If a linguist is invited to speak on the topic 'Language & Freedom' we expect
1) him to begin with the etymology of word constellations linked to Freedom in various ancient languages and their modern successors. In particular, he would explain how the term for not being a slave come to mean having various sorts of political, economic and legal rights or entitlements. The puzzle was why particular cultures or civilizations had interpreted Freedom and Liberation in different ways with the result that the 'Yogi' considered it to be release from transmigration, while the 'Commissar' thought it had to do with the overthrow of Capitalism, while, in America, it was seen in juristic terms as an expanding set of justiciable Hohfeldian immunities.
2) him to consider pragmatics- i.e. how such word constellations are actually used. In particular one might look at Orwellian uses of language or the 'semiotics' of Madison Avenue and so forth.
3) make policy recommendations with a view to enabling Language use to contribute to greater freedom. For example, the 'Plain English Campaign' encouraged Law Courts and Bureaucratic Institutions to get rid of obsolete jargon so as to promote access and inclusivity thus increasing effective Freedom. Furthermore, ensuring that speakers of minority languages have equal access to relevant information or tribunals increases effective freedom for them.
4) At the beginning of the 1930's, something new had appeared- viz. computer and other artificial languages. Godel, Turing & Tarski had shown that Freedom, for any given language, might not be definable within it. In other words, it would remain a 'primitive' within any juristic or deontic language which could have a mathematical representation. A separate development was that mechanical translation or even computers, or artificial intelligences, able to pass the Turing Test (i.e. appear indistinguishable from human interlocutors) were on the horizon. How might this impact Freedom?
Noam Chomsky, at the height of his intellectual powers in 1973, gave a talk on 'Language and Freedom' which signally failed to do what was required of him. This was because he wasn't really a linguist. He was a shithead. Also, he wouldn't have recognized Freedom if it came and bit him in the leg.
To be fair, in 1966. the influential Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee put a dampener on thirty years of enthusiasm for machine translation. They reported “We do not have useful machine translation and there is no immediate or predictable prospect of useful machine translation.” The committee effectively recommended a halt to the various research programmes and a return to human translators. Though there were big theoretical advances in computer science and statistics, it was not until the 1980s, when cheap computing power became available, that commercial research began again in earnest. Thus, Chomsky might be forgiven for ignoring the one development in his field which we consider the most important to our lives as we live them today.
A separate point has to do with 'Project Camelot'- the 'Manhattan Project for the Social Choices'- which increased funding for the teaching of stupid shite at the Post-Grad level in America. Though it started off as an anti-Communist strategy, it was soon captured by the Pinkos whose 'long march through the institutions' ended in senile impotence and 'woke' incontinence. My point is that there's an economic reason why Chomsky, despite being useless and mad, gained salience while guys doing useful stuff were unhonoured and unsung. On the other hand, some of those who did useful work- like Robert Mercer who had contributed to 'Brown Clustering'- became billionaires capable of changing the political landscape by funding particular causes- e.g. Brexit which was all about gaining freedom from Brussels.
When I was invited to speak on the topic “Language and freedom”, I was puzzled and intrigued. Most of my professional life has been devoted to the study of language. There would be no great difficulty in finding a topic to discuss in that domain. And there is much to say about the problems of freedom and liberation as they pose themselves to us and to others in the mid-twentieth century. What is troublesome in the title of this lecture is the conjunction. In what way are language and freedom to be interconnected?
The answer is that Courts and Legislatures use language. Both may be concerned with Freedom. At least, such was the case in Chomsky's country- much though he may have hated it.
As a preliminary, let me say just a word about the contemporary study of language, as I see it. There are many aspects of language and language use that raise intriguing questions, but – in my judgement – only a few have so far led to productive theoretical work.
Chomsky's theoretical work wasn't productive. Why? It was predicated on magic. The boring, statistical, 'E-language' approach did yield results which we all now greatly profit by. But it was essentially 'Skinnerian' and statistical.
In particular, our deepest insights are in the area of formal grammatical structure.
Which don't exist.
A person who knows a language
or a generative AI
has acquired a system of rules and principles – a “generative grammar,” in technical terms – that associates sound and meaning in some specific fashion.
on the basis of Skinnerian 'reinforcement'- albeit of a stochastic kind. It is purely a matter of chance that I have acquired an English idiolect whose peculiar grammar and syntax shows the deep influence of Tamil, Hindi, and even Arabic and Swahili. Nevertheless, my aim is always to sound like a teenaged Californian cheerleader who is also a Vampire Slayer.
There are many reasonably well-founded and, I think, rather enlightening hypotheses as to the character of such grammars, for quite a number of languages. Furthermore, there has been a renewal of interest in “universal grammar”,
which arose out of the notion of a universal Turing machine though, no doubt, you could see it as related to a Liebnizian or Lullian universal mathesis. Incidentally, this was originally an Islamic notion.
interpreted now as the theory that tries to specify the general properties of those languages that can be learned in the normal way by humans.
A wrong interpretation. Normal humans can learn no such theory. Perhaps computers can. In other words, this project may be useful for machines communicating with each other who may, where there is category theoretical 'naturality, actually converge upon a universal grammar but only for specific purposes where, for some reason, concurrency problems don't arise and there is no profit in strategic behaviour.
Sadly, Chomsky's project has no utility for humans who, for whatever reason, may need to gain competence in different languages.
Here, too, significant progress has been achieved.
No. Only bollocks was talked. It turns out Skinner, not Chomsky, was right. Reinforcement is what matters.
The subject is of particular importance. It is appropriate to regard universal grammar as the study of one of the essential faculties of mind.
Nope. Minds can exist without language and language of a useful enough sort can be generated by computers which have no minds.
It is, therefore, extremely interesting to discover, as I believe we do, that the principles of universal grammar are rich, abstract, and restrictive, and can be used to construct principled explanations for a variety of phenomena.
False explanations. But Astrology can do so just as well.
At the present stage of our understanding, if language is to provide a springboard for the investigation of other problems of human nature, it is these aspects of language to which we will have to turn our attention, for the simple reason that it is only these aspects that are reasonably well understood.
Skinnerian reinforcement was well understood. What was new was things like 'Brown clustering'. But Chomsky wasn't smart enough to understand the Math.
