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MARIO BUNGE
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 107
1. CRISIS IN LINGUISTICS 109
1.1 Language and Linguistics 109
1.2 Chomsky's Upheaval 116
2. GRAMMAR 123
2.1 Syntax 123
2.2 Semantics 131
3. UNIVERS ALS AND NATIVISM 141
3.1 Linguistic Universals 141
3.2 Language Acquisition 147
4. METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS 158
4.1 Testing Linguistic Theories 158
4.2 Nature of Linguistic Research 163
5. CONCLUDING REMARKS 168
BIBLIOGRAPHY 170
INTRODUCTION
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108 MARIO BUNGE
cal) analysis of linguistic expressions is the means for curing that quaint
disease called 'philosophy', whereas to Chomsky the theoretical analysis
of language is an end in itself as well as the best method to understand
man. And, whereas toWittgenstein linguistic inquiry is within the reach
of anyone, to Chomsky a
it is specialized endeavor within cognitive psy?
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 109
study. We shall discuss also several other features of the current meth?
odological and philosophical crisis of linguistics. In particular, we should
like to remove some of the roadblocks to further progress in linguistics.
1. CRISIS IN LINGUISTICS
Linguists agree that their job is to study languages, but disagree on what
language is. Such disagreement may be explained by the fact that lin?
guistics has long roots in the humanities and only short ones in the sci?
ences, particularly anthropology. As in the case of other important con?
cepts, one may hope that language be eventually defined (implicitly) by
a comprehensive theory or system of theories. Meanwhile the diversity
of conceptions of language, which reflects conflicting philosophies as well
as differences of emphasis, affects linguistic inquiry by unnecessarily
deepening the chasms amongst the various linguistic schools. Table I ex?
hibits some of these differences.
The differentconceptions of language are related not only to the di?
-
versity of linguistic schools each of them attached to its own philosophy
- but also to the current of the study of language into half
fragmentation
a dozen different disciplines. These disciplines, that are only tenuously
connected to one another, are pure linguistics (the study of grammars),
psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics, medical linguistics,
and applied linguistics. (Anthropological linguistics or ethnolinguistics has
been absorbed by sociolinguistics.)
For pure linguistics language is a system of symbols with certain syn?
tactic, semantic, and phonological features codified in grammars. For
psycholinguistics language is a psychological phenomenon: it expresses
feelings and thoughts, in an adjunct to action, and also a tool that facil?
itates the elaboration of thought. For sociolinguistics language is ameans
of communication; as such, it is an aspect of social behavior and there?
fore an ingredient of the cement of human society. For neurolinguistics
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110 MARIO BUNGE
TABLE I
signals
A L serves as a means of commu? the mirror of mind a tool for thought and a
nication means of communica?
tion
Grammars describe and codify generate and trans? describe and codify lan?
languages form sentences, as guages
well as explain and
predict them
Linguistic universals cultural universals innate mental uni? evolutionary and histor?
are versals ical commonalities
The language faculty related to other cog? unrelated to other related to all sensory
is nitive faculties cognitive faculties motor and cognitive
abilities
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 111
PureL
NeuroL
Fig. 1. The linguistic hexagon or system of that study language. Here 'L'
disciplines
stands for 'linguistics'. Pure L is construed as the study of grammars, -
which since
-
Chomsky (1965) include syntax, semantics, and phonology.
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112 MARIO BUNGE
ing to answer the related question 'How does language exist?'. Accord?
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 113
spectively. (For the ontological status of such cultural objects see Bunge
1981.)
The pure linguist, like the mathematician, is entitled to pretend that
there is such a thing as a language detached from particular biological and
social processes. He resorts to such fiction when he focuses his attention
on the speech commonalities (or rather similarities) of the members of a
speech community. He does so when he construes a phoneme as an
equivalence class of sounds, or a sentence as an equivalence class of
meaning-carrying strings of sounds. He deals then with de Saussure's
langue in contrast with parole, and Chomsky's competence as distinct from
performance. The primary linguistic fact is one of parole or linguistic
"performance". Langue and linguistic "competence" are constructs: they
are conceptual models of concrete speech processes in or be?
occurring
tween brains.
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114 MARIO BUNGE
I submit that pure linguistics deals only with such a model object,
whereas every one of the other five sides of the linguistic hexagon (recall
Figure 1) studies certain features of the primary linguistic fact of speech
production, understanding and utilization - i.e. parole or performance.
(From our point of view Chomsky's mistake in this regard lies not in dis?
tinguishing competence from performance but in asserting that the for?
mer is the steady state of the speaker-hearer rather than an elaborate
construct. More in Sect. 3.2.)
In addition to constructing such model objects as morphemes, sen?
tences, grammars, and languages, linguists are supposed to build theo?
ries describing such model objects, therefore, indirectly, accounting for
some aspects of the primary linguistic facts represented by the model ob?
speakers and speech communities; and the latter cannot be studied with?
out using some of the conceptual tools wrought by the pure linguists.
Hence the relation between pure linguistics and the remaining branches
of linguistics is one of complementation not of mutual exclusion or of
domination. (However, it would be nice to derive grammars from psy?
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 115
TABLE II
Facts and constructs in three sciences
ITEM_LINGUISTICS PHYSICS_BIOLOGY_
General theories Eventually, general General relativistic General theory of evo
linguistic phenome
_na._
Facts in real world Production and un- Moving bodies that Changes of various
derstanding of utter- absorb or emit heat, kinds occurring in real
anees. radiation, etc. populations immersed
in a variable environ?
ment.
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116 MARIO BUNGE
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 117
revolutionary in certain
respects, particularly syntax. (However, I will
argue below was counter-revolutionary
that TGG in other respects.) To
begin with Chomsky showed the inadequacy of phrase structure gram?
mars, in that they did not contain rules of transformation, and so did not
account for the mapping of declaratives into interrogatives, active forms
into passive ones, and the like. This deficiency led Chomsky to conceive
of a grammar in a new and more comprehensive way, namely as con?
taining not only formation rules (specifying phrase structures) but also
transformation rules (specifying transformations of phrase structures).
