Syntax 1:1, April 1998, 1936

Noam Chomskys Minimalist Program and the Philosophy of Mind. An Interview. ` le Marty Camilo J. Cela-Conde and Gise Palma, Spain 1997

1. Cela-Conde & Marty You have many times mentioned that the Cartesian idea about the ability to use linguistic signs to express freelyformed thoughts is a very good approach to understanding what human language is. Perhaps because of this, your views have often been described as Cartesian. However, there exists a different way of considering Cartesianism- the one that Cognitive Functionalism holds when proposing a dualism between biological brain structures and mental functions. To express this in Fodors words, from the point of view of Cognitive Functionalism, it is a kind of chance that psychological systems end up by being embodied in biological systems, and Biology has no power to explain psychological phenomena. Is it possible to be a Cartesian in the first way and not in the second, as the Minimalist Program seems to indicate? Noam Chomsky One can interpret the concept Cartesian in various ways, focusing attention on one or another component of the ideas that were developed or influenced by Descartes. One observation that played a significant role in Cartesian thought is that human language has creative aspects. Descartes and his successors argued that these creative aspects of language use (my term, not theirs) cannot be explained in mechanical terms, and would provide the clearest evidence that another creature has a mind like ours. They are manifestations of a second substance, res cogitans, in Cartesian metaphysics. It is possible that Descartes was familiar with the work of Juan Huarte, who some time earlier had emphasized the generative power of ordinary human intelligence that enables active minds, assisted by the subject only, without the help of any Body, to produce a thousand Conceits they never heard spoke of. Huarte went on to distinguish this unique and shared human capacity, infinite in scope, from still higher forms of creativity that are not a common human possession, he held. Similar ideas were developed extensively in later years, particularly in the Romantic era. The basic observations and insights seem quite reasonable, and significant as well. They can be rephrased without reliance on the metaphysical dualism
*This interview has been supported by the project PS95-0059 of the Comisio n Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnolog a, Ministerio de Educacio n (Spain).
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that was shattered by Isaac Newtons demolition of the mechanical philosophy, which left us with a picture of the world that is antimaterialist and relies on spiritual forces, as Margaret Jacob puts it picturesquely but capturing the essential point. Newtons own position was that a purely materialistic or mechanistic physics is impossible, Alexander Koyre concludes. Since then there has been no coherent formulation of metaphysical dualism or the mind/body problem, in my opinion. It is possible to reconstitute a kind of dualism in a different form: for example, in the ways you mention, drawn from theoretical cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Suppose that we investigate some of the functions of the brain (call them mental functions) in isolation from the brain structures themselves. This can be a perfectly legitimate and reasonable procedure, but we should be careful not to draw unwarranted conclusions from it. The procedure is not restricted to mental functions; other properties of the world can be studied in a similar way, and regularly are. Thus, one can study the solar system as a system of point masses, within rational mechanics, basically a branch of mathematics. And one can study chemical properties in isolation from properties of particles in motion; in fact, that is pretty much the way chemistry was studied until the quantum theoretic revolution made it possible to unify chemistry with a radically different kind of physics. Chemistry achieved its triumphs . . . in isolation from the newly emerging science of physics, a leading historian of the subject points out (Arnold Thackray). The same was true of genetics prior to the discovery of the mechanisms involved, and there are many other examples. I do not think that the mental aspects of the world are different in this respect from others. Though it is possible and sometimes useful to study certain properties of a system X in abstraction, it would be an unacceptable form of dogmatism, in my opinion, to reject insights into the properties that derive from other ways of studying the system X. That is true whether X is the planetary system, chemical properties, genetics, mental functions, or anything else. Suppose we have two theories of cognitive function, and it is discovered that only one of them is compatible with brain structures. It would make little sense to disregard this evidence on the grounds that we are investigating mental functions in abstraction from brain structures. In the post-Newtonian world, there seems to be no coherent alternative to John Lockes suggestion that, just as motion has effects which we can in no way conceive motion able to produce, so also certain kinds of organized matter may have a faculty of thinking. As others concluded in the following century, those properties termed mental are the result of the organical structure of the brain just as matter is possessed of powers of attraction and repulsion that act at a distance (La Mettrie, Joseph Priestley). We can say that it is a kind of chance that organized matter should exhibit powers of attraction and repulsion, or properties of chemical affinity or psychological phenomena. But that seems to me a misleading way of expressing the fact that empirical truths do not hold a priori.
