End of the Revolution

FEBRUARY 28, 2002

by John R. Searle
New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
by Noam Chomsky
Cambridge University Press, 230 pp., $60.00; $20.00 (paper)
1.
Almost three decades ago I reviewed in these pages a striking development in the study of language that I
called Chomskys Revolution in Linguistics.
1
After such a long time it would seem appropriate to assess
the results of the revolution. This article is not by itself such an assessment, because to do an adequate job
one would require more knowledge of what happened in linguistics in these years than I have, and certainly
more than is exhibited by Chomskys new book. But this much at least we can say. Judged by the
objectives stated in the original manifestoes, the revolution has not succeeded. Something else may have
succeeded, or may eventually succeed, but the goals of the original revolution have been altered and in a
sense abandoned. I think Chomsky would say that this shows not a failure of the original project but a
redefinition of its goals in ways dictated by new discoveries, and that such redefinitions are typical of
ongoing scientific research projects.
The research project of the revolution was to work out for each natural language a set of syntactical rules
that could generate all the sentences of that language. The sense in which the rules could generate the
infinite number of sentences of the language is that any speaker, or even a machine, that followed the rules
would produce sentences of the language, and if the rules are complete, could produce the potentially infinite
number of its sentences. The rules require no interpretation and they do more than just generate patterns.
Applied mechanically, they are capable of generating the infinite number of sentences of the language.
Syntax was regarded as the heart of linguistics and the project was supposed to transform linguistics into a
rigorous science. A grammar, in the technical sense used by linguists, is a theory of a language, and such
theories were called generative grammars. Stated informally, some rules of English are that a sentence can
be composed of a noun phrase plus a verb phrase, that a verb phrase can consist of a verb plus a noun
phrase and that a noun phrase can be composed of a determiner plus a noun, that nouns can be woman,
man, ball, chair; verbs can be see, hit, throw; determiners can be the, a. Such rules
can be represented formally in the theory as a set of instructions to rewrite a symbol on the left side as the
symbols on the right side. Thus,
S NP + VP
VP V + NP
NP Det + N
N man, woman, ball
V hit, see, throw
Det a, the
This small fragment of an English grammar would be able to generate, for example, the sentence
The man hit the ball.
Such rules are sometimes called rewrite rules or phrase structure rules because they determine the
elementary phrase structure of the sentence. Chomsky argued that such rules are inadequate to account for
the complexities of actual human languages like English, because some sentences require that a rule apply to
an element not just in virtue of its form, but in virtue of how it got that form, the history of how it was
derived. Thus, for example, in the sentence
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The chicken is ready to eat
even though the words are not ambiguous, the sentence as a whole is syntactically ambiguous depending on
whether chicken is the subject or the object of eat. The sentence can mean either the chicken is ready to
eat something, or the chicken is ready for something to eat it. To account for this ambiguity it seems,
Chomsky argued, that we have to suppose that the sentence is the surface expression of two different
underlying sentences. The sentence is the result of applying rules that transform two different underlying, or
deep, structures. Such rules are called transformational rules, and Chomskys version of generative grammar
was often called transformational grammar because of the argument for the necessity of transformational
rules. In the classical versions of the theory, the phrase structure rules determined the deep structure of the
sentence, the bearer of meaning; the transformational rules converted deep structure into surface structure,
something that could be uttered. In the example of the chicken above, there is one surface structure, the
sentence I have quoted, and two deep structures, one active, one passive.
It was a beautiful theory. But the effort to obtain sets of such rules that could generate all and only the
sentences of a natural language failed. Why? I dont know, though I will suggest some explanations later.
But seen from outside a striking feature of the failure is that in Chomskys later work even the apparently
most well-substantiated rules, such as the rule for forming passive sentences from active sentences, have
been quietly given up. The relation between John loves Mary and Mary is loved by John seemed
elegantly explained by a transformational rule that would convert the first into the second. Apparently
nobody thinks that anymore.
Another feature of the early days was the conviction that human beings were born with an innate brain
capacity to acquire natural human languages. This traditional viewit goes back at least to the seventeenth
centuryseemed inescapable, given that a normal infant will acquire a remarkably complex system of rules
at a very early age with no systematic teaching and on the basis of impoverished and even defective stimuli.