Moreover in this extended sense a grammar was also to contain
morpho
phonemic rules
(or rules of phonetic "representation") and, from 1965
on, semantic rules as well. New also was Chomsky's insistence on the need
for theory construction in linguistics, in particular the need for exact
(mathematical) theories, at the time when most linguists devoted most of
their time to field or taxonomic work, as is still the case in anthropology
(the cradle of modern linguistics). In sum TGG was revolutionary in some
respects.
On the other hand TGG is also to be seen as counter-revolutionary in?
sofar as its practitioners broke the tradition of empirical inquiry and pro?
moted a return to armchair speculation in the manner of Wilhelm von
Humboldt. may be regarded as a kind of humanistic
In fact TGG lin?
guistics parallel to the humanistic (as opposed to scientific) psychology
and sociology that began to gain some academic respectability shortly after
the first manifesto of TGG appeared. Chomsky himself (1972 p. 165) has
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118 MARIO BUNGE
stated that TGG little if anything to science, and is on the other hand
owes
departments.
It seems also clear that Chomsky's theorieshave not been universally
so that this style of inquiry cannot
adopted by the linguistic profession,
be regarded as a new overriding paradigm on the same footing as the
paragons built by Newton or Darwin. (See Partee 1981 in Harman (ed.)
1981, and Percival 1976.) TGG played only a minor role in the Interna?
tional Congress of Linguists of 1982. Moreover the Chomsky school, so
homogeneous and powerful in the 1960s, has split into a number of
groups, not only with regard to the problem of meaning but to other
pher should examine critically all such theses. He should also ascertain
whether they are essential or incidental to TGG. Should he find that some
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 119
of those theses are incidental, i.e. detachable from TGG, he would help
linguists assess TGG on its own intrinsic merits. (Parallel: In assessing
quantum mechanics one must start by separating the mathematical and
empirical grain from the philosophical chaff. It won't do to judge either
by the other.) This is precisely what we intend to do in the following.
We begin by listing what we take to be the most characteristic philo?
sophical and methodological theses held by Chomsky at some time or
other of his intellectual development.
Linguistic Theses
L2 Syntactic thesis: Every sentence has not only a surface syntactic struc?
ture discoverable with the help of ordinary (constituent or phrase struc?
ture) grammar but also a deep syntactic structure not so discoverable.
(This used to be "the central idea of transformational grammar": Chom?
sky 1965, p. 16. The distinction is unclear and Chomsky himself does not
make much of it in his recent writings, e.g. in 1980.)
Psychological Theses
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120 MARIO BUNGE
P3 Innatism: We inherit not only the facult? de langage but also all the
essentials of language (namely universal grammar). Acquiring a lan?
guage is not really learning it from scratch but selecting the grammar that
best accords with the fragmentary and noisy linguistic inputs we receive.
In other words every human being is born with a linguistic "compe?
tence". The exercise of "competence" only improves "performance".
Methodological Theses
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 121
P5.)
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122 MARIO BUNGE
tacitly and can speculate about them but cannot get at them by objective
means.
(e.g. neurophysiological)
Re M3 There is nothing wrong with postulating mental states and proc?
esses as long as mind is not regarded as self-existing. The injunction not
to neurologize is an arbitrary philosophical obstacle to scientific prog?
ress.
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 123
2. GRAMMAR
2.1. Syntax
According to classical
linguistics grammar is the same as syntax. Chom?
sky (1957) enlarged the concept of a grammar to include morphopho
nemic rules and, later on (1965), semantical (or meaning) rules as well.
(He has also often defined a grammar as a function that pairs sound or
sign sequences with meanings). In this section we shall be concerned with
this enlarged concept of a grammar and, in particular, with its syntactic
component. After all, what distinguishes TGG from its predecessors is
mainly the priority it assigns syntax. Moreover I suspect that, once the
dust and smoke of the current battle has settled, TGG will be viewed as
an important contribution to the theory of syntax.
According to Chomsky (1965, p. 4) "A grammar of a language pur?
ports to be a description of the ideal speaker-hearer's intrinsic compe?
tence". But, since such an ideal speaker-hearer is supposed to handle only
grammatical (well formed) sentences, grammars are prescriptive or nor?
mative, contrary to Chomsky's claim and in agreement with classical lin?
guistics. (We shall to this in a while.) Moreover,
return to
according
Chomsky (1965) grammars are theories allowing one to generate or de?
rive sentences the way mathematical theories allow one to deduce theo?
rems. In particular universal grammar, which is innate, would be a the
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124 MARIO BUNGE
ory. It follows that "we assign to the mind, as an innate property, the
(Chomsky 1972, p. 88). Hold your horses and continue to listen to the
master.
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 125
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126 MARIO BUNGE
sequence) does not occur in any grammatical rules, consider the rules de?
scribing the transformation of a sentence into its denial or into the cor?
S-+NP+ VP
NP->Art + N
VP-* V + NP
Art-* a
N^
[boy
\ girl
Ibook
Ikissed
1 read
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 127
Now, if (X, Y) is a formation (or phrase structure) rule, then it states only
that X is composed (hence can be analyzed as or into) Y. And if (X, Y)
is a transformation rule, then it states only that X transforms (obligato?
rily or optionally) into Y. In this construal grammatical rules are not in?
structions or prescriptions for doing something but are on the same foot?
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128 MARIO BUNGE
ality of language.
The other possibility is to regard grammatical rules as statements rep?
resenting linguistic patterns, perhaps laws, or at least trends. In this case
we must face the problem of the prima facieexceptions to the grammat?
ical rules: we must know how to recognize deviant or ungrammatical
expressions and what to do with them. (As will become clear in a mo?
ment, these two are just so many aspects of one and the same problem.)