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The cognitive functionalist approach seems to me to draw from Cartesianism the wrong property: the dualism that made sense as a scientific hypothesis when Descartes formulated it, but that cannot be sustained, as Newton showed. Cognitive Functionalism reconstructs a dualistic perspective in a form that is methodologically useful as a way of investigating the world in the present state of our understanding, much as it was in the case of chemistry for most of its modern history, pre-DNA genetics, etc. But it should not be regarded as anything more than a temporary convenience, in my opinion, and surely not invested with any metaphysical import. In response to your question, then, I now think, and always have thought, that it is possible in fact, quite appropriate to be Cartesian in the first sense that you mention, but not in the second. The conclusion holds for the Minimalist Program as of all earlier work of mine. 2. C. & M. In your paper Language and Nature (Mind, 1995) you hold that methodological dualism is even more pernicious than metaphysical dualism. To what kind of dualism does the computer metaphor belong? N.C. The computer metaphor is harmless, perhaps even useful, if recognized to be nothing more than a metaphor. If more than that is intended, I think we do fall into the danger of methodological dualism by which I mean the demand that one must put aside the normal assumptions of rational inquiry when we investigate mental aspects of the world. Let me stress that no one (at least, no one we are discussing here) advocates methodological dualism; but we often find manifestations of it in practice, as I have tried to illustrate elsewhere. In my opinion, these are pervasive features of contemporary theoretical cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Sometimes it is an aid to the imagination to think of mental functions as software and the brain as hardware. We can then say that psychology (including linguistics) studies the software, while the brain sciences study the hardware. But for the reasons I already mentioned, this should be regarded as at best a convenience. The brain is an object in the natural world; we can only assume that those phenomena termed mental are the result of the organical structure of the brain in this respect, they are much like chemical, optical, electrical, and other properties. They raise no fundamental issues of principle, only questions of fact. The software/hardware distinction is much more obscure, and raises all sorts of problems that do not arise when we are considering a natural system and its properties. The software/hardware distinction is not a property of the device itself, but rather depends on designers intent, standard use, and other factors that do not arise when we study a natural system, in particular, the brain and its mental properties. In short, the computer metaphor is innocent if adopted as a convenience, but can be misleading if taken too seriously. 3. C. & M. The kind of mental computation that you explain in your
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Minimalist Program is reminiscent of the connectionist one. We would like to know whether this is a coincidence or does it reflect deeper relationships. N.C. Connectionist theories study certain properties of brain structures in abstraction. Like any other theories, they have to demonstrate their legitimacy in terms of the insight and explanatory power they provide. In the case of language, there is nothing much to discuss: there are few results of any significance, to my knowledge. A good deal of effort has been expended in trying to model certain marginal aspects of language acquisition in these terms (for example, acquisition of irregular verbs in English). The results are inconclusive, and it is not clear what import they would have even if something could be demonstrated. There are some elements of language use that might well lend themselves to investigation in connectionist terms. Suppose, for example, that Peter is a speaker of my language (meaning a language similar to mine, by some criterion that varies with circumstances and intentions). If I meet Peter, my sensory system quickly adapts to his speech, and I am able to interpret his utterances by the mechanisms of my own linguistic system; I understand him to be saying what I would say using expressions that are a counterpart to what I hear, under this transduction. These familiar everyday experiences can extend over quite a broad range, and are by no means trivial to explain. Peripheral processing systems with a connectionist character might turn out to play a role in this very rapid adaptation. Other such possibilities can be imagined, and may well be worth pursuing. There is a great deal of discussion in the literature of what it would mean if an account of cognitive functions in terms of neural nets might prove to be feasible. Most of this discussion seems to me to be another illustration of methodological dualism. I doubt that the literature of embryology includes much debate over what it would mean if unstructured models with unknown properties were to be able to account for development of organisms without appeal to complex constructions in terms of concentration of chemicals, the cells internal program, production of proteins, and so on. As for the Minimalist Program, it seems to me to be as remote in conception from connectionist architecture as other computational models of language have been. To mention one of the simplest properties, the minimalist program, like others, assumes that compositionality is a fundamental and elementary property of language systems; one of the few admissible operations takes two objects already formed, attaches one to the other, and constructs a new object with the properties of the target of attraction. Perhaps one can express similar properties within a sufficiently intricate connectionist model, perhaps not; the matter is debated. Whatever the outcome, for the moment it seems reasonably clear that a fundamental and elementary property of computational models is, at best, a strange and complex property of connectionist models, one that is unexpected and unnatural (if even formulable).
