Chomsky

Noam : Meet the universal man

New Scientist 19 March 2012 by Graham Lawton
Magazine issue 2856.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328560.200-noam-chomsky-meet-the-universal-man.html?full=true

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Human Brain Topic Guides
Why can everyone learn Portuguese? Are some aspects of our nature
unknowable? Can you imagine Richard Nixon as a radical? Is Twitter a
trivialiser? New Scientist takes a whistle-stop tour of our modern
intellectual landscape in the company of Noam Chomsky

See gallery: "Chomsky's life in pictures"

Let's start with the idea that everyone connects you with from the
1950s and 60s - a "universal grammar" underlying all languages. How is
that idea holding up in 2012?
It's virtually a truism. There are people who misunderstand the term
but I can't deal with that. It's perfectly obvious that there is some
genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that
it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component,
whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

But there are critics such as Daniel Everett, who says the language of
the Amazonian people he worked with seems to challenge important
aspects of universal grammar.
It can't be true. These people are genetically identical to all other
humans with regard to language. They can learn Portuguese perfectly
easily, just as Portuguese children do. So they have the same
universal grammar the rest of us have. What Everett claims is that the
resources of the language do not permit the use of the principles of
universal grammar.

That's conceivable. You could imagine a language exactly like English
except it doesn't have connectives like "and" that allow you to make
longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no
idea about this: they would just pick it up as they would standard
English. At some point, the child would discover the resources are so
limited you can't say very much, but that doesn't say anything about
universal grammar, or about language acquisition. Actually, I doubt
very much that a language like that could exist.

Ideas about human nature naturally crop up in your work. It's a fuzzy
term, so what do you mean by it?
To me it's just like bee nature. Humans have certain properties and
characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other
organism does. That's human nature. We don't know very much about it
except in a few domains. We know a lot about how the digestive system
develops, that's part of human nature. We know some things about the
visual system. With regard to cognitive systems, the systems are more
complex and difficult to investigate, so less is known. But something
is. Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which
happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about
that.

In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are
just too complicated to be really researchable.
That's a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts
itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too
complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex
for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex
for them, they hand it to psychologists... and so on until it ends up
in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and
more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and
interesting properties.

If human nature is relatively fixed, as you argue, how do we achieve
social and political change?
Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale
evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it. With language,
for example, we have very good evidence that for the last 50,000 years
there has been no evolution. That is a reflection of the fact that our
basic capacities have not evolved.

So within a realistic time frame there is not going to be any change
in human nature. But human nature allows many different options and
the choice among those options can change, and it has. So there are
striking changes, even in our own lifetime, of what we accept as
tolerable. Take something like women's rights: if you go back not so
many years women were basically regarded as property. That's a sign of
the expansion of our moral spheres. So sure, human nature remains the
same but a lot of things can change.

Sticking with social and political change, what is going on with
climate-change denial in the US?
The Republican party now has its catechism of things you have to
repeat in lockstep, kind of like the old Communist party. One of them
is denying climate change.

Why is it happening?
It happens that there's a huge propaganda offensive carried out by the
major business lobbies, the energy associations and so on. It's no
secret, they're trying to convince people that the science is
unreliable, that it's a liberal hoax. Those who want to be funded by
business and energy associations and so on might be led into repeating
this catechism. Or maybe they actually believe it.

The Republican-dominated House of Representatives is now dismantling
measures of control over environmental destruction that were
instituted by Richard Nixon. That shows you how far to the right they
have gone. Today Nixon would be a flaming radical and Dwight D.
Eisenhower would be off the spectrum. Even Ronald Reagan would be on
the left somewhere. These are interesting, important things happening
in the richest and most powerful country in the world that we should
be very much concerned about.

The media has been one of your big interests over the years. Are new
and social media really changing the way we do things?
I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I'm kind of out of the Stone
Age, I don't use any of these things and don't know a lot about them,
but they are doubtless effective. For example, Occupy Wall Street
could not have developed like it did without social media.

Are they affecting other things very much?
I think that is open to question. For one thing, by their very nature
they have to be fairly superficial, there isn't a lot you can say in a
tweet or even an internet post. Almost by necessity, I think it is
going to lead, or has led, to some superficiality. So like most
technology, there is an upside and a downside.

You argue that the US is in political and economic decline. Is that
also true of the intellectual and scientific worlds?
Well, there are some who do claim that, but I'm not convinced. For
example, if you look at the journal Science, the editor-in-chief Bruce
Alberts has a series of editorials in which he is deploring the way
science is taught in the US. In the federally funded schools and the
universities people are being taught factoids; they are taught the
periodic table to memorise when they do not understand what it is
about. Alberts says this totally misleads people about the nature of
science and that it is driving kids away from science. If what he is
describing does overwhelm the education system it will presumably lead
to a decline in scientific competence and capacity as well.

Looking back on your long career, if you were to start all over again
would you still choose to study language?
When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the
concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have
done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left?
It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

In the 1950s, there was a serious attempt to address the core problems
of language and it was immediately discovered that everything was a
problem and we did not understand a thing. Now a great deal has been
learned and we understand a lot more about the nature of language. The
contemporary field is still very exciting. It is a living field. If
you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either
the field is dead or you are.

Profile
For over 50 years, Noam Chomsky has studied linguistics and philosophy
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has global
reputations as a linguist (key book, Syntactic Structures) and for
political analysis/activism (key book, Manufacturing Consent). His new
book, The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray, will
be published in April (Cambridge University Press)