So, how to begin? Well, I guess I can start by giving it its ☆☆☆☆☆. (Begun 2011.01.06, with comment 2011.01.23.)
The book begins with Chomsky, with typical clarity and documentation, examining the many egregious failures of responsibility the American intellectual elite have displayed in remaining ignorant of America's true history, and/or of disseminating the myth of American democratic benevolence in the world. But very quickly the book moves beyond that and it was with great pleasure that I had my first extended foray into Chomsky's real passion, that of linguistics. It turns out that this is a fascinating subject, especially as told with the intelligence and creative honesty of Chomsky.
And I loved that Chomsky seriously questioned the intellectual integrity of his linguistics community, as well as that of the behaviorist's school of psychology, for failing to be empirical even as they aver their scientific integrity. I felt a particular affinity for this because I am doing something similar with the economic schooling and schools I have experienced and read. My first reaction was surprise at just how similar in kind are our arguments. But when I thought about it a bit more, my surprise is misplaced because they both go to conceptual and thinking fallacies that naturally arise whenever and wherever ideology trumps practical experience.
The interviewer Mitsou Ronat brings obvious intelligence and a thorough knowledge of linguists to the interview, and was perhaps integral to the high quality of the discussion.
Anyway, for these reasons, and many more, it is well deserving of five stars.
But that only begins to describe the depth of the excitement I felt reading this book because in Lang. & Resp. I read tangible evidence of a connection I have long felt between Chomsky and the psychologist C.G. Jung. I began reading Chomsky several years after I had begun to explore Jung, and nowhere in all the Chomsky I've read, which isn't everything but is quite a bit, do I remember him mentioning Jung. But I have found that my exposure to Jung, even in a limited way, has helped me to understand Chomsky. I have felt for a long time that both these thinkers have a similar, very empirical, approach in their method's of inquiry and in coming to tentative conclusions about the nature of life. And I am bemused that both have been castigated by their ideological peers for being ideologues.
In Lang. & Resp. Chomsky, in several places, sharply criticizes both behavior psychologists and linguists for a secular ideology that blinds them to the pragmatic real world evidence that their theories fail to account for in more than very limited examples of diurnal reality. For an example of his criticism as it pertains to linguistic ideology, see my earlier blog 2011.01.08. This argument reminds me of the frustration Jung felt whenever he was accused of being un-scientific by peers stuck on theories to the oblivion of real world experience. Jung felt that theories were easy traps that could and did lead the un-wise into trying to force the facts of life to fit the theory at the expense of understanding what the real world facts were saying about life. Chomsky's argument against behaviorist theories is just about identical.
Both Jung and Chomsky condemn as irrational empiricism when it dismisses or overlooks the unknown just because it is unknown. Chomsky is less troubled by a scientist ascribing to God a characteristic or behaviour than for that scientist to irrationally ascribe that behaviour to incomplete and unproven psychological 'truths' only because they are 'modern' theories that have removed God from the equation. Chomsky, on several occasions in Lang & Resp. comments that it was indeed scientific for thinkers of the past to assign a behaviour to 'God' because doing so was saying, quite bluntly, 'we don't know why this or that, and until we do it remains simply what it is, a mystery.' To Chomsky, that is being honest and empirical. Jung makes the exact same kinds of arguments throughout his writing about the unconscious.
But what really got me buzzing with excitement was when I realized that Chomsky's descriptions of a 'universal grammar' is nothing more or less than Jung's archetypal imagery from the collective unconscious but put into words and their rules rather than images and their meanings. Jung speculated — I am here loosely paraphrasing him — that there was some innate quality to being human, like a genetic code (what Ronat referred to as a "mental organ"), that is independent of race or creed that creates common archetypal imagery expressed through myth, mythologems, religions and dreams. Chomsky's universal grammar argues the exact same thing, but for the development of language.