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4. C. & M. Those who hold the mind/brain identity thesis are often criticized from this point of view: a simple act, like that of picking up a book that lies on a table, implies the need of a decision to pick up the book (something like the nous poeiticus of Aristotle). Do you think that we must postulate the presence in brain activity of something more than: I. II. III. Perceiving the book Remembering emotions linked to previous readings Giving motor orders to pick up the book?

N.C. I am skeptical of these formulations throughout. To begin with, a mind/brain identity thesis presupposes some way of distinguishing mind and brain. I know of no sensible way to make the distinction, except in the irrelevant sense already mentioned: we can study certain properties of the brain termed mental in abstraction from others, as a convenience. Secondly, there is no reason to believe that an action must be preceded by a decision to undertake it. I may pick up a book from the table, or say that it is too cold to swim, without first making a decision to perform the act. An account of behavior in such terms mingles different modes of description and explanation in a way that is bound to produce confusion, not illumination. In ordinary common sense usage, we speak of people making decisions and acting on these decisions, much as we speak of comets heading towards the earth but (fortunately) missing, and waves crashing against the shore. The natural sciences do not try to make sense of the ordinary intentional descriptions in the case of comets and waves, and there is little reason to expect that the sciences, if they ever reach as far as human action, will try to incorporate common sense ways of describing rational and appropriate behavior. It should be added that this is a big IF: the goal is remote, and perhaps unattainable for reasons rooted in human cognitive capacity, something which, if true, should surprise no one who thinks that humans are part of the organic world, not angels. In ordinary usage, we describe human action in terms of what people perceive, remember, intend, decide, etc. Within the sciences, there has been quite interesting work about perception and the organization of motor activity, but it does not reach even contemplate the explanation of behavior. In my personal opinion, speculation about the matter is not very useful, any more than it would have been useful two centuries ago to speculate about the nature of chemical elements (which Lavoisier thought we might never come to know), the strange semi-spiritual character of electricity that so intrigued Newton, and so on. The world is as it is. In one part of life, we try to gain theoretical insight into its nature and workings, making use of the scienceforming capacities that are one component of the human mind, about which we understand as little as about most other complicated matters. In another part of life, we try to make sense of what is happening around us in the only terms that our ordinary shared understanding allows.
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5. C. & M. Even in this case, it does not seem impossible to find a neurobiological correlate of what would be a decision some kind of decision, at least. The discovery of a slow negative DC-potential that appears in some cortical areas prior to intentional acts gives way to the socalled readiness potential or Bereitschaftspotential (BP) (Kornhuber & Deecke, 1965). As Deecke (1996) suggests, the finding of the BP may encourage philosophers of the mind to consider pre-rolandic aspects (motivation, will, providence) and not just retro-rolandic aspects (perception, cognition). Perhaps it is not yet possible to explain behavior along these lines, but it seems that we are closer to understanding it than Newton was about the semi-spiritual character of electricity. N.C. Accounts of how a cockroach walks are formulated in terms of the organization of neurobehavioral units (oscillators, servomechanisms, etc.). If they are correct, there should be neurobiological correlates. Something similar should be true of the organization of human motor activity. Such accounts commonly involve notions that relate loosely to what we think of as plans, intentions, and so on. Theoreticians sometimes even borrow such terms as plan and intention from ordinary usage, just as physicists speak of energy and liquids and earth scientists of rivers and mountains. But as elsewhere, I see no reason to expect that the meaning of the borrowed word will relate to the ordinary one; or to put it differently, that the common sense notions will enter into theoretical explanation. Others feel differently and regard the matter as significant, even crucially significant, in this particular case (though not in others); for example, intentional realists, if I understand their argument. I am not convinced. Progress in the study of organization of behavior still leaves us very far from an explanation of behavior. The reasons have to do with phenomena of ordinary experience that were also at the heart of Cartesian thought, which distinguished between machines that are compelled to act in certain ways (given internal state and external environment), and humans who are only incited and inclined to do so, but could decide otherwise (under the same conditions). To take a standard Cartesian example, I may be highly motivated (incited and inclined) to keep my finger from the flame, but I may choose to injure myself. I may even purposefully put my finger in the flame without any conscious decision, and only come to recognize what I am doing as part of the action. Whatever is going on, at some point the motor action is (unconsciously) organized. It is at that point that scientific inquiry begins. It may postulate something like motivation, goals, etc., and will certainly seek neurological correlates to whatever is involved in the organization of behavior. But what enters into a (possibly perverse) choice of action lies elsewhere, so the Cartesians argued, not without reason, I think. That is the classic problem of choice of action, of will and decision. Suppose we knew everything about how members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, as Newton put it when reviewing the mysteries
