Part 1 (1/2)
The Primacy of Grammar.
Nirmalangshu Mukherji.
Preface.
Human languages are commonly viewed as complex, porous, and moldable systems that we construct by active human agency to meet a variety of sociocultural ends. On this view, languages are more like inst.i.tutions such as legal and political systems; they are no doubt codified in some sense, but their codified character should not mislead us into thinking that there is some natural basis to their organization. In contrast, a small minority does hold the view that languages are natural objects with a biological basis, not unlike the respiratory or immune systems. Even there, most think of biological systems as irreducibly complex and messy where the methods of the exact sciences such as theoretical physics do not apply.
In any case, for most people, a prominent lesson from the history of the sciences is that there are reasons to be skeptical about genuine scientific advances in the study of what may be called the ''inner'' domains.
In the prevalent intellectual scenario, it is of considerable interest that the contemporary discipline of generative linguistics-also called ''biolinguistics''-has raised the prospects for developing a form of inquiry achieved only in some of the basic sciences. Biolinguistics is arguably the only attempt in the history of ideas in which, according to Noam Chomsky, a study of an aspect of the human mind-language-is beginning to have the ''feel of scientific inquiry.'' Biolinguistics is currently suggesting that the structure of language may be ''perfect'' in design, not unlike the arrangement of petals in the sunflower and the double helix of the DNA. Yet these advances have been accomplished essentially independently of the natural sciences, especially biology. In that sense, biolinguistics has initiated a (basic) science in its own terms. In view of these startling developments, there ought to be some interest in the foundations of this discipline. For instance, it is most natural to ask: Which aspect of nature does this science investigate? The topic is introduced in chapter 1.
I made a very preliminary attempt to address this issue in a short monograph earlier (Mukherji 2000). The present book vastly extends the scope of that work. Here I have made a more serious eort to construct a philosophical discourse that weaves in and out of some of the basic ideas in biolinguistics, including some technical ones, as I examine its internal logic. My contention is that the theoretical beauty of biolinguistics cannot be adequately displayed without marshaling some degree of rigor and formal precision. Biolinguistics is not just a clever coverage of data; it is a search for invariants in nature, as noted. The limited technical discussion of grammatical theory in chapters 2 and 5 is directed at the nonlinguist readers, but is neither intended nor enough to turn them into working linguists. As for professional linguists, there is perhaps some novelty in the way familiar material has been presented. In any case, I need this material for the complex argument that follows.
What It Is Not I am aware that biolinguistics is not alone in syntax research, not to speak of studies on language as a whole; there are other perspectives on the organization of language and the architecture of the mind. However, as my basic interest is to understand the scope and limits of biolinguistics and to extract some general consequences from that understanding, I have made no attempt to engage in comparative studies; to that extent, this work is not a defense of biolinguistics.
In fact, the work is pretty much confined to Chomsky's contributions in linguistic theory. Apart from the fact that Chomsky continues to be the prime mover in biolinguistics, the issues that interest me arise directly from his work, or so I think. I am aware that almost everything Chomsky is currently saying on the design of the language faculty is under dispute even within the core biolinguistic community; I have noted as many of them as possible while trying not to clutter the text with field-internal debates. In fact, I myself will express a variety of disagreements with Chomsky. So, as with any rational inquiry, the general argument of the book is conditional in character: a.s.suming the validity of Chomsky's claims that I find attractive (and I will tell you why), certain general conclusions seem to follow that go far beyond those claims. I am not suggesting that Chomsky is likely to agree with these conclusions.
This basic focus on Chomsky's work in biolinguistics has also (severely) constrained the extent to which I could address specific topics from other disciplines that merit extensive discussion on their own. Apart from topics internal to biolinguistics, the work touches on topics in the history and philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, lexical and formal semantics, and psychology of music, among others. I discuss them, at a suitable level of abstraction, only to see what light they throw on the character of biolinguistic inquiry from the perspective that interests me.
In any case, it is physically impossible by now to look at even a fraction of the literature on language and related capacities, not to speak of developing expertise in all the areas listed above. My own professional location is in the philosophy of language. Venturing out from there, I had to make hard choices regarding the material to include, and a host of rich details internal to the individual disciplines had to be set aside, mostly by design but sometimes out of sheer exhaustion as well.
Some perspective on the nature of language and mind does seem to follow once these choices are made.
What It Is Biolinguistics is centrally concerned with Plato's problem: How do humans come to know so much from so little exposure to the environment?
