The Science of Language (17 page)

NC:
There are some philosophers who know the sciences very well, and who have contributed to [the sciences]. They don't question the sciences; they try to clarify what they are doing and even contribute to them at some conceptual level. That's pretty much what Descartes and Kant and others did who were called philosophers. You can be connected to the sciences and know them extremely well. Take someone like Jim
Higginbotham. He knows linguistics very well, and contributes to it.

 

NC:
and is doing it not the way technical linguists do, but with philosophical interests that relate to traditional questions of philosophy, and so on. I think that that's always a possibility. I suspect that
John Austin was right when he said that philosophy should be the mother of the sciences. It's clearing away the thickets and the underbrush and trying to set things up in such a way that the sciences can take over.

NC:
Not only in the sciences, but in people's lives. . . . Take for example [
John] Rawls[, the political philosopher]. He's not working in the sciences. He's trying to figure out what concepts of justice we have that underlie our moral systems, and so on. And it does verge on the sciences. So when
John Mikhail [who has a degree in philosophy but is also developing a science of a moral faculty that distinguishes permissible from impermissible actions] picks it up, it becomes a science.

NC:
Which part of what he's doing? What do you have in mind?

JM:
Well, he at least used to in many cases talk about propositions and thoughts, and the like, and gave these a very Fregean kind of reading. The idea wasn't that these were somehow biological entities; at least, that didn't come out in what I've read of his
.

NC:
His view, if I understand it correctly, is what he calls “
weak conceptualism” – that these entities are independent of, but reflections of, internal mental events. But then the question comes, well, what function are they performing? If they're just a one-to-one image of what's inside, why not dispense with them? We could say the same about chemistry. There are the elements, and compounds of them; and then there are images of them in some Platonic universe that we could study, if we wanted. Unless they have some other properties that are not determined by the internal events that they are reflections of, then they're dispensable.

NC:
Well, can you make up a sensible externalist project? There certainly are
externalist projects – when you and I are talking, it's not just what is going on in your head and what's going on in my head; we're interacting. So the study of how parts of the world interact, depending on their internal natures and lots of other things – that's a topic, but I don't understand why it's a particular topic for philosophers. That's just another topic. Maybe philosophers have something interesting to say about it; that's fine. There's interesting work on
pragmatics. But what doesn't seem to exist, so far as I can see, is externalist semantics. Did you take a look at
Tyler Burge's latest book?[C]

NC:
You should; this comes up. There are a lot of critical essays on his work; one of them is mine [see “Internalist Exploration,” in Chomsky
2000
]. What I wrote is mainly on the externalism, and he has interesting responses (Hahn & Ramberg
2003
). You can see if you can make something of them. I don't personally think that they come to anything. He's an intelligent person
trying to engage with the issues; most philosophers don't even engage with them; and – of its type – it's as good a job as I know of. Paul Pietroski is writing about these things now.

JM:
Yes, he is; I admire his work. I particularly like some of his contributions to semantics (Pietroski
2005
); a good internalist understanding of it too . . .

NC:
and a good critical analysis of what's going on in the field, which I think is
rare.

NC:
Well, you just don't know . . . The more you can attribute to the third factor – which is the way that science ought to go; the goal of any serious scientist interested in this is to see how much of the
complexity of an organism you can explain in terms of general properties of the world. That's almost like the nature of science. Insofar as there is a residue, you have to attribute it to some specific genetic encoding; and then you've got to worry about where that came from. Obviously, there's got to be something there; we're not all amoebas. Something has got to be there; so, what is it?

 

JM:
It might be nice to have answers
.

NC:
I'm not sure; I like the edges of the puzzle.

JM:
OK, you're right. They're much more fun
.

NC:
Think of how boring the world would be if we knew everything we can know, and even knew that we can't understand the rest.

JM:
Yes,
Peirce's millennial form of science does sound boring
.

NC:
Well, the nice thing about it is that his view can't be true, because he was making a serious error about evolution – assuming that we're basically angels by natural selection. But you could have something like it. You could imagine that the species would reach the point that everything knowable is known, including the limits of knowledge. So you could know that there are puzzles out there that can't be formulated. That would be ultimate boring.

JM:
You've suggested many times that
human cognitive capacities have limitations; they must have, because they're biologically based. You've also suggested that one could investigate those limitations
.

NC:
in principle.

 

NC:
. . . well, it might be beyond a human capacity; but that's just another empirical statement about limitations, like the statement that I can't see ultraviolet light, that it's beyond my capacity.

NC:
Well, it may be contradictory, but I don't see any internal contradiction in the idea that we can investigate the nature of our
science-forming capacities and discover something about their scope and limits. There's no internal contradiction in that program; whether we can carry it out or not is another question.

JM:
And common sense has its limitations too
.

NC:
Unless we're angels. Either we're angels or we're
organic creatures. If we're organic creatures, every capacity is going to have its scope and limits. That's the nature of the organic world. You ask “Can we ever find the truth in science?” – well, we've run into this question. Peirce, for example, thought that truth is just the limit that science reaches. That's not a good definition of truth. If our cognitive capacities are organic entities, which I take for granted they are, there is some limit they'll reach; but we have no confidence that that's the truth about the world. It may be a part of the truth; but maybe some Martian with different cognitive capacities is laughing at us and asking why we're going off in this false direction all the time. And the Martian might be right.

JM:
. . . assuming that the Martian could understand our cognitive capacities
.

NC:
. . . right.

JM:
The project of investigating the limits of our cognitive capacities seems to me to be quite different from the kinds of projects that philosophers are fond of, or have been fond of, when they have introduced various kinds of epistemic constraints on what counts as meaningful or sensible or whatnot. Investigating the limits is a scientific project, not what too often amounts to a stipulative one
.