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that confounded him. We would still, it seems, face the traditional problem of how the will decides to give one command or another, say, to put ones finger in the flame, despite the factors that incite and incline us to do otherwise. There have of course been many efforts, including very sophisticated and intriguing ones, to show that the problem is misformulated and does not arise, or has one or another solution. Personally, I think the basic problems remain about as they always were. To rephrase the traditional issues in the terminology you suggest, if neurobiological correlates of something like a decision are found, that still leaves unanswered the traditional problems of choice of action. Still not addressed is the question of how the will makes this particular decision, not others, even overcoming powerful motivation. These questions are not raised in the empirical study of organization of behavior, even when it makes use of notions similar to plan, intention, decision, motivation, etc. Thus, in his standard review, C.R. Gallistel writes that Motivation, as I use the term here, refers to those processes in the central nervous system that organize behavior so that, in the aggregate, the animals separate acts tend towards some culminating point, or action, or state of affairs (The Organization of Action. Erlbaum 1980, p. 321). That is fine, but there is an apparently distinct problem, not contemplated: the choice of action that initiates these processes rather than different ones. The gap remains unchanged, as far as I can see, even if neurobiological correlates are found. The study of organization of behavior and its neurobiological correlates investigates how internal mechanisms enter into the act of picking up a cup from the table, but does not raise the question of how I choose to do that rather than push the cup off the table as I might, even if I would be greatly harmed by doing so. These matters seem to fall together with the creative aspect of language use, in some respects. And like it, they lie beyond our understanding, at least now, perhaps forever, as Descartes sometimes speculated. We have no serious research programs that address these problems, as far as I am aware. There seems to me no sound reason to believe that behavior is caused, in any sense of cause that we comprehend, hence no reason to expect that there will be a theory that will explain how it is caused. There may be no explanation of behavior that deals with traditional questions of philosophy of mind, questions that cannot easily be dismissed, I think. As for the suggestion that philosophers of mind consider motivation, will, providence, I do not quite understand it. Motivation and will (and in some cases providence) are what they have always considered, though the basic problems seem to me to remain about where they have always been. On the comparison between understanding behavior and understanding the semi-spiritual character of electricity (in Newtons case), I would not want to press the analogy too far, but if we do pursue it, we might well draw the
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opposite conclusion: that understanding of behavior is much more remote. The properties that Newton considered semi-spiritual are real ones: in Newtons terms, the source of electricity does not lose weight and the electricity has detectable effects, so electricity has both material and immaterial aspects, a conclusion that he interpreted in terms of the Arian heresy in his mature physical theories (he was interested in grand theory, not just physics, of course). In contrast, we do not know that there is such a topic as explaining behavior, so it seems to me. Nevertheless, there is doubtless much to learn about organization of action. Perhaps something like decisions, plans, intentions, etc., do in fact enter into a theoretical account at some appropriate level. And to repeat, we may well discover that actions need not be preceded by anything like a decision or intention in any sense of the term that relates even loosely to ordinary usage which is not to say that there is no relevant brain activity as the action is (somehow) selected, then planned, organized, and executed. 6. C. & M. Could you give us an opinion on the present day studies (Crick & Koch 1990, 1995, Damasio 1995, Penrose 1994, Smythies 1994, Freeman 1995) regarding perceptual consciousness? Are we already decoding thoughts? N.C. I do not have any informed opinion about these studies, which I read with interest but am in no position to evaluate. As far as I can see, these investigations are finding some neural correlates to what in informal intuitive terms we call thought and consciousness. But the gap is huge, and the fundamental issues that have been such a source of perplexity over the ages are not being addressed. I do not say that as a criticism. Far from it. We should pursue scientific inquiry as far as it can reach, but it is important for professionals to be very scrupulous in describing its reach. That is true whether we have in mind economists giving advice on the path to growth and development, scientists investigating brain mechanisms and cognitive functions, or any others. Whatever the interest of these achievements, a computer program that generates proofs of theorems in propositional calculus does not solve the mind/body problem, a generative grammar does not account for the creative aspect of language use, and discovery of neural activity that correlates with consciousness or categorization is not decoding thoughts. 7. C. & M. The Minimalist Program seems to include a bigger emphasis on the semantic aspects of language, moving away, in some way, from the syntactic aspects. Could this approach encourage us to search for semantic universals of human language? Could you give us some examples? N.C. I do not think there is any difference in point of view regarding syntax/semantics or semantic universals, though naturally, understanding of these matters has evolved over time.
