The Science of Language (11 page)

Some of the specific proposals that came along in
LSLT
– well, it has been possible to resurrect them in different form, such as generalized
transformations. On the other hand, as Howard Lasnik pointed out to me recently – and I'd completely forgotten –
LSLT
does not have in it a rule of
movement. That's been a core topic in generative grammar since the sixties – how to formulate the movement rules. I started talking about it in
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory
; and we were talking about it even before that – around 1960. The idea of trying to formulate the principles of a rule of movement and find the conditions on it – WH-island conditions, and this, that, and the other thing – that's turned into a central topic of the field. There's a volume coming out of papers of a conference on WH-movement and chains. It's a very sophisticated picture of where all this has come to, and one aspect of the rules of movement and the concept of
Merge. Internal Merge is an effort to show that it is natural – and indeed, inevitable – for language to have such a process. [Well,] it's not there in
LSLT
. I'd completely forgotten about it, I'm so used to it by now, but Howard went back and pointed out that in fact what's there are notions of permutation and deletion, which give you the effect of movement, but there's no movement there. So that's a substantial change. And you can see where in the semi-methodological approach of that time, rules of permutation and deletion seemed to make sense, whereas from a more fundamental and principled point of view, they shouldn't exist, and you should only have Merge, which yields movement as a special
case.

So it's a matter of constant rethinking, and some old things come back, and some don't. And if they do come back, it's usually in different
ways.

NC:
We stayed quite close for many years later.

 

NC:
My interest in it was certainly stimulated by his work. And you'll see the occasional footnote in his writings where we talked about . . .

I met Goodman when I was about 17 or so. I had never had any background in philosophy and I started taking his graduate courses with people who had a serious background, and he was very accommodating and helpful, and he didn't consider it inappropriate in any way that I didn't know anything. He'd direct me to read things, and the like. He was teaching at the time what became the
Structure of Appearance
, and the later courses that I took with him were teaching what became
Fact, Fiction, and Forecast
. What struck me particularly was that, whether you agreed with his conclusions or not, whatever he was doing was pursued with absolute intellectual integrity – and that's unusual, and striking. And it was worth pursuing in detail, even if you didn't agree, because you were witnessing a serious mind at work, taking what he's doing very, very seriously, pursuing the difficulties – trying to find the difficulties, and seeing if he could overcome them – all of it clearly
on issues of very considerable significance. And he had a very ambitious project – more so, I think, than my interpretation of it at first. The
Structure of Appearance
was supposed to be a preliminary study to the
Structure of Reality
– and, of course, that never came. It got sidetracked into
Fact, Fiction, and Forecast
.

His nominalism, of course, was also an expression of extreme intellectual integrity. He thought that the concept of a set was incoherent. If things are composed of the same elements, they can't end up being different if you arrange them differently. He wanted to pursue that extremely parsimonious assumption to the limits – anything that didn't fall within it was somehow illegitimate. You can see the merits of that. Actually, my earliest work – which disappeared; it didn't go anywhere – was in fact an effort to give a nominalistic account in his sense of the basic foundations of syntactic structure. There's an article in the
Journal of Symbolic Logic
about it back then, fifty years ago.

And the other work that I was doing was along the same lines. And yes, the notion of a constructional system and its significance comes straight out of that. Also, the concern for simplicity.

But you have to distinguish two different notions of simplicity. One of them was his interest; I'm interested in it too, but of course focused differently. His notion of simplicity was absolute; he wanted to find a concept of simplicity that's going to hold for everything. He argued, with some plausibility, that the search for simplicity in theory is no different than the search for theory. What you're trying to do is find principles that are true – and their only access to truth is through some form of internal coherence and internal elegance and other properties that he tried to find. Now, there is a different notion of simplicity that is theory-internal. Maybe a different word should be used; sometimes I called it “evaluation.” What you try to do is from within a theoretical framework that you're assuming – maybe you want to change it, but you're working within it – and you want to find the optimal manifestation of it, given particular evidence. That's language acquisition.

JM:
That appears clearly in
Aspects;
does it appear in
Logical Structure . . .

NC:
It appears in
Logical Structure of Syntactic Theory
; there's a section in there trying to distinguish notions of simplicity and saying that the simplicity measures . . . actually, it's in
The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew
– 1949 – where there is an internal notion. In fact, most of that is a detailed effort to show that the particular system of grammar that's developed is a relative maximum in terms of simplicity, an internal simplicity measure – meaning that if you change any two rules, it would be less simple. There wouldn't be any way to show that it's an absolute maximum. And a good deal
of linguistics since then has been – you can conceive of it as being – concerned with that problem, until it gets to the stage of principles and parameters, around 1980. Every approach to general linguistic theory that I know of that was worked out with any concern or care was looking for essentially a relative fixed maximum within a fixed format. And these notions – though they're not Goodman's notion of simplicity – they are inspired by his search for an absolute notion of simplicity, which was
rare. He tried, Pat[rick] Suppes did some work on it, a few others. It's something that runs through all the sciences. Hermann Weyl writes on symmetry; that's a similar kind of
conception.

