Decoding Chomsky, by Chris Knight

Noam Chomsky has often discussed "Plato's Problem," which he obviously finds fascinating. The problem is this: how can people know so much given a relative poverty of stimuli? Just today you found yourself talking to someone and the words just flowed out of you; you didn't have to think about them beforehand. You probably never uttered some of those sentences before, in the exact way. We all take this for granted, easily. Plato wondered about it and surmised that the reason we are able to know so much is because we already knew it in a previous life! You just talk to each other and knowledge sorta miraculously emerges via a quasi midwifery. Or rather: our forebears knew things and passed this ability to know (best example: apprehending our native language so easily) on to us. In a sense, we already "know" everything, but we need it drawn out by some...process. Today, people talk about genes. Chomsky takes Plato's "soul" and changes it to something like "biological language acquisition device," but you already knew that. (<----see what I did there?)

But this Plato Problem still seems iffy to me.

Chomsky has often written about "Orwell's Problem" too: how can people not know so many things that truly impact their lives, when the information is basically right in front of them? Noam has offered a solution to why this problem exists in books such as his famous one from 1988 (co-written with Edward Herman), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Very sophisticated propaganda tools have been developed during the 20th century, suffice to write, for now.

                                     Chris Knight, radical British anthropologist, studied

                                        Chomsky's works for over two decades

In the 1970s an intellectual proposed there's a "Chomsky Problem," which is this: how can one man write a massive body of work on linguistics, while never mentioning the social world or politics in those books, while at the same time issuing scads of books critical of his own country's foreign and domestic policies? In Chomsky's political books the mention of science, much less linguistics is basically zero. The writer who (as far as I know) coined the "Chomsky Problem" thought Noam's linguistic work was brilliant; his political writings were, IIRC, "naive." 

For at least 20 years I've wondered about the Chomsky Problem, but as I read more and more I came to the opposite conclusion: I thought Chomsky's linguistics were preposterous, while his criticism of the official lies of the State Department (and much much much more) were astonishingly acute.

I read books from the Right about Chomsky that were mostly ad hominem character assassinations. I've read far too many books by academics on his linguistics that see his grammar models as genius. Of course, the worldwide Left love his political books. There are at least five intellectuals who seem to have made their careers out of explaining, collecting, and championing Chomsky's oeuvre. 

George Lakoff is one cognitive neurolinguist whose work makes a hell of a lot of sense to me, and he seems to despise Chomsky. Chomsky seems to despise Lakoff. (See Randy Allen Harris's The Linguistics Wars on this, and I understand Harris has an update in the works!) Chomsky answers Lakoff's barbs by saying Lakoff doesn't "understand" his work. But Lakoff was one of the early bright followers of Chomsky's linguistics models, only to break with him - radically - when it became apparent Chomsky's linguistics would never be able to account for semantics (by which I mean meaning in language). And Lakoff (who has amassed quite a large body of scholarship himself) has barely had anything to say about Noam's politics. Lakoff is definitely a liberal of some sort...

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So: Social Anthropologist Chris Knight (Wiki) has, almost miraculously, solved the Chomsky Problem. I've been trying to solve it for 20 years; I now feel the euphoria that one of us has solved it. My many blogspews here as the "Overweening Generalist" on my own attempts to solve the Chomsky Problem now seem horribly unsophisticated. And so it goes...

 Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics, recently released, is an astonishingly well-written and researched volume that will probably be the most important work in the history of ideas, post World War II, that you'll read for quite some time, and I say this if only out of Chomsky's massive influence. Knight has made a stellar contribution to the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of intellectuals 1945-now, and has explicated lucidly a new and dynamite version of how the "cognitive revolution" arose. 

Knight has apparently spent the past 20 years researching this book and has managed to boil it all down to 240 pages, plus endnotes, a massive bibliography, and index. In an interview he mentioned that he'd finished a work in his field of Anthropology and hadn't really covered the origin of language in humans, because he felt he didn't know enough about the subject. Knowing Chomsky was Mr. Linguistics (having virtually single-handedly made it into a science and moving Linguistics from the Anthropology Department into the new Cognitive Science labs at your nearby Big University), he read Chomsky's linguistics in order to understand. And he ran into what I ran into: it's a cold, abstract to a painful degree, literally meaningless, an unworkable series of models that, - get this - by definition, has nothing to do with humans communicating with each other. 