Small children pick up a highly competent knowledge of a language even though they get no formal
instruction and the utterances they hear are limited and often not even grammatical.
The traditional objection to this innateness hypothesis (Chomsky always objected to this term, but it
seems reasonable enough) was that languages were too various to be accounted for by a single brain
mechanism. Chomskys answer was that the surface variety of languages concealed an underlying structure
common to all human languages. This common structure is determined, he wrote, by an innate set of rules of
Universal Grammar (UG). The innate mechanism in the brain that enables us to learn language is so
constituted that it embodies the rules of UG; and those rules, according to Chomsky, are not rules we can
consciously follow when we acquire or use language. I think the official reason for the abandonment of the
research program was that the sheer complexity of the different rule systems for the different languages was
hard to square with the idea that they are really all variations on a single underlying set of rules of UG.
There were, as might be expected, a number of objections to Chomskys proposals. I, for one, argued that
the innate mechanism that enables the child to acquire language could not be constituted byi.e., made
up ofrules. There are no rules of universal grammar of the sort that Chomsky claimed. I argued this on a
number of grounds, the chief being that no sense had been given to the idea that there is a set of rules that no
one could possibly consciously follow: if you cant follow them consciously then you cant follow them
unconsciously either. I also argued that, precisely to the extent that the mechanism was innate and applied
automatically, it was empty to suppose that its application consisted in rule-governed behavior, No sense, I
wrote, had been given to the idea of rules so deeply buried in unconscious brain processes that they were
not even the sort of things that could be consciously followed.
Just as a child does not follow a rule of Universal Visual Grammar that prohibits it from seeing the infrared
or ultraviolet parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, so the child does not follow rules of Universal
Linguistic Grammar that prohibit it from acquiring certain sorts of languages but not others. The possibilities
of vision and language are already built into the structure of the brain and the rest of the nervous system.
Chomsky attempted to answer my arguments in a number of places, including the book under review. But in
the case of UG he has given up the idea that there are rules of universal grammar.
In his recent book, as well as in other works (most importantly, The Minimalist Program
2
), Chomsky
advances the following, much more radical, conception of language: the infant is indeed born with an innate
language faculty, but it is not made up of any set of rules; rather it is an organ in the brain that operates
according to certain principles. This organ is no longer thought of as a device for acquiring language,
because in an important sense it does not so much acquire as produce any possible human language in an
appropriate environment. Chomsky writes,
We can think of the initial state of the faculty of language as a fixed network connected to a switch box;
the network is constituted of the principles of language, while the switches are the options to be
determined by experience. When the switches are set one way, we have Swahili; when they are set
another way, we have Japanese. Each possible human language is identified as a particular setting of the
switchesa setting of parameters, in technical terminology. If the research program succeeds, we
should be able literally to deduce Swahili from one choice of settings, Japanese from another, and so
on through the languages that humans can acquire. [my italics]
According to this view, the possibility of all human languages is already in the human brain before birth. The
child does not learn English, French, or Chinese; rather, its experiences of English set the switches for
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child does not learn English, French, or Chinese; rather, its experiences of English set the switches for
English and out comes English. Languages are neither learned nor acquired. In an important sense they are
already in the mind/brain at birth.
What happens, then, to the rules of grammar? Chomsky writes that
This Principles and Parameters approach, as it has been called, rejected the concept of rule and
grammatical construction entirely: there are no rules for forming relative clauses in Hindi, verb phrases
in Swahili, passives in Japanese, and so on. The familiar grammatical constructions are taken to be
taxonomic artifacts, useful for informal description perhaps but with no theoretical standing. They have
something like the status of terrestrial mammal or household pet.
The overall conception of language that emerges is this: a language consists of a lexicon (a list of elements
such as words) and a set of computational procedures. The computational procedures map strings of lexical
elements onto a sound system at one end and a meaning system at the other. But the procedures themselves
dont represent anything; they are purely formal and syntactical. As Chomsky says,
The computational procedure maps an array of lexical choices into a pair of symbolic objects. The
elements of these symbolic objects can be called phonetic and semantic features, respectively, but
we should bear in mind that all of this is pure syntax and completely internalist.
