RLA Revista de lingüística Teórica y Aplicada, 38, 2000

Chomsky on mind modules, meaning, and Wittgenstein.

Question and reply.

Noam Chomsky and Emilio Rivano

The issues raised in the following exchange touch briefly and non-technically on some
general topics in current linguistic theory, such as external systems, design specifications,
and legibility conditions. Other topics are function, meaning, and certain perspectives on
Wittgenstein. The question is raised by Emilio Rivano, the reply is by Noam Chomsky.

A few suggested readings are: Language and Thought (1994, Wakefield, R.I., and London:
Moyer Bell), "Language and nature" (1995, in Mind, 104, 1-61), The Minimalist Program
(1995, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press), Nuestro Conocimiento del Lenguaje Humano
(1998, Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad de Concepción & Bravo y Allende
Editores. English-Spanish Bilingual Edition), all by Noam Chomsky.

***

A. Emilio Rivano: There is a topic that came back to me the other day, as I was lecturing
on Toulmin and Wittgenstein. It struck me also that I had mentioned the point to you in the
form of a written question for the discussion session we had when you were here. And, if I
am not mistaken, this is an issue you wanted to address then, but we ran out of time. The
original question was this: "When you say that the language faculty produces
representations conditioned by the design of other systems (the legibility conditions), what
kind of conditioning is operating here? (You also speak of imposition, force and motivation
in this context). And do we need these representations at the language faculty level, since
we must have them at the other levels anyway (for legibility)? Wouldn't they be produced
twice?"

The topic now comes in the following form: I find it problematic, on the one hand, to
conceive of human language as an organ, and, on the other, to have conditions imposed on
it by external systems. Let's suppose that "uninterpretable formal features are the
mechanism that implements the displacement property". That, to the extent that it is
confirmed or accepted under current criteria, is OK. But it strikes me as a move of a
different nature to go from that to conceiving "the displacement property as being forced by
legibility conditions". For it would seem to me that the legibility conditions are not
"conditions" at all, but simply functions of the displacement feature on external
environments.

I don't find it problematic to conceive of human language as an organ or system, but I find
it problematic to conceive of functions of this organ as another organ or system. (I think
this might remove the bothersome notion of "optimal design")

More radically: is there any need for a conceptual system? Doesn't semantics, rather, deal
with a wild variety of functions performed by the language faculty? There is a visual
system, but not a system of seeing. That is, the multiplicity of visual functions cannot be
the object of a theory, but, simply, or at best, of description. Vision is the organic system.
The (endless variety of) visual performances, "seeing", are functions of the system.
Likewise, language is the system and "meaning" names a wild variety of functions of this
system.

Roughly, this is how the topic connects with Wittgenstein. His insights, at times openly
framed as frustrations about the impossibility of being part of a theory of language, move in
areas of linguistic functions. And we can't hope for any theory on functions of the human
faculties, but mere descriptions. This fine analyst found himself in a world of fragments,
specific meaning functions, meaningful in particular contexts; a world where no theory is
possible. As the man of genius he was, he managed to say much about it, a matter we can
set aside for now.

B. Noam Chomsky: The way I've been looking at the matter is essentially this. I think
there is by now overwhelming evidence that there is a distinctive faculty of language FL,
one of the many modules of mind/brain, with its own specific properties. I'm taking a
"language" L to be a state of FL. L generates an infinite set of expressions EXP, each a
structured complex of representations of sound and meaning, let's say a (PF,LF) pair,
"representation" of course not having the connotations of the philosophical literature and its
special usage -- there need not be anything (and indeed, there apparently isn't anything)
"represented" in the sense, say, of theories of ideas.

To be usable at all, the expressions (at least, a large enough set of them, which we can take
to be infinite) must be accessible to the systems of language use: at least, the sensorimotor
systems and the systems of thought and conceptual organization. Conventional
assumptions, with traditional roots, are that PF is accessible to the sensorimotor systems,
LF to the others (I think this is almost surely inadequate or wrong, but we can take it as a
starting point, as has been done implicitly, in some form, for thousands of years). That is a
minimal condition of usability for FL. These "external" systems (external to FL, not to the
person) have their own properties, independently of language. These properties therefore
impose "minimal design specifications" for FL: it must satisfy at least these, or it won't be
usable: PF and LF must be "legible" to the external systems. The "minimalist program"
explores the possibility that these are also maximal conditions, in nontrivial respects -- that
is, that FL is in nontrivial respects an optimal solution to the minimal design specifications.

Looked at this way, the program doesn't seem to me to be subject to the problems you raise.
The only "conditioning" is that the external systems provide minimal design specifications.
It's in principle possible (though empirically presumably not) that some organism O would
have something like FL (maybe our FL) that fails its legibility conditions, so that O would
not be aware that it has FL, nor would any conspecific (we might discover it by some
indirect means). That doesn't seem to me problematic.

