Bilgrami, Chomsky & my marriage to She Hulk- part 1

The following is Bilgrami's introduction to Chomsky's 'What kind of creatures are we?'

These lectures present a lifetime of reflection by a scientist of language on the broader implications of his scientific work.

Sadly, Chomsky's work wasn't scientific. At one time, it looked like it could be but, like phrenology, that appearance was delusive. Thus there are no 'broader implications' of either type of stupidity.

The omnibus title of the lectures, “What kind of creatures are we?” conveys just how broad the implications are meant to be. They cover an impressive range of fields:

all of the following of which, with one exception, turned out to be shit

theoretical linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of science, history of science, evolutionary biology, metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of language and mind, moral and political philosophy, and even briefly, the ideal of human education.

The joker in the pack is evolutionary biology which has scientifically proved that Chomsky was completely wrong.

Lecture 1 presents with clarity and precision, his own basic ideas in theoretical linguistics and cognitive science (both fields in which he has played an absolutely central founding role)

but which turned to shit for that reason

recording the progress achieved over the years but recording much more strenuously how tentatively those claims to progress must be made and how a very large amount of work remains to be done even in the most fundamental areas of study.

coz the thing, fundamentally, was a pile of shit. Whatever your field of study, you will find that much much more work must be done in order to turn shit into gold and thus render your subject utile and attractive to smart people.

Changes of mind over these years are also recorded, some of the most striking of which occurred only in the last decade or so.

But changes of mind don't matter if you are still dabbling in shit.

The lecture begins by motivating the question its title announces, “What is Language?”

Why motivate something obviously pointless? Why not asky 'What is why?'

It behooves us to ask it because

we are as stupid as shit and can't predict that asking a stupid question will elicit only increasingly stupid answers?

without being clear about what language is, not only will we not get the right answers to other questions about various specific aspects of language (perhaps cannot even correctly frame those specific questions), but because we won’t get close to investigating or even plausibly speculating about the biological basis and evolutionary origins of language.

It is because Physicists were not clear about what Matter is, or what Energy is, that their subject could advance on the basis of empirical observation and scientific experiment.

A stupid pedant, mindlessly marking exam papers, may think there is a 'right answer' which is elicited by asking the 'right question'. But pedantry is not thinking.

A tradition that goes back to Galileo and Descartes recognized the most fundamental feature of language that then got its most explicit articulation in Humboldt, which as cited by Chomsky is: “Language is quite peculiarly confronted by an unending and truly boundless domain, the essence of all that can be thought.

If any thought can be expressed in language and if thought is boundless then this must be true. But if what can be seen or heard or smelled can be denoted or otherwise signified in language then what is true of Language is also true of stinky shit. Thus we could could with equal truth say 'Smelling shit is peculiarly confronted by an unending and truly boundless domain, which, because smell can be signified in language, is consubstantial with the essence of all that can be thought- if the thinker is a stupid gobshite'.

It must therefore make infinite employment of finite means,

Shit is produced by a digestive system which features 'infinite employment of finite mean'.

and is able to do so, through the power which produces identity of language and thought.”[1]

It is the power of SHAZAM which produces not just the identity of language and thought but also turns little boys into muscle bound super-heroes.

Darwin too is cited as repeating this in a more elementary form in the context of evolutionary concerns about language: “The lower animals differ from man solely in his almost infinitely larger power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas.”

the same is true of members of the Justice League or Marvel's the Avengers. I want to be Iron Man when I grow up. What happened to She-Hulk? She could be my girl-friend and then Black Widow would get jealous but, more worryingly, so would Thor. He'd be all like- bros before hos dude!- and I'd be like, the dude has to do what the dude has to do.

It is worth noting that there are three fundamental features observed here by Humboldt and Darwin.

It is not worth noting the ignorant ideas of peeps wot lived before there was Wikipedia on your smartphone.

First the claim to an infinite power residing in a finite base,

but this claim is equally true of the small change in your pocket or the crumbs that fell from your sandwich. Let your left testicle represent zero and your right testicle represent one. Then your nutsack can represent anything in binary code. Congratulations! Don't you feel real smart now?

second the link of ideas with sound,

or smells. Why does everybody forget smells?

and third the link of language with thought.

which is where the whole thing falls down. Such a link is either an example of language not expressing a thought or else it is a thought inexpressible in language because no recursive or other algorithmic means exist for its implementation.