In another sense, the study of formal properties of language
which are irrelevant because most communication is as informal as fuck
reveals something of the nature of humans in a negative way: it underscores, with great clarity, the limits of our understanding of those qualities of mind that are apparently unique to humans and that must enter into their cultural achievements in an intimate, if still quite obscure, manner.
But if humans have this limitation then they can't say what the significance of that limitation might be.
In searching for a point of departure, one turns naturally to a period in the history of Western thought when it was
pretty fucking backward. Why not take as your point of departure, current cutting edge work which is already proving useful and thus 'paying its way'?'
possible to believe that “the thought of making freedom the sum and substance of philosophy has emancipated the human spirit in all its relationships,
e.g. fucking your friend, Schlegel's, wife
and . . . has given to science in all its parts a more powerful reorientation than any earlier revolution.” The word “revolution” bears multiple association in this passage, for Schelling also proclaims that “man is born to act and not to speculate”;
he speculated. Napoleon acted. But so did Wellington and Blucher.
and when he writes that “the time has come to
talk high falutin' bollocks because, unlike Napoleon or Wellington we are talkers, not doers.
proclaim to a nobler humanity the freedom of the spirit,
free alcoholic spirits might interest humanity- noble or otherwise. Vacuous proclamations are just wasted words.
and no longer to have patience with men’s tearful regrets for their lost chains”
There were no such men requiring patience or verbose perorations.
we hear the echoes of the libertarian thought and revolutionary acts of the late eighteenth century.
No. We hear hysterical nonsense.
Schelling writes that “the beginning and end of all philosophy is – Freedom.”
We know better. It begins with an open problem in a STEM subject. When that subject closes the problem, it ceases to be 'philosophical'.
These words are invested with meaning and urgency at a time when people are struggling to cast off their chains, to resist authority that has lost its claim to legitimacy, to construct more humane and more democratic social institutions.
There has never been such a time save where actual galley slaves or chain gangs existed. As for 'social institutions' we don't want nutters to construct them or interfere with them in any way even if they are weeping because they lost their chains or manacles or other S&M paraphernalia.
It is at such a time that the philosopher may be driven to inquire into the nature of human freedom and its limits, and perhaps to conclude, with Schelling, that with respect to the human ego, “its essence is freedom”; and with respect to philosophy, “the highest dignity of Philosophy consists precisely therein, that it stakes all on human freedom.”
It has nothing to stake. Sad.
We are living, once again, at such a time.
1973? There may have been revolutions around that time but they tended to make everything worse. There were some exceptions. Portugal rose and rose after it got rid of Salazar's stupid regime. Spain and Greece, too, prospered as never before. But these were 'carnation' or 'velvet' revolutions. A moribund authoritarianism collapsed and there was a return to freer conditions which had previously prevailed.
A revolutionary ferment is sweeping the so called Third World, awakening enormous masses from torpor and acquiescence in traditional authority.
Thankfully, in India, Mrs. Gandhi put an end to that stripe of nonsense. Even China got rid of the Gang of Four and decided to embrace the Market.
There are those who feel that the industrial societies as well are ripe for revolutionary change – and I do not refer only to representatives of the New Left.
Drug addled nutters or sociopaths of various descriptions.
The threat of revolutionary change brings forth repression and reaction.
Ford set up concentration camps for dissidents but it was Jimmy Carter who physically exterminated the American proletariat
Its signs are evident in varying forms, in France,
Pompidou ordered the killing of the French kulaks.
in the Soviet Union,
Brezhnev was overthrown by his cat which had formed a strategic alliance with Soviet mice- many of whom were of a Trotskyite predisposition.
in the United States—not least, in the city where we are meeting. It is natural, then, that we should consider, abstractly, the problems of human freedom, and turn with interest and serious attention to the thinking of an earlier period when archaic social institutions were subjected to critical analysis and sustained attack.
Where? France had an Emperor and then the Bourbons returned after which the House of Orleans took over. Then there was a Second Republic till another Emperor turned up after which there was a third Republic. In Germany, by contrast, Kings and their Generals decided the pace and scope of political change. 'Critical analysis' was shit and achieved nothing.
It is natural and appropriate, so long as we bear in mind Schellings’s admonition that man is born not merely to speculate but also to act.
But stupid cunts can only speculate in a stupid fashion. Their actions, however, may be hilarious. Chomsky posing as a persecuted dissident is almost as funny as Woody Allen.
One of the earliest and most remarkable of the eighteenth-century investigations of freedom and servitude is Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755), in many ways a revolutionary tract.
But a deeply stupid and mischievous in ways some of his readers would discover to their own great personal cost.
In it, he seeks to “set forth the origin and progress of inequality, the establishment and abuse of political societies, insofar as these things can be deduced from the nature of man by the light of reason alone.” His conclusions were sufficiently shocking that the judges of the prize competition of the Academy of Dijon, to whom the work was originally submitted, refused to hear the manuscript through.Rousseau was the scribe of the fabulously wealthy Louise Dupin who was fascinated by a Cartesian priest who, a century previously, had written tracts on the the Equality of the Two Sexes. If there is mind body dualism, it follows that females are not naturally inferior, at least mentally, to men. But the same must be true of those who labour in the fields. Their minds are not essentially inferior to those with the leisure to cultivate the arts and sciences. Rousseau's foolishness was to think private property was to blame for inequality. He wasn't a Cartesian- indeed, he had no knowledge of philosophy, just like Chomsky.
In it, Rousseau challenges the legitimacy of virtually every social institution, as well as individual control of property and wealth. These are “usurpations . . . established only on a precarious and abusive right . . . having been acquired only by force, force could take them away without (the rich) having grounds for complaint.” Not even property acquired by personal industry is held “upon better titles”. Against such a claim, one might object: “Do you not know that a multitude of your brethren die or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you needed express and unanimous consent of the human race to appropriate for yourself anything from common subsistence that exceeded your own?” It is contrary to the law of nature that “a handful of men be glutted with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities.”
If the 'multitude' really was starving then they could do no work and thus nobody at all would be 'glutted with superfluities'. Rousseau was talking bollocks. However, everybody knew there could be a Jacquerie as happened in 1358. There was a good reason the propertied had a vested interest in getting behind the Sun King.
