CHOMSKY........................................................................................................

AND HIS CRITICS

Edited by

Louise M. Antony and Norbert Hornstein

CHOMSKY........................................................................................................

AND HIS CRITICS

PHILOSOPHERS AND THEIR CRITICS

General Editor: Ernest Lepore

Philosophy is an interactive enterprise. Much of it is carried out in dialogue astheories and ideas are presented and subsequently refined in the crucible of closescrutiny. The purpose of this series is to reconstruct this vital interplay amongthinkers. Each book consists of a temporary assessment of an important livingphilosopher’s work. A collection of essays written by an interdisciplinary groupof critics addressing the substantial theses of the philosopher’s corpus opens eachvolume. In the last section, the philosopher responds to his or her critics, clarifiescrucial points of the discussion, or updates his or her doctrines.

1 Dretske and His CriticsEdited by Brian McLaughlin

2 John Searle and His CriticsEdited by Ernest Lepore and Robert van Gulick

3 Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His CriticsEdited by Barry Loewer and Georges Rey

4 Dennett and His CriticsEdited by Bo Dahlbom

5 Danto and His CriticsEdited by Mark Rollins

6 Perspectives on QuineEdited by Robert B. Barrett and Roger F. Gibson

7 The Churchlands and Their CriticsEdited by Robert N. McCauley

8 Singer and His CriticsEdited by Dale Jamieson

9 Rorty and His CriticsEdited by Robert B. Brandom

10 Chomsky and His CriticsEdited by Louise M. Antony and Norbert Hornstein

CHOMSKY........................................................................................................

AND HIS CRITICS

Edited by

Louise M. Antony and Norbert Hornstein

Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1norbert hornstein and louise antony

1 Chomsky on the Mind–Body Problem 11william g. lycan

2 Chomsky’s Challenge to Physicalism 29jeffrey poland

3 Real Materialism 49galen strawson

4 Naturalistic Inquiry: Where does Mental Representation Fit in? 89frances egan

5 Chomsky, Intentionality, and a CRTT 105georges rey

6 Referential Semantics for I-languages? 140peter ludlow

7 Meaning and its Place in the Language Faculty 162paul horwich

contentsvi

8 Small Verbs, Complex Events: Analyticity without Synonymy 179paul m. pietroski

9 In Defense of Public Language 215ruth garrett millikan

10 The Theory Theory as an Alternative to the Innateness Hypothesis 238alison gopnik

11 Repliesnoam chomsky

Reply to Lycan 255Reply to Poland 263Reply to Strawson 266Reply to Egan 268Reply to Rey 274Reply to Ludlow 287Reply to Horwich 295Reply to Pietroski 304Reply to Millikan 308Reply to Gopnik 316

Major Works by Noam Chomsky 329

Index 333

Notes on Contributors

Frances Egan is Associate Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Centerfor Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. She is the author of numerousarticles in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology, including“Folk Psychology and Cognitive Architecture,” and “Computation and Content.”

Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology at the University of California atBerkeley. She is the author of many articles on cognitive development and itsrelation to philosophical problems, and has written two books, Words, Thoughtsand Theories with Andrew Meltzoff, and The Scientist in the Crib with AndrewMeltzoff and Patricia Kuhl.

Paul Horwich is Kornblith Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center ofthe City University of New York. He is the author of Probability and Evidence:Asymmetries in Time, Truth, Meaning, as well as numerous essays in the philo-sophy of language, the philosophy of science, and metaphysics.

Peter Ludlow is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University ofNew York, Stony Brook. He is author of Semantics, Tense, and Time: An Essay inthe Metaphysics of Natural Language, as well as a number of articles on topicsranging from semantics and the philosophy of linguistics to cyberspace ethics.He is editor or co-editor of several volumes, including Readings in the Philosophyof Language.