Chomsky is eager to emphasize that the principles and parameters approach is a tentative research project
and not an established result, but it is pretty clear that he thinks the original project of thirty-five years ago
has failed. For years he has told us that the interest of the study of language was that it was a window on
the mind and that from it we could identify a great many of the minds properties. One of his favorites: the
mind uses structure-dependent rules, for example the transformational rules I earlier described.
3
Now he
has given all that up. Language is a specific faculty with no general mental implications; and there are no
rules, hence no structure- dependent rules. In an important sense there arent even any languages. All each
person has is what he calls an I-language, I for internal, individual, and intensional.
4
A neutral scientist,
a Martian scientist in Chomskys thought experiment, might reasonably conclude that there is a single
human language, with differences only at the margins.
What about words and their meanings? Well, Chomsky speculates, maybe all possible concepts are also in
the brain and what we call learning the meaning of a word is really just learning a label for a concept we have
always had. However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of
concepts, and that the childs task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few
other possibilities. So, to take two examples discussed by Chomsky, on this view every human child that
ever lived had at birth the concepts of bureaucrat and carburetor; indeed children born to the cave men
twenty thousand years ago had these concepts, and all of us would still have them even if carburetors had
never been invented and bureaucrats had never existed. In the face of the sheer implausibility of this claim
Chomsky likes to appeal to the example of the immune system. Nature has provided us with the capacity to
produce a huge stock, literally millions, of antibodies, even antibodies against antigens that have been
artificially synthesized. So why not a huge stock of innate concepts, ready for any word we could
conceivably invent? On this view, the only part of language that depends on stored conventions is the
sounds of the words used to label the innate concepts.
2.
To people who take the study of language seriously I think all this ought to seem more disquieting than it
does to Chomsky. For all those years he was telling us that we had overwhelming evidence that speakers of
a language were following certain types of rules, and that we even had evidence about which rules they were
following. What happened to all that evidence? If the rules are all thrown out, what was the evidence
evidence for?
Let us start with Chomskys idea of a neutral Martian scientist arriving on Earth and finding our languages an
object of study for natural science. The point of imagining a Martian, he said, is to free us of our local
prejudices. The scientist will find that we all speak the same language, except at the margins, and that the I-
language with its variations is the proper object of study for natural science. Does that sound right to you? It
doesnt to me. First, any such scientist has to have a language of her, his, or its own. No language, no
science. So the scientists first step is to compare our languages with her own. How are they like and unlike
Martian? The only way I can imagine the scientist doing this is to imagine that she learns one of our
languages, say English. She does that as anyone, scientist or otherwise, would, by figuring out how to
translate her expressions into English and English expressions into Martian.
Let us suppose she is so good at it that soon she is bilingual. Then she will discover an interesting fact.
Knowledge of English is not much use to her when she is confronted with monolingual Finnish speakers.
For example she will eventually find out that the Finnish single-word sentence, Juoksentelisinkohan,
appropriately pronounced, translates into English as I wonder if I should run around a little bit without a
particular destination. So to learn Finnish she has to start all over again. And the same sequence repeats
itself when she tries to converse in Arabic, Swahili, or Japanese. Is there really only one language on earth?
Not in her experience.
Worse yet, she will soon discover that language is not an object of natural science and could not be. The
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Worse yet, she will soon discover that language is not an object of natural science and could not be. The
distinction, rough as it is, between the so-called natural sciences and the social sciences is based on a
more fundamental distinction in ontology, between those features of the world that exist independently of
human attitudes, like force, mass, gravitational attraction, and photosynthesis, on the one hand, and, on the
other, those whose existence depends on human attitudes, like money, property, marriage, and government.
There is a distinction, to put it in very simple terms, between those features of the world that are observer-
independent and those that are observer-relative or observer-dependent. Natural sciences like physics,
chemistry, and biology are about features of nature that exist regardless of what we think; and social
sciences like economics, political science, and sociology are about features of the world that are what they
are because we think that is what they are.
