01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Linguistic Wars In the field of linguistics, and specifically in Chomsky's department at mit, the late 1960s was a period of dissension and discord among faculty and students. A September 1972 New York Times article called "Former Chomsky Disciples Hurl Harsh Words at the Master" quotes Chomsky's colleague John Ross as saying that Chomsky was so committed to the framework he had elaborated that "he can't see where it's inadequate" (70). Ross and other "schismatics" insisted that "you can't do syntax without doing semantics as well," a premise that "transformational grammarians" such as Chomsky did not accept. The article also quotes George Lakoff, another MIT colleague: "Since Chomsky's syntax does not and cannot admit context, he can't even account for the word `please.'. . . Nor can he handle hesitations like `oh' and `eh.' But it's virtually impossible to talk to Chomsky about these things. He's a genius, and he fights dirty when he argues. He uses every trick in the book, and he's the best debater I've ever met."

Visit the Discussion Salon on Linguistics

The linguistic wars took on such momentum that they broke out of academic circles and became known to the public. They were well rehearsed in the mainstream media ­ including the New York Times, roughly six years after the fact. A great number of persistent misconceptions arose from the schism these skirmishes created within the field of linguistics. Perhaps it is for these reasons that the public perception of linguistics is both frozen in time and based upon inaccuracies; knowledgable people working outside the field are likely to have heard of deep structure and generative grammar, but remain unaware of the substantial advances made by Chomsky and others since. At first, those people who were working with Chomsky at MIT in the late 1960s on the work that was overturning Bloomfield-inspired linguistics rallied around him. He was calling into question a whole field as it had, until that point, been understood. Paul Postal recalls: It was really a psychologically painful situation, because [Bloomfieldian linguistics] was itself a revolutionary linguistics that had gained its ascendancy by proclaiming that it was the scientific way to study language, and that traditional linguistics was unscientific. [The followers of Bloomfield] had, themselves, trampled on people rather forcefully, made a lot of enemies, did a lot of unpleasant things. Now, bang, not very long after they were really in place, they were suddenly being attacked, and in a way that was incomprehensible to them. They were being told that they weren't being scientific. That just had to be a nightmare for them. (qtd. in R. A. Harris 73) Gradually, some of Chomsky's people came to the conclusion that his approach needed radical reworking, and they formulated what was considered by certain observers to be a more satisfactory one. Robin Lakoff describes it in rather dramatic terms: As of 1965, and even later, we find in the bowels of Building 20 [the home of the MIT linguistics department] a group of dedicated co-conspirators, united by missionary zeal and shared purpose. A year or two later, the garment is unravelling, and by the end of the decade the mood is total warfare. The field was always closed off against the outside; no serpent was introduced from outside of Eden to seduce or corrupt. Any dissension had to be home-brewed. (qtd. in R. A. Harris 102) Much has been made of this dissension; in fact, a recent book argues that the rift between the interpretivists (Chomsky) and the generative semantics program (George Lakoff, McCawley, Postal, and Ross) was not quite so clear. "The two programs were in fact quite complementary, and the tensions between them not only bound each to the other, but also steered them jointly on to a more productive path than either of them individually might otherwise have taken" (Huck and Goldsmith 3). But Chomsky downplays its importance and his own part in this "war." And he especially condemns R. A. Harris's view that "everything must be a power play, a religion. . . The real world has no resemblance to these fantasies, a fact easily demonstrated by a look at the published literature" (31 Mar. 1995). Chomsky continues: The "dissension" between, say, Jackendoff and others (many of them not my students: Lakoff, Postal, etc.) was from about 1966 or so. I was never really part of it. . . my one participation in the debate was in 1969, at a conference in Texas, where I flew in and flew out immediately at the impassioned request of a former student there, Stanley Peters, who wanted me to make some public response to the by then rather hysterical tone of the generative semanticists, all pretty childish in my opinion, and in 1969 I had quite different things on my mind. (3 Apr. 1995) What kind of things? While the battle raged at MIT, Chomsky reached "the peak" of his antiwar activity. Between fulfilling this commitment, conducting his linguistic research, and publishing the results, he "hardly would have had time for `power struggles' even if I had been interested" (14 Aug. 1995). It is also notable that "every single appointment in my own area in those years in my own department was a generative semanticist (Postal, Ross, Perlmutter, Kiparsky ­ insofar as he worked on these topics) and not a single person who I was actually working with (Lasnik, Jackendoff, Emonds, Kayne, etc.) was appointed ­ facts always omitted by the `postmodern historians' (i.e., R. A. Harris) of this period, though they know them perfectly well" (14 Aug. 1995). The other issue that was generated by this conflict involved the left's perception of Chomsky's scientific work: many began to consider it rigid because it was founded upon principles of inherited genetic abilities and immutable categories, the anathema of left-wing thinking, which stresses the role that environment plays in individual development. Chomsky dismisses this point of view as "completely irrational" for the following reasons: First, the denial of inherited genetic abilities is simply ridiculous. Looking beyond truisms, we find, as everywhere in the biological world, that the effects of inherited genetic abilities are enormous. Second, why the enormous prevalence and success of ideas that could not conceivably be correct, like the various "empty organism" theories? That question arises after one has shown these theories to be wrong, in this case, scarcely more than absurd. I also suggested an answer: empty organism theories are very useful to those who are engaged in manipulation and control, because they remove all moral barriers to such actions (for the good of the targets, of course!). I suggested that that is one likely reason for the appeal of these absurd notions to what is called "the left" . . . and to the other advocates of engineering of consent and social management. . . Third, not only is it very clear that there are highly significant genetic factors in the mental (as all other) domains, but we should be delighted to discover the fact, since without such initial constraints, there can be no significant development, creative acts, and so on. (13 Feb. 1996) Another row erupted in 1972 that had a familiar echo to it. In December of 1971, Chomsky had reviewed, once again (in the New York Review of Books), the work of B. F. Skinner, this time his extremely popular Beyond Freedom and Dignity. The book advocated applying the techniques of behavioral science to mute antisocial tendencies in society with the objective of creating a more benign civilization. Skinner had been denounced by numerous libertarians and humanists as authoritarian, but it was Chomsky who, after a long and detailed analysis of the alleged substantive content of the work under review, described his envisioned society as akin to "a well-run concentration camp with inmates spying on one another and the gas ovens smoking in the distance." An article in the London Times in February of 1972, "America's Great Intellectual Prizefight," quoted Skinner: "I wonder how a man of such intelligence can do a thing like that," he said sullenly. "We are on opposite sides of the debate, and I'm very content with that. I can't take him seriously as a critic. He's a mentalist and refuses to accept that there is a science of behaviour. He's unaware of what's going on in the field of behaviour modification, and he's having trouble with his linguistics."