It goes straight back to Galileo. I don't know if Goodman would have seen it this way, but for Galileo, it was a physical point – nature is simple, and it's the task of the scientist to, first of all, discover just what that means, and then to prove
it. From the tides to the flight of birds, the goal of the scientist is to find that nature is simple; and if you fail, you're wrong. It was a major issue right through – still is – in the history of the
sciences. Newton, for example, had an approach to chemistry that was different from
Dalton's – they weren't contemporaries, but the Newtonian approach and what became the Daltonian approach were quite different. The Newtonians wanted to reduce chemistry, the phenomena of chemistry – the fields weren't really separated – to fundamental, elegant principles, rather like the principle of gravitation. That was a principled approach to chemistry that a lot of people worked on through the eighteenth century. Dalton simply said, let's assume whatever level of complexity we need in order to account for the phenomenon; that's his atomic theory – anathema to the Newtonians. It was Dalton's approach that proved successful, at least for a long period – although you could argue that contemporary chemistry is returning to a kind of Newtonian approach with the quantum theoretic interpretation of chemistry. In any event, these issues have always been very much alive, and still are. They show up everywhere in the sciences, and Goodman had sufficient integrity not only to notice them, but to try to do something about them.

NC:
That's one thing that we discussed for all the years that I knew him, and I never understood it [what his view was]. And it was the same in every other aspect of his work.
So take, say,
Fact, Fiction, and Forecast
. The part of that work that became influential in philosophy was the part that he was less interested in. If you take a look at the book, it's in two parts. The first part is the new riddle of induction; the second part is the solution to
it. What he was
interested in was the solution to it. I think you can barely find a paper on that in later literature. There are tons of references to
grue
and
green
and
bleen
and
blue
and this, that, and the other thing. But as far as he was concerned, that was an observation. Even if you could figure out a solution to green and grue, you could find another example just like it. What he was interested in was his
solution to the problem – projectibility. And I remember back in 1949 or 1950 – approximately then – discussing with him (because I didn't understand it) how it would possibly work unless you assumed innate
principles. So, take a pigeon – or a person, for that matter. It or she sees that emeralds are green, and that gets entrenched, and becomes a projectible predicate, and so forth. But the same person sees that emeralds are grue; so why is that not being entrenched? The only possible answer that I can think of is that green is somehow a part of the nature of the pigeon and the person, and grue isn't. So now we're back to the kind of innatism that he
objected to. Quine and Goodman were working together pretty closely, but Quine just cut the Gordian knot at that point. He just assumed that the properties that are going to be projectible are innate; that's his quality space. Goodman didn't want to do that; he wanted an argument for it. The projectibility theory was supposed to be an argument for it, but I don't see how it can possibly work.
And the same question arises about simplicity – where is it coming from? Is it a metaphysical fact – the way that, say, Galileo thought? Or is it a cognitive fact – is it something about the way that we look at the world? Well, if it's a cognitive fact, then it's not going to be the way to find out about the truth of the world, but it's going to be a way to discover our best conception of the world, given our cognitive abilities and limitations. He would never have accepted that interpretation; and he also wouldn't have accepted the metaphysical one, I'm sure. And therefore he didn't understand a word I said – and he ended up with neither one nor the other. And that I didn't understand, and still don't. And I can't find any clarification of it in his work, and couldn't find any in our discussions.

JM:
I suppose his behaviorism might have played a role. It seems to play a role in his so-called solution to the projectibility problem
.

NC:
He thought so, but I don't see how. Unless you presuppose some cognitive structure, I don't see any way of distinguishing in the entirety of experience which predicates are going to be projectible, and which not. It won't work just to say that these are the ones that have been used; how do you know which ones can be used?

NC:
Well, I don't really know Wittgenstein in the manner of a true disciple, but one of the reasons I was less impressed with his work was that he evaded the issue. Goodman tried to face it. Why is it “given?” Well, at that point Wittgenstein, so far as I can tell, retreats to saying “We're giving descriptions, not
explanations.” It's fine to give descriptions, but to someone looking for answers to “Why?” it's not interesting. Goodman didn't want to do that. He wanted explanations. But it seems to me that the explanations are going to be either cognitive – something to do with our mental structures – or maybe even extra-organic: maybe it has something to do with the ways in which organic creatures can deal with the world, given the laws of physics, or whatever. So either it's going to be cognitive and epistemological. Or it's going to be metaphysical. And I don't see how to be in favor of that, for essentially Kant's reasons – you can't get beyond what we can understand. Or it's [the explanation is] in some kind of methodological domain – which I cannot see how we can ground, except in our cognitive capacities.

NC:
Purely personal, but in my own personal development, the ideas [involved in the effort to construct a science of language and, more generally, human nature] kind of grow out of an effort to come to terms with the impossible but exciting project that Goodman was engaged in. And it's a terrific education. The project was a perfect foil, because he was pursuing it with complete integrity and commitment; and it was a very clear project. And if you can respect the project, you can – at least in my own case – you can come to the conclusion that “here's why it can't work.” You are led like me in a different direction which leads to something about universal grammar and, more generally, the universal moral principles, and also to some sort of science-forming capacity – it's [all] just part of our nature.

NC:
I prefer Hume's version. He says, look, it's animal instinct. He didn't know where to go from there. But I think that's correct. So his solution to the problem of induction,
as distinct from Goodman's, is that it's simply animal instinct. It's our nature; and we can't go beyond that, other than to discover our nature – which leads us into cognitive science. But not for him, of course.