Five minutes with Noam Chomsky – “Europe is pretty much following behind US policy, no matter what that policy is”

Last week the General Assembly of the United Nations voted in favour of recognising Palestine as a non-member observer state. The EU was unable to reach a common position on the issue, with some states voting in favour and others, including Germany and the United Kingdom, abstaining. EUROPP editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson asked Noam Chomsky for his views on the vote and Europe’s wider response to the Israel-Palestine crisis

The language capacity: architecture and evolution

There is substantial evidence that the human language capacity (LC) is a species-specific biological property, essentially unique to humans, invariant among human groups, and dissociated from other cognitive systems. Each language, an instantiation of LC, consists of a generative procedure that yields a discrete infinity of hierarchically structured expressions with semantic interpretations, hence a kind of “language of thought” (LOT), along with an operation of externalization (EXT) to some sensory-motor system, typically sound. There is mounting evidence that generation of LOT observes language-independent principles of computational efficiency and is based on the simplest computational operations, and that EXT is an ancillary process not entering into the core semantic properties of LOT and is the primary locus of the apparent complexity, diversity, and mutability of language. These conclusions are not surprising, since the internal system is acquired virtually without evidence in fundamental respects, and EXT relates it to sensory-motor systems that are unrelated to it. Even such properties as the linear order of words appear to be reflexes of the sensory motor system, not available to generation of LOT. The limited evidence from the evolutionary record lends support to these conclusions, suggesting that LC emerged with Homo sapiens or not long after, and has not evolved since human groups dispersed

Choices and Prospects

Excerpt In examining the attacks on the U.S. on September 11, we must first identity the perpetrators of the crimes. It is generally assumed, plausibly, that their origin is the Middle East region, and that the attacks probably trace back to the Osama Bin Laden network, a widespread and complex organization, doubtless inspired by Bin Laden but not necessarily acting under his control. Let us assume that this is true. A sensible person would try to ascertain Bin Laden’s views, and the sentiments of the large reservoir of supporters of much of what he says throughout the region. About all of this, we have a great deal of information

An interview on linguistic variation with Noam Chomsky

This is an interview to Noam Chomsky (MIT) on linguistic variation

On certain formal properties of grammars

A grammar can be regarded as a device that enumerates the sentences of a language. We study a sequence of restrictions that limit grammars first to Turing machines, then to two types of system from which a phrase structure description of the generated language can be drawn, and finally to finite state Markov sources (finite automata). These restrictions are shown to be increasingly heavy in the sense that the languages that can be generated by grammars meeting a given restriction constitute a proper subset of those that can be generated by grammars meeting the preceding restriction. Various formulations of phrase structure description are considered, and the source of their excess generative power over finite state sources is investigated in greater detail

Mental Representations

Knowledge of language (and probably much else) can properly be regarded as a system of mental representations and operations to form and modify them. In these terms, many problems concerning language and knowledge can be reasonably approached, sometimes solved, though many mysteries remain, and prospects are opened to incorporate this inquiry within the natural sciences

Language and Problems of Knowledge

Every serious approach to the study of language departs from common sense usage, replacing it by some technical concept. The general practice has been to define "language" as extensional and externalized (E-language). However, such a concept of language and its variants raises numerous problems and it is argued in this paper the E-language is an artifact with no status in a theory of language. A better move would be to consider "language" as intensional and internalized (I-language). Bearing this conception in mind, the approach to the knowledge of language as knowledge of an ability--very common among those philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein--is examined and rejected as a philosopher's pipe dream