Reflections on Language (Chomsky, 1975) With two updates

     Noam Chomsky Reflections on Language (1975) Chomsky’s famous book defending his

view that there is some innate language-learning capability, and that details of its nature are at least in part accessible to empirical research. A dense text, made more so by NC’s irritating habit of using letters where fictitious names would do just as well, or words would do better. Also, several of his examples purportedly showing some universal grammatical rule don’t in fact do so, but merely demonstrate some of the quirks of English grammar.
     His general thesis is IMO valid enough. He points out that it’s a specific example of the general rule that theories are under-determined by evidence, in that language as experienced by the child does not offer any transparent clues to its nature, content, and form. Clearly, children must have some sort of decoding capacity built in, else they could not arrive at language competence (which they do).
     The maxim of indeterminacy of theories is one that critics and supporters of science would do well to remember. Many people believe, falsely, that science deals in certainties, that if something is scientifically proven, it’s certain. It’s not. It’s just proven. OTOH, non-scientific beliefs aren’t proven. At best, there are grounds for belief, a phrase that means that supporting evidence in the speaker’s opinion outweighs refuting evidence.
     This is not the best book to give a person who wants to find out something about why the preponderant opinion is that children have an instinct to learn language and will do so with a minimal amount of environmental input (and often in despite of it!) ** (2000)

     Update 2012: On reflection, I think that Chomsky has made a number of errors because he focuses on written rather than on spoken language. His famous distinction between surface and deep structure IMO demonstrates that he has a tin ear for speech. Intonation differentiates what he calls surface and deep structure very nicely. Intonation is in fact essential. Chomsky should have asked himself, Why do English speakers agree pretty well 100% on which bits of sound form a word?

     Update 20250502: I discovered a few weeks ago that NC was unilingual. I think that's the reason for the erroneous claim of the surface/deep structure of  language. Any multilingual knows that intonation is an essential aspect of every language spoken by humans. Intonation defines both the structure (syntax) of an utterance, and defines the semantics of what would otherwise be identical utterances.  For example, in English a rising inflection signals a question, or incompleteness, or an invitation to agree, etc, depending on context and dialect.

     For an example of intonational semantics, say the following sentence 5 times, stressing a different word in it each time: "He arrived here this morning." Then do the same with a  rising inflection.

     One of the problems in every stage production is the right or best intonation for every speech. Consider also the semantic role of intonation in Mandarin and related languages.

Eat the Rich (book)

     P. J. O’Rourke Eat the Rich (1998) PJ is influenced by Friedman, and it shows. He makes the same mistakes Friedman makes: a) he confuses wealth and money; b) he assumes the market is honest; and c) he ignores the environment ("externals"). Apart from that, he makes many useful points about economics, even if he doesn’t follow through on them, and draws inconsistent conclusions from them/
     He’s right that the market is, despite its messiness, the best way to allocate economic resources. But he (like his mentor Friedman) has several blind spots. The worst is his assumption that prices are efficient when they reflect the intersection between the desire of the seller to get the highest price and the buyer’s desire to pay the lowest. He sees no necessary connection between price and costs; he doesn’t even mention this relationship. Yet he believes that subsidies for businesses are bad, and doesn’t see why: It’s because subsidies cause misstatement of the cost of goods, false prices, if you will.. So, he doesn’t see that government-built infrastructure is a subsidy; he thinks infrastructure one of the functions of government. For example, government-built highways allow truckers to operate at less than the true cost of trucking, and so underprice their services. This means that railroads can’t compete on short haul, small shipments (they could when their competition was horse-drawn transport, remember.) It seems to me that if government is to supply infrastructure, it must somehow price such goods so that each user pays a correct share of the cost. Variable license fees and taxes are the only way to do this. However, trucking companies are successful in keeping their licence fees and taxes below their share of the cost of highways. PJ would approve of this. He believes in as little (and as inexpensive) government as possible. He doesn't see less cost for government means higher costs elsewhere in the economy.
     He’s wrong about government’s redistribution function, which he thinks is evil. All economies are engines of redistribution, and the question must always be, what’s redistributed for whose benefit and under whose control.. He doesn’t ask this question, and in fact trashes the idea that government should bring some sort of fairness into the redistribution. He’s right about that, but for the wrong reason. Government must redistribute the demand for wealth (ie, money) so that the suppliers have a reasonably stable customer base. To put it another way: when the economy produces large quantities of wealth, as ours does, the problem is no longer scarcity but surplus. That means that the problem becomes one of consumption, not of production.
     PJ seems to have some inkling of this in his brief attack on military spending (done as a throw-away comment, by the way.) But, as usual, he doesn’t follow through, because he can’t conceive of any common, ie public, interest that supervenes individual desire. (He has misread Adam Smith, as so many Friedmanites do). He doesn’t in other words draw the obvious (to me ) conclusion that government spending on military hardware etc is a misallocation of resources, and a profound distortion of the market. If the money so spent were distributed more or less evenly to everyone, it would quickly find its way into the pockets of those who supply what most people want, which is neither war nor the preparation for war.
     But most of all PJ is wrong about the desirability of getting rich, in part because he has such an infantile notion of wealth. He’s quite right to say that free market capitalism (however badly implemented) is a fabulous engine of wealth creation. He doesn’t ask whether the prices paid for wealth reflect their true costs. He twits the Swedes for borrowing their prosperity, but he doesn’t ask the obvious question whether environmental degradation isn’t a more serious form of borrowing wealth.
     Part of the reason PJ doesn’t ask this question is that he doesn’t really understand money. He says it’s a symbol, and a medium of exchange, yet he still thinks of being wealthy as having lots of money. This confusion of wealth and money is a fundamental error, and leads to the insane notion that the function of an economy is to create money. Or rather, that the more money is made, the richer people are. Yet at the same time, PJ uses money correctly in a number of cases, such as in measuring relative levels of consumption (GDP per person). It’ exasperating to see someone staring at a bunch of trees and and unable to see a forest.
     The book is irritating because PJ insinuates a lot of wrong-headed notions even as he criticises equally wrong-headed ones. **