The consistent empiricist will be reluctant to admit the very existence of
ungrammatical expressions: all he is prepared to do is to check whether
the suspect occurs in the corpus available to him and, if it does not, to
declare it uncommon. In theory, then, he is supposed to preach the an?
archist doctrine that anything goes. On the other hand the consistent ra?
tionalist is likely to outlaw as ungrammatical whatever expression does
not fit in with his grammar. In this way he is spared the agony of seeing
his pet model ruined by miserable counterexamples. And, to save the na
tivist thesis in the same breath, he will impute ungrammaticality to "ac?
cidents in performance", never to "competence", which he regards as
ceptions to them.
(See Bunge 1983 b for a synthesis of empiricism and
rationalism.) They are likely to admit that both the corpora and the
grammars that attempt to cover them are imperfect. And they are likely
to use some exceptions to recast some rules, and some rules to regularize
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 129
the irregulars or even reject them altogether. No vicious circle here but
rather a give and take between -
empirical data and conceptual models
just like in any other science. The difference is that, unlike the natural
- but like the - the
scientist technologist linguist can alter language, al?
beit only marginally inmost cases. In fact linguistic gate-keepers such as
literary critics and members of language academies, as well as language
reformers and planners, do this all the time. Think of such language re?
formers as Andr?s Bello and George Bernard Shaw, who reformed spell?
ing rules and regularized irregular verbs.
Adopting this third stand is tacitly admitting
that the grammatical rules
are neither pure conventions nor strict laws but rather trends. (Labov 1972
offers persuasive evidence for the hypothesis that linguistic rules are sta?
tistical trends.) Being trends they are capable of being corrected in the
interest of generality, simplicity, or euphony. In other words language is
neither fully conventional nor fully natural. Instead, it is a result of in?
vention constrained by laws and circumstances. In this respect language
does not differ from agriculture, art, or politics: all four and many others
are human creations blending necessity, chance and artifact. (By the way,
Only behaviorists would object to the thesis that grammars are con?
structs -
but they have been effectively disposed of by Chomsky himself
(e.g. 1959, 1972, 1975, 1980). The interesting question is whether gram?
mars reside in an immaterial mind, in the brain, or in neither. The first
possibility is ruled out by physiological psychology, which regards the
mind as a collection of brain functions (processes); and it is also implau?
sible in the light of neurology, which shows agrammaticism (or tele
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130 MARIO BUNGE
adopt the view that grammar is in the brain - e.g. as a brain circuit, a
neuron assembly, an engram, or even a mere disposition for certain neural
connections to be established. The reason is that the grammar of a lan?
guage, in the sense of a structure of it, is not detachable from the lan?
guage itself. The correct question would seem to be, instead, 'Where is
language, complete with its grammar?'.
However, this new question too is ill-conceived, for it presupposes that
language, like the sun or the Queen, must be located somewhere. If lan?
guage is regarded as a construct (recall Table I in Section 1.1), then it can
be nowhere, for only material entities are somewhere. What does have
a spatial and temporal localization is speech, or rather the total speech
- the Wernicke Broca "areas"
system and together with the vocal tract.
- or rather the
In other words speech production and understanding of
- is
utterances localizable and identifiable with a physiological process.
What holds for grammar as the structure of language holds also, mutatis
mutandis, for grammar as a model of such structure. Thus the TGG of
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 131
deep vs. surface structure, which we included in our agenda, will be tak?
en up in the next subsection. We now leave the realm of exact theory to
enter that of intuition and hand-waving or even flag-waving.
2.2. Semantics
Before Chomsky (1965), linguists were careful to avoid the misty hills of
semantics; now they are lost in them. Chomsky and his school had the
excellent idea of emphasizing that, since meaning is an aspect of lan?
guage, linguistic theory should have a semantic component. (This idea
was of course familiar to philosophers since Peirce and Frege, but it had
not penetrated into linguistics.) They also had the good idea of attempt?
ing to exactif y the vague thesis of the Port Royal grammarians, that a full
understanding of a sentence involves digging up the ideas it expresses.
This intuition led to two innovations: the distinction between surface
structure and deep structure, and the thesis that the latter determines
meaning.
The gist of the concept of deep structure is that it "expresses the con?
tent of a sentence" (Chomsky 1965, p. 136). Thus an Indian taught her
and she learned from an Indian have different surface structures but the
same deep structure. Moreover they mean the same despite their differ?
ent appearances: deep below they are the same. This intuition was gen?
eralized and somewhat elaborated into the so-called Katz-Postal thesis
(Katz & Postal 1964), which became incorporated into the so-called
"standard theory" of TGG (Chomsky 1965).
Semantics seemed finally on a secure footing. For a while there was
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132 MARIO BUNGE
exhilaration in the TGGcamp. The exhilaration did not last long: diffi?
culties cropped up with the Katz-Postal thesis, and Chomsky (1971) re?
placed it with the thesis that surface structure too contributes to mean?
ing. This theory came to be known as the "extended standard theory",
although it is not a theory proper. Moreover it is far from being accepted
by the majority of generative linguists.
Here we are interested in the following problems: (a) what is deep
structure? (b) how are deep structures to be determined? (c) what is
meaning according to TGG? and (d) how do structures and rules deter?
mine meaning according to TGG? It will turn out that TGG has no clear
answers to these questions: it does not define clearly the notion of deep
structure, and it has no clear concept of meaning. (TGG does not even
draw a distinction between sense and reference, familiar though by no
means to all philosophers.)
clear The whole thing is still just as fuzzy as
it was for the philosophical grammarians of Port Royal - only, more
complicated by a technical jargon that serves to disguise the lack of a
precise theory. Chomsky himself, with his characteristic candor, admits
that "there is no reasonably concrete or well-defined 'theory of semantic
representation'" (1971, p. 183). The reader will look in vain for a hy
pothetico-deductive theory of reference or of sense in the only systematic
survey of semantics by a sympathizer of the Chomsky school (Lyons 1977).