Rousseau argues that civil society is hardly more than a conspiracy by the rich to guarantee their plunder. Hypocritically, the rich call upon their neighbors to “institute regulations of justice and peace to which all are obliged to conform, which make an exception of no one, and which compensate in some way for the caprices of fortune by equally subjecting the powerful and the weak to mutual duties”– those laws which, as Anatole France was to say, in their majesty deny to the rich and the poor equally the right to sleep under the bridge at night. By such arguments, the poor and weak were seduced: “All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom. . . .” Thus society and laws “gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, destroyed natural freedom for all time, established forever the law of property and inequality, changed a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected the whole human race to work, servitude and misery”. Governments inevitably tend toward arbitrary power, as “their corruption and extreme limit”. This power is “by its nature illegitimate,” and new revolutions must dissolve the government altogether or bring it closer to its legitimate institutions … . The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his subjects. Force alone maintained him, force alone overthrows him.'
This was all very well but the French knew how the Jacquerie ended. The fact is, if the propertied could not put down the rabble, then there would be a foreign invasion which would reduce the entire nation to serfhood. That's why the French Revolution ended when a little Corsican artillery officer crowned himself Emperor and offered to guarantee title in land acquired by peasants during the Revolution in return for loyalty and military service. Chomsky knew as little about French history as he did about anything else he gassed on about.
What is interesting, in the present connection, is the path that Rousseau follows to reach these conclusions “by the light of reason alone,” beginning with his ideas about human nature. He wants to see man “as nature formed him”.
In other words, seeing our species as one which evolved by natural selection. In this respect the work of John Maynard Smith on evolutionarily stable strategies (which appeared in 1973) and on 'uncorrelated asymmetries' (e.g. unicity in encoded by who owns what) as dictating eusocial 'bourgeois strategies' is of great interest. Like his mentor, Haldane, Smith had been a card carrying Communist. Sadly, Marxism turned out to be stupid shit.
It is from human nature that the principles of natural right and the foundations of social existence must be deduced.
Around this time, category theorists were discovering that 'naturality' (non-arbitrariness) is far to seek. Even where there is an objective function to be maximized or minimized, that objective is itself arbitrary. Had Chomsky understood math- as opposed to an indulgence in pseudo-mathsy mental masturbation- he would have understood that his own research program was nonsense because of complexity, computability and concurrency problems as well as lack of naturality and unicity. You may say, 'Chomsky's ignorance and stupidity allowed him to survive as a 'public intellectual'.' But, the rejoinder is 'public intellectual' means the same thing as 'public toilet' except the intellectual spews out shit whereas a toilet sends it down the sewer.
This same study of original man,
Rousseau made no such study. He just dashed off some hysterical shite.
of his true needs, and of the principles underlying his duties,
e.g. his duty to hand over his kids to the Foundling's hospital so that he won't be put to the trouble and expense of raising them
is also the only good means one could use to remove those crowds of difficulties which present themselves concerning the origin of moral inequality,
why do we consider homicidal rapists to be morally inferior to Mother Theresa? Is it because of Neo-Liberalism?
the true foundation of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and a thousand similar questions as important as they are ill explained.
In other words, they aren't important at all.
To determine the nature of man, Rousseau proceeds to compare man and animal. Man is “intelligent, free . . . the sole animal endowed with reason.” Animals are “devoid of intellect and freedom.”
Like women? Louise Dupin didn't think so. Since she was as wealthy as fuck, Rousseau didn't dare disagree with her.
In every animal I see only an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order to revitalize itself and guarantee itself, to a certain point, from all that tends to destroy or upset it.
This is the Cartesian element Rousseau absorbed through Madam Dupin. But Descartes was a mathematician. There were subtleties to his system which neither Rousseau nor Chomsky could appreciate.
I perceive precisely the same things in the human machine, with the difference that nature alone does everything in the operations of a beast, whereas man contributes to his operations by being a free agent.
This is the scholastic 'conatus'. But for Cartesians it is linked to mathematical phenomena like tautochrones (solved by the end of the seventeenth century but given an analytic treatment later by Euler and Lagrange) and, in a sense, to problems in Physics which remain open and thus are 'philosophical'.
The former chooses or rejects by instinct and the latter by an act of freedom, so that a beast cannot deviate from the rule that is prescribed to it even when it would be advantageous for it do so, and a man deviates from it often to his detriment . . . .
Rousseau clearly knew nothing about animals. They aren't Cartesian 'meat-machines'. But the reason for this was only captured by mathematical ideas of 'regret-minimization' and information theoretic notions of 'surprisal' both of which have turned out to be very useful for machine learning, generative AI, LLMs etc, etc. Chomsky steered clear of anything useful or insightful. Skinner didn't. He has prevailed.
it is not so much understanding which constitutes the distinction of man among the animals as it is his being a free agent.
There is a story that monkeys refuse to learn how to speak so as to remain free. Through the ages, humans have envied wild animals their freedom and abundance of leisure.
Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impetus, but he realizes that he is free to acquiesce or resist; and it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul is shown. For physics explains in some way the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of willing, or rather of choosing, and in the sentiment of this power are found only purely spiritual acts about which the laws of mechanics explain nothing.
This looks like Cartesian dualism- Mind stuff is different from Matter stuff- but ,save in an Occasionalist universe (where God is the only efficient cause), something like Darwinian Evolution must be true. Thus, if you want to stick with the hysterical bollocks of Rousseau or Chomsky, you end up having to stipulate for some magical gene which appears and spreads instantaneously at some point in our evolutionary history. How is this different from saying God created the world on a Thursday afternoon in 4004 BC?
Thus the essence of human nature is human freedom
in which case it exists in all possible worlds including ones where the Big Bang never occurred. The essence of bullshit is that it makes claims of this type.
and the consciousness of this freedom. So Rousseau can say that “the jurists, who have gravely pronounced that the child of a slave would be born a slave, have decided in other terms that a man would not be born a man.”
No. They have decided that the guy who owns the slave also owns the child of the slave. He may also own a cow and have title over the calf it gives birth to. This does not mean the calf belongs to the human species or that the human child is actually a calf.
Sophistic politicians and intellectuals search for ways to obscure the fact that the essential and defining property of man is his freedom:
Though it is no such thing. That's why there are plenty of people in jail. Few cows or pigeons are incarcerated even if, as I have frequently asserted, they are responsible for hideous financial crimes which have left me impoverished.
“They attribute to men a natural inclination to servitude,
other men, not themselves
without thinking that it is the same for freedom as for innocence and virtue – their value is felt only as long as one enjoys them oneself and the taste for them is lost as soon as one has lost them.
