A review of DECODING
CHOMSKY (2016) by Chris Knight (Yale University Press)
---------------------
Chris Knight sent me his Decoding
Chomsky Ms., unsolicited, presumably in the knowledge that I am one of the
great defenders of Chomsky. I replied, having read the preface, with a brief
message of what I thought was wrong with it, mentioning that I might do a
proper review on my blog and/or submit it to Biolinguistics. He replied saying
that it would be a good idea. In the event I did this longer review and sent
him a copy for the right of reply. He never did. Recently I also got an
unsolicited message from Philip Lieberman who encouraged me to read his
articles refuting Chomsky, again presumably because I might react, which I do
in the article below as well (as opposed to Chomsky himself who has no time to
engage at length in such negative enterprise1).
----------------------
One of the best German grammars, in my humble opinion at
least, is the (1981) Grundzüge einer deutschen Grammatik by
Heidolph et al., published by the Akademie Verlag, Berlin, DDR (the former GDR). In their foreword the
authors make the following point (my translation):
The system of language should not
appear to be an isolated description. It is therefore important, based on a
Marxist-Leninist concept of human language, to at least point to a
language-theoretic framework.
Chris Knight would approve while detractors can point out
that above assertion was only mentioned once or twice (but not even in the
‘index’) in the 1,000 page compendium, adding insult to injury by perhaps being
jocular, like in the TV ad, ‘they would have to say that, wouldn’t they’.
Personally, I too think it’s a nice idea that good science
is done by good people, the definition of good being something like ‘socialist’
or ‘syndicalist-anarchist’, something that the political activist Chomsky
espouses, something that Chris Knight approves of. Chris Knight however seems
intent to prove the point that a good man like Chomsky can do bad science by
claiming that the study of language is ‘value-free’, when according to Knight,
language evolved from humans being social and egalitarian. What other
permutations are there? Bad people doing bad science like in Nazi-Germany, like
Mengele? Can you have bad people being good scientists? What about all the Nazi
rocket scientist that were taken to the USA to make major contributions to
NASA, like Wernher von Braun? What about all the great Soviet scientists who
like our German friends above always credited Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism as
their main inspiration? Chomsky who is no friend of Soviet-style
totalitarianism, at least in the vein of Orwell’s Animal Farm, after all coined the term ‘intellectual commissars’
but of course given universal application inasmuch it also applies to servile
American intellectuals like Alan Dershowitz.
Chris Knight is however doing more than just accusing
Chomsky of bad science: he is accusing Chomsky of doing bad science that in
turn supports the class-enemy, namely the American military industrial complex.
His contention is that Chomsky willingly and knowingly accepted the ‘bad-mad’
science idea promulgated by the likes of Warren Weaver, i.e. coming up with a universal language that
would allow the implementation of a translation machine – with American English
as the ‘universal’ language of course, being able to get into the heads of all
American enemies and defeat them before they can put their bad thoughts into
action. That MIT at the time was in part funded by the Pentagon is no secret
and Chomsky knew as much as anybody else. So did Chomsky sell his soul for a
fat salary package? Did the powers-to-be allow Chomsky to operate a sideline as
political activist highly critical of the powers-to-be because he was useful in
concocting a linguistic science that served them well?
Let’s briefly consider the evidence for this proposition.
Machine translation has certainly made much progress but certainly not based on
the Chomsky paradigm. But what about the wider implication of Chomsky’s
perceived ‘value-free’ linguistics that allowed successive American governments
(and their great allies in the UK) to operate without any limitations? Did the
Chomskyian concept of a ‘universal grammar (UG)’ aid an abet American
capitalism and imperialism? When Chomsky famously critiqued Skinner’s
behaviourist model of human language as a potentially ‘fascist’ enterprise, he
did save linguistics from bad science but obviously failed to stop behaviourism
to take centre-stage in the ‘social’ sciences of education, marketing
(advertising) and business in general, to this very day. Note that Chomsky
never attacked Skinner ad hominem, he just disagreed with his bad science,
perhaps giving some credence to the proposition that even good men can do bad
science. Obviously Chomsky never doubted his own brand of linguistics but, as
Chris Knight points out, Chomsky on occasion did have doubts about the whole
academic enterprise in which he was immersed. Chris Knight seems to have a
particular measure in this regard: you must get yourself arrested in order to
prove you have made the transition from value-less scientist to scientist with
a social conscience, à la James Hansen and of course according to Chris Knight
himself who was fired from his East London university for being a political
activist (and later having been arrested as well). Knight should therefore not
forget that Chomsky was arrested several times and at one stage was facing a
long prison sentence, and then landed on Nixon’s notorious list of enemies of
the state. Knight also singles out Charles Hockett and Marshal Sahlins as
‘champions of unified science’, both academics in the mold of Noam Chomsky (but
were, as far as I know, never arrested for anything, the former not notable for
any political activism while the latter is indeed one of the good guys). So,
Chomsky wins on that count alone. Obviously one must admire political
dissidents who risk jail if not their life to stand up for their beliefs.