In any event, according to either the standard (1965) or extended
standard (1971) theory, we need to disclose deep structures in order to
determine meanings. Unfortunately there is no clear and general defi?
nition of "deep structure": all we have is examples. Moreover there can
be no effective procedure for determining deep structures. Indeed, the
methodological maxim M2 (Section 1.2) enjoins us to posit unobserva
bles to account for appearances,
in order instead of attempting to infer
the former from the latter. Thus, deep structures have to be conjectured.
There would be nothing wrong with this if we only knew for certain what
deep structures are. Lacking such knowledge the search for deep struc?
ture looks very much like the search for the Holy Grail as described by
Mark Twain.
Yet, in a way we do manage to conjecture (non-Chomskyan) deep
structures all the time without the guidance of TGG. Thus consider the
sentence he saw the moving van which is structurally ambiguous. It can
be made to "derive" from (i.e. it is compatible with) he saw the van mov
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 133
ing as well as with he saw the van that transports household things. When
presented with the original sentence (or its surface structure) the hearer
or reader must guess the proposition ambiguously designated by the giv?
en sentence, or he must make an inquiry. TGG won't help him to do the
edge not of grammar. What TGG can do is to analyze the process in terms
of underlying deep phrases and transformational rules. In other words,
the person puzzled by the moving van sentence will be told how to derive
what he does not need, namely the surface structure given him to begin
with.
At first sight this situation looks similar to the one in physics, where,
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134 MARIO BUNGE
designated by the sentence the girl read the book isRab, where 'R' stands
for the act of reading, V names the girl, and (b' names the book. The
logical form of the proposition underlying the passive the book was read
by the girl is Rba, where R is the converse of R. And that of the propo?
sition designated by the girl read the book yesterday is R'abc, where V
names the day before and R' is now a more complex (namely ternary)
relation.
(Syntactic analysis does not help reveal logical form. Thus the sentences
she just came and sie ist eben gekommen, though structurally different,
stand for the same proposition.) If the sentence is ambiguous, the hearer
may have to conduct an inquiry in order to determine which proposition
the speaker had inmind when uttering the sentence. In this respect he is
no better off than with TGG - but at least he knows what he must look
for.
In (1) 'opened' designates a unary predicate - call it 01. The logical form
of the proposition designated by (1) is then 0xd. In (2) the same word
designates a binary predicate 02, and the logical form is 02md. The con?
cept designated by the word 'opened' in (3) is now a ternary predicate
logical form is 03mdy. Finally, the proposition un?
03. The corresponding
a
derlying (4) has the logical form 04mdyk, where now 04 is quaternary
Each of these analyses corresponds to a different reading of
predicate.
the fuzzy word 'opened'. (The reader may wish to introduce even more
can the same word In
complex concepts that be designated by 'opened'.)
short conceptual analysis can exhibit a complexity unsuspected at the
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 135
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136 MARIO BUNGE
sentences
\ i / SURFACE
designate
Construct
Fig. 2. A sentence s designates a proposition p with a meaning The latter has left
Mc(p).
or sense, and right projection
projection tfcip) 2ftc(p) or reference.
=
<f?c) Purc(c) U Impc(c)
=
{x E C |x h c} U {x e C Ic h x},
P :A x B x ... x JV-> 5.
We now stipulate that P refers to the members of all of the Cartesian fac?
tors in its domain, i.e. we set
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 137
reference classes of all the predicates occurring in it. Thus the reference
class of "All beavers build some dams" is the same as the of "Some dams
are built by beavers", namely the union of the class of beavers and the
class of dams. Note that in our theory reference differs from extension.)
Our semantics can help us, in case of doubt, make it clear what exactly
we are talking about (reference) and what we are in effect saying (sense).
As an illustration take Chomsky's famous sentence they are flying planes.
In our view this sentence designates ambiguously the propositions
and
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138 MARIO BUNGE
In our terminology, the propositions underlying (7) and (8) are the con?
junctions:
unary predicate, "is eager to please" is a binary one. (Whereas (9) is syn?
onymous with "John is easily pleased", the corresponding adverbial form
"is eagerly pleased" makes no sense.) In other words, whereas the logical
form of (9) is Pa, that of (10) is "there is at least one individual x such
that Qax". So, even though (9) can still be said to be syntactically similar
to (10), the corresponding propositions are structurally different.
What about the infamous colorless green ideas sleep furiously? Chom?
this sentence in 1957 and ungrammatical in
sky declared grammatical
1965. In our view the sentence is syntactically unobjectionable and more?
over itmakes sense - this being why we can discard it.We discard it for
-
as nothing can be both colorless and colored
being self-contradictory,
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 139
e.g. green. And also for involving a category mistake, as being green and
The written sentencesmay be the same, but the spoken ones are not, as
suggested by the stresses. In fact they designate different propositions,
namely
Since (13) entails (14), the meaning of (14) should be included in the
of - which
meaning (13) is counterintuitive. True, but this and worse is
bound to happen in open contexts. The entailment theory of (part of)
sense was designed to apply strictly only to exact languages. In these no
new names and predicates are supposed to occur once the basic
(primi?
tive) ones have been listed; as a consequence the logical axiom of addi?
tion will not play havoc. Analogy: elementary geometry applies exactly
to ideal geometrical objects and only approximately to real objects such
as a rugged coastline. The only way to apply to real
elementary geometry
situations is by disregarding irregularities. If one whishes to model real
objects more faithfully then one needs higher geometry. Just as the the
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140 MARIO BUNGE
(ii) The tasks of discovering meanings and of rendering them more def?
inite are tasks for conceptual analysis and theory building, not for gram?
mar.
ing the bigger the better, the two occurrences of 'the' cannot mean the same
and, moreover, neither is really the definite article. (This is suggested by
the German and Spanish je grosser desto besser, and cuanto
translations
m?s grande tanto mejor, respectively.) On the other hand the logical
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 141
To Chomsky there was nothing surprising about the failure of the clas?
sical linguists to discover universals, for they had remained confined to
surface structures, which, indeed, vary considerably across languages. On
the other hand the idea of deep structure and the hypothesis of innate
ness led inevitably to the search for a grammar fitting all natural lan?
guages. (Many a scientific hypothesis has a spurious origin. The pedigree
of a hypothesis matters little compared with its truth and explanatory
power.)