William G. Lycan is William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of Philosophy at theUniversity of North Carolina. His publications include Logical Form in NaturalLanguage, Knowing Who (with Steven Boer), Judgment and Justification, Modalityand Meaning, Consciousness and Experience, and Real Conditionals.

notes on contributorsviii

Ruth Garrett Millikan is a graduate of Oberlin College and Yale University.She is currently Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and The AlumniAssociation Distinguished Professor for 2000–2003 at the University of Connect-icut. She is author of Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories, WhiteQueen Psychology, On Clear and Confused Ideas, and Varieties of Meaning: TheJean Nicod Lectures for 2002, forthcoming. She works in the philosophies ofbiology, psychology, and language, and on questions in ontology.

Paul M. Pietroski is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at theUniversity of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of Causing Actions,along with articles in the philosophy of language and semantics.

Jeffrey Poland is a member of the Department of Psychology and the Centerfor Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He is theauthor of Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations, and co-author, with WilliamSpaulding, of two forthcoming books on the analysis and reform of clinical andresearch practices concerning mental illness.

Georges Rey is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland atCollege Park. He is the co-editor, with Barry Loewer, of Meaning in Mind: Fodorand his Critics, and the author of Contemporary Philosopy of Mind: A ContentiouslyClassical Approach, as well as of numerous articles in the philosophy of mind andcognitive science.

Galen Strawson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. Heis the author of books on free will, causation, and the philosophy of mind:Freedom and Belief, The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume,and Mental Reality, and is currently working on a book on the “self.”

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Anarchy Archives, for compiling our list of works byNoam Chomsky, and the College of Humanities and Department of Philosophyof the Ohio State University for help in deferring the costs of production.

Introduction

NORBERT HORNSTEIN andLOUISE ANTONY

There is probably no single person within the last century who has had a moredramatic impact on contemporary understandings of language and the mind thanNoam Chomsky. Not only did he fundamentally restructure the science oflinguistics, but he transformed the science of psychology, rehabilitating thedoctrines of mentalism and nativism after their long exile during the reign ofbehavorism. Philosophers took note: the Chomskian revolution offered both newpossibilities for understanding language and mind, and new challenges toentrenched philosophical opinion. This volume brings together ten scholars –philosophers and philosophically minded cognitive scientists – to explore someof the possibilities and to take up some of the challenges.

Any discussion of Chomsky’s work must begin with the linguistics. One of thecentral features of Chomsky’s view of language is his emphasis on the biologicalbasis of the human linguistic capacity. Fish swim, birds fly, people talk.According to Chomsky, these various talents are of a piece – all of them rest onspecific biological structures whose intricate detail is, to a considerable degree,attributable to the organism’s genetic endowment. Human linguistic capacityinvolves, in particular, a postulated “mental organ,” many of whose specificfeatures are innately specified. This posited structure is initially dedicated to theacquisition of linguistic knowledge and is subsequently involved in variousaspects of language use, including the production and understanding of utter-ances. The aim of linguistic theory is to describe the initial state of this facultyand the changes it undergoes with exposure to linguistic data. Chomsky charac-terizes the initial state of the language faculty as a set of principles and parameters(see Chomsky 1981). Language acquisition then consists in the setting of theseopen parameter values on the basis of linguistic data available to the child. Inthis way, Chomsky explains both the commonalities and the differences amonghumanly natural languages. The commonalities are reflections of the initial state

introduction2

of the system: it is a universal grammar (UG), a super-recipe for concoctinglanguage-specific grammars. The differences are embodied in the various gram-mars that result when parametric values are fixed.

Linguistic theory, given these views, has a double mission. First, it aims toadequately characterize the particular grammars (and, hence, the mental states)attained by native speakers during the process of language acquisiton. A theoryis said to be “descriptively adequate” just in case it achieves this goal. Butlinguistic theory has a second aim, and that is to explain how grammaticalcompetence is attained – to explain, in other words, how descriptively adequategrammars can arise on the basis of exposure to “primary linguistic data” (PLD)– the data children are exposed to during the period of acquisition. A theory thatsatisfies this requirement is said to be “explanatorily adequate.” Explanatoryadequacy will depend on an articulated theory of UG – a detailed theory of thegeneral principles and open parameters that characterize the initial state of thelanguage faculty.

