The Incoherence of Chomsky’s ‘Biolinguistic’ Ontology

Abstract

I am indebted to the editors of Biolinguistics for their unsolicited invitation to comment in this forum along with John Collins. A bit of background. 2004 saw the publication of a book of mine whose chapter 11 explicated the harsh claim that a selection from the work of Noam Chomsky was the most irresponsible passage written by a professional linguist in the history of linguistics. The only justification would depend on the claim being both essentially correct and important. Given the extraordinarily influential (even dominant) role which Chomsky’s work has uncontroversially played in the linguistics of the last half century, if the claim of massive irresponsibility is true, there is no way it could fail to be important, at least to linguists. For it would support the view, central to Postal (2004), that much of the persuasive force of Chomsky’s linguistics has been achieved only via a mixture of intellectual and scholarly corruption. So one would only need to focus on issues about the truth of the claim. But I do not intend to revisit directly the responsibility issues of chapter 11; anyone concerned with them can refer to the original. Such a move is in any event unmotivated, since Collins’s remarks do not address most of the criticism in chapter 11 and none of that in other chapters (and of course nothing from Levine & Postal 2004). Rather, the present goal is only to briefly indicate why Chomsky’s ontological position, his so-called biolinguistics, is absurd. The issues of irresponsibility and Chomsky’s ontological position are closely intertwined. It is, I suggest, the hopeless quality of Chomsky’s ontology which underlies the irresponsibility addressed in chapter 11. For the failures of intellectual standards I invoked involved remarks aiming to justify his ontological view. If Chomsky had a defensible position on this matter, he presumably would have defended it seriously over something like the four decades (see fn. 14 below) since he began advancing it. This would have required addressing the extremely strong critiques made of it; these have previously multiply accused the position of being