Noam Chomsky – The biolinguistic turn lecture notes – part three

Well with the biolinguistic approach in place we want to discover the relationship between psychological states and the world as described in other terms. We want to know how computational states are related to neurophysiological states or represented in one terminology. We also want to find out how those mental states relate to the organism external world. As for example when the motions and noises produced by our forager bee direct others to a distanced flower or when I talked about a recent trip to india. Or when I say that I recently read Darwin's Decent of Men but "Men" referring to a book. All of this is called intentionality in philosophical jargon.

The broad issuses were raised permanently at the end of the decade of the brain which brought the last millenia to a close. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences at the end of the millenium in the year 2000 published a volume to mark the occasion. It summarized the current state of understanding in these areas. The guiding theme of the volume was formulated by a distinguished neuroscientist Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle in the introduction to the collection. It is in his words "the thesis that things mental indeed minds are emergent properties of brains while these emergencies are not regarded as irreducible but are produced by principles that control the interaction between lower level events, principles we do not yet understand." That same thesis has been put forth in recent years as a "astonishing hypothesis of the new biology" a "radical new idea in the philosophy of mind" the "bold assertion that mental phenomena are entirely natural and caused by neuro-physiological activities of the brain" opening the door to new and promising inquiry and so on.

Contributors to the American Academy Volume where for the most part quiet optimistic about the prospects about the remaining gaps between psychological and physiological accounts. Mountcastle's phrase "we do not yet understand" reflect that optimism. Suggests we will soon understand. He wrote that "researchers speak confidently of a coming solution to the brain-mind problem" similar confidence has been expressed for half a century including announcements by prominent scientists, nobel price winner in one case, that the brain-mind problem has already been solved.

We may recall usefully similar optimism. Shortly before the unification of chemistry and physics, in 1929 Bertrand Russels who new the sciences well, he wrote that "chemical laws cannot at present be reduced to physical laws". In his phrase "at present" like Mountcastle's "yet" expresses the expectation that the reduction should take place in the course of scientific progress perhaps soon. Now in the case of physics and chemistry it never did take place. What happend was something different and totally unexpected, namely unification of a virtually unchanged chemistry with a radically revised physics. And its hardly necessary to stress the fact that the state of understanding and achievment in these areas, 50 - 80 years ago, was far beyond anything that can be claimed for the brain and cognitive sciences today. With outh to give us pause.

The American Academy Volume reviews many important discoveries but the leading thesis should arouse our skepticism. Not only for the reason that i just mention. Another reason is that the thesis is by no means new. In fact it was formulated in virtually the same words two centuries ago, late 18th century, by the eminent chemist Joseph Priestley. He wrote that "properties of mind arise from the organisation of the nervous-system itself and those properties termed mental are the result of the organic structure of the brain". Just as matter is possessed of powers of attraction and repulsion that act as a distance contrary to the founding princibles of the modern scientific revolution from Galileo and Newton and beyond.

Noam Chomsky - The biolinguistic turn lecture notes - part two

Assuming that, I turn to some things that ought be obvious. It can scarcely be denied that some internal state is responsible for the fact that I speak and understand some variety of whats loosly called english but not say, hindi or korean. To borrow and in fact adapt a traditional term we can call this state, wherever it is, thats internal to me a state of the human faculty of language, primarily a state of the brain. We can call each such state an internalized language in technical literatur often called an I language. For simplicity I call it that. It should also be uncontroversial that the faculty of language has an initial state, part of our biological endownment, which permits a certain range of options - the attainable I languages.

The faculty of language then is a special property that enables my granddaughter but not her pet kitten or chimpanzee to attain a specific I language on exposure to appropriate data, data which her mind in some obscure way is able to extract from the glooming buzzing confusion and interpret as linguistic experience. That is no slight task. Nobody knows how its done, but it obviously is. More accurately every infant acquires a complex of such states, thats a complication error, but I put that aside. The expectation that language is like everything else in the organic world and therfor is based on a genetically determined initial state that distinguishes, say my granddaughter from my pets. That assumption has been called the innateness hypothesis. There is a substantial literature debating the validity of the innateness hypothesis. The literatur has a curious character. There are lots of condemnations of the hypothesis but its never formulated. And nobody defends it. Its alleged advocates, of whom I am one, have no idea what the hypothesis is. Everyone has some innateness hypothesis concerning language, at least everyone who is interested in the difference between an infant and say her pets.

Furthermore the invented term -innateness hypotheses- is completely meaningless. There is no specific innateness hypothesis rather there are various hypothesis about what might be the initial genetically determined state. These hypothesis are of course constantly changing as more is learned. That all should be obvious. Confusion about this matters has reached such extreme levels that it is becoming hard even to unravel, but I put this aside.

The biolinguistic approach takes mental faculties to be states of the organisms. In particular internal languages (I languges) are states of the faculty of language. I focus on language but most of what follows should hold as well for other cognitive faculties and in fact for far simpler organisms (bee communication or navigation). Well, when we adopt this approach several questions arise at once.

The central one is to determin the nature of the initial and attained states. And tho the matter appears to be controversal I know of no serious alternative to the thesis that these are in substantial measure computational states wether we have in mind insect navigation or what you and I are doing right now. Again, thats held to be controversal but since there is no alternative ideas I dont understand why. Its held to be controversal for humans. Its not held to be controversal for say insect navigation but the question is about the same.

Investigation of the brain in these terms is sometimes called psychological and its contrasted with investigation in terms of cells, chemical processes, electrical activity and so on that is called physiological. These are again terms of convenience, they dont have any sharp boundaries. Chemistry and Physics where distinguished in pretty much the similar way not very long ago. The formular involving complex molecules that we now study in school. These where pretty recently considered to be "merely classificatory symbols that summaries the observed course of the reaction. The ultimate nature of the molecular groupings was held to be unsolvable and the actual arrangements within a molecule, if this means anything, was never to be read into the formular".

Kekulé whos structural chemistry paved the way to eventual unification of chemistry and physics. He doubted that absolute constitution of organic molecules could ever be given. His own models, his analysis of valency and so on where to have only an instrumental interpretation as calculating devices. Large parts of physics where understood in the same way by prominent scientists including the Molecular theory of gases, even Bohr's modell of the atom. In fact, only a few years before physics and chemistry where united in Linus Pauling account on the chemical bond, Americas first nobel price winning chemist dismissed talk about the real nature of chemical bond as in his therms "metaphysical twaddle, this was nothing more than a very crueld method of representing certain known facts about chemical reactions, a mode of representation only" just a calculating device. The rejection of this skepticism by a few leading scientists, whos views where incidentally condemned as a conceptual absurdity, paved the way to the eventual unification.

This very recent debates, talking about the 1920s' in the hard sciences, I think have considerable relevance for todays controversies in computational theories of cognitive capacity - thats from insects to humans. Important topic, one that I discussed little bit elsewhere, that deserves more attention than it recieves.