Contemporary whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward
Snowden even receive praise in the mainstream media (cf. The Guardian). Should
Chomsky have taken up arms and joined the Black Panthers? Should Chris Knight
leave the Labour Party and join a South-American revolutionary cadre like Regis
Debray did (or at least teach social anthropology at a university in Cuba)?
Should we all be brave like Orwell and rush off to the next civil war in Spain
or Syria?
How come former American academics like Barack Obama and
Samantha Powers achieve high political office? Is it, was it Chomsky’s fault?
Sure, there is a lot of tokenism one can criticize even though Chomsky never actively
engaged in it. Yes, he accepted many academic honours from prestigious (and
some not so) universities but he never sought or in the slightest wanted the
kind of celebrity status that would launch him into the world of political and
corporate elites (à la famous linguist Steven Pinker and the aforementioned
Dershowitz, both of whom got much more than they bargained for, cf. Bryant
2015). He could have easily attained high office at MIT or elsewhere, seek
admission to influential think-tanks or seek political office. Chomsky, after
all, as an ordinary ordained academic, was called upon to speak before the UN
where it is normally de rigueur to
have high political connections.
What does Chris Knight want from him? That he dress in rags
and live in a hovel like the oppressed masses in the shanty towns of our global
village? Should he, like Tolstoy, take to wearing peasants’ clothes to show his
solidarity? Above all, what should Chomsky do to live up to Chris Knight’s idea
of a good scientist? Is it just to adopt a new paradigm that fits the one Chris
Knight adheres to?
There is simply no evidence at all that Chomsky’s
linguistics have somehow contributed to or collaborated with the political,
military and corporate establishment of the USA. While there is nothing
inherently wrong with the Popperian obsession of wanting to falsify Chomsky’s
scientific theories (Chomsky after all came to prominence critiquing Skinner), there
is everything wrong with the obsession to falsify his theories on account of a
misconstrued political motivation, which in Chris Knight’s case is doubly hard
to understand as he actually supports Chomsky’s politics. Maybe – and I’m only
joking - Chris Knight is a double
agent, an agent-provocateur who follows the long line of infiltrators who keep
up the illusion that the worst enemy of the left is the factional left.
It is much easier to understand how reactionary linguists
malign Chomsky in order to diminish his political impact, for if they can only
falsify Chomsky’s theories, can they bury the political animal as well. In fact,
these are the ‘scientists’ Chris Knight should attack: they are subservient to
the establishment first and foremost, and secondly their science may also be
bad: they are the intellectual commissars Chomsky speaks about.
Chris Knight the social anthropologist – who admits to
having no technical knowledge of linguistics – nevertheless makes a big deal in
his book about Chomsky’s take on the evolution of language, which even if it
was wrong, would not amount to much in his overall work on linguistics.
