Is the ontology of biolinguistics coherent? (original) (raw)
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The Incoherence of Chomsky’s ‘Biolinguistic’ Ontology
Biolinguistics, 2009
I am indebted to the editors of Biolinguistics for their unsolicited invitation to comment in this forum along with John Collins. A bit of background. 2004 saw the publication of a book of mine whose chapter 11 explicated the harsh claim that a selection from the work of Noam Chomsky was the most irresponsible passage written by a professional linguist in the history of linguistics. The only justification would depend on the claim being both essentially correct and important. Given the extraordinarily influential (even dominant) role which Chomsky’s work has uncontroversially played in the linguistics of the last half century, if the claim of massive irresponsibility is true, there is no way it could fail to be important, at least to linguists. For it would support the view, central to Postal (2004), that much of the persuasive force of Chomsky’s linguistics has been achieved only via a mixture of intellectual and scholarly corruption. So one would only need to focus on issues about...
International Philosophical Quarterly 62(4): 383-411, 2022
This article explores the tension between the antithetical philosophies of empiricism and innatism underlying Chomskyan linguistics. It first follows the trail of empiricism in North American linguistics, starting from the work of Leonard Bloomfield at the beginning of the Twentieth century, and its influence on the Chomskyan paradigm, after which the Kantian trail of innatism initiated by Chomsky himself is reconnoitered. It is argued that the Chomskyan approach to natural language represents a paradigmatic example of the unsavory consequences of the divorce between mind and matter instituted by Kant, in particular because human language involves an intimate relation between both types of reality. In Chomsky's Generative Grammar, on the other hand, the material side of language is treated as completely autonomous from its mental correlate and analyzed in terms of a priori conceptual structures and computational operations; for its part, the mental side of language is treated as innate; the relation between the two is thus made utterly obscure and incomprehensible. The conclusion of the article argues in favour of a more balanced approach inspired by Aristotelianism and Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics.