languages such thought experiments as Putnam’s 1975 ‘twin earth’ thought experiments), and the consideration of what water does mean in a natural language leads to the conclusion that its reference cannot be determined extensionally. The same is true for every referring expression in a natural language, including proper nouns. Further, C maintains that the meanings of most lexical items in a natural language are far more elaborate than what is normally recorded in dictionaries and suggests that lexical structure is best explored within a decompositional framework such as that of Moravcsik 1990 or Pustejovsky 1995 as a kind of abstract syntax.

In the first essay, C traces the evolution of his own conception of grammar, beginning with transformational-generative grammar in its various forms; continuing with the ‘principles and parameters’ framework, which he considers a more significant ‘revolution’ than transformationalgenerative grammar, the latter being a continuation of both traditional and structuralist ideas; and culminating in the ‘minimalist program’. In the principles and parameters framework, an internalized grammar (an I-language) is considered, in the words of the fifth essay, to be ‘an instantiation of the initial state [with the parameters fixed], idealizing from the actual states of the language faculty’, which are ‘the result of the interaction of a great many factors, only some of which are relevant to the inquiry into the nature of language’ (123). The development of the minimalist program was motivated by two closely related questions. First, ‘to what extent [can] the principles themselves . . . be reduced to deeper and natural properties of computation’ (123); and second, ‘to what extent [is] language . . . a “good solution” to the legibility conditions imposed by the external systems with which it interacts’ (9)?

As the descriptor ‘minimalist’ suggests, C seeks a theory which is stripped to bare essentials. A language must contain phonetic and semantic features, a way of bundling these together into lexical items, and a way of combining lexical items together into larger expressions. It must also interact with other systems of the mind/brain which are responsible for producing and recognizing its expressions both phonetically and conceptually. An ideal or ‘perfect’ I-language is one whose computational apparatus consists only of entities and operations that are necessary to insure...