sam harris 2015,Sam Harris The Chapel Hill Murders and Militant Atheism

Optical Illusions, Language Acquisition, and Universal Grammar

It is a curious fact that all humans perceive optical illusions in the same manner. That is, their brains misinterpret the same information in exactly the same way to produce exactly the same misperception. How does this happen? After all, we do not teach little children the "rules" of perception (or misperception). How does a child, for example, "learn" to judge colour intensity or hue on the basis of light and shadow? In the well known colour illusion, humans of all ages see the same colour as being of different hues depending on whether that colour is interpreted as being in light or shadow. No one is ever taught how to do this, or even that it should be done. Yet it happens unfailingly and spontaneously.

This is very similar to the way humans develop the ability to judge the correctness or incorrectness of linguistic utterances and acquire the capacity to produce what they believe to be correct utterances. Chomsky attributes this seemingly remarkable ability to what he calls a "language organ" (or Language Acquisition Device) in the brain, or to an inherent property of language, to which he gives the name "Universal Grammar." Such a leap of the imagination is the linguistic equivalent of attributing the human susceptibility to optical illusions to an "optical illusion organ" or an "Optical Illusion Acquisition Device" in the brain. Of course, the very suggestion of an "optical illusion organ" in the brain strikes us as ludicrous. But Chomsky and the Universal Grammarists appear not to be struck by a similar sense of absurdity when it comes to positing the existence of a "language organ."

The fact is that both the capacity for language and the susceptibility to optical illusions arise from "lower-level," more fundamental processes and phenomena in the brain, processes that are of a rather general nature and are associated broadly with information processing, built-in mechanisms such as pattern recognition, induction, and analogy formation. Many of the processes and phenomena are the same in both cases, and have nothing specifically to do with either language or optical illusions.

Chomsky's "Universal Grammar": The Linguistic Equivalent of Intelligent Design

Noam Chomsky's "Universal Grammar" is, in my opinion, the linguistic equivalent of Intelligent Design. Consider how it operates: Chomsky observes patterns in language (and across languages) and then posits a "language organ" in the brain—a "ghost in the machine" or, perhaps, a "deus ex machina" of sorts—to account for them, much in the manner of Christian fundamentalists observing patterns and order in nature—in other words, the appearance of "design"—and positing an "intelligent designer," namely, the Christian God, to account for them. According to Chomsky, the language organ appeared in human brains fully formed, like Athena bursting forth from the head of Zeus, but also in the manner of the ex nihilo creation of the fundamentalist-Christian, fiat-issuing God of Genesis 1. Chomsky has no time for evolution as a possible explanation for the patterns observed in language. Nor is he interested in the origins of language. He leaps blithely to the conclusion that there must be some sort of "organ" in the brain that is responsible for producing the order and patterns of language.

That he does so in bad enough. But that his devotees should accept his diktat as gospel truth smacks of a religious fervour that is quite unbecoming for an academic discipline. The following passage from an article by John Colapinto in The New Yorker (April 16, 2007, p. 131) provides some insight into the cult-like "culture" that pervades the world of Chomskyan linguistics:

Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist, who wrote admiringly about some of Chomsky’s ideas in his 1994 best-seller, “The Language Instinct,” told me, “There’s a lot of strange stuff going on in the Chomskyan program. He’s a guru, he makes pronouncements that his disciples accept on faith and that he doesn’t feel compelled to defend in the conventional scientific manner. Some of them become accepted within his circle as God’s truth without really being properly evaluated, and, surprisingly for someone who talks about universal grammar, he hasn’t actually done the spadework of seeing how it works in some weird little language that they speak in New Guinea.” (Read more here.)

Note the religious language that Pinker uses to describe the reverence with which Chomsky's circle regards him and his theory of universal grammar. They accept universal grammar "on faith" as "God's truth" as handed down by a "guru" whose "pronouncements" take on the same sort of authority as the ex cathedra statements of the infallible Roman Catholic Pope.

