The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky Read Free Book Online

persons. He realizes very well that a person is not an object. It's got something to do with psychic continuity. He goes intothought experiments: if two identical-looking people have the same thoughts, is there one person, or two people? And every concept you look at is like that. So they seem completely different from animal concepts.[C]
    In fact, we only have a superficial understanding of what they are. It was mainly in the seventeenth century that this was investigated.Hume later recognized that these are just mental constructions evoked somehow by external properties. And then the subject kind of tails off and there's very little that happens. By the nineteenth century, it gets absorbed into Fregean reference-style theories, and then on to modern philosophy of language and mind, which I think is just off the wall on this matter.
    . . . But to get back to your question, I think you're facing the fact that the human conceptual system looks as though it has nothing analogous in the animal world. The question arises as to where animal concepts came from, and there are ways to study that. But the origin of the human conceptual apparatus seems quite mysterious fornow.
    JM: What about the idea that the capacity to engage in thought – that is, thought apart from the circumstances that might prompt or stimulatethoughts – that that might have come about as a result of the introduction of the language system too?
    NC: The only reason for doubting it is that it seems about the same among groups that separated about fifty thousand years ago. So unless there's some parallel cultural development – which is imaginable – it looks as if it was sitting there somehow. So if you ask a New Guinea native to tell you what a person is, for example, or a river . . . [you'll get an answer like the one you would give.] Furthermore, infants have it [thought]. That's the most striking aspect – that they didn't learn it [and yet its internal content is rich and intricate, and – as mentioned – beyond the reach of the Oxford EnglishDictionary ].
    Take children's stories; they're based on these principles. I read my grandchildren stories. If they like a story, they want it read ten thousand times. One story that they like is about a donkey that somebody has turned into a rock. The rest of the story is about the little donkey trying to tell its parents that it's a baby donkey, although it's obviously a rock. Something or another happens at the end, and it's a baby donkey again. But every kid, no matter how young, knows that that rock is a donkey, that it's not a rock. It's a donkey because it's got psychic continuity, and so on. That can't be just developed from language, or from experience.
    JM: Well, what about something likedistributed morphology? It might be plausible that at least some conceptual structure – say, the difference between a noun and a verb – is directly due to language as such. Is that plausible?
    NC: Depends on what you mean by it. Take the notion of a donkey again. It is a linguistic notion; it's a notion that enters into thought. So it's a lexical item and it's a concept. Are they different? Take, say,Jerry Fodor's notion of the language of thought. What do we know about the language of thought? All we know about it is that it's English. If it's somebody in East Africa who has thoughts, it's Swahili. We have no independent notion of what it is; in fact, we have no reason to believe that there's any difference between lexical items and concepts. It's true that other cultures will break things up a little differently, but the differences are pretty slight. The basic properties are just identical . When I give examples in class like river and run these odd thought experiments [concerning the identities of rivers – what a person is willing to call a river, or the same river that you find in my work], it doesn't matter much which language background anyone comes from, they all recognize it in the same way in