In fact, by the time he formulated the "standard theory" of TGG,
Chomsky (1965) was firmly committed to the idea of universal
grammar
(UG). He initially defined this as "the study of the conditions that must
be met by the grammars of all human languages" (1972, p. 126). Later
he repudiated this characterization adopting instead that of "the initial
state of any learner of any language", i.e., the innate language faculty
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142 MARIO BUNGE
(1980, p. 69 and 1979, passim). And more recently the "initial state" is
equated to an entity, the "language acquisition device" (LAD), acting like
a black box that receives experiental inputs and outputs the grammar
(Chomsky 1981, p. 35). Let us pass over the mistakes of identifying a state
(of a thing) with a thing, and of believing that a black box model, such
as LAD (=UG), can explain anything. (Black boxes describe and can
eclipse, but their serious investigation has been conducted outside his
school. It has been conducted mostly without the benefit of TGG and
without the dead weight of the speculation that all humans are born with
a tacit knowledge of UG. One example is the study of nasalization and
assimilation as universal phonological processes (Foley 1977). The best
known empirical investigation of linguistic universals has been conducted
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 143
subject precedes the object. Another example: languages with VSO bas?
ic order type have prepositions instead of postpositions.
The very notion of a linguistic universal poses at least two problems of
philosophical interest: how to go about finding them, and how to explain
them. The former is a methodological problem. The obvious solution to
it is that linguistic universals can be established only by the study of a great
many languages and, more precisely, by the investigation of a repre?
sentative sample of all 4,000 of them. This is the course chosen by all the
serious workers in the field. This course is perpendicular to that of the
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144 MARIO BUNGE
But of course physicists and chemists, from Prout on, have speculated
about atomic and molecular evolution; there is even a respected Journal
of Molecular Evolution. Moreover such investigation is becoming less and
less speculative, and much of it has become a mainstay of evolutionary
biology. Chomsky's rejection of the evolutionary approach to language,
together with his nativism, stem from his mentalism as well as from his
early men acquired them, as suggested by Parker & Gibson 1979. But
Haeckel's 'law' is not really a law. Infants do not have a mature nervous
system and they do not earn a living or cope with wild beasts and other
environmental hazards.)
Chomsky's view of language is static, in remarkable contrast with ev?
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 145
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146 MARIO BUNGE
evolutionary perspective.
Fourth, since speech is not only a method of communication but also
a thinking tool, it must have evolved along with knowledge. In fact, it is
likely that symbolic languages became possible only when reasonings were
formed and the need to discuss them arose. Before that time a far more
ready know, such as baby talk, telegraphic speech, and pidgins. The
grammars studied by TGG are likely to be comparatively late acquisi?
tions. And UG may have been the grammar of a protolanguage (orWorld
Language), the most primitive of all languages, from which all the mod?
ern ones may have descended. This hypothesis is not more
speculative
than that of the very existence of UG. (Presumably a protolanguage had
two categories: noun and verb. After all, names
only lexico-syntactical
and predicates are all we need in elementary logic, where Mary is black
is construed as "Mary blacks".)
To conclude, I suspect that there are more linguistic universals than
meet the eye, though perhaps not as many as Chomsky suspects. More
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 147
ly affairs all humans engage in some activities that are similar in all so?
-
cieties such as lying down, getting up, doing something with their hands,
and talking or using a speech surrogate such as ASL. And, whether
scholars or laymen, they all know something about the real world and
- or
they all do something with it else they do not survive. These ana?
tomical, behavioral, mental and environmental commonalities, as well as
a common biological origin, are likely to be the source of the cognitive
commonalities, which are in turn the basis of linguistic universals.
Given such cognitive universals, what is surprising is not that there are
linguistic universals, but that so few of them have been established so far.
There are two plausible and mutually compatible explanations for this
paucity. One is that only a few cognitive universals do have linguistic
- i.e. that
counterparts language is a highly artificial device. Another is
that linguistic universals have been either denied or taken for granted
rather than investigated. Whatever the reason, new linguistic universals
are unlikely to be found without taking into account a fair sample of all
the known - - and
languages pace Chomsky's opinion without making
use of sophisticated - as
linguistic theory Chomsky rightly insists.
To sum up, the hypothesis of UG is interesting and fruitful, but is still
hazy andis yet to be confirmed. We do not know yet whether" all lan?
guages share a basic structure, what this structure (UG) might be, let alone
how it originated. And yet that half-baked and unconfirmed conjecture
lies at the heart of the psycholinguistics inspired by Chomsky, to which
we turn next.
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148 MARIO BUNGE
cording to which we are born with a disposition or natural gift for learn?
ing languages, because everybody accepts this harmless thesis that ex?
plains nothing.)
Chomsky (1959) discredited effectively the behaviorist doctrine of ver?
bal behavior and acquisition by pointing out that any of us can create
sentences which he has never heard or read before. He holds that the
newborn human, unlike any other primate, is equipped with a linguistic
"competence" that is far more than the mere ability to learn languages:
it would be no less than a knowledge of UG, or the basic structure of all
languages. Furthermore, since according to Chomsky every grammar is
a theory - a view we shot down in Section 2.1. - the baby would be born
knowing a theory. This "theory" is very general; new hypotheses and data,
to be acquired during development, are needed for the grammar of a
specific language to "grow in the mind" of the child, much as he needs
nourishment for the growth of his body.
Normally the child is exposed from birth to a barrage of phrases. Ac?
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 149
a given set of empirical data. Never before had human babies, known to
be among the poorest performers in the animal kingdom, been credited
with such remarkable competence.
