Darwin's Dangerous Idea (73 page)

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2. CHOMSKY CONTRA DARWIN: FOUR EPISODES

bodies of theory [linguistics and Artificial Intelligence] have had cordial relations from an early date. And quite rightly, for they rest conceptually on the same view of the human mind." If only that were true! By 1989, he could
Chomsky, one might think, would have everything to gain by grounding
see how the gulf had widened.

his controversial theory about
a
language organ in the firm foundation
Not many scientists are great scientists, and not many great scientists get to
of evolutionary theory, and in some of his writings he has hinted at a
found a whole new field, but there are a few. Charles Darwin is one; Noam
connection. But more often he is skeptical.

Chomsky is yet another. In much the way there was biology before Darwin—

—STEVEN PINKER 1994, p. 355

natural history and physiology and taxonomy and such—all united by Darwin into what we know as biology today, so there was linguistics before
In the case of such systems as language or wings it is not easy even to
Chomsky. The contemporary scientific field of linguistics, with its
imagine a course of selection that might have given rise to them.

subdisciplines of phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, its warring

—NOAM CHOMSKY 1988, p. 167

schools and renegade offshoots (computational linguistics in AI, for instance), its subdisciplines of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, grows
A sizeable gulf in communication still exists between cognitive scientists
out of various scholarly traditions going back to pioneer language sleuths and
who entered the field from Al or from the study of problem solving and
theorists from the Grimm brothers to Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman
concept-forming behavior, on the one side, and those who entered from
Jakobson, but it was all unified into a richly interrelated family of scientific
a concern with language, on the other.... When the uniqueness of
investigations by the theoretical advances first proposed by one pioneer,
language processes as a human faculty is emphasized, as it has been by
Noam Chomsky. His slender 1957 book,
Syntactic Structures,
was an appli-Chomsky ..., the gulf becomes wider.

cation to natural languages such as English of the results of an ambitious

—HERBERT SIMON and CRAIG KAPLAN 1989, p. 5

theoretical investigation he had undertaken into yet another region of Design Space: the logical space of all possible algorithms for generating and On September 11, 1956, at MIT, three papers were presented at a meeting recognizing the sentences of all possible languages. Chomsky's work fol-of the Institute for Radio Engineers. One was by Allen Newell and Herbert lowed closely in the path of Turing's purely logical investigations into the Simon (1956), "The Logic Theory Machine," and in it they showed, for the powers of what we now call computers. Chomsky eventually defined an first time, how a computer could prove nontrivial theorems of logic. Their ascending scale of types of grammars or types of languages—the Chomsky

"machine" was the father (or grandfather) of their General Problem Solver Hierarchy, on which all students of computation theory still cut their teeth—

(Newell and Simon 1963), and the prototype for the computer language Lisp, and showed how these grammars were interdefinable with an ascending scale which is to Artificial Intelligence roughly what the DNA code is to genetics.

of types of automata or computers—from "finite state machines" through The Logic Theory Machine is a worthy rival of Art Samuel's checkers

"push-down automata" and "linear bounded machines" to "Turing machines."

program for the honor of AI-Adam. Another paper was by the psychologist I can vividly remember the shock wave that rolled through philosophy George A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," which when Chomsky's work first came to our attention a few years later. In 1960, went on to be one of the classic papers inaugurating the field of cognitive my sophomore year at Harvard, I asked Professor Quine what critics of his psychology (Miller 1956). The third paper was by a twenty-seven-year-old views I should be reading. (I considered myself at the time to be an anti-Junior Fellow at Harvard, Noam Chomsky, "Three Models for the Description Quinian of ferocious conviction, and was already beginning to develop the of Language" (1956). Retrospective coronations are always a bit arbitrary, as arguments for my senior thesis, attacking him. Anybody who was arguing we have seen several times, but Chomsky's talk to the IRE is as good an event against Quine was somebody I had to know about!) He immediately sugas any to mark the birth of modern linguistics. Three major new scientific gested that I should look at the work of Noam Chomsky, an author few in disciplines born in the same room on a single day—I wonder how many in the philosophy had heard of at the time, but his fame soon engulfed us all.