Where Jung puzzled at the common mythological themes he saw in the world religions, and then in the dreams of people ignorant of these archetypal motifs, Chomsky puzzles that regardless of race, language is learned from the exposure to a human environment, even when they are ostensibly inadequate. So, for example, even if a child is born a hunter-gatherer in the Amazon, s/he will become a New Yorker if raised there from a young enough age — but decreasingly so as the child ages before immersion and vice versa. Language acquisition is a human trait independent of race, and as such exists outside of the rules of a particular language's grammar. But this strikes me as exactly the same idea as the collective unconscious!
When Jung made a similar observation about the dreams of people from different ethnic back grounds, he was accused of being a racist. And that is very similar to what Chomsky has been charged with by the so-called 'socio-linguists' who argue that social environ trumps anything like a universal grammar and, therefore, claim that Chomsky is supporting a language class system that ghettoizes blacks, for example, because they do not speak 'proper' English.
In proposing a 'universal grammar' Chomsky broaches the problem of understanding skills that exist independently from the experiences of the individual. Chomsky argues that this universal grammar becomes a specific grammar through, perhaps, socio-biological systems that derive from the time and place that the infant and child experiences. But this is exactly the same rationale Jung used to postulate the collective unconscious. Jung argues that the collective unconscious, while universal, is expressed uniquely through the individual and his/her experiences, in the wordless language of meaningful imagery.
Chomsky also lightly introduces the problem of context when language is both used to create communication and understanding. To me, this is a huge hurdle for those in linguistics fixated on the rules of the acquisition of a language from within the language itself, because I do not understand how puns, for example, could be made intelligible from rules derived from within the language itself. Puns exist outside any rules of language, and yet are perfectly understandable — but only to those who have the right language skills and, perhaps, social awareness to make the pun 'work.' And it is here, too, that there is a curious link with Jung's ideas of symbols of transformation: the understanding of a transformative experience is done only when the previous rules are superseded by new ones outside of or beyond what had been up until then, the rule. Puns exist because of an understanding skill beyond the 'proper' rules of grammar/language, and Jungian transformation happens when understanding moves beyond an individual's personal rules of understanding. [And I've bumped into another weird fushigi: the only thread I'm following in the Goodreads social networking site, has just been discussing personal transformation that has changed completely one's understanding of life and their place in it.
M, every religion claims special rites are required for such experiences. I have to admit I had been listening to a series of books on my iPod as I worked, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Siddhartha, and I was somewhere in the middle of The Universe in a Single Atom when that switch in conscious processing occured. But I doubt it was Richard Gere's voice in my ears, reading the Dalai Lama's words, that caused the event! I think there is a physical basis in the brain for what happened, a switching from one stable topology to another, the collapse of observer into observed, or the formation of a metaobserver, I'm not really sure which.Back to Chomsky and Jung.
I experienced the "sea of joy and love" much the same as Rose describes it, but a few days after the initial experience, in trying to understand it, logically. It happened as I internalized what the Buddhist idea of "attachment" means. As I consciously let go of attachments and felt the release, found I had the power to release them if I chose, the joy that was there was very powerful. I realized I could let go of the attachment to life, and did. The only thing I was not ready to let go of was my responsibilities to my boys, and whatever I might be able to do to help others with my life (Jeff).]
Here's Noam Chomsky's (N.C.) discussion with Mitsou Ronat (M.R.):
CHAPTER 9I would like to return to the idea of the biological part of language acquisition, the so-called 'mental organ' or 'genetic links.' Until I read Lang. and Resp. I had not made an interesting link between an experiment I saw on TV with song birds and the 'problem' of the feral child, which is mentioned in Lang. and Resp.
Universal Grammar and Unresolved Questions
M.R.: These last years you have concentrated your linguistic work on the discovery of the conditions imposed on rules, that is, hypotheses concerning universal grammar. This is the third epoch of generative grammar which I defined at the beginning.
N.C.: We may think of universal grammar as the system of principles which characterizes the class of possible grammars by specifying how particular grammars are organized (what are the components and their relations), how the different rules of these components are constructed, how they interact, and so on.
M.R.: It is a sort of metatheory.