Of course, we can't rule out some such link existing in a possible world but, equally, we can't rule out that a particular sequence of farts retroactively created the Universe.

All of them are gathered in what Chomsky declares at the outset as the ‘Basic Property’ of language: “Each fartist provides an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions that receive interpretations at two interfaces, sensorimotor for externalization and conceptual-intentional for mental processes.”

Okay, Chomsky said 'Language' not 'fartist' but what is true of Language must be equally true of farts. To deny this proposition is to discriminate against disabled, or lazy, people who can only express themselves by incessantly breaking wind.

The hierarchical-structural element speaks to the first feature,

but it also speaks to farts, queefs and belching the National Anthem.

the sensorimotor interface to the second feature

unless you hold your nose and turn up the volume on your earphones

and the other interface to the third feature.

the USAF wanted to find such an interface so jet fighter pilots could control their weapons systems with their minds. But the interface does not exist. Chomsky's research program failed. The Pentagon had wasted its money. On the other hand, it appears that they were funding people to stare at goats till the goats' heads exploded.

If an interface between language and thought exists then, for a sufficiently scientifically advanced species, thought will create Reality. I seem to remember She-Hulk being trapped in a Television world by a Super-Villain with that power.

What will account for this Basic Property is a computational procedure.

Sadly, this is not the case. On the other hand we can't rule out the possibility that saying something like SHAZAM might not turn little boys into muscle bound super-heroes. Apparently She-Hulk is coming to Disney+ soon. Things are starting to look up for me.

The philosophical significance of this is two-fold:

1) Stupid people can get a PhD in a subject which shares the same fundamental ontological premises as the Marvel Comic Book Universe

2) She-Hulk is bound to become my g.f though both Black Widow and my b.f.f Thor are gonna be hella jelly.

a theory of language is necessarily a generative grammar

coz She-Hulk is real and will definitely be my g.f even though this may cause Thor to come out of the closet.

and, moreover, the theory is necessarily about an object that individual human beings possess,

like I'm gonna totally possess She-Hulk's hot-bod

internal to the individual subject and its mentality (i.e., intensional elements).

not to mention sexuality- nudge nudge wink wink.

It is not a theory about externalized utterances, nor is it, therefore, about a social phenomenon.

Yup, if your mental universe is compossible with She-Hulk being your g.f then there is little point externalizing utterances coz a social phenomenon you aint. Also, it turns out, all your internet buddies are bots.

The nomenclature to capture this latter distinction between what is individual/internal/intensional and what is externalized/social is I-language and E-language respectively. It is I-languages, which alone can be the object of scientific study,

No. I-language does not exist. It can be the object of theoretical speculation- like what type of g.f She-Hulk will turn out to be- but not scientific study. This was not obvious at a time when the Pentagon was prepared to fund research into a helmet which turned pilots' thoughts into actions. But then they were also funding nutjobs to try to walk through walls.

not E-languages.[2] And though such study is eventually to be redeemed in a biological account, until that eventuality the science captures the phenomena at a level of abstraction from the biology and speaks at the cognitive level of the computational power that satisfies the Basic Property.[3]

I suppose the guys who write Marvel Comic Books and Movies are 'capturing phenomena at a level of abstraction'. But those phenomena are not compossible with reality. There may be places which offer you Degrees in the Biology of the Hulk or the Wizardry of Hogwarts but such places ought not to be funded by taxpayers any more than Bilgrami or Chomsky type shite should be.

A different, more general, task is to discover the shared underlying features of all I-languages,

here is one such feature- they don't exist.

which is determined again by the biological properties with which human beings are endowed (a theme whose wider significance for cognition in general, is discussed again in Lecture 2). This more general task is undertaken with a view to discovering the biological endowment that determines what generative systems can serve as I-languages; in other words what are the possible human languages.

This is dictated by the fitness landscape. Whistling was once a language because that was what the topography of the Canary Islands dictated. Farts may have been or may become a language. Arguably, Maths is a language but me too stoopid to judge.

Chomsky, then, points out that as soon as the study of generative grammars addressing the Basic Property of language was seriously undertaken, some surprising puzzles emerged, with far-reaching implications.

The same thing happens when you start to think through the implications of having She-Hulk as a g.f. Does she cook South Indian food? Also, Green is the colour of Pakistani flag. Things could get confusing at Indo-Pak Cricket matches.

