Customer Reviews

New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind

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There are a lot of fantastic ideas in the book, despite the fact that it has the appearance of being a purely negative work (arguments against philosophers rather than a constructive piece of its own). In order to get to the original and interesting points, one has to overlook many familiar flaws in Chomsky's philosophical writing: (1) Because he mostly publishes collections of papers, such as this volume, his philosophical work is overly repetitive. Often one wonders whether this book would be half as long if the repetitions were just editted out. (2) One gets the sense that Chomsky is quite uncharitable to his opponents in reconstructing their arguments. For instance, he emphasizes psychological behaviorism as the key component to Quinean naturalism, overlooking many of the similiarities between his own view of naturalism and Quine's view (minus behaviorism). Chomsky makes an important point that an analytic/synthetic distinction can be made quite sharp and clear empirically on linguistic grounds (it follows from the language instinct). Quine himself would not object that a clear analytic/synthetic distinction could be made on empirical grounds, he makes one himself in one of his essays. (3) Chomsky often does not build systematic arguments against some of the points that his opponents make. Often, he would simply integrate a brief quotation from his opponents into his writing, and say something like "Fair enough, but this doesn't answer question X" and then he moves on. Often, a careful reader would want to reconstruct what Chomsky means, and would probably want to work out the very argument that Chomsky himself omits.

In short, if one is able to read this book in a very different way from the manner in which Chomsky reads the works of his opponents, (i.e., charitably) and look past the repetitiveness, one will see that this book is full of insightful ideas. In fact, I think that it has the potential to redirect certain fields of research in philosophy. Scholars who are interested in issues of naturalism and normativity, not just in the cognitive sciences, but sciences in general, should read this work carefully. Needless to say, anyone interested in what the foundations for a naturalized philosophy of language could possibly be must read this book.

This is Chomsky defending his conception of the mind and of language from philosophical views which are incompatible with it. The Kripke/Putnam view that meanings are largely determined by reference is countered by Chomsky's view that it is usually people, not words, that refer. One uses the word "London" to refer to different things in different conversational contexts, sometimes an abstract thing, sometimes something concrete, etc., and so there is no single coherent thing, London itself, which can serve as the referent of "London." One can make similar points about "water" and "gold," which supposedly makes trouble for Kripke and Putnam. Many other topics are treated in defending Chomsky's internalism and nativism, such as Quine on analyticity (for Chomsky, there are analytic entailments and they are largely innately based). In fact, there is really too much here to treat in any satisfactory way in a brief review, but suffice it to add that one really intriguing thing about this book is that Chomsky is going beyond mere syntax and also considering the probability of an innate basis for semantics. If I have one complaint, it is that Chomsky sometimes treats topics too quickly and sometimes even a bit enigmatically leaving more work for the reader to figure out what he means. But this fault, if I am right in calling it that, is rare, and the book is definitely worth reading.

Among other virtues, this compilation of lectures and essays contains:

- a concise and ingenious rejection of the traditional mind-body problem as a pseudo-problem arising from a superseded pre-Newtonian contact mechanics

- a dismissal of the conventional notion of mental content as conceptually underspecified and explanatorily irrelevant

- historical and conceptual arguments against the prospects of reducing the special sciences (namely, linguistics) to physics, neuroscience, etc.

This isn't even to mention the goodies this book contains for those (unlike me) interested more in language than in mind, including insights into the implications of overlooked yet paradoxical uses of everyday words and phrases, as well as powerful arguments against externalist views of linguistic meaning.

I can't recommend this book highly enough for anyone interested in philosophy of mind or philosophy of language.

This is a good reference book for anyone in the linguistics field, but unfortunately my order got lost in the mail.

This is a nativist argument... fine. But it's the same nativist argument said different ways. There was so much repeat in this book I feel that an easy third of it could have been omitted. Also, there's no introduction or abstract before each essential lecture, so you're forced to read the whole thing, not knowing where you can skip around. To top it all off, the book doesn't even try to mesh together the lectures to form some sort of general context or picture Chomsky is trying to make about language - what do these lectures lead to? In that sense, the reader not only try to comprehend what's being said, but also put together a puzzle - I felt like I was solving a mystery.

The book addresses a very broad debate in linguistics (how much is nature, how much is nurture?), but took very specific approaches to the solution. Which may be good. Surely, that means that the author is delving into exploration past the superficial. But, within these very specific explanations (some of which I have no expertise in) I felt that plays on words were being made to explain semantic idiosyncracies and things that are only odd to the paranoid schizophrenic. This isn't meticulous investigation, it's cherry-picking unique instances of curious happenstances. Chomsky's hypothesis has its cake and eats it, too, content enough to leave itself in a position where it can't be disproven. You can't prove it right, but you can't disprove it - another spaghetti monster instance (hopefully someone got that reference).

At least his discussion of tree-structures being epiphenomenal was good.

I cannot repeat here my review of this book published in The Times Higher Education Supplement (7 Apr 2000, p.23)

First because it is too long (1500 words).

Second because The Times owns the copyright.

To cut 1500 words down to 50: the whole book rests on sleights of word (which I called "legerdemot"). Its absurdity becomes patent when the author argues that even such concepts as "carburetor" and "bureaucrat" must be innate (as a direct consequence of the "poverty of the stimulus").

Linguistics a la Uri Geller, cooked in Creationist sauce.