Chomsky & Skinner (was RE: Freedom and equality?)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Sep 1 02:11:09 PDT 2000


Hi Ian:


>Some scholars cite Noam Chomsky's 1957 Syntactic Structures and his 1959
>review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, to which Skinner never replied, as the
>death knell of behaviorism. An anarchist slam dunk on authoritarianism in
>yet another neglected dimension of human affairs :-)

Whether Chomsky's hypothesis of innate ideas is a blow for anarchism, however, is far from clear. Why should we assume that the hypothesis of innate structures as the foundation of human language acquisition is less "authoritarian" & more "anarchistic" than the Skinnerian rejection of mentalism (Skinner argues that mentalism platonically invokes the "inner man" as the cause of behaviors: "The inner man is regarded as driving the body very much as the man at the steering wheel drives a car") & emphasis on the environment to account for our morals & mores naturalistically?

Chomsky argues: "Knowledge of language is normally attained through brief exposure, and the character of the acquired knowledge may be largely predetermined" (Chomsky, _Language and Mind_, 1968, p.ix). One might say that Chomsky's view is, if anything, more conservative than Skinner's, in that Chomsky squarely lines up behind Descartes in his battle against the anti-Platonic & anti-Cartesian tenets of radical behaviorism like Skinner's.

While Chomsky views "his insistence on language as the invariant and exclusive property of humanity as offering a 'modest conceptual barrier' against racism and other ethnocentric tendencies, precisely because it avoids the empiricism for which other attributes, such as colour, might be deemed relevant to the definition of the 'human'" (Kate Soper, _What Is Nature?_, p.62), the rejection of behaviorism raises a specter of zombies:

***** Zombies are stipulated to be creatures that are in some way identical to human beings -- and thus, in some sense, indistinguishable from human beings -- but which lack consciousness. Zombies are at least behaviorally identical to human beings or other conscious creatures, and they may also be like us in other ways.

That there might be creatures indistinguishable from human beings but that lack minds or consciousness is an idea that appears repeatedly in philosophical considerations. In one traditional form, the worry arises as an epistemic problem about our evidence for taking other things to have minds. You may recall Descartes' concern that the hats and coats that he judges to be worn by people in the square might "conceal automatons." And Hilary Putnam reminds us that William James' entertained the possibility of what he called an "automatic sweetheart." In the middle part of the 20th Century, it seems, this "problem of other minds" was a major problem, perhaps the major problem, in Anglo-American philosophy of mind.

From these epistemic concerns spring zombies. The inventor of philosophical zombies, Robert Kirk, separated the metaphysical issues countenanced from their epistemological vehicle, skepticism about other minds (1974a)1. Kirk created a salient device for investigating the metaphysical intuitions that underlie the epistemic worries. If the skeptical challenge about other minds is even coherent, then it must be at least logically possible that certain kinds of creatures could exist:

The sceptic's suggestion that others, despite their anatomical and behavioural resemblance to himself, might after all be insentient -- without sensory experiences of any kind -- is familiar enough....My aim is to show that it is indeed logically possible for there to be organisms answering to the description I have given (Zombies, for short.) (Robert Kirk, 1974a: 43)

But -- here's the rub -- the very possibility of zombies is at odds with at least some materialist (physicalist, naturalist) theories of mind -- and perhaps with any version of materialism. For materialists (physicalists, naturalists) hold that the material (physical, natural) facts fix the psychological facts, including facts about conscious states. Thus, even taking seriously the skeptical worry involves, prima facie, rejecting materialism (physicalism, naturalism). In that case it might seem that a central problem in philosophy of mind has built into it the rejection of one supposed solution. Hence the problem of zombies.... (Tom Polger, "Zombies," at http://www.uniroma3.it/kant/field/zombies.htm) *****

And the possibility of zombies (or of Cartesian skepticism about other minds or others' humanity) is a possibility of racism & sexism (which is the problem raised for Deckard -- a phonetic allusion to Descartes -- in _Blade Runner_).

On the other hand, one may interpret Chomsky as not a Cartesian dualist but a monist, since his "innate ideas" are understood as encoded in the brains. In that case, Chomsky has to accept, to his chagrin, that Steven Pinker's biologically reductionist account of language organs & grammar genes may be more Chomskian than Chomsky's own view.

To sum up, whether one views Chomsky as Cartesian dualist or proto-biological reductionist, it is not clear why Chomsky's linguistics should be regarded as a weapon for anarchist politics.

Yoshie



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