Chomsky's view on language acquisition makes too much room for in?
nate wisdom and too little for experience and creativity. In fact to Chom?
ing, because we have got from birth an implicit theory of language learn?
ing (1962, p. 528; 1975 p. 28). Fodor (1975) takes the final step by de?
claring that learning theories are not just unnecessary but impossible,
because actually we do not learn anything: all ideas are innate. (It would
follow then that the historians of ideas are wasting their time.)
One think that reheating the views of Socrates and Leibniz on
should
learning in the second
half of the 20th century takes not only consider?
able chutzpah but also powerful reasons and astonishing experimental
findings. In fact Chomsky offers only two reasons, neither of which is
sufficient. His first argument is from the failure of radical behaviorism:
since a normal child learns to speak "very fast", and since it is impossible
to learn or internalize a grammar from "the meager and degenerate data"
accessible to the child, the latter "must" have been born with a knowl?
of - a sort of
edge universal grammar filing cabinet where the infant can
file all the data he is presented with. Chomsky's second argument is from
the alleged functional rigidity of all our organs: even the brain would be
or genetically
totally preformed programmed (prewired), just like the
heart and the eye, so that the suggestion that we can learn to speak is just
as absurd as the idea that the heart must learn to its function.
discharge
These are Chomsky's sole reasons for upholding nativism, and neither of
them holds water.
The argument from the failure of behaviorism to account for speech
production would be valid if behaviorism were one of the horns of a di?
lemma, the other horn being nativism. Chomsky makes it abundantly clear
that he sees no via media between behaviorism and nativism: concepts
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150 MARIO BUNGE
mystery in this: the human brain is remarkably plastic. The failure of be?
haviorism is no excuse for turning the clock back to Socratic nativism.
The right strategy is to acknowledge the cognitive component of learning
and its creative nature, as most psychologists do nowadays. Thus Bartlett
(1958), Hebb (1949) and Bindra (1976) were constructivists and so was
guess F on the strength of a few instances and possibly with the help of
some generalizations learned earlier. We may hazard now one form of
on a suf?
F, now another, subjecting each guess to some tests until we hit
to the right F- or give up. (See Bunge
ficiently close approximation 1983a,
Ch. 2.).
Chomsky's second argument for nativism is the supposed functional
of the brain. He claims that the work of Hubel, Wiesel, and oth?
rigidity
ers, on the visual cortex, supports nativism by showing that the neurons
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 151
in that region are highly specialized from birth although they degenerate
unless activated by suitable experiences at the right time (Chomsky 1979,
production. (See e.g. Hubel 1982, and Wiesel 1982.) Not surprisingly, the
neurons in the primary visual cortex are specialized and are organized into
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152 MARIO BUNGE
Firstly, linguists have not yet discovered whether all languages do share
a basic structure and, if so, what this is: recall Section 3.1. Hence to at?
tribute to newborns the perfect command of that which linguists ignore
is bizarre, and in any case it exemplifies explicatio obscurum per obscu
rium. In other words, "explaining" language acquisition in terms of in?
nate knowledge is like saying that "we are the way we are because that's
the way we (genetically) are" (Giv?n 1979, p. 22). Secondly, nativism
lacks inductive empirical support. (This is no blemish for a rationalist or
apriorist, but it is a serioushandicap for anyone else: scientists are not
supposed to defend doggedly a theory in the absence of positive evidence
for it.)
More to the point, there is ample indirect (circumstantial) anatomical,
behavioral and cognitive evidence against nativism. The first is that the
infant cerebral cortex is very poorly organized: its neurons are small and
have a scant arborization, so that presumably the inter-neuronal contacts
are few, whence there are probably no neuronal systems capable of
minding. (See the revealing plates in Conel 1939-67.) The behavioral
evidence comes from developmental psychology, which shows that the
child develops his abilities ("faculties") only gradually, though by stages,
and this only provided he is subjected to the right stimuli at the right times.
To be sure children learn to speak "fast". But, as Galileo would ask, how
fast is "fast"?
As for the cognitive evidence against nativism, it boils down to this.
Although we still ignore the precise mechanism of language learning, we
do know that it is not the exercise of a single isolated "faculty", but only
one aspect of a complex sensory-motor-ideational process. That is,
speaking and listening involve knowing and doing. (See, e.g., Dale 1976.)
Chomsky's rejoinder, that even idiots learn to speak, is not to the point.
Some feeble-minded children learn to play chess, and others to make
quick mental calculations beyond the reach of the average normal adult.
Idiocy, like proficiency in language learning, is a matter of degree. In any
event, the case of mental retardates who learn to speak only proves that
it is abnormal for language to be dissociated from intelligence. Normally
the development of conceptual skills goes together with that of sensory
motor skills.
Contemporary psychology, in particular developmental and physio?
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 153
ricism (Hebb et. al. 1973; Whitaker 1973; Bindra 1976). Here are some
of the recent findings likely to contribute to a correct solution to the
problem of first language acquisition: (a) a large fraction, perhaps as many
as half, of the neurons in the associative cortex are uncommitted at birth;
mally); (g) all of the plastic subsystems of the brain are interconnected,
so they influence one another - whence the various mental "faculties" are
interdependent. In other words, unlike the rest of the nervous system and
unlike every other organ, the associative cortex of the human brain is
largely plastic. As A.R. Luria used to say, the human brain is the self
made organ, i.e. the organization of which is not totally predetermined
by the genome. Shorter: Every one of us builds up his own brain as he
learns.
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154 MARIO BUNGE
is just one aspect of a general cognitive (and social) activity. Fifthly, lan?
guage learning does not occur in a social vacuum: severely neglected
children develop poor language.
In short, we are of course genetically endowed with the organ of mind,
namely the brain; moreover, different people are presumably born with
different abilities. However, we must learn how to speak, just as we must
learn how to do sums and even how to walk. To put it differently: we
may espouse moderate or potential nativism, not radical or actual nativ?
ism. According to the former every one of us inherits peculiar abilities,
e.g. to learn manual skills or to play with abstract ideas. On the other
- of the kind held or Kant - as?
hand radical nativism by Plato, Leibniz,
serts that we are born with certain ideas. Both moderate and radical na?
tivism are compatible with psychophysical monism as well as with dual?
ism. However, only moderate nativism, i.e. the doctrine that we inherit
different abilities or propensities, is consistent with contemporary neu?
roscience and psychology.