There's no "motivation" except in the informal intuitive sense in which "functional

considerations" enter into cognitive psychology and the brain sciences, and discussion of
evolution. Thus, informal description often speaks of the visual system, its nature and
evolution, as "motivated" by the need to perceive important properties of the world. In their
serious moments, biologists understand that this is informal exposition, not to be taken
literally.

There is no redundancy. Thus, the sensiromotor system has its own properties, which may
or may not have been adapted for FL in the course of human evolution (there is much
debate about that); same with "thought systems". These properties impose design
specifications for FL. Nothing is stated twice.

To say that "the displacement property [is] forced by legibility conditions" is to say, less
informally, that expressions generated by states of FL will not be (properly) accessible to
the external systems unless they satisfy this property. The thought systems, for example,
require that expressions have certain properties: that they have phrases with certain
relations which can be interpretated as semantic relations. Maybe agent-patient, and maybe
theme-rheme, new/old information, etc. Those of the former type seem to involve "deep
structure" (first Merge); those of the latter type seem to involve "displacement" (maybe the
thought systems are designed to explore "edge of constructions" to detect these). If that's
the way the thought systems work, then displacement is "forced by legibility conditions" in
the sense that unless FL provides for displacement, the expressions won't be legible --
properly legible, that is; they might be interpreted as some kind of word salad. Similar
considerations hold at the sound side. Thus if FL provides PF without syllable structure, it
could well be that the sensorimotor systems could only give partial and distorted
intepretation, as a kind of noise.

Is there "any need for a conceptual system?" That seems to me a variant of an old question
about whether there is thought without language. The questions are sufficiently murky so
that one cannot speak with too much conviction, but it seems to me pretty clear -- from
introspection, efforts to understand what people are doing, comparative animal studies --
that there is thought without language, and that it has systematic properties, varying with
organisms. As I understand the term "conceptual system," it is just a loose informal
designation for whatever these systems turn out to be. I don't see the slightest reason to
suppose -- and in fact, very much doubt -- that common sense ordinary language judgments
will survive inquiry into these matters (just as "life" or "motion" or "liquid" disappear as
soon as the relevant sciences get beyond the most superficial levels -- here I disagree
strongly with the mainstream of contemporary philosophy).

"Doesn't semantics, rather, deal with a wild variety of functions performed by the language
faculty?" I think the question has to be clarified. The term "semantics" is used for all sorts
of things. Thus in "formal semantics," it is used for certain syntactic processes, at least if
we adopt the conventional usage of logic and logical philosophy. In its wide-ranging uses,
the term may well have the scope you suggest. All the more reason for using the term in
some more precise way: personally, I prefer the way it was developed in the tradition from
Peirce and Frege through Tarski-Carnap-etc., but if formal semanticists and others prefer a
different usage, that's OK, as long as one is not misled. Using the term in the Peirce etc.
tradition, it's a factual question whether natural language has "semantics": I think there is
reason to believe that it does not, as I've discussed elsewhere.

You're right that the visual system (actually, systems) have all sorts of functions. Thus it
seems that for mammals, including humans, there are at least two distinct visual systems
extending from the primary visual cortex, one having to do with things like object
recognition (apparently a "new system"), the other with guidance of action (beyond access
to consciousness, and apparently an "old system," like that of reptiles and amphibians).
When one looks more closely, there are many more properties, and the informal term
"function" becomes increasingly useless. As for "seeing," that's another informal term,
dropped by the sciences as soon as they go beyond superficiality. Thus, do frogs "see"? Do
we "see" with the part of our visual system that (beyond consciousness) leads us to grasp
the actual object accurately when we misinterpret it (consciously) in looking at a standard
perceptual illusion? These are questions of terminology, not fact. Same when we go beyond
superficiality in the study of language. The term "meaning" disappears very fast, or similar
notions in other languages (which are, of course, quite different in the way they handle
these semantic fields). Again, I think contemporary philosophy has been much misled in
these respects, taking (academic) English to be "capturing" the real world in some
fundamental way -- so that we have articles with titles like "the meaning of `meaning'" -- a
fit topic for descriptive study of some variety of English, but unlikely to be of much use in
the study of the way language is used and understood.

I'd read Wittgenstein differently. I take him to be saying that we should not be misled by
ordinary usage. It is fine for normal life, but science -- our effort to understand the world --
goes its own ways, which didn't seem to interest him much. Of course there won't be any
theory of language in his sense, or "theory of functions of the human faculties," just as there
won't be any theory of "the way we live." There is no such thing as "the study of
everything" in rational inquiry, including the sciences. Physics does not study everything
that is going on in the world -- or practically ANYTHING that is going on in the world
(that's why scientists do experiments, after all). The world is vastly too complex to study in
a serious way. But I don't see any particular insight in this; sounds to me like truism.

In fact, I'm personally disinclined to use the word "theory" outside of rather narrow
branches of the empirical sciences. When people speak of "Marxist theory" or "literary
theory," my flesh creeps; I think they are mostly deluding themselves.