It is interesting that biolinguistics has in fact furnished a partial but substantive answer to this ancient question for a restricted domain that falls within the wider domain of language; the identification of this restricted domain is a task that will occupy us through much of this work.
As discussed in chapters 3 and 4, biolinguistics has been able to maintain some distance from topics traditionally thought to be central to the study of language: concepts, truth conditions, and communication. In this very specific sense, biolinguistics is concerned with the study of grammars. As in the opening citation from Chomsky, I use grammar mostly to designate the object of biolinguistic inquiry, but sometimes I use it to label the inquiry itself. I expect the context to make clear which of the two uses of grammar is intended. For example, the t.i.tle of this work should strictly read The Primacy of Grammatical Theory. The context makes it very clear: no useful theoretical sense can be attached to the idea that the object-a piece of the brain-has primacy.
Grammars consist of schematic and computational aspects of the mind/brain. Principles of grammar compute over symbols (representations) that may be used to express thoughts and emotions. But these principles do not compute over contents of thoughts and emotions, where content covers both the (mind-internal) conceptual aspects and the xviii external significance of language. Against the current perhaps, I take the isolation of this rather austere object to be the central contribution of Noam Chomsky; its significance lies in its frugality. The history of the more established sciences suggest that once some observed complexity has been successfully a.n.a.lyzed into parts, a study of the original complexity often drops out of that line of research, perhaps forever.
This restriction to grammar, and the abstraction away from ''language,'' opens the possibility that the computational system of human language may be involved in each cognitive system that requires similar computational resources. In chapter 6 and the early part of chapter 7, a mixture of a.n.a.lytical argumentation, varieties of empirical and introspective evidence, and some speculation suggests a picture in which a computational system consisting of very specific principles and operations is likely to be centrally involved in each articulatory symbol system-such as music-that manifests unboundedness. Finally, in the rest of chapter 7, I suggest that the following things converge: e The scientific character of biolinguistics e Its independence from the rest of science e Its basic explanatory form.
The domains of its application.
From this perspective, the real gain of the biolinguistic approach to cognitive phenomena is that the approach may have identified, after thousands of years of inquiry, a specific structure of the human mind, perhaps a real joint of nature.
Acknowledgments.
I have been working on this book, o and on (more o than on), for over a decade. It is a pleasure to record my grat.i.tude for people who helped me sustain this eort for so long in otherwise dicult circ.u.mstances. As noted throughout this book, my foremost intellectual debt is to the work of Noam Chomsky, apart from my personal debt to him for his swift, lengthy, and typically critical but constructive comments in many e-conversations over the years. I am also delighted to mention Ramakant Agnihotri, Daniel Andler, Roberto Casati, Probal Dasgupta, Pierre Jacob, Lyle Jenkins, Mrinal Miri, Bibhu Patnaik, Susrut Roy, and Rajender Singh for their support to the project in various ways.
After several unsuccessful attempts (including computer disasters), the basic structure of this work finally fell (more or less) in place during the summer of 2003 in Paris, in studios located in the ancient Latin Quarters and the ravis.h.i.+ng Montmartre. I am grateful to Roberto Casati, close friend and critic, for proposing the visit on behalf of the marvelous Inst.i.tut Jean Nicod, and for maintaining a constant watch on my well-being. I am indebted to Maurice Aylmard and Gilles Tarabout of Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, and Pierre Jacob, Director of Inst.i.tut Jean Nicod, for supporting the trip. Unfortunately, several years elapsed before I could return to the work as I s.h.i.+fted to other more pressing concerns soon after returning from Paris.
I am fortunate that Ma.s.simo Piattelli-Palmarini, Howard Lasnik, Norbert Hornstein, Cedric Boeckx, and Wolfram Hinzen read one of the recent versions, in part or in full. I must mention that I had no personal acquaintance with any of these renowned scholars when I approached them. Yet, they agreed to look at the ma.n.u.script (repeatedly, in some cases); there must be some invisible hand after all. I also learned much from the reports of the reviewers for the publisher on the penultimate version. I deeply appreciate the eorts of the editorial team at the MIT Press for executing the project with exemplary understanding.
1 The Loneliness of Biolinguistics Reflecting on the state of language research, after a decade of work in the principles-and-parameters framework, Noam Chomsky (1991b, 51) observed that the systems found in the world will not be regarded as languages in the strict sense, but as more complex systems, much less interesting for the study of human nature and language, just as most of what we find around us in the world of ordinary experiences is unhelpful for determining the real properties of the natural world. . . . I have spoken only of language, which happens to be one of the few domains of cognitive psychology where there are rather far-reaching results. But I think it would hardly be surprising if the truth of the matter were qualitatively similar in other domains, where far less is known . . . only ancient prejudice makes this prospect appear to many to be unlikely.