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From the outset, work in generative grammar was motivated primarily by issues that are usually called semantic. The first comprehensive book, unpublished for many years, was my Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (195556: published in part in 1975). The opening chapter sketches the domain that this work intends to address: crucially, the fact that a person who has had limited experience with language somehow comes to understand new expressions in highly specific ways. The rest of the book tries to address the problem by proposing mechanisms that would yield the interpretation of an infinite array of expressions, given the limited experience that suffices to put them in place. Subsequent work introduces many changes, often radical ones, but follows essentially the same course. Personally, I prefer to use the term syntax to refer to these topics; others use the term semantics, which I would prefer to restrict to the study of what are often called language-world connections more properly, in my view, connections between language and other parts of the world, some within the organism (presumably, the articulatory organs and conceptual systems, among others), some outside, like the computer I am now using. This approach to language was concerned with language universals, but in a way that differs somewhat from earlier approaches. Within the framework of generative grammar, language universals are taken to be properties of the initial state of the human faculty of language, not properties observed in all or most languages. The two concepts are related, but not identical. Thus properties of the initial state commonly are not instantiated directly and individually: their effects do show up in particular languages, but typically through complex interactions involving properties of the initial state and the experience that leads it to assume one or another form. Consider, for example, the sentences (1)-(2): (1) (2) he thinks that John is a genius his mother thinks that John is a genius

Sentence (2) can be understood to mean that Johns mother thinks that he, John, is a genius. But sentence (1) cannot be understood to mean that John thinks that he, John, is a genius. In more technical terms, the pronoun (which may or not be articulated phonetically, depending on the language) can be referentially dependent on John in (2) but not in (1). The property of referential dependence is often called semantic because it plays a role in what expressions mean and how they are understood. I prefer to call it syntactic, because the inquiry does not yet reach to language/world relations; it is restricted to what is in the head. Analogously, we should clearly distinguish the inquiry into how the sensorimotor systems relate expressions to sounds from the study of the information that the language provides to the sensorimotor systems, and how it is constructed by internal operations. I would prefer to reserve the term phonetics for the former inquiry, and to regard the latter as part of syntax, in the general sense of the
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term, including what is called phonology. It is important to keep the distinctions in mind. Whatever terms we decide to use, referential dependence is determined in part by properties of the expression, in particular, the formal property known technically as c-command that holds between the pronoun and John in (1) but not in (2). As far as we know, it is a universal property of language that referential dependence is determined by c-command in the manner illustrated in these examples. We could say that one of the semantic universals is that for any language L, a pronoun cannot be referentially dependent on an antecedent that it c-commands. As we move to less elementary cases than this, it becomes harder to formulate the universals in the form: (3) Every language has the property P.

