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.

On Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker advances the theory that the decline in violence over the course of human history is attributable to the rise in the human capacity for reason. He cites the Flynn Effect as evidence that humans are becoming more intelligent, particularly in terms of their capacity for abstract reasoning. He then suggests that this increased capacity for reasoning leads to a more moral attitude towards the relation between self and others, and this in turn leads to less violent behaviour. Pinker invokes the Enlightenment and its veneration of reason as the turning point in the history of violence, a turning point that he calls “the humanitarian revolution.”

If there is indeed a decline in human violence, and if there is indeed a Flynn Effect, there is, however, no way of demonstrating that there is a causal relationship between them. They are, if they exist, merely parallel phenomena that could very well both be driven by some third factor acting independently on each one, or they might be completely independent phenomena that just happen to occur together and follow a similar pattern.

In the case of violence, it is much more likely that it is tied to the division of labour than to the rise in the human capacity for reason. The greater the division of labour, the lower the level of violence. Why is this so? Division of labour creates dependence, and the greater the division of labour, the greater the dependence. Now, the more we depend on others, the less likely we are to be violent towards them, for violence towards them is a form of violence against ourselves. We need to maintain positive relations with those we depend on for our existence, for any threat to those relations is a threat to our own existence.

It is worth noting in passing that the Enlightenment was accompanied (though not necessarily causally) by the demise of feudalism and the rise of a new social and economic order in which greater freedom and independence led, paradoxically, to greater dependence of a different sort. The emergence of mercantilism (just prior to the Enlightenment) and the subsequent development of capitalism and industrialization carried the division of labour to new heights. In fact, capitalism set the division of labour on a upward spiral from which there would be no returning, a spiral in which there would be ever-increasing division of labour and ever-increasing dependence of the individual upon the collective. One of the consequences of the Industrial Revolution was a rapid increase in urbanization, which, as Georg Simmel has noted, increases division of labour and thus increases the individual’s dependence upon others. Much as Pinker would like to give the Enlightenment the credit for turning the tide of violence, that seventeenth-century intellectual movement had very little to do with generating the social forces that led to a reduction in violent behaviour. If anything, the Enlightenment was an ad hoc or even post hoc response to what had already been accomplished by other historical events, most notably the end of the feudal system and the rise to dominance of capitalism.

After two centuries of runaway capitalism, and a century and a half of unbridled industrialization and rampant urbanization, we have become so dependent on others that we would not be able to survive for even the briefest period of time if we were left entirely to our own devices. Every aspect of our individual existence is tied to the products and services that others provide. We could not feed and clothe ourselves and put a roof over our heads without the help of others, let alone enjoy the comforts that we have come to regard as our right as human beings. We subconsciously recognize this and consequently treat others with civility and respect; we do this out of crass self-interest rather than out of any moral compunction or rational conviction about the superiority of abstaining from violence. It is not so much that violent behaviour is morally wrong but that non-violent behaviour is socially and practically expedient. Pinker downplays the self-interest aspect. He expands on Peter’s Singer’s claim in The Expanding Circle that “the escalator of reason” (a term Singer invented) leads us ever increasingly to the realization that self-interest is not more important than collective interests. But this is really a sort of circular argument. As we have just seen, collective interests serve self-interest and that is precisely what makes them so important. Collective interests derive their importance from the individual’s need to protect self-interest. This is so precisely because of the division of labour and the interdependence that it precipitates.

In areas where this interdependence does not prevail, violence continues to run amok. Consider the rise of bullying among schoolchildren across the civilized world. It has reached epidemic proportions and is causing alarm among those responsible for maintaining order and safety in the school system. Not only is there violence in the form of persecution of the bullied by the bullies, but there is also the unreported violence of the bullied upon themselves in the form of suicide. The suicide rate among school-age children is rising at a disconcerting rate. How does one explain this, especially in light of Pinker’s appeal to the Flynn Effect and his claim that the average teenager today would score an IQ of 130 on the standard IQ test used in 1910? Teenagers may be smarter today, but are they kinder and gentler? The evidence suggests otherwise. And how might this evidence be explained? Clearly, teenagers and younger children do not see any interdependence between them and the people they bully. Those who are within the social network and contribute to maintaining status in the network are not the victims of bullying precisely because there is a definite element of interdependence among them. It is the ones who are beyond the pale, who are outcasts, who are considered superfluous to the self-interest of the bullies that get victimized. For even within social networks, there is division of labour. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. That’s how social networks operate. You have a role to play in getting me what I want, and I will play a corresponding role in getting you what you want: access, acceptance, popularity, fame, whatever.

Violence per se has not declined, despite Pinker’s impressive amassing of statistics to “prove” that it has. It’s overall manifestation is muted by the increasing realization that we cannot survive on our own and that we need the help and goodwill of others if we are to make it in life, and not just make it, but get ahead. Where and when such relations do not exist between individuals, human nature reasserts itself and we slip back into being our old violent selves. There is nothing particularly rational about this, and it does not require any advanced capacity for reason. Even a dog knows not to bite the hand that feeds it.