Chris Knight says he admires Chomsky's political work, and there's no reason not to believe him; he clearly admires Chomsky's scholarship and courage in this regard. As do I. At times Knight's said there are a lot of conscientious academics and intellectuals who have criticized the US as imperial power, but no one really even comes close to Chomsky. That said...

                                    Noam Chomsky, whose linguistic models are 

                                   (finally!) seeming to be exposed as going nowhere

Anyone who has tried to follow Chomsky's many models of "Cartesian Linguistics" (AKA masochists) and thought to themselves, "Either I'm an idiot or this is a put-on, or possibly massive fraud" - that was me at one point - will know what I'm referring to: "Phrase Structure Rules," "Transformational Rules," "Grammar," "Deep Structure," the nature of the "language organ," "The Minimalist Program," "Universal Grammar," and "Merge"? All scientistic, all going nowhere, basically. (Knight runs all these down, pp. 173-179)

So, wait a minute: What? How can Noam write about lies and propaganda - which are by definition language and signs and symbols and social work among human beings - while his linguistics work has nothing to do with our social being? Because of an admitted "schizophrenic" life Chomsky admits he must lead, because, since the 1950s, he's worked in the very place that the Pentagon has funneled enormous sums of research money into: MIT. Perhaps because his quasi-kabbalistic linguistics allowed him that Ivory Tower opiate he needed to deal with the cognitive dissonance? If so, if this is anywheres near a close view of Chomsky, then it's dramatic and strange to the nth degree, no?

Chomsky once wrote an article on the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. He greatly admired the anarchists. He had just turned 10 years old. He decided he'd rejected Trotskyism by age 12. This is an interesting fellow, eh? 

Noam had friends help him land the job at MIT, where he was able to work on the Pentagon's new idea: that computers and cybernetics and information theory would help make the world safe for capitalism after WWII. The idea that there's a language acquisition device - a very sophisticated computer - inside every human being's head? Very appealing to Pentagon folk. This was a computer whose source code must be cracked! And Chomsky's work looked like it was moving in exactly the direction they wanted. Maybe we can develop a computer that can translate any language into English; that should help in the Cold War effort against the Godless Commies. Let's let Chomsky lead a disembodied cognitive revolution. And he did. But: Noam didn't want to do any intellectual work that would help kill people in the name of Omnicorp.

Here's where adept conspiracy theorists can take this book and run with it: did Chomsky hijack linguistics and purposefully make it useless? Neither Knight nor I believe this to be true: Chomsky seems to genuinely have ideas - which seem bizarre and fruitless to me - about a sort of purity of work in "science." There's one of William James's lectures on pragmatism from the early 20th century, in which James talks about two vastly different temperaments among thinkers: the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded." Somehow, Chomsky is the apex of "tough-minded" when doing his political work, while his Linguistics is the very apogee of the "tender-minded."

His persona as a man of conscience and political integrity seems to have been a perfect match for the Pentagon: see? The top man in Cognitive Science is free to write his books, give talks criticizing the Pentagon all over the world. Because we're a free society! 

But how does Chomsky manage this cognitive dissonance? Does he feel it? What have been the unintended consequences of Chomsky's total oeuvre? Knight answers these questions to my satisfaction. To those of you who've heard or read that Chomsky defended a Holocaust Denier named Robert Faurisson, was/is friends with former CIA director John Deutsch, and went against virtually the entire faculty and student body at MIT in defending Walt Rostow in getting his job back at MIT, even though Rostow has been nailed overwhelmingly in Chomsky's books on Vietnam? Knight satisfactorily answers these queries, too. 

As an Anthropologist, Knight treats the heavily-funded-by-Pentagon cognitive scientists as a "tribe." Why did this particular form of nonsense catch on so wildly in postwar Unistat? Knight gives a fascinating answer. If the only other superpower seemed to run on ideas based in matter (Dialectical Materialism), then what if we do away with matter? And, to a large extent, they did. Information/data is weightless, travels at the speed of light: matter is secondary. So is the Body...

