Noam Chomsky · Politics
Chomsky’s other revolution: that the human capacity for language is innate (universal grammar), the clearest proof that creativity is native to the mind - and his claim that this creative human nature is the very ground of his case against domination, since a being born free and creative cannot justly be ruled as if it were a blank slate.
Consider something you do without a thought: you routinely produce and understand sentences that have never been spoken in the history of the world. You are doing it right now. This everyday fact was, for the young Noam Chomsky, the central mystery of the mind - and the clue to everything. Language cannot be a stock of memorized phrases or a set of habits drilled in by imitation, because its normal use is endlessly novel: from a finite vocabulary and a finite set of rules, a speaker generates and comprehends an unbounded range of new sentences, appropriate to situations never met before. In the 1950s the dominant psychology, B. F. Skinner’s behaviourism, tried to explain language as conditioned behaviour - stimulus, response, reinforcement. Chomsky’s devastating review of Skinner helped end that program and launch the ‘cognitive revolution.’ His alternative was that the mind contains a generative system, a built-in machinery of rules, whose defining feature is creativity: the infinite use of finite means.
Chomsky’s answer to Plato’s Problem is universal grammar: an innate structure, common to the whole species, that constitutes the initial state of the human language faculty. On this view, a child does not learn language the way she learns chess; language grows in her, the way an organ grows, once experience supplies the nutrition. The environment does not write grammar onto a blank slate; it merely sets the switches of a system that is already there, deciding which particular language (English, Swahili, Japanese) the universal machinery will express. This explains what otherwise seems miraculous: why children acquire language so fast and so uniformly without being taught, why the deep structural principles of all human languages are so similar beneath their surface variety, and why no other species does anything comparable. Language, for Chomsky, is a biological endowment, an organ of the mind - and its study is therefore a branch of the natural sciences, the biology of one distinctive human trait.
Chomsky drew this bridge most directly in his 1970 lecture ‘Language and Freedom.’ He set his linguistics within an older tradition - the rationalism of Descartes, the Romantic humanism of Humboldt - which had seen the creative, unbounded use of language as the very mark of a free mind, the thing that distinguishes a person from a machine or an animal. From this tradition Chomsky takes a picture of the human being as intrinsically creative and self-directing, and he argues that a consistent view of that nature leads, in politics, to the demand for freedom from domination. Humboldt had already made the move: because the true end of a human life is the fullest development of one’s own powers, and because that development requires freedom, the state that manages and molds its citizens cripples the very thing it should protect. Chomsky radicalizes Humboldt for the industrial age: if the coercions of the old absolutist state offend human nature, so do the coercions of the wage system and the modern corporation. The creativity that shows itself in language is of a piece with the freedom that ought to govern a whole human life.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Chomsky argued language is innate (the ‘poverty of the stimulus’ shows a child knows far more than experience could teach, so universal grammar must be built in), that this reveals creativity as native to the mind, and that he made this creative human nature the foundation of his politics of freedom.…
Leads to Wilhelm von Humboldt.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.