Not only harder, but pointless. The formulation (3) conceals the fact that the properties of expressions including the way they are understood result from the interaction of many factors, some of them deriving from the initial state of the language faculty, others from the experience that induces state changes in the language organ. We would run into the same problems if we tried to state universals for other systems in the form (3): say, the phonetic system, or the visual system, or the system of organization of motor behavior. One could list many further examples of universals of the kind just illustrated, but it would be misleading. Thus the property of c-command that enters into referential dependence also plays a prominent role in determining the interpretation of expressions of very different kinds. Consider, for example, the expressions (4)(7): (4) (5) (6) (7) John John John John ate an apple ate is too clever to catch Bill is too clever to catch

Sometimes these translate directly into other languages, sometimes not. There can be no serious doubt that the interpretation is crucially determined by properties of the initial state of the language faculty. These are universals in the sense of the term I am now considering, even though they may not be manifested in any simple way in particular languages. The distinction becomes still clearer when we look more closely at the interpretations of these expressions. We find that (5) means roughly that John ate some unspecified thing, as we would expect: the direct object an apple that appears in (4) is missing, and we fill in the blank with a kind of unspecified reference. But the analogy is not followed in (6) and (7). Thus (6) means something like (8) but (7) does not, analogously, have the meaning (9), rather (10).
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(8) John is so clever that he will not catch Bill (9) John is so clever that he will not catch some unspecified person (10) John is so clever that one cannot catch him The inversion of interpretation in the pair ((8),(10)), violating the analogy illustrated in ((4),(5)), is surprising, and requires explanation. In this case, the explanation is nontrivial. It does crucially involve c-command, but in interaction with other invariant principles of the initial state of the language faculty. There would be no simple way to state the semantic universals in the form (3). The simplest expressions are single words: book, house, city, etc. When we investigate their meanings, we find intricate and complex properties that children know without relevant experience. These must derive from the initial state of the faculty of language, hence be shared among the possible human languages. For example, the word book can be understood from a concrete or abstract perspective, or both simultaneously. Suppose the library has two copies of Ulysses, Peter takes out one, and John the other. Peter finds it inspiring and starts to memorize it, but John hates it and burns it. Did they take out the same book or different books? Does the pronoun it refer to something abstract or concrete? There are no answers to these questions. They are wrongly put. Peter and John took out the same book if we adopt the abstract perspective in interpreting the word book and the pronoun that is referentially dependent on it, and they took out different books if we adopt the concrete perspective. And as the example illustrates, we can adopt both perspectives simultaneously, despite the apparent contradiction, using the pronoun it in one case with the abstract perspective and in the other with the concrete perspective. We find such properties even in the simplest cases names of such substances as water, for example and they proliferate to considerable intricacy when we move beyond. Investigation of how expressions are understood has been the driving force of generative grammar from the outset, and remains so. The Minimalist Program does reformulate the approach somewhat, in that it assigns a more crucial role to interface levels, that is, to the points of interaction between the language organ and other subsystems of the mind/brain: sensorimotor systems and modes of thought and understanding. But the basic issues remain about the same. Quite a lot has been learned, particularly in the past few years, about the factors that determine what expressions mean and how they are understood. There has also been a good deal of productive inquiry into lexical semantics, which reveals many surprising properties of the kind just illustrated in the case of the word book. These have been some of the most exciting and lively areas of linguistic research in recent years. I do not see this as shifting emphasis from syntactic to semantic aspects of language, but rather as one part of the deepening of understanding of all of the syntactic aspects of language, now using the term syntax in its most general (and traditional)
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sense, referring to symbolic objects and their properties, including those properties that enter into the way they are used. 8. C & M. You are proposing a very interesting formulation of semantics to be restricted to the study of the language-world connections. You also mention that the property of referential dependence should be seen as completely syntactic because the inquiry does not extend to language-world relations, it is restricted to what is in the head. However, as you will agree (as everybody should since Bishop Berkeley), the concept of what is in the head is ambiguous. Every concept is, of course, in the head but some concepts do refer to things that are outside the organism, like a typewriter, while other things are inside the organism, like conceptual systems. Is every aspect of conceptual systems syntactic? Would that be the case of a priori knowledge in Kantian metaphysics, for instance? N.C. Hume says somewhere that Provided we agree about the thing, it is needless to dispute about the terms. Use of the term semantics to refer to study of language-world relations and syntax to refer to the study of properties of the symbolic systems themselves seems to me fairly conventional; in the study of formal languages, for example (e.g., the semantic relation between numerals and numbers, and the syntactic relation of concatenation). In the case of natural language, I suppose that few would use the term semantic to refer to morphological or intonational properties, or to c-command, though they have consequences for language-world relations. These are conventionally regarded as syntactic properties. The property of referential dependence seems to me to find its place within the syntax, in this sense. And, incidentally, it has little to do with reference in the technical sense: the principles work about the same way when pronouns are referentially dependent on the tall man and the average man, for example. But let us follow Humes good advice, and try to be clear about the thing, whatever terms we decide to use. Let us assume, as you suggest, that among the things in the head are conceptual systems, and that some of their elements are concepts. The internalist study of these objects I would like to call syntax, whether they are within a lingua mentis in Jerry Fodors sense, or some other type of system. But it would not follow that every aspect of conceptual systems [is] syntactic. Analogously, the study of morphological elements falls within syntax, but some aspects of morphological systems are not syntactic: for example, the fact that plurality has a semantic interpretation on nouns (the books are on the desk and the books are on the desks have different meanings), but not on verbal elements or adjectives (the plural inflection of the copula adds nothing new to the meaning of these sentences). Similarly, some aspects of conceptual systems are not syntactic; for example, those that have to do with how people use concepts in thinking or talking about what is outside the organism (or, for that matter, inside it).
