Review of Noam Chomsky’s New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind

Abstract

New Horizons (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000) is a collection of Noam Chomsky's recent papers on foundational and philosophical problems in study of human linguistic competence. According to Gilbert Harman, as quoted in book's blurb, essays represent most significant work that has been done in general area of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. This is surprising if true, for in these papers Chomsky places himself well outside mainstream of current philosophy of language. He mounts a sustained attack on some assumptions regarded by many philosophers as almost platitudinous; and among targets of forcible criticism in these pages are views of Burge, Davidson, Dummett, Putnam, and Quine. Notable among Chomsky's philosophical stalking-horses is idea that can at least partly explain semantic dimension of language by invoking a relation of reference between words and things. Semantics, as he remarks at several places in essays, could be understood as a part of syntax, construing latter broadly as theory of the properties and arrangements of symbolic objects.(p. 174) We could even say that for Chomsky, reference is intelligibly construed only as speaker's reference, as against semantic reference (see, for example, p. 188); though he is skeptical whether any appeal to a relation between words (or speakers) and things they speak about is likely to help explain nature and function of human language faculty. Chomsky's animadversions on reference form only one of several recurrent themes in New Horizons. He argues that mind-body problem has lacked a coherent formulation since Newtonian demise of mechanistic models of physical reality; that skepticism about meaning, a la Quine, should be taken no more seriously in a scientific inquiry into linguistic competence than should skepticism about syntax or phonology; and that, in general, philosophers adopt a double methodological standard when approaching study of language, that is, they typically assume that we must abandon scientific rationality when study humans 'above neck'-becoming mystics in this unique domain, imposing arbitrary stipulations and a priori demands of a sort that would never be contemplated in sciences, or in other ways departing from normal canons of inquiry. (p. 76) Many philosophers will find Chomsky's views irritating. But those who profess allegiance to generativist program in linguistics would do well to consider carefully where and how they disagree with him.