-----Original Message-----
From: John Halle <john.halle at yale.edu>
>
>For those of you who claim to have a deep interest in Chomsky's ideas,
>where were you last month when I made the following posting on the thread
>"What *object* or *entity* does psychology study?"
>
>"For those of you interested in Chomsky's take on this question (a
>question which he has spent a considerable fraction of his intellectual
>life addressing, incidentally) you might want to have a look at the essay
>"Language as a Natural Object" in the journal Mind from 1997, I believe.
>More technical but still very worth reading is Rules and Representations
>from 1980.
Though I haven't read that paper in Mind, I don't think there's any doubt how Chomsky would answer John's question. The object of study of psychology is the brain. (See "Language and Nature," Chapter 2 of Powers & Prospects, South End 1996).
Chomsky disputes the notion that there's any such thing as a "mind-body problem." According to standard thinking, this "problem" arises from the difficulty in reconciling mentality, which we don't understand, with matter, which we do. Chomsky argues that we don't really understand either term. He points out that the common-sense notion of matter involves mechanics. Objects influence each other through contact. This mechanical notion went out with Newton, who demonstrated that objects act on each other at a distance (gravity). Since then matter has only become more mysterious. Taking up the question of "the ghost in the machine," Chomsky writes, "Newton exorcised the machine, leaving the ghost intact. Furthermore, nothing has replaced the machine. Rather, the sciences went on to postulate ever more exotic and occult entities: chemical elements whose 'number and nature' will probably never be known (Lavoisier), fields and waves, curved space-time, the notions of quantum theory, infinite one-dimensional strings in space of high dimensionality, and even stranger notions.
"The criterion of conformity to common sense vanished along with contact mechanics. There is also no coherent notion of material, physical, and so on. Hence there is no mind-body problem, no question about reduction of the mental to the physical, or even unification of the two domains. The contemporary orthodoxies seem unintelligible, along with the efforts to refute them. Advocates and critics are in the same (sinking) boat, and no reconciliation is needed, or possible."
No point trying to reduce philosophy to physics when physics is just as much of a mess as philosophy. But this apparent hopelessness actually leads to a simple solution. If matter includes "gravitational attraction, fields, Kekule's structural formulas, curved space-time, quarks, superstrings, etc." then it could just as readily include "mental aspects of the world." Mentality is just one more strange property of matter. ("Strange" only in the sense that it doesn't agree with our pre-scientific notions of matter.)
Chomsky's basic message is that the world is one. It is neither physical nor mental, though it encompasses features attributed to both terms.
Whitehead came to a similar conclusion. He said that matter has properties that allow organisms to function holistically. This is called "organicism" and is contrasted to Bergson's "vitalism," which suggests basically the same thing except that holism is a special property of living matter. Rupert Sheldrake, the British biochemist-turned-theorist, sides with Whitehead on the grounds that you can't draw a definitive boundary between life and non-life. Not only do Sheldrake and Chomsky both make this point, but they illustrate it the same way, by calling attention to the life-like properties of crystals. The implication is that life merely takes advantage of holistic properties already inherent to matter.
Chomsky doesn't seem to be aware that biologists have already developed a theory of matter involving a "field" that enables organisms to function holistically. The problem is that most biologists are troubled by such a "strange" feature of matter and assume that the "morphogenetic field" could not be physically real. But as Chomsky shows, there's no reason to make such an assumption.
At all levels of organization, organic structures function holistically. Everything that happens within a cell works towards the benefit of that cell, and every cell works for the benefit of tissues and organs, right on up to the level of the whole body. The field coordinates activities. A particular protein molecule "knows" what it's supposed to do, not because it's mechanically driven to perform a particular task, but because it's guided by a field that coordinates that protein with the activities of other proteins. It's a field of information. In other words, it's a mind. The cell has a mind, and the protein is a thought within that mind.
At least in the paper I read, Chomsky doesn't address the basic issue: Why should the brain require mentality to carry out its functions when everything else in the body works just fine without this "mystical" property? There's no absolute boundary between brain and body. Whatever is true of one is certainly going to be true of the other. Therefore either mentality is an aspect of every biological function, or it's not an aspect of any biological function, including the brain. The implication of Sheldrake's work is that the body is permeated with that "special" feature of matter we call "mentality."
The key issue for biology is memory. We've got two kinds-- personal memory and species memory. Chomsky follows standard thinking in treating them as separate issues, with personal memory being in the brain, while species memory is in DNA. Though personal memory is clearly a function of mentality, Chomsky fails to realize that the same would have to hold true for species memory. If DNA contains species memory it's only in the sense that DNA possesses a field, or a mind. Rather than assume that the field belonging to DNA accounts for the design of the entire body, Sheldrake figures that the form of each particular structure in the body is maintained by the field governing that structure. So there's nothing for DNA to do but to differentiate people from each other. DNA affects development, channeling it in one direction as opposed to another, but that's all. (Quite a demotion for the celebrated template of life.)
Chomsky may not like all the ramifications of his weird version of materialism, but it does provide the means of getting beyond the bickering and developing a biology of mind.
Ted