I find it instructive to open the discussion with a somewhat free interpretation of these remarks. The citation has two parts. In the first, it is suggested that the study of ''complex systems'' ''found in the world'' is not likely to lead to the discovery of the ''real properties of the natural world.'' In the second part, the citation mentions the discipline of cognitive psychology where ''rather far-reaching results'' have been achieved in some of its domains. The results have been ''far-reaching'' in the sense that something has been learned in these domains at a sucient remove from ''the world of ordinary experiences.'' Combining the two, it follows that, in these few domains of cognitive inquiry, research has been able to abstract away from the complexities of systems found in ordinary experience to isolate some simple systems whose properties may be viewed as real properties of nature.
The implicit reference here is to some small areas of the more established sciences such as physics, chemistry, and certain corners of molecular biology, where rather surprising and deep properties of the natural world are sometimes reached by abstracting away from common experiences 2
Chapter 1.
and expectations (Stainton 2006). I will have many occasions in this work to evaluate advances in the ''few domains'' of cognitive psychology in terms of the history and methodology of physics and other advanced sciences (also see Boeckx 2006). For now, Chomsky seems to be generally suggesting that, in these domains, something like the explanatory depth of the natural sciences is almost within reach. How did it happen?
1.1..
Some Cla.s.sical Issues.
If ''cognitive psychology'' is understood broadly as a systematic study of human cognitive behavior (as contrasted to, say, motor behavior), then the study is probably as old as human inquiry itself. Extensive, and sometimes quite rigorous, studies on this aspect of human nature dominated much of philosophical thinking across cultures for centuries. These studies were not always cast in direct psychological terms-that is, in terms of the properties of the human mind. For example, language was often studied as an independent, ''external'' object by itself, and the character of the studies ranged from mystical reflections to more critical and often constructive suggestions on the nature of this object.
Such studies proliferated in large parts of the ancient Indian intellectual tradition. In the Rgveda (c. 1000 BC), for instance, the phenomenon of language is once described as a ''spirit descending and embodying itself in phenomena, a.s.suming various guises and disclosing its real nature to the sensitive soul.''1 On the other hand, much later but within the same tradition, Panini (c. 450 BC) worked out the first extensive and rigorous .
grammatical account of Sanskrit to trigger discussion and a.n.a.lysis that continue today (Kiparsky 1982; Barbosa et al. 1998, 2; Dasgupta, Ford, and Singh 2000; Coward and Kunjunni Raja 2001). Although nothing like the sophistication of Paninian grammar was ever reached in other domains, vigorous discussion of conditions governing human knowledge, perception, memory, logical abilities, and the like, continued for over a millennium in eight basic schools of thought with many subschools within each. The complexity and the depth of this tradition have begun to be understood in contemporary terms only recently. Unfortunately, the context and agenda of the present book do not allow more detailed comments on this tradition.2 Similar variations are found in the Western tradition as well. For the mystical part of the tradition, one could cite Hegel, for whom language is ''the medium through which the subjective spirit is mediated with the The Loneliness of Biolinguistics
3.
being of objects.'' The critical and constructive part of the enterprise took shape since Plato and Aristotle and continued to Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Hume, and later thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836).3 Here as well we notice the interesting unevenness between linguistic studies, say, in the Aristotelian and CartesianPort Royal traditions, and the rest of the studies on human cognition. While studies on language and logic grew in sophistication, it is hard to see any radical progress since, say, the Theory of Ideas proposed by Plato in the fifth century BC. Very tentatively, therefore, there seems to be a sense in which the ''few domains'' of language and related objects are such as to open themselves to focused theoretical inquiry.4 It is not dicult to reinterpret at least some of these studies from either tradition in naturalistic terms to suggest that they were directed at uncovering the ''real properties'' of one part of nature, namely, the human mind. For Bhartrhari (c. 450500 AD), a philosopher of language in the Paninian tradition, speech is of the nature of the Ultimate Reality (Sabda-Brahma): ''Although the essence of speech is the eternal Brahman, its significance evolves in the manner in which the world evolves.''5 The thought is subject to a variety of (often conflicting) interpretations.
However, no familiar conception of divinity-for example, an object of wors.h.i.+p-attaches to the concept of Brahman. In that sense, nothing is lost if Brahman is understood as a system of invariants that constrains both the evolution of the world and the significance of speech.