NC:
My own interpretation of those proposals is that they're suggestions about our
science-forming capacities. So these epistemic limits . . . your proposals should be consistent, try to avoid redundancy, try to unify different aspects of science – physical reductionism, say – I think that all of those can only be understood as explorations of the way that we, as particular creatures, try to proceed to gain our best understanding of the world in a systematic fashion. That's the way we do it . . . But if you want a proof that it's the
right
way, well, I don't see how that can be possible. All you can say is that it's the best that we can do. We may discover that we're always going off track, in which case maybe that's irremediable. If we can't find a different track, it's irremediable. And sometimes – if you look at history – humans have found a different track by lowering their sights. So, for example, lowering one's sights from understanding the world to understanding theories about the world led to a rather significant change, and it's a change – it's sort of symbolized by
Newton – that took several centuries to become internalized.

JM:
It gives you a very interesting understanding of
Wittgenstein's
Tractatus
and a number of other works in that genre. Was
Russell engaged on that sort of project, at least as you understand him – in his early work?

NC:
Pre-
Tractatus
?

JM:
Russell before [Wittgenstein's]
Tractatus.

NC:
He was engaged in a kind of conceptual analysis that I think he regarded as giving us insight into the nature of reality. But it was conceptual analysis – as, for example, the theory of
descriptions.

JM:
By the time of
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits,
he was quite explicit about making proposals, based on an understanding of human nature
.

NC:
There it is explicit. It becomes a much more subtle and sophisticated approach that does appear to recognize – as the very title of the book indicates – that we're dealing with some organic phenomenon that is going to have its
scopes and limits. He doesn't quite say it like that, but I don't know any other way of reading it.

JM:
You do get normative overtones in a lot of philosophical writing – this is the way you
ought
to proceed . . .

NC:
There's nothing wrong with that: you ought to do it by our lights, by the way we see things. It's the same with moral judgments.

JM:
How does that differ from saying, “this is the way we
have
to do it?”

NC:
It would be “this is the way we have to do it” if we knew enough about ourselves to say that there aren't any choices. Like “I have to fall off a cliff if I jump; I can't help it.” But we don't have that kind of understanding of much more complex things, like great areas of our lives.

These kinds of questions come up in
naturalistic moral theories and naturalistic epistemological theories, and in both – which are the traditional ones – you can try to work out what our moral instincts are and what our moral faculties are. But there's a gap between that and what's objectively right – an unbridgeable gap from the standpoint of some non-human creature that can be understood to be right, something of which our moral nature has only a partial grasp.

And the same is true of epistemology. What makes the best theory? People use the term “
best theory” freely, but what is the best theory? Well, we can try to sharpen up our criteria, as we understand them, but we're doing something analogous to investigating our own moral nature. We're investigating our epistemological nature, and within that framework you can come up with some notion of best theory that is on a par with our notion of right behavior. But again, from some point of view or standpoint that is external to us – which we can't take, because we're us, not that external thing – it could be evaluated in quite different ways.

NC:
I do believe that there is an objective truth; ok, so I'm a naïve realist of sorts – I can't help it. But I think that if we think about ourselves, we will see that there is no way to have any confidence about it. We can have confidence about the fact that this is the best I can do with my cognitive capacities – and we can have less confidence, because we understand less, that this is the right way to behave in accordance with our moral nature. And I presume that we all have the same cognitive capacities and moral nature. But – and here we get to the last line of the
Tractatus
[of Wittgenstein] – beyond this, we just have to keep silent.

NC:
He was putting it in the framework of an extremely poor
evolutionary argument. It was a fallacious argument. If you take that argument away, then the conclusion collapses. His argument was that we were selected to attain the truth. We wouldn't have survived if we didn't have a truth-seeking capacity, and therefore if we just pursue it to the end, we would have the truth. That's the core of the argument. But it just doesn't work. Nothing in human evolution selected people who were good at quantum theory . . .

NC:
. . . and to pose any kind of question . . .

NC:
I just don't know what that would mean. That's no organic entity that we can even conceive of.

NC:
A person who held such a belief would be saying that we are somehow angels. There couldn't be a creature in the universe that would incorporate our cognitive capacities as a sub-part, maybe reject them the way we reject commonsense contact mechanics, and maybe go on to ask further questions that we don't know how to pose, and maybe find answers to those questions, without limit. How can we say that? How do we go beyond the limits of possible organic development?

NC:
. . . have not produced thus far. Yes; that's not at all surprising. Take, say, your arithmetical capacity. That wasn't used throughout almost all of human evolutionary history. There's just a tiny little fleck of time during which that capacity has ever been used. This is what bothered
Anthony Wallace in his debates with Darwin. He argued that things like a mathematical
capacity couldn't have been selected, because they were never used. If you don't use it, it can't be selected. But they've got to be in there somehow. And, he suggested, there must be some other forces like gravitation, chemical
reaction, and so on that entered into the development of what he called human moral and intellectual capacities. That was regarded at the time as a kind of mysticism. But we should regard it as just sane science. It's on a par with what Newton was unable to accept, but should have: there are forces in nature that are beyond interaction through contact. Newton said it [there are such forces – specifically, gravity], but he didn't believe it. But it was right.

JM:
If one had a view of
human biology or perhaps biology in general rather more like Turing's or D'Arcy Thompson's, then you'd want to allow that proving useful is not a condition of a biological entity having some structure or being some kind of thing
.

NC:
Take D'Arcy Thompson. If biophysical laws determine the general shape of the properties of creatures, it doesn't say that you can't build
submarines.