audience had the sense that they were participating in a historic event of such Philosophers of language were divided in their response to his work. Some proportions. George Miller did, as he tells us in his account (1979) of that loved it, and some hated it. Those of us who loved it were soon up to our meeting. Herbert Simon's own retrospective view of the occasion has changed eyebrows in transformations, trees, deep structures, and all the other arcana over the years. In his 1969 book, he drew attention to the remarkable occasion of a new formalism. Many of those who hated it condemned it as dreadful, and said of it (p. 47): "Thus the two

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philistine
scientism,
a clanking assault by technocratic vandals on the beau-as they are. Chomsky and Fodor heaped scorn on this enterprise, but the tiful, unanalyzable, unformalizable subtleties of language. This hostile atti-grounds of their attack gradually shifted in the course of the match, for tude was overpowering in the foreign-language departments of most major Schank is no slouch in the bully-baiting department, and he staunchly de-universities. Chomsky might be a professor of linguistics at MIT, and lin-fended his research project. Their attack began as a straightforward, "first-guistics might be categorized, there, as one of the humanities, but Chomsky's principles" condemnation of conceptual error—Schank was on one fool's work was science, and science was the Enemy—as every card-carrying errand or another—but it ended with a striking concession from Chomsky: it humanist knows.

just might turn out, as Schank thought, that the human capacity to comprehend conversation (and, more generally, to think) was to be explained in Sweet is the lore which Nature brings,

terms of the interaction of hundreds or thousands of jerry-built gizmos, but Our meddling intellect Misshapes the

that would be a shame, for then psychology would prove in the end not to be beauteous forms of things:—

"interesting." There were only two interesting possibilities, in Chomsky's We murder to dissect.

mind: psychology could turn out to be "like physics"—its regularities Wordsworth's Romantic view of the scientist as murderer of beauty seemed explainable as the consequences of a few deep, elegant, inexorable laws—or perfectly embodied by Noam Chomsky, automata theorist and Radio psychology could turn out to be utterly lacking in laws—in which case the Engineer, but it is a great irony that he was all along the champion of an only way to study or expound psychology would be the novelist's way (and attitude towards science that might seem to offer salvation to humanists. As he much preferred Jane Austen to Roger Schank, if that were the enterprise).

we saw in the previous section, Chomsky has argued that science has limits, A vigorous debate ensued among the panelists and audience, capped by an and, in particular, it stubs its toe on the mind. Discerning the shape of this observation from Chomsky's colleague at MIT Marvin Minsky: "I think only a humanities professor at MIT could be so oblivious to the third 'interesting'

curious fact has long been difficult, even for those who can handle the possibility: psychology could turn out to be like engineering." Minsky had technicalities and controversies of contemporary linguistics, but it has long put his finger on it. There is something about the prospect of an engineering been marveled at. Chomsky's notorious review ( 1959) slamming B. F. Skin-approach to the mind that is deeply repugnant to a certain sort of humanist, ner's
Verbal Behavior
(1957) was one of the founding documents of cognitive and it has little or nothing to do with a distaste for materialism or science.

science. At the same time, Chomsky has been unwaveringly hostile to Chomsky was himself a scientist, and presumably a materialist (his Artificial Intelligence, and has been so bold as to entitle one of his major

"Cartesian" linguistics did not go
that far!
), but he would have no truck with books
Cartesian Linguistics
(1966)—almost as if he thought the antiengineering. It was somehow beneath the dignity of the mind to be a gadget materialistic dualism of Descartes was going to come back in style. Whose or a collection of gadgets. Better the mind should turn out to be an side was he on, anyway? Not on Darwin's side, in any case. If Darwin-impenetrable mystery, an inner sanctum for chaos, than that it should turn out dreaders want a champion who is himself deeply and influentially enmeshed to be the sort of entity that might yield its secrets to an engineering analysis!

within science itself, they could not do better than Chomsky.