(Yet itmust not be forgotten that this kind of nativism had been much
-
"in the air" for centuries e.g. in the old adage Quod natura non dat,
Salmantia non prestat. Huarte (1575) explained it in a famous work that
was translated into several languages and reprinted many times - as well
as censored by the Inquisition. He regarded the various mental "facul?
- - as functions of
ties" memory, imagination, and intelligence subsys?
tems of the brain, and explained the differences in inborn abilities as dif?
ferences in the composition of the brain. Contemporary neuroscience and
to with him - without
physiological psychology tend side though accept?
on the composition of the brain which he took from
ing the primitive ideas
Galen.)
In particular, aphasiology confirms the biological view of speech for?
mation and understanding. Thus lesions within Wernicke's "area" may
up. What is philosophically interesting is that (a) the site of lesion deter
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 155
mines the type of deficit, and (b) the pattern of recovery depends on both
-
the site of the lesion and the linguistic history of the patient e.g. more
often than not the second language is erased more easily than the first
(Paradis 1983).
These suggest that knowledge
studies of each language is "stored" in
a precise neural system - separate from, though linked with, the cogni?
tive "store". Unfortunately all our knowledge about these fascinating facts
comes from just 150 or so aphasia cases reported in the world literature.
Even so, these case studies are shedding much light on the processes of
speech formation and understanding. For one thing, they have confirmed
that insults to the brain (e.g. strokes, injuries, and tumors) result inmen?
- which should if the mind were an immaterial
tal deficits be impossible
entity.
I am not claiming that we have already obtained a satisfactory expla?
nation of language acquisition. I am claiming instead that this is a gen?
uine open problem but, at the same time, that we know enough to adopt
the correct approach to it. (On the other hand Chomsky believes that,
by postulating that we are born with a of the
knowledge mysterious UG,
he has solved the problem in its essentials.) I am also claiming that the
correct approach to this, or to any other factual problem, is not that of
armchair speculation but, instead, the observational, experimental, and
(incipiently) theoretical approach adopted by developmental and phys?
iological psychology.
This approach eschews the imprecise notion of a "mental structure",
central yet nowhere defined in Chomsky's work, which remains confined
to prescientific mentalistic philosophical psychology. It is not that science
must ignore the mind, but that itmust study it as a set of brain functions.
This is in a nutshell the thesis of physiological psychology, the newest and
fastest growing branch of psychology. According to it the study of mind
is ultimately an aspect of brain research. To be sure we cannot
dispense
with molar or phenomenological psychology; however, such studies pro?
vide only data and regularities to be explained in neurophysiological
terms.
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156 MARIO BUNGE
planation
- which oscillates between
subsumption and insight - is not the
one used in science. In science, to explain a group of facts is to describe
their mechanism with the help of an empirically confirmed theory (Bunge
1983 b, Ch. 10). We explain the propagation of light by disclosing the
mechanism of generation of the magnetic component of the field by the
electric one and conversely. We explain a chemical reaction as inelastic
scattering of atoms or molecules. We explain the origin of life in terms
of the self-assembly of subcellular units, which in turn would self-assem?
ble from molecules. We explain our having ideas in terms of the activity
- now
spontaneous, now elicited - of plastic neural systems. And we ex?
plain the formation and dissolution of social systems in terms of social
relations.
sarily material. Science does not know of any mental mechanisms be?
cause the mental is no more (and no less) than a collection of brain func?
tions. What is in the process
science of discovering is the neural
mechanisms that explain mental phenomena. On the other hand Chom?
"mental structures", that would "underlie" the mental
sky's postulated
"faculties", do not explain anything: they just redescribe the known facts
and surround them with a thick fog that cannot be pierced by either ex?
or mathematical modeling.
periment
Let us take a look at the way physiological psychology, in particular
my own view (Bunge 1980), might explain the generation and under?
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 157
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158 MARIO BUNGE
4. METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 159
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160 MARIO BUNGE
guistic theory, like any other scientific theory, should be able to predict.
To render this claim plausible they phrase some of their sentences in such
a manner that they look similar to genuine forecasts. For instance, in?
stead of saying 'Expression Xis acceptable', they may say 'Expression X
will be acceptable'. (See Botha 1981, Ch. 8, for a detailed but different
discussion of linguistic prediction.) To a methodologist of science that
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 161
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162 MARIO BUNGE
(b) Gi is simpler than G2. Unfortunately the key notions of intuition and
simplicity are left undefined. And yet we know that resorting to intuition
is unreliable because one man's intuition is someone else's paradox
(Bunge 1962). And resorting to simplicity is self-deceptive, for there are
many kinds of linguistic simplicity (syntactical, phonological, semantic,
pragmatic), and some of them are mutually incompatible (Bunge 1963).
Hence the finding that Gx accords better than G2 with one's intuition
should not count as evidence; and the claim that G\ is simpler than G2
pirical test because there are no ideal people and because self-evidence
is anything but objective. In short, TGG does not include an evaluation
guistic data are external evidence for it.Whereas empiricists tend to re?
(external) evidence as irrelevant, realists rate both
gard interdisciplinary
kinds of evidence as equally important. (Needless to say, rationalists are
not much bothered by evidence.) The ultimate reason for this is that hu?
man knowledge is one: disciplinary borders are somewhat arbitrary.
