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Reviewed by:
  • Chomsky: Ideas and ideals by Neil Smith
  • Gary Milsark
Chomsky: Ideas and ideals. By Neil Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix, 268.

It is hard to imagine another moment in intellectual history when a field has owed as much to the work of one person as linguistics does to that of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky now has about a half century of work behind him, and it makes sense that someone should try to describe his remarkable career to a nonspecialist audience. Neil Smith has undertaken this daunting task, and he has done it about as well as anyone could. The resulting book is clear, serious, nonpatronizing, and generally well-written. It is also remarkably accurate and well-informed, thanks both to S’s conscientious scholarship and to the fact that he and Chomsky have been acquainted for many years and maintained an active correspondence as the book was being planned and written.

There are five chapters, a brief introduction, and a still briefer conclusion and ‘envoy’. Ch. 1 (‘The mirror of the mind’) and Ch. 2 (‘The linguistic foundation’) together take up nearly half the text. The first is a general introduction to the nature of linguistic knowledge and its place in the cognitive system, incorporating discussion of such topics as modularity, the competence/performance distinction, and the application of the natural science paradigm to the study of language. These ideas have been discussed so often they have begun to seem like the fiftieth recording of the Pachelbel Canon. Nonetheless, they needed to be here, and S’s presentation is one of the better ones I have read. In Ch. 2, S leads the reader through the issues that have defined Chomsky’s work in syntax from the 1950s through recent times. The discussion is couched historically, tracing the nature of successive revisions in Chomsky’s views and the major reasons for them. This is an extremely difficult thing to get across to the nonspecialist reader for whom the book is intended, and the result is of course uneven. In places, the presentation becomes sufficiently turgid to require real patience and commitment on the part of the reader. In general, however, S seems to have gotten just about right the difficult judgment of how much detail to include, and how many and what sort of linguistic examples to adduce, in order to allow the reader to see that something unusually interesting and substantive is going on here.

Ch. 3 (‘Psychological reality’) describes the discussions and controversies that have vexed the relationship between linguistics and psychology since Chomsky’s arguments for a rationalist view of cognition collided with the radical empiricism that had been the reigning orthodoxy in psychology for half a century. As S points out (93), the fireworks reduce to the question of whether or to what extent it is true that ‘we have grammars in our heads’. S, as do I, regards much of this controversy as unfruitful to the point of silliness, and this gives an interesting edge to his review of the theoretical and evidentiary issues in areas such as parsing, language acquisition, connectionist modeling, and the study of language pathology. In Ch. 4 (‘Philosophical realism: Commitments and controversies’) we are given a similar tour of the battlefield that has opened up between linguistics and philosophy as a result of Chomsky’s work. The usual players (Wittgenstein, Quine, Putnam, Kripke, Searle) are here, and the usual issues (tacit knowledge, behavioral indeterminacy, private and public languages, the nature of reference) are examined. The writing is, to my taste, the best in the book, and I imagine that this is the part that most readers will find most interesting. The chapter also includes, on p. 141, the only real howler of a proofreading error I found in the entire book: Willard van Orman Quine’s name is given as ‘Willard van Quine’.

In Ch. 5 (‘Language and freedom’) S faces perhaps his most difficult task: constructing a link between Chomsky’s scholarly work and his politics. He succeeds surprisingly well, noting a linkage between Chomsky’s devotion to rational inquiry and his rejection of political and economic dogma, a similarity between his defense of...

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