Chomsky valued his virginity. Then, on his honeymoon night, his wife raped him. This was undoubtedly the fault of Neo-Liberalism. Still, it is a fact that Chomsky retained his taste for and enjoyment of his own anal cherry. That's why Foucault didn't like him.
” In contrast, Rousseau asks rhetorically “whether, freedom being the most noble of man’s faculties, it is not degrading one’s nature, putting oneself on the level of beasts enslaved by instinct, even offending the author of one’s being, to renounce without reservation the most precious of all his gifts and subject ourselves to committing all the crimes he forbids us in order to please a ferocious or insane master” – a question that has been asked, in similar terms, by many an American draft resister in the last few years,
It is very degrading to get shot by gooks. Please Mummy, don't let them send me to Vietnam!
and by many others who are beginning to recover from the catastrophe of twentieth-century Western civilization, which has so tragically confirmed Rousseau’s judgement:
but only to a cretin teaching useless shit
Hence arose the national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals which make nature tremble and shock reason, and all those horrible prejudices which rank the honour of shedding human blood among the virtues. The most decent men learned to consider it one of their duties to murder their fellowmen; at length men were seen to massacre each other by the thousands without knowing why; more murders were committed on a single day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single city than were committed in the state of nature during whole centuries over the entire face of the earth.
War is the mother of invention. Inventions raise the productivity of land thus making it a profitable proposition to expend the lives of a hundreds or thousands so as to gain territory capable of supporting thousands or millions. Chomsky's ancestors 'survived the catastrophes of Western civilization' in relative affluence and security by emigrating to 'Turtle Island' whose indigenous inhabitants had been exterminated or displaced.
The proof of his doctrine that the struggle for freedom is an essential human attribute, that the value of freedom is felt only as long as one enjoys it, Rousseau sees in “the marvels done by all free peoples
like the aboriginal Australians?
to guard themselves from oppression.”
they needed advanced weapons..
True, those who have abandoned the life of a free man-
i.e. a starving vagabond
do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains . . . . But when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel that it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.
Nor did it behoove 'naked savages' who were exterminated or displaced from valuable real estate. Still, there was a time when 'Red Indians' riding horses and firing rifles might have created a powerful state of their own across a wide swathe of North America.
Rather similar thoughts were expressed by Kant, forty years later. He cannot, he says, accept the proposition that certain people “are not ripe for freedom,”
unless they are Black.
for example, the serfs of some landlord:
unless they speak Polish
If one accepts this assumption, freedom will never be achieved; for one can not arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already acquired it; one must be free to learn how to make use of one’s powers freely and usefully.
This is silly. Serfdom or Slavery was ended gradually by 'enlightened despots' in Kant's Europe. There was quite a long transition period and considerable local variation.
The first attempts will surely be brutal and will lead to a state of affairs more painful and dangerous than the former condition under the dominance but also the protection of an external authority. However, one can achieve reason only through one’s own experiences and one must be free to be able to undertake them. . . . To accept the principle that freedom is worthless for those under one’s control and that one has the right to refuse it to them forever, is an infringement on the rights of God himself, who has created man to be free.
In which case, God is more than a bit crap.
The remark is particularly interesting because of its context. Kant was defending the French Revolution, during the Terror, against those who claimed that it showed the masses to be unready for the privilege of freedom.
The French decided Kant was wrong. Slavery was brought back- unless, as in Haiti, the slaves rebelled- and, soon enough, France had an Emperor.
Kant’s remarks have contemporary relevance. No rational person will approve of violence
We approve of violence done to those who seek to harm us
and terror.
We approve of those who strike terror into those who seek to harm us.
In particular, the terror of the postrevolutionary state, fallen into the hands of a grim autocracy, has more than once reached indescribable levels of savagery. Yet no person of understanding or humanity will too quickly condemn the violence that often occurs when long-subdued masses rise against their oppressors, or take their first steps toward liberty and social reconstruction.
No person of sound understanding will not, as quickly as possible, run away from such a place. Once safe, he may waste his time praising or condemning anything or everything.
Let me return now to Rousseau’s argument
why bother? The man was a lunatic.
against the legitimacy of established authority, whether that of political power or of wealth. It is striking that his argument, up to this point, follows a familiar Cartesian model.
It reflects his period of service to Madam Dupin. But he hadn't understood Descartes.
Man is uniquely beyond the bounds of physical explanation; the beast, on the other hand, is merely an ingenious machine, commanded by natural law. Man’s freedom and his consciousness of this freedom distinguish him from the beast-machine. The principles of mechanical explanation are incapable of accounting for these human properties, though they can account for sensation and even the combination of ideas, in which regard “man differs from a beast only in degree.”
To Descartes and his followers, such as Cordemoy,
an occasionalist, like Guelincx who thought that the 'rational soul can communicate with angels without language'. Why? Because God does everything. God alone knows why an atheist like Chomsky was so besotted with that nutter.
the only sure sign that another organism has a mind, and hence also lies beyond the bounds of mechanical explanation, is its use of language in the normal, creative human fashion, free from control by identifiable stimuli, novel and innovative, appropriate to situations, coherent, and engendering in our minds new thoughts and ideas.
Actually, a true Cartesian would be a mathematician and thus have some inkling that there are non-deterministic mechanical systems. This is like the currently open problem of whether it can be proved that P is not equal to NP. It turns out there can't be a 'natural proof' of this unless we have a way of discriminating random from pseudo-random. In other words, the question of determinism is open for math. What Chomksy and Rousseau were grasping at was vulgar nonsense which could only be 'Cartesian' if it was thoroughly 'occasionalist'- i.e. turned God into the sole efficient cause.
To the Cartesians, it is obvious by introspection that each man possesses a mind, a substance whose essence is thought; his creative use of language reflects this freedom of thought and conception.
Nope. We still don't know if there can be a 'lawless' choice sequence. Also, there may be no genuine randomness in the Universe. Chance is itself a Deus Absonditus.
When we have evidence that another organism, too, uses language in this free and creative fashion, we are led to attribute to it as well a mind like ours.
We do this anyway with certain animals- e.g. a shepherd and his dog. Skippy the kangaroo, if my memory serves, was equally communicative.
From similar assumptions regarding the intrinsic limits of mechanical explanation, its inability to account for man’s freedom and consciousness of his freedom, Rousseau proceeds to develop his critique of authoritarian institutions,
like marriage or having to raise your kids yourself
which deny to man his essential attribute of freedom, in varying degree.
Were we to combine these speculations, we might develop an interesting connection between language and freedom.
Stupid people can use language to talk nonsense about freedom. But they can also talk nonsense about linguistics.
Language, in its essential properties and the manner of its use, provides the basic criterion for determining that another organism is a being with a human mind and the human capacity for free thought and self-expression,
Had Chomsky found an infallible 'Turing test'? No. He was just talking bollocks.
and with the essential human need for freedom from the external constraints of repressive authority. Furthermore, we might try to proceed from the detailed investigation of language and its use to a deeper and more specific understanding of the human mind.
Has Chomsky achieved anything in this regard? No. He has become more and more paranoid and antagonomic.
Proceeding on this model, we might further attempt to study other aspects of that human nature which, as Rousseau rightly observes, must be correctly conceived if we are to be able to develop, in theory, the foundations for a rational social order.
We aren't. There is no such thing. Why? Categoricity and naturality are lacking.
I will return to this problem, but first I would like to trace further Rousseau’s thinking about the matter. Rousseau diverges from the Cartesian tradition in several respects.
Descartes was a Mathsy guy. Rousseau had great musical and literary talent. But do did Wagner. But we don't think of Wagner as a philosopher though he wrote well enough in that vein.
He defines the “specific characteristic of the human species” as man’s “faculty of self-perfection,” which, “with the aid of circumstances, successively develops all the others, and resides among us as much in the species as in the individual.”
It didn't reside in Rousseau. His brain turned to shit soon enough.
The faculty of selfperfection and of perfection of the human species through cultural transmission is not, to my knowledge, discussed in any similar terms by the Cartesians.
It was an Eighteenth Century development. One would have thought Chomsky would have preferred to dwell on Lord Monboddo in this connection. But that Scotsman had common sense and founded comparative linguistics and was an early contributor to the theory of evolution. In other words, he wasn't crazy and thus did not appeal to Chomsky.
However, I think that Rousseau’s remarks might be interpreted as a development of the Cartesian tradition in an unexplored direction, rather than as a denial and rejection of it.
What was that direction? With hindsight, it was the notion that there was a magical 'language gene' which appeared suddenly and spread instantly only to members of our species. This is isn't evolutionary theory. It is a belief in magic.
There is no inconsistency in the notion that the restrictive attributes of mind underlie a historically evolving human nature that develops within the limits that they set; or that these attributes of mind provide the possibility of self-perfection; or that, by providing the consciousness of freedom, these essential attributes of human nature give man the opportunity to create social conditions and social forms to maximize the possibilities for freedom, diversity, and individual self-realization. To use an arithmetical analogy, the integers do not fail to be an infinite set merely because they do not exhaust the rational numbers. Analogously, it is no denial of man’s capacity for infinite “self-perfection” to hold that there are intrinsic properties of mind that constrain his development.
If 'self-perfection' is an optimization problem then it has a dual such that every constraint must be a variable in the primal problem. If 'constraints' are intrinsic to mind, something outside mind may lift them- e.g. angels, oracles or just the invention of written language culminating in the creation of artificial languages and the use of computers. But, in that case, the primal problem is not wholly mental. Cartesianism is off the table. But so is Rousseau and Marx and other such nutters. 'Hardware' matters because it lifts binding constraints on very type of 'software' including brains or 'minds'. This is fine for Monboddo type evolutionary theory- suitably updated and mathematicized. But it spells curtains for Chomsky's hysterical shite.
I would like to argue that in a sense the opposite is true, that without a system of formal constraints there are no creative acts; specifically, in the absence of intrinsic and restrictive properties of mind, there can be only “shaping of behaviour” but no creative acts of self-perfection.
we can shape our behaviour so it is less imperfect or inefficient in particular tasks. Doing so is plenty creative. Talking paranoid shite isn't creative. Any nutter can do it.
Furthermore, Rousseau’s concern for the evolutionary character of self-perfection brings us back, from another point of view,
a stupid one which ignores the fact that the Neo-Darwinians, using mathematical game theory, were making great strides at around this time
to a concern for human language, which would appear to be a prerequisite for such evolution of society and culture, for Rousseau’s perfection of the species, beyond the most rudimentary forms.
Nothing of the sort has yet occurred. We have better tools and hardware. We don't have bigger brains capable of telepathy or telekinesis than our eighteenth century ancestors. True, I can fly halfway across the world in ten hours but I can't do this by flapping my arms as if they were wings. I have to get on an aero-plane.
Rousseau holds that “although the organ of speech is natural to man, speech itself is nonetheless not natural to him.”
Just as having an arsehole is natural to man, but shitting is unnatural.
Again, I see no inconsistency between this observation and the typical Cartesian view that innate abilities are “dispositional,” faculties that lead us to produce ideas (specifically, innate ideas) in a particular manner under given conditions of external stimulation,
if those stimulations arise 'naturally', then there is an inconsistency.
but that also provide us with the ability to proceed in our thinking without such external factors.
Stuff like being alive and breathing air as opposed to drowning at the bottom of a river
Language too, then, is natural to man only in a specific way.
just as shitting is natural only in a specific way which involves shit being expelled from the anus rather than ingested by it. These are amazing discoveries for which Chomsky has received insufficient praise.
This is an important and, I believe, quite fundamental insight of the rationalist linguists that was disregarded, very largely, under the impact of empiricist psychology in the eighteenth century and since.
Because that 'fundamental insight' was shit.
Rousseau discusses the origin of language at some length, though he confesses himself to be unable to come to grips with the problem in a satisfactory way.
Because he didn't know about magical genes which suddenly appear and spread instantaneously.
Thus if men needed speech in order to learn to think,
they don't though it does appear that not learning to speak causes some type of relative mental retardation
they had even greater need of knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speech. . . .
just as babies must know how to shit before they can discover the art of shitting on you.
So that one can hardly form tenable conjectures about this art of communicating thoughts and establishing intercourse between minds; a sublime art which is now very far from its origin. . . .
Yet common sense supplied tenable conjectures in this regard. Lots of people looked after babies as well as puppy dogs and other animals and came to see a continuum in signalling mechanisms across species. My wife even figured out a rudimentary way to communicate with me. If she wanted to get me out of bed and into my chair at my desk, which had a pile of work on it for me to do, she would open the curtains and say 'look! A miaow miaow pussy cat!'. I would lumber over to look at the miaow miaow pussy cat which, my wife would assure me would soon reappear, and then, out of force of habit, sit down and work through the pile of files on my desk.
He holds that “general ideas can come into the mind only with the aid of words,
though mathsy guys had 'general ideas' for which words were only invented after the fact
and the understanding grasps them only through propositions” –
Nope. A proposition is like a theorem or the judgment of the Court. The law of the excluded middle applies. But the thing may not be 'informative' and may not increase our understanding of anything. Also, plenty of 'general ideas' come into the mind without the aid of words.
a fact which prevents animals, devoid of reason, from formulating such ideas or ever acquiring “the perfectibility which depends upon them.”
This was nonsense. Animals reason well enough for their own purposes. Some animals out-source their reasoning- e.g. the sheep to the shepherd or sheep-dog. But, as a self-domesticated species, we do the same. Some of us specialize in useful types of reason. Others, like Chomsky, or me, double down on talking hateful bollocks.
Thus he cannot conceive of the means by which “our new grammarians began to extend their ideas and to generalize their words,” or to develop the means “to express all the thoughts of men”: “numbers, abstract words, aorists, and all the tenses of verbs, particles, syntax, the linking of propositions, reasoning, and the forming of all the logic of discourse.”
First there was language and only long afterwards was there grammar. But grammatical language is only a small subset of any particular person's idiolect.
He does speculate about later stages of the perfection of the species, “when the ideas of men began to spread and multiply, and when closer communication was established among them, [and] they sought more numerous signs and a more extensive language.” But he must, unhappily, abandon “the following difficult problem: which was most necessary, previously formed society for the institution of languages, or previously invented languages for the establishment of society?”
Which came first? The chicken? The hen? Nope. It was the rooster. In other words, language evolved on the basis of sexual selection. This is a type of 'co-evolution' relatively independent of the fitness landscape.
The Cartesians
because they lived long ago and were as ignorant as fuck
cut the Gordian knot by postulating
some magical shite
the existence of a species-specific characteristic, a second substance that serves as what we might call a “creative principle” alongside the “mechanical principle” that determines totally the behaviour of animals.
Guys who lived long ago when witches were still being burned at the stake may be excused for babbling about magical shite. But Chomsky has had every educational advantage and continual access to the smartest people working at the cutting edge of multiple disciplines. If his theory is more foolish than that of an eighteenth century lawyer, the reason may be that his political views are way crazier.
There was, for them, no need to explain the origin of language in the course of historical evolution. Rather, man’s nature is qualitatively distinct: there is no passage from body to mind. We might reinterpret this idea in more current terms by speculating the rather sudden and dramatic mutations might have led to qualities of intelligence that are, so far as we know, unique to humans, possession of language in the human sense being the most distinctive index of these qualities.
It is one thing to say God does everything. It is another to worship a magical mutation.
If this is correct,
i.e. if pigs routinely fly to the moon
as at least a first approximation to the facts, the study of
moon-pig
language might be expected to offer an entering wedge, or perhaps a model, for an investigation of human nature that would provide the grounding for a much broader theory of human nature.
but that theory would be paranoid shite. Why are moon-pigs refusing to come to my birthday party? Is it because of Neo-Liberalism or some sinister skulduggery on the part of the P.T.A?
To conclude these historical remarks, I would like to turn, as I have elsewhere, to Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the most stimulating and intriguing thinkers of the period
when peeps were as ignorant as shit
. Humboldt was, on the one hand, one of the most profound theorists of general linguistics, and on the other, an early and forceful advocate of libertarian values.
Nonsense! He was a typical Teutonic 'beamten'- i.e. civil servant- who never got beyond 'beamtenliberalismus'- i.e. the top-down liberalism of the bureaucrats.
The basic concept of his philosophy is Bildung,
i.e. he was in the tradition of Moses Mendelssohn. But this is a slippery slope to Steinthal type 'Völkerpsychologie' (ethno-psychology) or Sapir-Whorf type relativism or the even more cretinous notion that 'language speaks us.' Still, Humboldt and Steinthal and so forth did genuine linguistic research. Chomsky didn't.
by which, as J.W. Burrow expresses it, “he meant the fullest, richest, and most harmonious development of the potentialities of the individual, the community or the human race.”
The more useless type of Bureaucrat or Diplomat still gasses on in that manner.
His own thought might serve as an exemplary case. Though he does not, to my knowledge, explicitly relate his ideas about language to his libertarian social thought, there is quite clearly a common ground from which they develop, a concept of human nature that inspires each.
It is a racist concept. Another bureaucrat- but one who served the East India Company as opposed to the Prussian state- was J.S. Mill.
Mill’s essay On Liberty
warned against the tyranny of the majority- stuff like the mutinous Hindoooos getting rid of the East India Company. Mill lost salience once Disraeli outflanked Gladstone and it became increasingly apparent that the upper working class would vote Tory or Unionist. Maybe women would vote the right way? Sadly, in America, they imposed Prohibition the moment they were enfranchised.
takes as its epigraph Humboldt’s formulation of the “leading principle” of his thought: “the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”
which would involve hobos shitting on Humboldt's head for the entertainment of the Tzar and the Holy Roman Emperor. Queen Victoria, however, was not amused.
Humboldt concludes his critique of the authoritarian state by
serving it with vim and vigour. The fucker was a Prussian official. He wasn't a Lesbian Trotskyite demanding compulsory gender reassignment surgery for everybody who works at the Pentagon.
saying: “I have felt myself animated throughout with a sense of the deepest respect for the inherent dignity of human nature, and for freedom, which alone befits that dignity.
Which, I suppose, is better than being animated by Walt Disney but not by much. Did you know, in the German version of Mickey Mouse, Goofy invades Poland?
” Briefly put, his concept of human nature is this:
The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason,
which Darwin showed didn't fucking exist
and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.
A complete and consistent asshole
Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes;
Which is why Humboldt resigned. It wasn't the case that a salary from the Prussian Crown was the indispensable condition for Humboldt's dignity.
but there is besides another essential – intimately connected with freedom, it is true – a variety of situations.
Humboldt was both a diplomat and a guy who presided, from time to time, over the Education Department.
Like Rousseau and Kant, he holds that
nothing promotes this ripeness for freedom so much as freedom itself.
because nothing promotes nonsense save that very nonsense
This truth,
which ranks alongside 'it's nice to be nice' as an eternal verity
perhaps, may not be acknowledged by those who have so often used this unripeness as an excuse for continuing repression.