Along the way, you'll learn about the deep roots of Sociobiology (and a form of scientific feminism that needs to come back from being beaten down by anti-science Leftists in academia), how a Russian Futurist/surrealist from the first two decades of the 20th century influenced Chomsky without Chomsky seeming to know about it, and much more.

If you had to ask me, what was the overall value of Chomsky's linguistic work at MIT? I'd say it was  "Don't study language using this approach! Language is and has no doubt always been a deeply social thing!"

If you're interested in politics, philosophy, and the idea of "science" being an open and public - and possibly ultimately unified thing?: Decoding Chomsky is for you. If you're already a seasoned reader of Chomsky, I feel safe to say you'll learn a few new things from this book. For me, the book spoke to my interests in the origin of language (of which Chomsky's work is literally laughable) and the fallout from the new and wonderfully interdisciplinary "cognitive sciences." Knight let me on to some reasons I hadn't even considered about why my valuation of being a "generalist" has taken such a beating since the 1950s. Not long ago I wrote a piece about why I thought Alfred Korzybski's work had waned, and Knight fills in a lot of gaps there, too. I'm interested in the history of Structuralism, the academy, "PR", mass stupidity, intellectuals, embodied knowledge, Descartes, Plato, Newton, Galileo and Bertrand Russell, the possible synthesizing of all knowledge, why many people have the idea that "science" isn't for them, the idea of theory and practice going hand in hand, and the timeless notion that ideas have consequences and one clue to this is looking at the time and place and social situation in which ideas blast off and catch on. 

So, I loved this book. My intellectual friends have already heard WAY too much about my problems with Chomsky, and I'm only so lathered up over Noam because I love him, although I know it doesn't seem like it. Ya just hafta take my word. - OG

Chris Knight's website for further ideas about Chomsky and MIT

Here's an interview with Chris Knight in the journal Radical Anthropology from five or so years ago that gives a lot of the gist and pith of Decoding Chomsky. It was this interview, sent to me by Sue Howard, that felt like a revelation: "Here's a guy who seems to have maybe solved the Chomsky Problem!" 

If you have been taken by Chomsky's ideas about language and want to remediate, some suggestions:

-The Major Transitions of Evolution, by John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary

-Adam's Tongue, by Derek Bickerton

-Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, by Michael Tomasello

-Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

-From Molecule to Metaphor, by Jerome Feldman

-Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, by Sarah Hrdy

-The Way We Think, by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier

Here's something many of us are looking forward to: 7000 Universes: How the Languages We Speak Shape the Way We Think, by the stellar Lera Boroditsky. Gotta wait till 2018, though...

If you're way too busy and don't think you can get to reading Decoding Chomsky soon, HERE is a pretty damned good podcast interview of Chris Knight about Chomsky, by the thoughtful and erudite publisher and science fiction writer Douglas Lain.

Post scriptum: After writing about the Two Chomskys in light of William James's ideas of the "tough-minded" and "tender-minded" I remembered I blogged on it four years ago.

                                         Psychedelische Grafik von Bob Campbell

Unpacking "Common Sense" and My Chomsky Problem

It seems there are numerous variations on the "Chomsky Problem," but the classic one - possibly the first - is this one, by Paul Robinson:


>Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today. He is also a disturbingly divided intellectual. On the one hand there is a large body of revolutionary and highly technical linguistic scholarship, much of it too difficult for anyone but the professional linguist or philosopher; on the other, an equally substantial body of political writings, accessible to any literate person but often maddeningly simple-minded. The 'Chomsky problem' is to explain how these two fit together. --Paul Robinson/New York Times, February 25, 1979 [167]<


Okay, in a nutshell, my Chomsky Problem is that his linguistics is based on Cartesian Enlightenment assumptions about how the mind works, and that in turn is based on disembodied reason, as if in our nervous systems we manipulate mathematical symbols based on formal logic and set theory - all influenced by an overly rationalistic Cartesian input-output idea that took over artificial intelligence in the 1950s, which argues: we can model a "deep structure" of language, with syntax guiding the way, diagrams of trees that look like some offshoot from the Kabbalah, phonology and the sound patterns of a given language were important too, and semantics would somehow be accounted for at some point, based on syntax. (Whew!)