N.C.: And a set of empirical hypotheses bearing on the biologically determined language faculty. The task of the child learning a language is to choose from among the grammars provided by the principles of universal grammar that grammar which is compatible with the limited and imperfect data presented to him. That is to say, once again, that language acquisition is not a step-by-step process of generalization, association, and abstraction, going from linguistic data to the grammar, and that the subtlety of our understanding transcends by far what is presented in experience.
M.R.: The expression "mental organ" has appeared on occasion in these hypotheses...
N.C.: I think that is a correct and useful analogy, for reasons we have already discussed. The problems concerning this "mental organ" are very technical, perhaps too much so to enter into detail here [but which which link to an interesting fushigie with something else I was reading at about the same time — see 'Atwood' below this citation.] A particular grammar includes rewriting rules, transformational rules, lexical rules, rules of semantic and phonological interpretation. It seems that there are several components in a grammar, several classes of rules, each having specific properties, linked in a manner determined by the principles of universal grammar. The theory of universal grammar has as its goal to determine precisely the nature of each of these components of the grammar and their interaction. For reasons we have already discussed—having to do with the uniformity of acquisition of a highly complex and articulated structure on the basis of limited data—we can be sure that universal grammar, once we have understood it correctly, imposes severe restrictions on the variety of possible rule systems. But this means that the permissible rules cannot express in detail how they function, and it also means that the rules tend to overgenerate —one cannot include within the rules themselves the restrictions placed on their application. What many linguists have tried to do is to abstract from the rules some quite general principles that govern their application. The study of these abstract conditions is a particularly interesting part of universal grammar. I have been working on this topic since the beginning of the 1960s, and more specifically in the past few years. From about 1970, I have been working on and writing about some fairly radical hypotheses on this subject. These hypotheses restrict very severely the expressive power of transformational rules, thereby limiting the class of possible transformational grammars. To compensate for the fact that the rules, thus restricted, tend to generate far too many structures, several quite general principles have been proposed concerning the manner in which transformational rules must be applied to given structures. These general principles are of a very natural type, in my opinion, associated with quite reasonable constraints on information processing, in ways that are probably related quite closely to the language faculty. What I hope to be able to show is that these principles provide the basic framework for "mental computation," and that in interaction with rules of limited variety and expressive power, they suffice to explain the curious arrangement of phenomena that we discover when we study in detail how sentences are formed, used, and understood. I doubt that they will work entirely, but I believe that they are on the right track. This type of approach has proven very productive, much more so than I expected. In my opinion this is a reasonable way to develop the Extended Standard Theory. Some work has been published, and more is on the way. I feel that the work of the past few years is much more encouraging than has been the case for quite some time. I'm very happy about it ... (180-2)
The 'problem' of the feral child is that beyond a certain age if a human child is not exposed to language, then that person fails to acquire language skills. S/he may learn the words that can do things, like get food, or the like, but the real language of understanding seems lost. This is exactly comparable to the song bird experiment I saw, in which a baby song bird was incubated and hatched sonically isolated from the song birds of its genus — a so-called 'feral' bird, if you will. That bird did have a song, but it was without the depth and vibrancy of the normally raised song bird. And this biological connection between the acquisition of a behaviours is even more strongly supported by those people who as adults got for the first time the use of their eyes or ears, but found that they were unable to use them — whatever mechanism required in the body between the brain and the senses that is needed to turn light or sound into meaningful images or communication had never been created, and seemed to now be something that could not be created.
And, in another near fushigi, the problem of context in understanding language was hammered home, for me, when I read the following:
To what does this refer? When I first read it, it seemed obvious to me it was about the ecological problems facing the planet these days, with over exploitation and global warming. But is it? Here's the bigger picture:
Even with the entire context of the cited text, I first read 'The Nature Issue' as relating to the problems of the ecology, because that is the context I have come to expect with that kind of phrase. It took a couple of second thoughts to realize that the word 'issue' was referring to the magazine itself, and 'nature' to the travel. And even here, my thoughts turn to Jung and the differences between symbols and signs, and the problem of having adequate knowledge to know when a sign is a symbol and vice versa.
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