Letters to the
LITERARY EDITOR
Chomsky's 'proofs'
Sir: Your reviewer (6 February) does not do justice to the connec- tion between Chomsky's linguistics and politics. Chomsky be- lieves that because his linguistic discoveries establish that men are not blank at birth but full of intri- cate innate capabilities, it follows that all authority is not only unnecessary but destructive, and man needs only freedom for self- expression. That is why Chomsky opposes not only the oppressive capitalist order and denies the need for political, authority of any sort, but also advocates that teachers, instead of teaching, should stimu- late their students to express what is already within them. It is true that when asked for details about the free society of the future, Chomsky produces town meetings or workers' committees, coordin- ated by a central planning appara- tus not utterly devoid of authority. But this is only one of the curio- sities in his thinking.
On the other hand, your re- viewer gives Chomsky too much credit for his achievements in lin- guistics, He has not 'proved' any- thing if only because no scientific theory offers 'proof'. But even if we take what he says about lan- guage to be true, he does not tell us all that much. That man's in- nate capacities are fairly compli- cated is not new. Kant and Hum- boldt, on whom Chomsky draws more than on Descartes, can hard- ly 'be accused of supposing that the human mind is simple, and if one compares their writing with Chomsky's, their notions of human rational powers might even be sus- pected of being more, complicated than his. Neither has Chomsky elaborated a theory of linguistics. Nor has he proposed how it might be tested. That his scheme for a theory fits certain facts does not exclude the possibility that a dozen other schemes might fit equally well. To be exact, he has only of- fered some suggestions for what a theory of deep structures might be like and declared that the behav- iourist model cannot explain cer- tain phenomena. The latter comes as no great shock to literate men.
But even his suggestions for a theory of deep structures are self- contradictory. His claim to fame is not that he has discovered that men are born with rational powers, but that, unlike traditional philoso- phers, he can demonstrate this scientifically. He offers to explain language as the product of fixed rules built into human beings, which would mean that computers could be programmed to become as talkative as men. (So far, how- ever, the computers at MIT are not notorious for their conversational powers.) His philosophical pre- decessors, Chomsky tells us, had not discovered how infinite varia- tions could be produced by a sys- tem of fixed rules. But he has re- alised that the new 'technical de- vices for expressing a system of recursive processes' make it pos- sible to convert a mere philo- sophical idea into a real scientific theory. Translated, Chomsky's of- fer means that we will demonstrate humans are creative by reducing their language to a mechanical process. In short, in spite of all his loud hostility to the behaviourists, he is not so different from them. They think human beings are program- med Dam without; Chomsky thinks they are programmed from within. His criticism of behaviourism ap- pears to support his description of these internally programmed crea- tures, wonderfully similar to bees. as 'creative'. But as he presents his arguments in scientific jargon, he also succeeds in bolstering the
hopes of social scientists proposing to know all the 'causes' of human thought and behaviour. A just assessment of Chomsky would praise his contribution to the science of rhetoric.
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