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A question arises, however, when we go on to say that concepts refer to things. The terms are used here in an invented technical sense, so they mean what their inventor says they mean, like tensor or undecidability. We therefore cannot judge whether the assertion is true until we are told more about the meaning of the technical terms concept, thing, refer. We cannot appeal to natural language. Natural languages may have similar words, but not with the appropriate technical sense, typically. Thus in English there are words refer and concept, but they are not used in the sense intended here. The same is true in similar languages. That is why Frege had to invent a technical sense for Bedeutung and Sinn, and why there is much variation in translating his neologisms. Furthermore, I do not think the natural language notion thing is going to be very helpful. As Hume put it, echoing a long tradition dating back at least to Aristotle, even in the case of people, animals, rivers, and so on, the things we talk about are fictitious, established by human understanding and imagination, not identified by a mind-independent nature. That is all the more true when I say that the thing that concerns John most is the fate of the earth, to which he referred, saying that it is grim. In ordinary language, we say that people use words to refer to things, but things in a sense that has no place in any attempt to give a scientific or philosophical explanation (if they are different, as often alleged). To return to the example I mentioned earlier, I may use the word book to refer to what Peter and John took out of the library (Ulysses, simultaneously abstract and concrete). Here too, only confusion arises if we try to interpret the natural language expressions as we do in the study of formal systems, postulating a relation between the word and a thing: book is to Ulysses as prime is to 7. That does not seem to me how language works, either on the phonetic or semantic side. And matters do not improve when we extend the usage from words to concepts, in my opinion. The warning that misinterpretation of the surface form of natural language may lead to philosophical error traces back at least to 18th century criticisms of the theory of ideas, and has become famous in this century in the later Wittgenstein and Oxford ordinary language philosophy. The warning should be heeded, I think, in this case too. To the best of my understanding, the study of mental aspects of the world leads us to postulate the existence of a variety of cognitive systems (language among them), which have their own properties and interact in various ways. The internalist study of these systems is what I would prefer to call syntax. The study of how people use these systems is often called pragmatics. If semantics is understood to be the study of the relation of words/concepts and things, where thing has some non-mentalistic interpretation, then there may be no such topic as the semantics of natural language. The analogy to formal arithmetic breaks down here, as it does in other respects. In contrast, if semantics is understood to be the study of relations of language (or concepts) to the outer and inner world, then there is such a topic; it is
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more or less on a par with phonetics, understood as the relation of (internal) linguistic elements to (external) motions of molecules in the air and the like, but involving no notion similar to reference, in its technical sense. On a priori knowledge, in this naturalistic setting we have to distinguish several cases. One is what Konrad Lorenz called the biological a priori: chimpanzees seem to know that snakes are dangerous without experience, for example (though the a priori knowledge appears not to be quite about snakes, so closer analysis reveals). Doubtless much of our knowledge is similar, namely, those parts of knowledge that come to use from the original hand of nature, in Humes words. There is also a priori knowledge associated with analytic truths. I recognize that the orthodoxy of the past 40+ years is that these do not exist, but the conclusion is problematic, I think. We have to distinguish two cases: (1) what is metaphorically called the language of science; and (2) human language, a biological object. For the language of science, the conclusion is doubtless correct; Quine did not disagree with Carnap on this. But unless one believes in a highly implausible homogeneity of mind theory under which quantum physics and what my grandchildren tell me fall within one seamless web, we cannot conclude from this that expressions of natural language have no intrinsic semantic properties. The evidence seems to me overwhelming that they do, just as they have intrinsic phonetic properties. These intrinsic properties seem to yield such relations as formal entailment and formal rhyme. Thus pin rhymes with bin, and the statement that Peter persuaded John to go to college entails that John intended (at some