Chomsky, as all other evo-devo writers, Knight included, have no empirical evidence
of what language evolution is based on, so educated guesswork (called theory by
some) must suffice. Chomsky (and his co-author Berwick in their most recent
work on this subject – which I did review in Biolinguistics, causing much
consternation amongst certain Chomsky critics, cf. Sperlich 2016) defend the
theory that human language ‘evolved’ from some sort of genetic mutation in the
brain that allowed language to develop, possibly in a short time, say from
80,000 BC, based on what Chomsky famously calls MERGE, i.e. the ability to
merge two language tokens (like words) and conceive of them as a new category
(like a phrase or a component of a phrase) and iterate up the ladder of
complexity until we arrive at what language constitutes today: a finite system
to creates infinite output, allowing a Shakespeare to use some 23,000 different
words in his opus. Chris Knight thinks this a lot of nonsense and somehow part
of the Pentagon conspiracy to reverse the Tower of Babel scenario: Chomskyan
‘universal grammar’ being the main ingredient. I am not sure why Knight dwells
so much on this Tower of Babel myth even though it was a pet idea of Warren
Weaver. Knight actually comes close to believing the myth himself, which is strange
for a self-confessed socialist who should not believe in proverbial old-wives
tales that make up the Bible. The Tower of Babel is a utterly pointless story
when considering possible scenarios for the evolution of language. On the more
scientific side Chris Knight, as the social anthropologist does of course
favour the theory that language evolved from human social interaction, noting
that the hunter gatherer period of human evolution would make for a good
starting point because hunter gatherers were a band of egalitarian comrades
that depended on cooperation to survive. It’s a nice idea popularized by the
likes of EP Thompson and other Marxist writers like Engels2 with a
view on the origins of human language. As an anthropological linguist myself (and
having been arrested once too in the concrete jungles of London), I sympathize
with the view that egalitarian, social interaction should condition language
that in turn reinforces egalitarian, social interaction in a progressive
feed-back loop but, alas, I have seen little evidence of this in the remote
islands of Vanuatu where I did my fieldwork. Language, unfortunately appears to
be a neutral tool, used in every which way, from quasi-religious rituals to
progressive action. Language as an organ does not determine our thoughts and
actions any more or less than our digestive system: the biological limitations
are what they are. Even our ever increasing knowledge about such biological
systems does not enable us to change the system (in medical terminology such
advanced knowledge does not seem to help much to maintain such systems in good
working order for the common good). We interpret the world through language but
we seem unable to change it for the better even within that narrow range of
what is humanly possible. Different languages do not give rise to different world
views either, as some deluded linguists claim. I also studied the language of
Niue which is typologically ergative, meaning roughly it is the reverse of an
accusative language where typically the actor is the subject and the object the
‘patient’, in other words, an ergative language is somewhat similar to the
passive voice of accusative languages (‘The cat chased the mouse’ versus ‘The
mouse was chased by the cat’). The language relativist might suggest that
Niueans are much nicer people than the English because their language seems to empathize
with the ‘patient’, more than with the ‘actor’. That is of course total
nonsense. What struck me most working as an anthropological linguist – acting
somewhat reluctantly in the tradition of the Western anthropological tradition
that investigates cultures that are not as much advanced as the West (now
politically incorrect to say ‘primitive’) – was that all the people I have come
across (and I have travelled all around the globe as well) are all the same,
analogous to the language diversity conundrum that Chomsky solved by saying
that if a Martian came to earth he/she/it would immediately figure out that all
the human languages only differ on the surface, i.e. have a common baseline
(called ‘universal grammar’). In other words the diversity of cultures and
races is only a surface feature however much such notions are abused by racists
and cultural supremacists. Chris Knight’s nice idea of the hunter gatherers
being a nice bunch of people who developed language and the concept of ‘liberté,
égalité, fraternité’ also seems to be contradicted by some recent scholarly
(sic) research, sensationally entitled ‘natural born killers: humans predisposed
to, study suggests’ as published in The Guardian:
“From the empirical figure of 2%
of deaths by lethal violence in primitive hunter-gatherers, different
historical times have had different levels of lethal violence,” said Gómez.
Note that the 2% is supposed to be some sort of historical
average. Note also the terminology of ‘primitive’. It seems OK to use the term
historically but not synchronically – perhaps Chris Knight can write a rebuttal
to remind Dr Gómez above that if anyone is ‘primitive’ it must be modern man
who has apparently evolved to practice mutually assured destruction – MAD, i.e.
one cannot but help to point to contemporary, extreme ‘lethal violence’
perpetrated in places like Syria and the use of ‘lethal force’ by terrorist
states (which includes the USA, according to Chomsky, and no doubt in accord
with Chris Knight). What has language (as a biological system) to do with all
that? Nothing much as far as I can see, quite apart from what Chomsky calls
‘language performance’, namely the use and abuse of language to serve the interests
of the intellectual commissars, as so well described by George Orwell in his 1984.
When medical experts study the respiratory system they are
subject (hopefully so) to research ethics that precludes butchering people,
just like when linguistics experts study language. We cannot drill holes into
the brain to find out where language resides. We can speculate that mirror
neurons enable us to match real world objects with linguistic labels, as much
as the cooperative ‘heave-ho’ is some sort of mirror image of the actual
physical work done. We can do all sorts of advanced brain scans to see what
areas of the brain ‘light up’ with electrical nervous energy when we say ‘good
morning’ or ‘stop that insane violence in Syria’. In fact another detractor of
Chomsky, one Philip Lieberman (2015), introduces his article as follows:
Language evolved over millions of
years by Darwinian processes, and its primary role is communication. Speech is
the default mode by which we share our thoughts with others. The communicative
role of language is apparent in that the neural structures that code a word’s
meaning in the brain are activated by the sound pattern of its name.