Repression is either profitable or prudential. If it needs to excuse itself, it isn't repression. It is your Mummy suggesting maybe you should put your pants on before going to school- more particularly if you are the Principal.
But it seems to me to follow unquestionably from the very nature of man.
or the very nature of God or the Magical Mutation or some such shite.
The incapacity for freedom can only arise from
not being able to kill those who are trying to enslave you
a want of moral and intellectual power;
as expressed by fucking over fuckers who try to fuck with you.
to heighten this power is the only way to supply this want; but to do this presupposes the exercise of the power, and this exercise presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous activity.
Nonsense! Getting and loading a gun supplies the power to kill. Pulling the trigger exercises it. But if the other guy has surrendered or run the fuck away, there is no need to do so.
Only it is clear we cannot call it giving freedom, when
what we are actually doing is pulling our own pudding
bonds are relaxed which are not felt as such by him who wears them. But of no man on earth – however neglected by nature, and however degraded by circumstances – is this true of all the bonds which oppress him. Let us undo them one by one,
by pulling on our pudding with greater and greater vim and vigour.
as the feeling of freedom awakens in men’s hearts, and we shall hasten progress at every step.
Unless, like Rousseau we give ourselves a hernia by our incessant jerking off.
Those who do not comprehend this “may justly be suspected of misunderstanding human nature, and of wishing to make men into machines.”
Bosch made my washing machine. Hopefully, some particularly durable type of Ger-man was used because I neglected to pay for the extended warranty.
Man is fundamentally a creative, searching, self-perfecting being:
Fundamentally, Man fucks himself.
“To inquire
does this taste good?
and to create
i.e. take a dump
– these are the centres around which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve.” But freedom of thought and enlightenment are not only for the elite.
More particularly if they don't want that shite. In that case, maybe we can market it to the Proles or the Queers or the Gooks or whatever.
Once again echoing Rousseau, Humboldt states, “There is something degrading to human nature in the idea of refusing to any man the right to be a man.”
But what is more degrading yet is being sodomized by the mailman who then proceeds to shit on your tits.
Chomsky thinks Humboldt would have lurved the 'Liberation Theology' of
radical Catholics of Latin America
which drove poor people into the arms of the Pentecostal Church
who are concerned with the “awakening of consciousness,”
i.e. realizing it sucks to be poor and that listening to stupid Marxists- priests or otherwise- will make you poorer
referring to “the transformation of the passive exploited lower classes into conscious and critical masters of their own destinies”
Which is what happens when you embrace the 'Gospel of Prosperity'.
much in the manner of Third World revolutionaries elsewhere.
all of whom shat the bed unless they created kleptocratic dynasties.
He would, I am sure, have approved of their criticism of schools that are more preoccupied with the transmission of knowledge than with the creation, among other values, of a critical spirit.
Knifing teechur so as to relieve him of his wallet displays this very critical spirit towards 'the transmission of knowledge'.
From the social point of view, the educational systems are oriented to maintaining the existing social and economic structures instead of transforming them
into shit. Chomsky proceeds to gas on in Marxist vein about how Capitalism and Free Markets are very evil. The Chinese, who had experienced the alternative, did not agree. Embracing the market, they rose up rapidly. True, this did mean greatly limiting the freedom of nutters like Chomsky while investing heavily in STEM subject research. It now looks as though they may take the lead in generative AI because they do it very much more cheaply.
A vision of a future social order is in turn based on a concept of human nature. If in fact humans are indefinitely malleable, completely plastic beings, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then they are fit subjects for the “shaping of behavior” by the state authority,
Which is why China has risen so much above India.
the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee.
Without which you just have gangs knifing each other in between selling drugs.
Those with some confidence in the human species will
wank whereas those with some confidence in the prevailing incentive system will do useful work or research. If such confidence is not justified, they will try to emigrate.
hope this is not so and will try to determine
by wanking furiously
the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community.
All of which has to do with 'mechanism design'. But then Language itself is simply a Schelling focal solution to coordination and discoordination games.
In a partly analogous way, a classical tradition spoke of artistic genius acting within and in some ways challenging a framework of rule.
A genius or daimon is a supernatural being animating a particular person, place or thing. One may as well speak of a magical gene.
Here we touch on matters that are little understood. It seems to me that we must break away, sharply and radically, from much of modern social and behavioral science if we are to move toward a deeper understanding of these matters.
By embracing magic and 'tutelary geniuses'. Why not the alchemical properties of astrological signs?
Here, too, I think that the tradition I have briefly reviewed has a contribution to offer.
That contribution is almost equal to that of toilet paper.
As I have already observed, those who were concerned with human distinctiveness and potential repeatedly were led to a consideration of the properties of language.
Which are not the monopoly of what we call languages. Indeed, the intension 'language' has an unknown and unknowable 'extension'. We can't consider the properties of things which are beyond our ken. All we can do is make arbitrary stipulations about them which may serve us well enough for some pragmatic purpose.
I think that the study of language can provide some glimmerings of understanding of rule-governed behavior
He means the reverse. Protocols and paradigms can help in the study of a language but the reverse isn't the case. We can use mathematics to study economics but we can't use economics to study math- though we can explain why math develops rapidly in places where there is a strong economic motive to have better ways of calculating certain things.
and the possibilities for free and creative action within the framework of a system of rules that in part, at least, reflect intrinsic properties of human mental organization.
Or cellular automaton or other such beasties which exist only 'in silico'. Consider Conway's Game of Life which came out in 1970. It is Turing complete and can simulate a 'universal constructor' or any other Turing machine including a universal grammar.
It seems to me fair to regard the contemporary study of language
by useless shitheads like himself
as in some ways a return to the Humboldtian concept of the form of language: a system of generative processes rooted in innate properties of mind but permitting, in Humboldt’s phrase, an infinite use of finite means.
Humboldt made some interesting discoveries about exotic languages. Chomsky didn't.
Language cannot be described as a system of organization of behaviour.
Anything at all can be described as such.
Rather, to understand how language is used,
by imbeciles or paranoid shitheads
we must discover the abstract Humboldtian form of language – its generative grammar, in modern terms.
That's easily done. The generative grammar for talking bollocks involves ex falso quodlibet and cascading intensional fallacies. Throw in a bit of gesture politics and you can pose as a public intellectual decade after decade without ever saying anything true or interesting.