A uber-abundance of data from the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that humans must have their emotional, embodied brain/nervous system working well if they are to make appropriate decisions. Chomsky, unfortunately, really did some harm to his own linguistics/theory of Mind when he embraced Descartes. There appears to be no trace of "disembodied reason" for anyone to tap into. Or if you have located "disembodied reason," please alert me in the comment section at the conclusion of this article. (And to boot: Chomsky, amazingly, savagely denigrated thinkers in the philosophical empirical tradition! Such are the vicissitudes of genius?)


There are no syntactical "trees" in the brain/nervous system. There are neurons and neural clusters that operate chemically and electrically. Chomsky has very little to say about the human brain! His basic love for Descartes very early in his career seems to have steered him a few shades of wrong. Since around 1990, findings in cognitive science have shown that the Cartesian model of Rationalism is seriously flawed. (To start looking into this, see Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error or Keith Devlin's Goodbye, Descartes. Or Jerome Feldman's From Molecule To Metaphor. Or have a good long look-see in George Lakoff's The Political Mind, subtitled in the 2008 hardback version with "Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century Politics With An 18th-Century Brain," which seems a not-so subtle dig at Chomsky, who Lakoff once studied linguistics under.)


Chomsky's linguistics? It just seems flat-out wrong to me, and yet, as a good scientist, he has modified his linguistic models many times when older models didn't account for data. He also delineated a formal discovery procedure, which, while yielding results that seem less than satisfactory to say the least, are nevertheless valuable. (In science, demonstrating that hypotheses and possible theories do not work is still valuable, for its eliminative aspect.)


On the other hand, 180 degrees from Robinson's take on Chomsky's work as a critic of the US State Department and the way consent is manufactured, the role of intellectuals, and many other things that seemingly don't have anything to do with his linguistics work, his work has been, to my eyes, tremendously great. The immanent critiques in these books seem to me anything but "maddeningly simple-minded," as Paul Robinson seems to think. (I think, folks, we get a clue about Paul Robinson there. Who knows if he's changed since 1979? Is he even alive?) 


Chomsky deserves his immortality as an intellectual with his byzantine-but-wrong linguistics, but especially his hundred-plus books on State power, the crimes of ruling class Americans, his anarchist stance, his critique of fellow intellectuals, and his French Enlightenment-heroic "speaking truth to power."


So: my Chomsky Problem is about 180 degrees from Paul Robinson's. 


There are very many interviews in which Chomsky is asked how his linguistics work relates to his work as a political activist, and it's there that my Chomsky Problem gets thicker (and admittedly seems the crux of any "Chomsky Problem"), but I will elaborate in some future blog-blather, and attempt to answer Robinson's call to explain "how these two fit together."
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Chomsky seems to think any citizen can see through the butter-thick haze of State propaganda if (s)he applied "Cartesian common sense." And Noam has very articulate explanations for what this type of "common sense" is, but if it's "true" why does it seem like only a few people see through the US official bovine excreta?
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Giambattista Vico was actuated by Rene Descartes' ever-increasing hold on the minds of Europe's intellectuals, and sought to present a countervailing force to "Renato," as he called him in his Autobiography.


Here's Vico:
"When people cannot know the truth, they strive to follow what is certain and defined. In this way, even if their intellect cannot be satisfied by abstract knowledge, scienza, at least they may repose in common knowledge, conscienza." - New Science, paragraph 137, italics in David Marsh's translation, and possibly the original. 


Just what this "conscienza" consists of, when unpacked, seems far more like that "common sense" I see in everyday life here in the US in 2011. And to end this, I would like to quote Robert Anton Wilson, on his own definition of "common sense.":


"The body of hominid (or primate) prejudice that is so widespread that only philosophers, mathematicians, physicists and other eccentrics ever contradict it." - from an interview with New Libertarian magazine, 27 November, 1977. 


This definition seems much closer to what Vico wanted to say, but probably could not, because the Inquisition was always listening in.