One is the “structure dependence” of linguistic operations: in all constructions, in all languages, these operations invariably rely on structural distance rather on the computationally far simpler notion of linear distance.

Linguistic operations can be mapped to some degree and for some purpose to various purely notional 'structures'. But they can't depend on things which don't exist.
A theist may say our existence depends of God the Creator. There is no proof of this but the claim may have some imperative utility of an other than self-serving type. But this is not the case were we to we say our existence depends on some notional structure which must exist because otherwise our research program would never be able to turn shit into gold and thus our funding would get pulled and our kids would say 'I hate you Daddy. You are poor and can't buy me cool stuff. I'm glad Mom is doing the Milk-man.'

Language learners know this automatically, without instruction.

Nonsense! Nobody automatically knows some stupid shite invented by stupid shitheads without considerable instruction from shitheads and the threat of not getting your sheepskin if you don't repeat that garbage.

There is support for this from evidence from experimental neuroscience and psychology.

And from the fact that the typical 3 year old language learner does not know that, from the computational point of view, linear dependence is simpler than structural dependence. On the other hand, they do know you are a big poopy-head which is strange because Mom promised not to tell.

The result follows from the assumption that the order is simply not available to the operations that generate the structured expressions that are interpreted at the conceptual-intentional interface, for thought and organization of action. That follows in turn from the very natural assumption that I-languages are generative systems based on the most elementary computational operation, which is order-free. These and numerous other considerations provide substantial evidence that linear order is ancillary to language, not involved in core syntax and semantics. The same is true of the various external arrangements of sign language, which is now known to be remarkably like spoken language in its structure, acquisition, use, and even neural representation. Presumably these external properties reflect conditions imposed by the sensorimotor system. The option of using linear order does not even arise for the language learner. Linear order and other arrangements are relevant to what is heard, i.e., externalized, not to what is thought, which is interior.

Structures don't exist. Protocols do. But they are like locks. They can be picked. So, if protocols unlock valuable or mission critical stuff, they are arranged to cascade. This is what creates the illusion of structure. But even cascading protocols can be hacked in multiple ways. That's why even the illusion of structure has little utility.

In practice social processes are easily understood in terms of co-evolved complexity but have mathematically intractable dynamics when looked at in isolation. No doubt, in purely formal, or mathematical, languages, one could very usefully look for 'univocal foundations' but this does not mean Mathematics is itself univocal. How it will develop depends on the fitness landscape- i.e. the problems where it can be usefully applied. Chomskian shite turned out to be useless. With hindsight, we may give armchair reasons why this was inevitable. But, more often than not, we would be referencing work which did not become widely known till the Seventies.

He then points out that these conclusions accord well with the little that is known about the origin of language.

But they accord equally well with She-Hulk stepping out of the TV screen to come be my g.f. I know it is unheard off that fat middle aged guys suddenly get hot Super-hero girl friends but, dude, hearing is totes linear and based on exteriorization. It doesn't apply to what I get up to in my thoughts inside my own cozy little bed-sitting room.

The sensorimotor system “appears to have been in place long before language emerged,”

in other words, our species had heads before we got into rap

and there seems to be little specific adaptation for language.

or farting

Cognitive properties of far deeper kinds than those possessed by apes, or presumably non-human hominins, are intrinsic to language.

and to the art of the witty and well timed fart

Apes have gestural systems adequate for signing and auditory systems adequate for perception of speech, but unlike human infants, they interpret speech just as noise, and even with extensive training cannot achieve even rudiments of human sign language.

Monkeys won't learn to speak, according to a popular folk tradition, because they don't want to be pressurized into going to College. But, that's the reason our species is more successful than theirs.

Aristotle had said that language is ‘sound with meaning’, but these considerations just outlined, suggest to Chomsky that the priorities in the slogan might be reversed and language would be better understood as ‘meaning with sound’.

or smell, in the case of the silent but deadly critique of this type of Psilosophy

In case this comes off as Platonist (something that was zealously propagated by Jerrold Katz), it must be kept firmly in mind that for Chomsky, ‘meaning’ here is intended as a thoroughly psychological (eventually biological) category and thus not at all reified in Platonist terms.

so farts are meaningful

Such conclusions, in turn, fuel Chomsky’s longstanding claim that language is not to be understood as it everywhere is among philosophers, anthropologists, and others, as in some defining way tied to communication.

like farts

If externalization of language is secondary, and the tie of language to thought is primary, then communication cannot be central to any answer to the question this lecture asks: What is language? Indeed, as he says, there is reason to think that most of language/thought is not externalized at all.

