Neoliberalism and Global Order
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
5. Secondary
Readings
Noam
Chomsky. “Neoliberalism and Global Order” in Profit
Over People.
Key Terms (tags): globalization,
Supporting References:
- Smith, Barry C. "Chomsky, Noam." The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. : Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference. 2005. Date Accessed 19 Aug. 2013
“Chomsky, Noam (1928– ). American linguist and philosopher
whose pioneering work on language, Syntactic Structures
(1957), and devastating ‘Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal
Behaviour’ (in Language (1959) led to the cognitive
revolution, and the demise of behaviourism, in psychology. Languages
are largely identified by their structure, so, for Chomsky,
linguistics
is the study of the structure of human languages. He also argues that
the theory of language is the theory of a speaker's knowledge of
language—knowledge represented in the mind of the individual. So
linguistic theory becomes the study of those linguistic structures
represented in the minds of speakers which constitute their knowledge
of language. Thus linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology
which studies the mental structures responsible for linguistic
competence. Linguistic competence is just one of the interacting
components which contribute to the production of linguistic
behaviour, so the latter can provide only a rough guide to the
speaker's linguistic knowledge. A theory of competence aims to factor
it out from the performance data of language use by eliciting
judgements from speakers about which strings of words belong to their
language (i.e. which strings they find grammatical), then
constructing a grammar
that generates all and only those grammatical strings.
“Chomsky uses the term ‘grammar’
to mean both the theory formulated by the linguist and an internal
component of the speaker–hearer's mind. This is legitimate so long
as the grammar provides a model of the speaker– hearer's
competence: a finite means for generating the potential infinity of
linguistic forms a speaker–hearer can produce or recognize. Part
of the task in explaining what the speaker knows is to account for
this creativity: that by the age of 4 most children can produce and
recognize a huge range of sentences they have never heard before, by
rearranging familiar words into new but legitimate configurations.
The best available hypothesis is that they have mastered a system of
grammatical knowledge which it is the task of the linguist to
describe. Because the grammatical rules or principles are not
consciously known and cannot be explicitly stated by the
speaker–hearer, Chomsky infers that they must be unconsciously, or
tacitly, known. This mentalist hypothesis serves to explain why
speaker–hearers conform to complex generalizations that go beyond
what could be picked up from the available linguistic evidence.
“The philosopher Quine has
criticized Chomsky's position claiming that all we have to go on is
behavioural dispositions of speakers, and that these do not
discriminate between different descriptively adequate grammars
speakers could be using to assign structure to sentences they
recognize as belonging to their language. But although the evidence
is behavioural, the theoretical constructs posited to explain it do
not have to be. By postulating the grammars that underlie linguistic
behaviour, Chomsky can formulate generalizations which explain
speakers' linguistic judgements and use, including the gaps we find
in the data.
“Another task is to explain how
children with such different cultural backgrounds, intelligence, and
experience learn, without explicit training, and at much the same
age, to speak their native language. How do speakers acquire
knowledge of language? In Chomsky's view, a large part of this
knowledge is innate, a matter of a biological endowment specific to
humans. Speakers move from an initial state of the language faculty,
which they share, to an attained state, which they develop on
exposure to the primary linguistic data. The initial state is
characterized by the principles of universal
grammar: a finite set of interactive
principles which allow for parametric variation within a certain
range. The variety of human languages is explained by the different
vocabularies and parameter settings of the universal principles
which characterize the attained states of the language faculty in
different speakers. Chomsky distinguishes E-language—the common
notion of languages like Dutch, English, German—which is
hopelessly vague, and I-language—the internal language of an
individual speaker–hearer— which is the proper object of
scientific study.
“In addition to his work in
linguistics, Chomsky has been an active critic on the left of the
political spectrum and has published far-reaching criticisms of US
domestic and foreign policy.”
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