But quite apart from the religious overtones, the positing of a universal grammar is based on the same principle of causation as the claims of Intelligent Design. The patterns that are observed, whether in language(s) or in nature, are "caused" by some external agent outside of the process: in Chomsky's case, a brain structure he conjures up and calls the "language organ"; in the case of fundamentalist Christians, an intelligent, necessary (i.e., non-contingent) Being outside of time and space and external to the natural order. Note that Chomsky implicitly ascribes the same sort of "necessity" to the purported "language organ" as the fundamentalist Christian ascribes to the Creator God or proponents of Intelligent Design ascribe to the Intelligent Designer. One must not question its origin or existence: it is simply there, a priori, having appeared fully formed, like the mythic Athena sprung forth from the head of Zeus, without any explanation for its appearance or any need for such an explanation. This is surely the linguistic version of the Bible's Creator God or of Intelligent Design's "Intelligent Designer": a self-existent, self-generating, self-sustaining entity that is the "cause" of observed orderliness and patterned forms.

Of course, there is no need to resort to such a "ghost in the machine" or a "deus ex machina" to explain the patterns observed in language. The most parsimonious explanation for the so-called "deep structures" that might exist in language(s) is that they reflect the natural patterns that exist in human experience. If language is an attempt to represent human experience, then it isn't any wonder that different languages exhibit a remarkable similarity in their "structuredness," especially in those cases where the human experiences of diverse and sundry peoples are largely similar. It is hardly mysterious that sentences in different languages should contain a subject and a verb. Human experience requires this. The underlying notion that manifests itself as a grammatical subject is in fact not "grammatical" at all: it is a fundamental requirement of human experience. If we are to talk about the people and objects in our experience, then there must be a slot in our discourse for this kind of element. The same sort of analysis could be applied to verbs. The rest of "grammar" arises from the natural process of stylization, a process in which constantly repeated actions tend to fall into a set pattern. This is not even necessitated by the need to communicate with others so that our utterances will be understood beyond our own private sphere. Even if one were to invent a personal language for one's own private use, one would inevitably fall into patterns of regularity through the inevitable process of stylization—and thus evolve a personal "grammar."

If similarities exist across languages, it is precisely because the structures underlying these similarities developed at a very early stage in human evolution and in the evolution of language. The surface differences are the result of the isolation of various groups that split off from the original founding population and branched off on their own, were then exposed to different environmental circumstance, and eventually developed their own variations on the basic patterns to suit their new surroundings and circumstances. This has been amply demonstrated with the Indo-European family of languages. The process can be pushed farther and farther back in time to the point when language first emerged among human populations. It can be assumed that this emergence occurred when the "human" population was not dispersed over the face of the earth but concentrated in one fairly limited geographical region.

Languages may also undergo devolution, a process in which the original complexity of the language is lost. English appears to be undergoing just such a process at present, largely as a result of the powerful influence of American English on world English and the devolution of formal education in the United States. The fine distinctions that were once made in English are now disappearing. The vocabulary is shrinking as certain words pass out of popular usage. And what was once considered "ungrammatical" is now acceptable, and not only acceptable, but the standard form. Before our very eyes, we see the power of culture to shape not only the surface structure of language, but the very thought processes that underlie these structures. This process of linguistic devolution clearly belies the notion of a universal grammar or the existence of a "language organ" in the brain. The pseudo-scientific terminology employed by Universal Grammar does nothing more than lend an air of scholarly respectability to what is essentially a creed, a set of beliefs fabricated out of whole cloth, much as the pseudo-scientific language of Intelligent Design is calculated to give plain old Creationism a cloak of scientific respectability so that it can gain access to the academic and scholarly world. Universal Grammar, then, is not a scientific theory, or even a hypothesis; it is a dogma. It is to linguistics what Intelligent Design is to biology.

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