Where, then, do language and linguistics fit in? I think it is obvious that a group of letters or sounds can be
called a word or a sentence of English or Finnish only relative to the attitudes of English and Finnish
speakers. You can see this quite clearly in the case of linguistic changes. Pick up a text of Chaucer and you
will find sentences that are no longer a part of English, though they once were, and you can produce English
sentences that were not part of Chaucerian English. Of course, Chomsky is right to insist that English is
not a well-defined notion, that the word has all sorts of looseness both now and historically. I am a native
English speaker, yet I cannot understand some currently spoken dialects of English. All the same, the point
remains: a group of letters or sounds is a sentence, or a word, or other element of a language only relative to
some set of users of the language.
The point has to be stated precisely. There is indeed an object of study for natural science, the human brain
with its specific language components. But the actual languages that humans learn and speak are not in that
way natural objects. They are creations of human beings. Analogously humans have a natural capacity to
socialize and form social groups with other humans. But the actual social organizations they create, such as
governments and corporations, are not natural, observer- independent phenomena, they are human creations
and have an observer- dependent existence. As their speakers develop or disappear, languages change or die
out.
There is a deep reason why languages like English or Finnish must be rule-governed. The sentences and
other elements only exist as part of the language because we regard them as such. Language is in an
important sense a matter of convention. But if so, there must be some principles by which we regard some
strings as sentences of English and others not. Being a sentence of English is not a natural fact like being a
mountain or a waterfall; it is relative to the observer. Functional phenomena that are relative to an observer
divide into two kinds, those like knives, chairs, and tables, which can function as such because of their
physical structure, and those like money, language, and government, which function the way they do
because we assign to them a certain status and with that status a function that can only be performed
because of the collective acceptance of the entities as having a certain status and with that status a
function.
5
The second class, the status functions, require systems of rules (conventions, accepted procedures,
principles, etc.). Human languages, like money, property, marriage, baseball games, and government, are
constituted by certain sorts of rules that, years ago, I baptized constitutive rules.
6
Such rules do not
merely regulate existing activities, like the rules of driving, but they create the very possibility of such
activities. There are no purely physical properties that are sufficient to determine all and only sentences of
English (or money, baseball, US congressmen, married couples, or private property). But why not, since all
these are physical phenomena? Because the physical phenomena satisfy these descriptions only relative to
some set of conventions and of peoples attitudes operating within the conventions. Something is money,
property, a sentence of English, etc., only relative to the attitudes people have within systems of rules. That
language is constituted by rules cannot be legitimately denied, as now Chomsky tries to do, on the
theoretical ground that it is hard to square with a certain conception of the innate language faculty.
But why did the attempt by linguists to get descriptively and explanatorily adequate generative grammars fail?
I said I did not know, but here is one hypothesis. They wanted rules of a very unrealistic kind. They wanted
rules for sentence formation that could be stated without any reference to the meanings of words or
sentences and they wanted rules that generated sentences algorithmically, i.e., according to a set of precisely
statable steps, without any need for interpretation and without any other things being equal conditions.
The model was based on the formation rules for artificially created logical and mathematical systems. But
human social rules are almost never like that. The history of the passive transformation is illustrative. You
can formulate a transformational rule that converts sentences of the form
NP1 verbs NP2
into
NP2 is verbed by NP1.
Thus it converts
John loves Mary
into
Mary is loved by John.
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But what about sentences like
John weighs one hundred and sixty pounds
or
John resembles Eisenhower.
These do not yield
One hundred and sixty pounds is weighed by John
or
Eisenhower is resembled by John.
Why not? I think any child recognizes that the passive does not work in these cases because of the meanings
of the words. Resembling and weighing are not things that can be done by someone to someone or
something in the way that loving, seeing, hitting, and desiring can be. So you can passivize sentences with
loves, sees, hits, and desires but you cant turn sentences into the passive voice with weighs and
resembles. Perhaps in other languages sentences with verbs synonymous to these permit conversion into
the passive, but not in English. The point is not that I have given a correct explanation, but rather that this
sort of explanation was not permissible in generative grammar. The proponents of generative grammar
required explanations using only syntactical rulesno meanings allowedoperating on syntactical entities.
The correct picture seems to me this. There are indeed innate mechanisms in the human brain for acquiring
and using language. That is why we have languages and our close relatives, the chimpanzees, do not. The
mechanisms work according to certain principles, like any other organ. But it is not a matter of rules, and
learning a language is not a matter of following rules of Universal Grammar, any more than seeing something
is a matter of following rules of Universal Visual Grammar.