The W Heath Robinson Story Book (book)

     Anonymous. The W Heath Robinson Story Book (1979) A compilation of stories first published in Playbox Annual (1916-25), republished to show off Robinson’s drawings. They are in the same graphic style as Beardsley's flowing curlicued lines and large black areas. Very nice to look at. Robinson of course had a less louche sensibility than Beardsley, but both were fascinated by the bizarre and the fantastic. Robinson introduces all kinds of odd and endearing details: for example, when the frogs answer the Frog King’s summons, they bring their families - tadpoles, of course! The illustrations suit the stories very well: they provide a lovely dream-like, funny but also edgy quality to the book.
     The stories themselves are told in a clear, straightforward style, well adapted to young readers, who mostly want to know what happens next. Most of the tales are quests, in which the hero (often a younger, foolish brother) encounters a variety of magical helpers, and has the wit to both accept and use them. If there is a message in them, it’s that you should listen to whatever advice  you get, no matter how weird it sounds. Names and other details indicate that the stories are adapted from folk-lore  collections (at the time folk lore was major academic industry).  The number of magical, black-box-like devices that assist the heroes is astonishing, as is the general mundaneness of the rewards: the Princess, of course, but mostly jewellery and food. I suppose these witness to the hard and dreary life of the original tellers of these tales. A good read, and worth looking at carefully. ***

Guns, Germs, and Steel (book)

     Jared Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999) Diamond’s thesis is simple: in the long run, over several thousand years, what determined the dominance of Eurasia in human history was its early development of food production, and this in turn was governed by climate, ecology, and geography. These interacted. The ecology provided a large suite of plants and animals for domestication, and the geography gave Eurasia a wide band of similar climates within which to diffuse the new technology. By contrast, Africa and the Americas had a much smaller suite of plants and no large mammals suitable for domestication, while Australia had essentially none. Africa and the American continents also had climatic and geographic barriers to north-south diffusion of food production when it was developed.
     The thesis is persuasive, and Diamond’s point that long-term trends in history cannot have been influenced very much by culture or idiosyncratic accidents such as the rise of some anomalous individuals. He is also acutely aware of short term culturally determined twists in history. For example, the adoption of new technologies is influenced by a culture’s openness; but a culture that doesn’t quickly adopt new techniques will be overwhelmed (conquered, out-competed) by cultures that do. But individual decisions by rulers over large coherent cultures can have long-term consequences: China’s long decline in technology was caused by internal power struggles, and that’s why Western Eurasia dominates today rather than China. And so on.
     What might be called the E-C-G theory of history sounds like a theory that explains everything, but not quite. Diamond claims that it is a statistical theory: it can explain, and to some extent predict, large scale phenomena, but not small scale ones. In this respect human history is like all historical sciences, and Diamond insists that human history can be brought to a more objectively scientific state by learning from the  the methodologies of the other, simpler, historical sciences. These sciences are even capable of a kind of prediction: If theory X is true, then certain should be found in the historical record. In his defence of historical sciences Diamond doesn’t quite say what I want to say: Physics has been so spectacularly successful because it’s simple.
     A rich and suggestive book, made better by Diamond’s ability, unusual in an American academic, to write clearly. **** (2000)