To learn a language is to construct for oneself this abstract system, of course unconsciously.
No. It is merely to acquire proficiency in a particular type of communication. There is no 'unicity' when it comes to countable abstract systems with an infinite model (such being the case for Chomsky's universal grammar) because of the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem. Even if some such thing were imbibed unconsciously it is vanishingly improbable that anyone else imbibed the same thing.
The linguist and pyschologist can proceed to study the use and acquistion of language only insofar as they have some grasp of the properties of the system that has been mastered by the person who knows the language.
This is a false claim. To get British citizenship, I had to show proficiency in English. I also had to see a Doctor after receiving an injury to my skull. In both cases, the people who tested me had no 'grasp of the properties of the system'. They applied a test in a mechanical manner to check I comprehended information presented in English and that I could respond correctly to questions like 'who is the Prime Minister of the UK'. One doesn't have to know everything about a Language or everything about Neurology in order to determine if a person speaks that language and is not concussed or suffering mental impairment.
Furthermore, it seems to me that a good case can be made in support of the empirical claim that such a system can be acquired, under the given conditions of time and access, only by a mind that is endowed with certain specific properties that we can now tentatively describe in some detail.
Chomsky's mind's specific property is that it is shit. He has made a lot of noise but no useful contribution to anything.
As long as we restrict ourselves, conceptually, to the investigation of behavior, its organization, its development through interaction with the environment, we are
doing something potentially useful for which the market might reward us or which will have some Social benefit for which a philanthropist or provider of Public Goods might pay and propagate.
bound to miss these characteristics of language and mind.
which are unknowable or wholly imaginary.
Other aspects of human psychology and culture might, in principle, be studied in a similar way.
One could study fartology to determine what type of fart would trigger a Revolution such that Social Justice is achieved within a framework of fiscal subsidiarity, environmental sustainability and free and compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all heterosexual males.
Conceivably, we might in this way develop a social science based on
bullshit
empirically wellfounded propositions concerning human nature.
e.g. human nature tends to turn into corpse nature after decapitation
Just as we study the range of humanly attainable languages,
we can't because the range is unknown
with some success, we might also try to study the forms of artistic expression or, for that matter, scientific knowledge that humans can conceive, and perhaps even the range of ethical systems and social structures in which humans can live and function, given their intrinsic capacities and needs.
In which case why not go one up on those who conduct such studies by studying that study? Why stop there? There is an infinite regress here. The meta-physicist claims to lay down the limits of physics but the meta-meta-physicist will then lay down the limits of metaphysics and so on. But those Societies which are becoming more productive and thus taking over territory and resources from stupid metaphysical or magical cunts, invest in first order studies of a utilitarian type.
Perhaps one might go on to project a concept of social organization that would – under given conditions of material and spiritual culture – best encourage and accommodate the fundamental human need – if such it is – for spontaneous initiative, creative work, solidarity, pursuit of social justice.
Fartology postulates the existence of a sequence of farts which can achieve all this. Sadly, it is underfunded.
I do not want to exaggerate, as I no doubt have, the role of investigation of language. Language is the product of human intelligence that is, for the moment, most accessible to study.
Nope. You have to go to the fucking Amazon forest to find out about exotic languages. Math is what is most accessible and cheapest to study.
A rich tradition held language to be a mirror of mind.
No. The ancient saying was 'wine provides the mirror of the mind, just as bronze provides the mirror of the body'. We use language deceptively and strategically. In vino veritas- guys speak their mind when drunk. Sadly, beer swilling Teutonic pedagogues like Herder came to the startling conclusion, towards the end of the eighteenth century, that their own word salad represented 'reflection' (Besonnenheit) rather than vomit.
To some extent, there is surely truth and useful insight in this idea.
There is none.
I am no less puzzled by the topic “language and freedom” than when I began – and no less intrigued. In these speculative and sketchy remarks there are gaps so vast that one might question what would remain, when metaphor and unsubstantiated guess are removed.
Shit. But that's all that Chomsky was capable of producing. Whatever he read or heard about, he failed to digest but did turn into a prodigious turd.
It is sobering to realize – as I believe we must – how little we have progressed in our knowledge of human beings and society,
at this very time, the foundations were being laid for the type of machine translation, speech recognition and generative AI we all now find so useful. Some of those involved in this research are now very very fucking rich. They can change political- perhaps even geo-political- outcomes. Meanwhile everything Chomsky praised or spent time on turned out to be mischievous, mendacious, shite.
or even in formulating clearly the problems that might be seriously studied. But there are, I think, a few footholds that seem fairly firm. I like to believe that the intensive study of one aspect of human psychology – human language – may contribute to a humanistic social science that will serve, as well, as an instrument for social action.
Circle jerks. Citation Cartels. Woke 'cancel culture'. But that triggered a massive backlash.
It must, needless to say, be stressed that social action cannot await a firmly established theory of human nature and society,
self-interested actions in various markets were based on a 'firmly established theory' which, however, was capable of considerable fine-tuning to improve outcomes.
nor can the validity of the latter be determined by our hopes and moral judgements.
Had Chomsky's hopes been fulfilled or had his moral judgments been enforced, his world would have turned to shit. Americans would now be speaking either Russian or Chinese.
The two – speculation and action – must progress as best they can, looking forward to the day when theoretical inquiry will provide a firm guide to the unending, often grim, but never hopeless struggle for freedom and social justice.
A firm guide would have slapped Chomsky silly the moment he started indulging in ultracrepidarian bullshit. He was a linguist. He should have found ways to make foreign languages easier to learn or spent his time compiling dictionaries or doing other such donkey work. Instead, he babbled nonsense and acted as a Pied Piper to two generations of low IQ grad students who ended up wasting their lives.
When you go to a foreign country whose language you don't speak, you often feel that you are like a prisoner. There is so much you want to do but which you can't do because you don't know the language. Even for people living in their own countries who don't know English, there is this feeling of lack of enfranchisement. Automatic translators greatly help such people. There are villagers in China and India and Nigeria who are using these tools to export what they produce at a much higher price by being able to interact directly with potential customers on the other side of the globe. Thus, in practical terms, mathematical and highly theoretical work on both natural and artificial languages has contributed greatly to increased Freedom- economic, intellectual, artistic, cultural, etc.- all over the world. Chomsky's contribution to this was zero or negative. Let this be his epitaph.
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