There are indeed rules of specific languages, but the effort to find generative grammars for these languages is
bound to fail, precisely because the aim was to obtain rigorous, strict, exceptionless rules of the sort that
you get for constructing formal systems such as the predicate calculus, or axiomatic set theory, and such
rules make no reference to what the entities were to be used for. The rules were to be stated without any
reference to the meanings or the uses of the sentences generated. Natural human phenomena almost never
have rules like that. There will often be exceptions to a rule; there will typically be semantic considerations in
the formulation and application of the rule; and there will in general be an other things being equal clause
understood in the application of the rule.
When Chomsky suggests that the concepts expressed by words like carburetor and bureaucrat must be
innately known by every child, and that learning the meanings of the words is just a matter of applying labels
to concepts the child already has, you know that something has gone radically wrong. He has a very
unrealistic conception of learning. It is as if he supposed that learning the meanings of these words would
have to consist in having ones nerve endings stimulated by passing bureaucrats and carburetors, and
because there is no way such passing stimuli could ever give us the meanings of these words, it looks like
the meanings must be innate.
This argument is called the argument from the poverty of the stimulus and it occurs over and over in
Chomskys work. But a more realistic conception is the following: in order to understand, for example, the
word bureaucrat, a child has to be introduced to a culture, a culture that includes governments, bureaus,
departments, powers, employment, and a host of other things. A child does not learn a set of discrete
concepts, but learns to master a culture, and once that culture is mastered, it is not difficult for him to
understand the word bureaucrat. Similar remarks could be made about carburetor. This concept only
makes sense within the context of some knowledge of internal combustion engines. Once you have the basic
understanding of how such engines work it is not hard to understand that a carburetor is a device for mixing
air and fuel.
Furthermore, one often has a partial or imperfect knowledge of a concept. Chomskys analogy with the
immune system thus seems grossly inadequate. Concepts are seldom all or nothing, and they are almost
always systematically related to other concepts. You cannot have the concept of carburetor or
bureaucrat without having a great many other logically related concepts. But chemical compounds are
both all-or-nothing and discrete. Each antibody is distinct from every other antibody, and for any antibody
you either have it or you dont. For concepts you can have a partial grasp of the concept, and there is no
way you can have a concept without having many other concepts.
3.
I do not wish to give the impression that Chomskys entire book is concerned with these issues. On the
contrary, most of the book is concerned with debates about current issues in philosophy. I will discuss one
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contrary, most of the book is concerned with debates about current issues in philosophy. I will discuss one
of them, the question of unconscious rules of human cognition, which is related to the question of language.
A standard explanatory device in Chomskys earlier work, and in cognitive science in general, is to claim
that we are unconsciously following rules. The importance of this can hardly be overestimated. Once we
have the possibility of explaining particular forms of human behavior as following rules, we have a very rich
explanatory apparatus that differs dramatically from the explanatory apparatus of the natural sciences. When
we say we are following rules, we are accepting the notion of mental causation and the attendant notions of
rationality and existence of norms.
So, for example, if we explain my driving behavior by saying that I am following the rule Drive on the right-
hand side of the road, even when I am following this rule unconsciously, we have a mode of explanation
that is quite different from saying that the car follows the rule Force equals mass times acceleration. Both
rules describe what is happening, but only the first actually is a case of following a rule. The content of the
rule does not just describe what is happening but plays a part in making it happen. In order to make an
explanation of behavior as following rules work, we need to be able to distinguish cases which are guided by
a rule from cases which are merely described by a rule. One condition of rule-guided explanations is that the
rules have to be the sorts of things that one could actually follow. If you spell out those conditions, you find
that unconscious rules have to be the sort of things that at least could be conscious. So, for example, I can
follow the rule Drive on the right unconsciously, but it is the sort of rule I could bring to consciousness.
For a number of reasons rules may be unconscious, and in some cases, such as brain damage or repression,
a person may be unable to bring the rule to consciousness. But an unconscious rule has to have the kind of
content which could be consciously understood, interpreted, followed, or violated.