Though I was struck at the time by Minsky's observation about Chomsky, This was certainly slow to dawn on me. In March 1978, I hosted a re-the message didn't sink in. In 1980, Chomsky published "Rules and Repre-markable debate at Tufts, staged, appropriately, by the Society for Philosophy sentations" as a target article in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
and I was and Psychology.7 Nominally a panel discussion on the foundations and among the commentators. The contentious issue, then and now, was Chom-prospects of Artificial Intelligence, it turned into a tag-team rhetorical wres-sky's insistence that language competence was largely innate, not something tling match between four heavyweight ideologues: Noam Chomsky and Jerry that a child could properly be said to
learn.
According to Chomsky, the Fodor attacking AI, and Roger Schank and Terry Winograd defending it.

structure of language is mostly fixed in the form of innately specified rules, Schank was working at the time on programs for natural language com-and all the child does is set a few rather peripheral "switches" that turn him prehension, and the critics focused on his scheme for representing (in a into an English-speaker instead of a Chinese-speaker. Chomsky says the computer) the higgledy-piggledy collection of trivia we all know and some-child is
not
a sort of general-purpose learner—a "General Problem Solver,"

how rely on when deciphering ordinary speech acts, allusive and truncated as Newell and Simon would say—who must figure out what language is and learn to engage in it. Rather, the child is innately equipped to speak and 7. This account is drawn, with revisions, from Dennett 1988a.

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understand a language, and merely has to rule out certain (very limited) esting," he couldn't see how there might be something "disheartening" to possibilities and rule in certain others. That's why it is so effortless, according psychologists in the discovery that they might have to pass the buck to to Chomsky, for even "slow" children to learn to speak. They aren't really biology- Years later, I finally realized that the reason he didn't see what I was learning at all, any more than birds learn their feathers. Language, and driving at was that although he insisted that the "language organ" was innate, feathers, just
develop
in species ordained to have them, and are off limits to this did
not
mean to him that it was a product of natural selection! Or at least species that lack the innate equipment. A few developmental triggers set the not in such a way as to permit biologists to
pick up
the buck and analyze the language-acquisition process in motion, and a few environmental conditions way in which the environment of our ancestors had shaped the design of the subsequently do some minor pruning or shaping, into whichever mother language organ over the eons. The language organ, Chomsky thought, was tongue the child encounters.

not
an adaptation, but . . . a mystery, or a hopeful monster. It was something This claim has encountered enormous resistance, but we can now be sure that
perhaps
would be illuminated some day by physics, but not by biology.

that the truth lies much closer to Chomsky's end of the table than to that of his opponents (for the details, see the defenses of Chomsky's position in It may be that at some remote period a mutation took place that gave rise Jackendoff 1993 and Pinker 1994). Why the resistance? In my
BBS
com-to the property of discrete infinity, perhaps for reasons that have to do with mentary—which I presented as a constructive observation, not an objection—

the biology of cells, to be explained in terms of properties of physical I pointed out that there was one reason to resist this that was perfectly mechanisms, now unknown __ Quite possibly other aspects of its evolu reasonable, even if it was only a reasonable
hope.
Just like the biologists'

tionary development again reflect the operation of physical laws applying resistance to "Hoyle's Howler," the hypothesis that life didn't begin on Earth to a brain of a certain degree of complexity. [ 1988, p. 170.) but began somewhere else and migrated here, the psychologists' resistance to Chomsky's challenge had a benign explanation: if Chomsky was right, it How could this be? Many linguists and biologists have tackled the prob-would just make the phenomena of language and language acquisition that lems of the evolution of language, using the same methods that have worked much harder to investigate. Instead of finding the learning process going on well on other evolutionary puzzles, and getting results, or at least what seem before our eyes in individual children, where we could study it and manip-to be results. For instance, at the most empirical end of the spectrum, work by ulate it, we would have to "pass the buck to biology" and hope that the neuroanatomists and psycholinguists has shown that our brains have features biologists could explain how our
species
"learned" to have language com-lacking in the brains of our closest surviving relatives, features that play petences built in at birth. This was a much less tractable research program. In crucial roles in language perception and language production. There is a wide the case of Hoyle's hypothesis, one could imagine