In the first instance it may be worth pointing out to
Lieberman’s ‘speech is default mode’ that sign is as readily available as
speech and that sign languages are even developed by deaf communities without
linguistic input, indicating that language is modality-independent with regard
to externalization (Chomsky, pers. comm.). I certainly concur with the notion
that ‘speech is the default mode by which we share our thoughts with others’
but notice what it is we share: ‘thoughts’. If we equate thought with language
(as I do) or at least in Chomsky’s sense of ‘the language of thought’, it
becomes a logical thought (excuse the pun) that thought precedes speech. Even
more to the point is that by introspection alone, I can claim, sadly perhaps,
that many if not most of my thoughts never get put into speech (or writing) and
thus communicated to others. Sure, communicating thoughts to others can confer
an evolutionary advantage (however, in present times this communicative
‘performance’ as practiced by the likes of Clinton and Trump in American
politics seems more of a evolutionary
disadvantage if not outright disaster), as also noted by Chomsky. Lieberman’s
second point that neural structures light up when words match meaning, is
nothing but a truism. Sections of the brain also light up when we think (and
not speak). There is plenty of evidence that we can even influence or even
direct our physiology by thought alone. Maybe it is time for neuro-linguists to
determine if neural structures need to be activated to produce thoughts before
further neural motor action is put in place to translate thought into speech.
In any case it seems to me that detractors like Lieberman and Knight provide
plenty of evidence that defeats their own theories (see also Note 1).
Still nobody, Chomsky included, has the slightest idea how
the mind arises from the brain – if there is such a thing. In the same vein
nobody has the slightest idea how language competence is embedded in our
brains, how it is acquired and how it has evolved. Chomsky and many other
linguists have devised interesting theories that seem to match the rules and ways
we generate language but as Chomsky says, linguists now are only at the stage
of Galilean physics, and by way of another analogy: scientists (linguists
included) are like the drunks who look for the lost car keys under the lamp
post because that’s where the light is. To accuse Chomsky – in this light – of
a corrupt science, as does Chris Knight, is nothing short of insulting. It is
more so because Chris Knight is, by all accounts, a progressive thinker in his
political domain. I would not sink so low and accuse Chris Knight of practicing
his version of a corrupt science just because I disagree with his scientific
point of view, and based on an unwarranted suspicion that as an established
academic he willingly derives his income from questionable sources. Chris
Knight’s current employer being UCL, which has ties to the British military
complex via its Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering – sounds a
bit like MIT – what with various departmental academics attending a nefarious
London conference entitled Military Radar (2016).
Notes
1 Knight
in his ‘acknowledgements’ does make the point that he had sent Chomsky his Ms
and that Chomsky had briefly replied which Knight summarized (which according
to Chomsky is stretching the truth, pers. comm.) with commentary as follows:
I sent Noam Chomsky the
uncorrected proofs, mentioning that I was concerned lest my criticisms of his
linguistic ideas might provide ammunition for the political right. Chomsky
reassured me that having read through my book, he couldn’t detect any
criticisms of his linguistic ideas! Chomsky always situates himself to the left
of his critics, and so is not used to criticism from that quarter. Following
his usual political instincts, he described my misunderstanding of the relation
of the Pentagon to MIT, and to advanced research in general, as a mistake
common in mainstream ideology and in right-wing economics. Secondly, he
insisted that there wasn’t even a remote connection between his notion of
Universal Grammar and fantasies about a universal language, thus confirming my
impression of a modular mind.
Not sure if Knight fully appreciated the presumed Chomsky
riposte of ‘not detecting any criticisms of his linguistic ideas’ – apart from
adding an exclamation mark! That’s really quite hilarious! It’s like Knight
replying to my review, saying he did not detect any criticisms of him and his
book!
2 Engels’
famous quote ‘Comparison with animals proves that this explanation of the
origin of language from and in the process of labour is the only correct one’.
REFERENCES
Bryant, N. (2015) Flight Logs Put Clinton, Dershowitz on
Pedophile Billionaire’s Sex Jet.
Lieberman, P. (2015) Language Did Not Spring Forth 100,000
Years Ago. PLOS Biology, February 13,
2015
Military Radar (2016) http://www.militaryradarconference.com/speakers
Sperlich W. (2016) A plea for Why Only Us? (Berwick & Chomsky 2016).
No comments:
Post a Comment