The Hollow (book)

Agatha Christie The Hollow (1946) Late period Christie. John Christow, Harley street doctor and medical researcher, is murdered, and everything at first points towards Gerda his wife; then all clues point away, but  lead nowhere. Poirot eventually realises that this is the most important clue, and manages to arrive on the scene just as the wife is about to murder Henrietta, the dead man’s mistress (who, along with the other members of the Angakell clan, has been protecting her.) Christie takes more time developing character in this book, and has some interesting things to say about the creative process via Henrietta, who is a sculptor, and the scientific mind, via Poirot (of course), John Christow, and John’s son Terence.
     Christie does some nice satire on the upper classes, and her portrait of Lucy Angakell, an amiable sociopath, is priceless. Other Christie motifs: the long shadows of the past, the plight of the working woman, the malign effects of over submissiveness, the nature of obsessive relationships, the persistence of feudal attitudes in modern England, and ironic but retributive justice (Gerda  dies by drinking the poisoned tea she intended for Henrietta).
     Very well done. Could make a very good three or four part series. This book marks the beginning of Christie’s late phase, when she allows herself the luxury of digressions and extended character portrayal instead of sticking closely to the puzzle plot. The effect is that the plot becomes more complex than the puzzle, which makes the book much more interesting. She doesn’t always carry it off (in her last books, she rambles too much), but when as here she integrates all the apparent digressions into the main line of the story, the result is very effective. ****

Smoking (and quitting)

For some reason, smoking came up in conversation this evening. At one time, I smoked 30 or more cigarettes per day. Today, that would cost me $12-$15 per day here in Ontario. Enough to buy a car.

I quite not by trying to quit, but by deciding I would not have the next cigarette. Within two weeks I was longer smoking, but I relapsed twice. Now I haven't had that next cigarette for forty years.

The Meme Machine (book)

Susan Blackmore The Meme Machine (1999). Blackmore explicates an extended version of Dawkins notion of memes. It constitutes a rough theory of memes. She starts by observing that humans are imitators -- in fact, other animals hardly imitate at all, and even the ones who do (e.g., parrots) imitate a limited range of behaviours, whereas humans imitate just about everything. She thinks this behaviour a) needs explaining; and b) has consequences. The consequence she sees are memes (short for mimemes). A meme is whatever a human imitates. It can be relatively simple (e.g., a handshake) or quite complex (eg, a song.) Memes can combine into memeplexes.
     The most significant aspect of memes is that by being imitated they are replicated. If we now look at things from their point of view, they are replicators -- and replicators inevitably evolve. Blackmore’s explanation of evolution from this p.o.v is excellent. She draws various conclusions, some of which are clearly testable (and she says so) and some of which aren’t. The most interesting general conclusions are as follows:
     First, that human culture is an effect of memes' evolution. Those memes that replicate successfully constitute the culture. And the culture changes because of course the replicators continually evolve. Humans continually invent new behaviours, because imitations aren’t necessarily exact, and memes may be varied or combined with other memes. Any new memes or variations of existing ones may (not) be easy to copy (whatever that means), so some new memes will proliferate at the expense of existing memes. Thus the culture changes. This is most obvious in the case of fashion, but can be seen in other aspects of culture.
     Second, that memeplexes may include memes accidentally, in which case these memes survive not by intrinsic merit but because they are dragged along by the successful replicators.
     Third, that the most successful memeplexes include religions.
      Fourth, that when memes first appeared, that is when humans became better imitators, whatever genes were implicated both in imitation and in improved survival of the imitators would also spread. This, she thinks, may account for both the very large human brain and for language. Both the large brain and the language are good for memes.
     Fifth, that memes may proliferate to the detriment of their carriers, and may therefore in the long term destroy their own vehicles.
     Sixth, that the self or ‘I’ is an illusion, a memeplex. From this last conclusion she speculates further that it is possible to live without this illusion, and points to various mystical traditions that say much the same thing. Her last chapter is a re-writing of Buddhist doctrine, and therefore also resonates with Christian and other mysticisms.
     A very interesting book, which I shall reread.
****