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 163
language). Because writing, recording and taping are very recent inven?
tions there can be no direct empirical evidence for or against that hy?
pothesis. But then there is no direct evidence either for the hypothesis
that primitive man slept, thought, or loved. What evidence there is, is
circumstantial and interdisciplinary, namely via general principles of bi?
ology, psychology, and sociology. Thus we are sure that primitive man
had all our physiological needs (though not all our wants) because biol?
ogy tells us that he belonged to the same genus as we do; we are certain
that he thought, because he had a large skull and because tool making -
in particular making tools for fashioning further tools - requires imagi?
nation, foresight, planning, and communication; and we are reasonably
certain that he spoke because language is a useful adjunct to thought, a
tool of communication, and a component of social structure. In sum we
make use of circumstantial and interdisciplinary evidence by virtue of
certain general principles drawn from neighboring sciences. The auton?
omous linguist does not permit himself such liberty. More in the next
section.
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164 MARIO BUNGE
\ \
suggest
c
test
?H
analyze
codify
Fig. 3. Salient features of the relation of theories in pure linguistics with theories in psy
cholinguistics and sociolinguistics, and between those theories and data as well as facts (which
form a superset of the data). Note that only a subset of the totality of data, namely lin?
guistic data proper, are directly relevant to pure linguistics.
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 165
proach. By this Imean that TGG focuses (a) on the individual speaker
hearer with neglect of his or her linguistic community, as well as (b) on
the sentence with neglect of the text or discourse. In other words, the ob?
jects of study (or "units of analysis") of TGG are the individual and the
sentence, both of which are actually components of systems. In a system?
ic perspective, on the other hand, the natural referents or "units of anal?
ysis" are the linguistic community and the text or discourse. The advan?
tages of this alternative approach are the general advantages of systemism
over atomism (Bunge 1979) plus a number of particular advantages to the
linguist. One of them is that the social matrixand role of speech is not
overlooked. Another is that pathological speech can be distinguished
qualitatively from normal speech, for psychotics are perfectly capable of
forming correct sentences, but they are often unable to deliver coherent
texts. (See Martin 1982 for a criticism of the use of Chomsky's model of
language in research into schizophrenic language.)
To return to the complexity of speech and language, and the corre?
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166 MARIO BUNGE
PureL
'
^?\ N
' studies ^
/ n
y 1 \
PsychoL O language O SocioL
% models <?
^SPEECH /
Fig. 4. The three headed monster. 'L' stands for "linguistics", PsychoL is understood as
united with neurolinguistics, and SocioL as comprising not only proper but
sociolinguistics
also anthropological, geographical, and historical linguistics. The broken lines symbolize
the (so far) tenuous links among the three heads.
and using natural laws. And for being partly a social science, linguistics
is also interested in disclosing some of the man-made laws, i.e. rules and
conventions. Surely conventions may ultimately be understood in terms
of laws and circumstances, as when one discovers that certain conven?
tions are given up because they have ceased to be valuable. But the point
is that, whereas natural laws are inherent in concrete things and are quite
gard concrete circumstances; and when they study speech (parole) they
would seem to confine themselves to observation. However, this limita?
tion is self-imposed: it does not derive from the nature of the object of
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 167
design.
The final question we must address is whether linguistics is a science
in the strict sense of the English word or in the lax sense of the German
Wissenschaft. There seems to be consensus among linguists at least on this:
that linguistics is a science, though an immature one like anthropolgy
rather than a mature one like biology. One reason for this evaluation is
the paucity of language and speech laws. (Recall from Section 2.1 that
the rules of grammar do not qualify as natural laws, or objective pat?
terns, if only for the conventional ingredient in them.) A second reason
is that pure linguistics does not explain anything. Chomsky's criticism of
structuralism, that ismainly descriptive and classificatory (Chomsky 1957),
applies to his own work on the grammar of English. Indeed, although it
does provide a codification and analysis of the English language, a gram?
mar of it, even if transformational generative, is not a theory but a de?
scription of the language (Section 2.1). In any event that which calls for
explanation is not language (langue), which is a construct, but speech
(parole). And the latter can only be explained by the other branches of
linguistics, chiefly psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. In conclusion,
linguistics is an incipient science or protoscience rather than a full fledged
science. (See Bunge 1967, 1983b for the concepts of science, protosci?
ence, and pseudoscience.)
Like many a young science linguistics contains some pockets of bogus
science. Paradoxically some of these are linked - via an obsolete
philos?
-
ophy to advanced linguistic theories such as those proposed by the
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168 MARIO BUNGE
(since Chomsky's mentalistic speculations cannot pass for science); (c) the
confinement to comparatively little data from few languages; (d) the dis?
counting of counterexamples as "mere performance phenomena", (e) a
heavy reliance on intuition and a feeling of simplicity. The first blemish
is the original sin of the Chomsky school, from which all its other sins
derive. It is intimately allied to Chomsky's philosophy, a blend of ration?
alism and intuitionism closer to Kant than to Descartes. And it has been
regared as the reason for the failure of linguistics to attain a fully scien?
tific status (Derwing 1979).
To conclude, although linguistics has come a long way in the course of
our century, it still has a long way to go before it becomes a full fledged
science. However, itwon't move much further unless it gets rid of its un?
sound philosophical and methodological ballast and achieves the integra?
tion of its various branches.
5. CONCLUDING REMARKS
lutionary event and moreover one that has had important repercussions
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PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN LINGUISTICS 169
'Chomsky package' we have listed the following: (a) the conduct of lin?
guistic research in total isolation from the realities of brain and society;
an almost exclusive concentration on a single language, namely Eng?
(b)
lish, even while purporting to study linguistic universals; (c) a prolifera?
tion of unacceptable hypotheses concerning ghostly "mental structures
underlying mental abilities" and innate capacities; (d) an unorthodox way
of dealing with counter-examples; (e) an unbiological (in particular non
evolutionary) and unhistorical (synchronie) perspective on language; (f) a
lack of interest in empirical research; (g) plenty of obscure yet key no?
tions, such as those of linguistic competence (or UG), linguistic intuition,
-
and deep structure; (h) reliance on intuition or "tacit knowledge" e.g.
- rather than on explicit principles or rules;
in disclosing deep structures
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170 MARIO BUNGE
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