Chomskys rules do not meet that condition. For him the rules of language are computational rules, but
what exactly is the definition of computation, according to which these rules are computational? On the
standard definition of computation, we are to think of computations as reducing to vast sets of zeroes and
ones zapping through the computer. Is that how we are to think of unconscious rule-following on
Chomskys model? Lots of zeroes and ones in the childs head? That can hardly be right because the zeroes
and ones are in the mind of the programmer. In actual commercial computers, the only reality independent of
the observer consists of rapidmillions per secondtransitions in complex electrical circuits. Commercial
computers dont literally follow rules because they do not have the mental apparatus necessary for rule-
following. We program the computers to behave automatically as if they were following rules, and thus we
can get the same results as human rule-following behavior.
So there is a dilemma: if we are to think of computational rule-following in the technical sense of reducing to
binary symbols, then there is literally no rule-following independent of an observer and we have lost the
explanatory power of psychological explanation. If we are to think of computation in the common-sense
meaning, according to which, when we say, for example, that the child computed the meaning of the
sentence we just mean that he figured it out, then the unconscious rules do not meet the condition of being
thinkable.
Chomsky has now given up on the idea that there are rules of particular languages, but the difficulty about
computation remains. This is an absolutely crucial point at issue and I want to make it completely clear.
Chomsky insists that the study of language is a branch of natural science and the key notion in his new
conception of language is computation. On his current view, a language consists of a lexicon plus
computations. But my objection to this is that computation is not a notion of natural science like force,
mass, or photosynthesis. Computation is an abstract mathematical notion that we have found ways to
implement in hardware. As such it is entirely relative to the observer. And so defined, in this observer-
relative sense, any system whatever can be described as performing computations. The stone falling off a
cliff computes the function The distance I fall has to equal half the square of gravity multiplied by the time I
fall: S = 1/2(gt
2
). The water flowing over a dam at the rate of one gallon per second computes the addition
function 2 + 2 = 4 every four seconds, and so on with everything else in the world. Unlike, say, electrical
charge, computation is not discovered in nature, rather it is assigned to physical processes. Natural
processes can be interpreted or described computationally. In this observer-relative sense there cannot be a
natural science of computation.
In the original definition of computation, before the invention of computing machinery by Alan Turing and
others,
7
computing meant figuring something out in arithmetic or mathematics, and a computer was a
person who computed. In the sense in which I solve mathematical problems I really am intrinsically
computing and the attribution of computational features to my conscious thought processes is not relative to
an observer. Now, when Chomsky says that language is a matter of computation, which is it? Is it the
observer-relative sense of zeroes and ones? If so, the project is no longer natural science and the
computations do not explain the phenomena but merely describe processes whose causal explanation has to
be found in neurobiology. Is it the observer-independent sense in which human beings figure things out? If
so, then the unconscious rules dont meet the conditions necessary for rule-following explanations. In
neither case do we get an account of language that is at all like natural science. Chomsky says, John Searle
and I have discussed these issues for some years. Indeed. And I expect the discussions to continue.
In any case, as I noted above, Chomsky has now given up on the idea that Universal Grammar is a matter of
unconscious rule-following. But he also dismisses the idea that real human languages are governed by rules.
That, I believe, cannot be right.
I would not wish my criticisms of Chomsky to be misunderstood. At a time when various embarrassingly
incompetent accounts of language are widespread in university humanities departments under such names as
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incompetent accounts of language are widespread in university humanities departments under such names as
literary theory, deconstruction, and postmodernism it is worth emphasizing that his work in linguistics
is at the highest intellectual level.
8
This is the first of two articles about linguistics.
1. The New York Review, June 29, 1972.
2. MIT Press, 1995.
3. Reflections on Language (Pantheon, 1975), pp. 3133.
4. By intensional he means that the language is identified not by the sentences it produces (the extension) but
by the means according to which they are produced (the intension). In principle two different I-languages
might produce the same sentences.
5. For more on this point see John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (Free Press, 1995).
6. See How to Derive Ought from Is, Philosophical Review, Vol. 73 (January 1964), pp. 4358.
7. Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind, Vol. 59 (1950), pp. 433460.
8. I wish to thank Stephen Neale, Barry Smith, and Dagmar Searle for criticisms of an earlier version of this
article.
Copyright 1963-2010 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
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