Chomsky’s conception of linguistics as a science oriented around these twogoals – particularly the latter goal – was one of the revolutionary aspects of histheory of language. In any given domain, there is an intimate relation betweenhow a problem is conceived and the kinds of explanations one should offer.Chomsky proposed that we identify explanation in linguistics with a solution tothe problem of how children can attain mastery of their native languages. This isoften referred to as “the logical problem of language acquisition.” It sets linguisticexplanation in the context of the problem of explaining how a child masters arich and highly structured system on the basis of a rather slender data base. Theproblem looks like this.

Natural languages pair sounds and meanings over an unbounded domain ofstructures. Humans typically come to master at least one such mapping in asurprisingly short time, without conscious effort, explicit instruction or apparentdifficulty. How is this possible? An adequate answer to this question must takeaccount of the following facts.

First, a human can acquire any language if placed in the appropriate speechcommunity. Get raised in Boston and you’ll grow up speaking English the wayBostonians do. Similar remarks hold for Moscow and Russian, Tel-Aviv andHebrew, and Paris and French. It would seem that this fact could be handilyexplained by reference to the diversity of the data available to the children raisedin these various locales and exposed to these various forms of human language.But here we must confront a second fact, namely, that the PLD, the data actuallyavailable to the child, are, taken on their own, vastly insufficient to determine therich grammars the children inevitably attain. Specifically, there are four kinds ofproblems with the data that prevent them from determining the outcome:

(a) The set of sentences the child is exposed to is finite, while the knowledgeattained extends over an unbounded domain of sentences.

(b) The child is exposed not to sentences per se but to utterances of sentences.

introduction 3

Utterances are imperfect vehicles for the transmission of sentential informationas they can be defective in various ways. Slurred speech, half sentences, slips ofthe tongue, and mispronunciations are only a few of the ways that utterances canprove unreliable as indicators of sentence structure.

(c) Acquisition takes place without explicit guidance by the members of thespeech community. As it happens, children do not make many errors to beginwith when one considers the range of logically possible mistakes, and the errorsthey do commit fall into regular, predictable patterns. Moreover, adults do notengage in systematic corrections of errors that do occur. Finally, even whencorrection is offered children don’t seem to notice or to care. Children seem, inshort, surprisingly immune to any form of adult linguistic intrusion (see Light-foot 1982 for further discussion).

(d) Last, but perhaps most importantly, it is likely that, of all the linguisticevidence theoretically available to the child, only that in simple sentences isabsorbed. The gap between input and intake is attributable to various cognitivelimitations such as short attention span and limited memory.

All of this implies that the acquisition process is primarily guided by theinformation available in well-formed simple sentences. In contrast to the evidenceavailable to the linguist in theory construction, the information the child uses inbuilding its grammar is severely restricted. The PLD do not contain, for example,either negative data (the information available in unacceptable, ill-formed sen-tences) or complex data (the information yielded by complex constructions). Thissuggests that whenever the linguistic properties of complex clauses diverge fromsimple ones, the acquisition of this knowledge cannot be data-driven. Thus theacquisition of a grammar cannot be a matter of routine induction. The overallargument here has become known as the argument from the poverty of thestimulus.

The general picture that emerges from these considerations is that attaininglinguistic competence involves the development of a rule system or grammar andthat humans come equipped with a rich innate system that guides the process ofgrammar construction. This system is supple enough to allow for the acquisitionof any humanly natural language grammar, yet rigid enough to yield results evenin the face of the deficiencies of the PLD. Linguistic theories must describe boththe grammars attained, and the fine structure of the innate capacity that makespossible the attainment of these grammars – they must be, in other words, bothdescriptively and explanatorily adequate.

Since the very beginnings of generative grammar these issues of descriptiveand explanatory adequacy have loomed large. Chomsky’s arguments, for example,against Markov models of human linguistic competence were that they wereincapable of dealing with long-distance dependencies exemplified by conditionalconstructions in English and hence could not be descriptively adequate. Hisargument in favor of a transformational approach to grammar rested on the claimthat it allowed for the statement of crucial generalizations evident in the