But only coz we are afraid of losing our job or g.f. and thus have to hold in our farts and humorous anecdotes and theories about 9/11.

If one firmly understands that language is not designed by human beings but part of their biological endowment, then as an object of study, whether scientific or philosophical, there might have to be considerable shift in our methodological approaches.

But if these methodological approaches don't yield better Structural Causal Models and useful technological advances then they should be encouraged to kindly go fuck themselves.

The quotation from Darwin that Chomsky cited with approval had it that what is fundamental about language is a ‘power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas.”

Like Le Petomane.

Except for the fact that, as we have mentioned, sound (along with other modes of externalization) has been demoted, Chomsky’s own theoretical account of the Basic Property takes this point in Darwin for its word –though perhaps not the exact word since ‘associating’ isn’t exactly right in describing the central operation that the account posits. Associating happens, after all, even in classical conditioning (bell, food) and Chomsky has famously repudiated behaviourist accounts of language. Moreover associations between two objects, as even non-behaviourist psychologists understand association, may imply that the order of the objects is important in a way that the far greater weight put on the forms suited for semantic interpretation at the conceptual/intentional interface (rather than the sensorimotor interface) establishes it is not. So moving away from Darwin’s misleading word ‘associate’ for what Darwin himself wants to say, what Chomsky has in mind rather is to make central that we are unique in possessing the capacity to ‘put together’ ideas and syntactic elements.

In which case Darwin was wrong. Only an Occassionalist God could ensure a particular species has a unique capacity. But such a God could also ensure that the right sequence of farts emitted by a fat middle aged South Indian man would cause She-Hulk to step out of the TV screen and become my g.f even though this is bound to cause Thor to throw a hissy fit and finally come out of the closet.

And this fundamental conception of language is echoed in the theoretical account of the Basic Property, in which the crucial operation is given the name MERGE, which can operate externally on two distinct objects to create another, or it can operate internally from within one object to create another, yielding automatically the ubiquitous property of “displacement” (phrases heard in one place but understood also in a different place) in the form appropriate for complex semantic interpretation.

Chomsky is wrong because the Occasionalist God who is the efficient cause of everything in the Universe would not have endowed us with a unique capacity simply so as to justify some cretinous theory of his.  By contrast, God is definitely going to permit me to fart my way into a deep and very meaningful relationship with She-Hulk.

These are called External and Internal MERGE respectively

& I'm gonna let She-Hulk do both to me

and respect for simplicity

No. Simple-mindedness.

in scientific method, applicable in linguistics as anywhere else, dictates that we keep the basic operation down to this minimum and not proliferate operations in accounting for the computational power that grounds the Basic Property.

But it is scarcely parsimonious to say a Property magically appears at some instant in our species life and that this makes us wholly unique.

Working through some examples to present how language design is at its optimal if we stick to this methodological injunction, Chomsky presents changes in his own view, such as on the phenomenon of ‘displacement’ which he once saw as an ‘imperfection’, but which now, if one correctly keeps to the simplest methodological assumptions as just mentioned, is something that is simply to be expected.

So Chomsky thought that 'displacement' (i.e. the ability to communicate about things not immediately present), which is what makes language useful, was an 'imperfection'. Wow!

The lecture concludes with a bold attempt to exploit these last methodological points to bring two seemingly disparate questions together: what account shall we give of the Basic Property? and how and when did language emerge?

But Chomsky's program hasn't contributed anything to either computational nor ethological theories or practices. Thus, it is merely parasitical and interested in saying 'see, I wasn't completely wrong. I just need to abandon a few more of my original ideas so as to pretend that Science hasn't already shown I was barking up the wrong tree throughout my academic career.'

Interestingly, some recent research shows that farts can have hallucinogenic properties thus I wasn't completely wrong when I said I'd definitely be able to cause She Hulk to step out of the TV to be my g.f. Admittedly, this would not happen in real life but, if my farts are sufficiently psychedelic, I might well believe it was happening.

Thus, like Chomsky, I'm not really an elderly fool who has wasted his life touting bizarre political views. She Hulk is going to be my bride just as surely as Capitalism will be overthrown by a well-timed Chomskian fart.