point) to go to college. Believing the former, with no further information I can properly draw the conclusion that John intended to go to college, but I can draw no similar conclusions about Peters intentions. The facts are not controversial; they are accepted on all sides. A scientist studying language will want to explain these facts. Empirical studies typically I think invariably follow a certain line of inquiry: find the structural properties of expressions that enter into interpretation, and the intrinsic semantic properties of persuade, intend, etc. Is there an alternative hypothesis? It is widely assumed that the distinctions have to do with depth of belief, semantic importance, or something of the sort. But no substantive proposals have been put forth, and the prospects do not look good, to put it mildly. There is no way to evaluate the theses, though one might want to ask why they have been assumed to have such force. Empirical inquiry lends considerable support to the conclusion that there are semantic and phonetic relations that hold on the basis of intrinsic properties of expressions (e.g., formal entailment and rhyme). These happen to yield an analytic/synthetic distinction. The conclusion has no philosophical import, as far as I can see, and no particular interest in the empirical study of language. But one might say that a category of a priori knowledge is grounded in these terms, perhaps entering into rational behavior. The same reasoning carries over to postulated conceptual systems, insofar
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as they are understood; but that may be because they are so hard to distinguish from linguistic systems, in the relevant domains. 9. C. & M. It is true that the search for semantic universals is a problem if we try to argue in favor of the sentence (3): (3) Every language has the property P.

It collides head on with the fact that linguistic properties result from the interaction of many factors, some deriving from the initial state of the language faculty, while others come from experience. You mentioned that we will run into the same problems if we tried to use the term universals for other systems in the form (3). Nevertheless, it seems possible to find universals related to the visual system, such as the perception of the continuum of light, with wave-lengths corresponding to quite discrete colors. We may try to find even semantic universals (in ethnolinguistic terms) when simple colors are related to the names they are given in different languages. N.C. Universal properties of language, including semantic universals, typically do not fall into the category (3) in any simple way (irrelevantly, we can always restate them in the form (3) if we allow sufficient complexity). The same is true of universal properties of the visual system. But many generalizations are directly of the form (3). Consider the principle that I mentioned earlier: a pronoun cannot be referentially dependent on an antecedent that it c-commands. It is reasonable to suppose that this is an irreducible principle of the theory of the initial state of the language faculty: Universal Grammar (UG), in its contemporary sense. It is, then, a language universal in the sense I mentioned, and it can readily be restated in the form (3): Let P be the property of observing this principle; then every language has the property P. Consider a slightly more complex case: Richard Kaynes recent proposal that left to right order reflects asymmetric c-command (his Linear Correspondence Axiom, LCA). He proposes that the LCA too is an irreducible principle of UG. It follows from a certain version of the LCA that the underlying order in every language is subject-verb-object. The latter statement is a generalization of category (3), derived from a principle of UG. This generalization is not directly instantiated in what we observe. When the observed order is different, the thesis holds, displacement operations have applied to modify the universal underlying order. The empirical generalization is of category (3), but highly theory-internal: it is about unobserved underlying structures. There has also been very productive study of generalizations that are more directly observable: generalizations about the word orders we actually see, for example. The work of Joseph Greenberg has been particularly instructive and influential in this regard. These universals are probably descriptive generalizations that should be derived from principles of UG. A major
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research project within generative grammar has been to explain them in such terms. And there are generalizations of many other kinds. My point was that satisfaction of (3) in a simple way is not a condition on language universals, as the term is understood in contemporary UG, which diverges from traditional universal grammar in this regard. To a considerable extent, the tradition limited itself to properties allegedly found on the surface in languages, either always, or as tendencies. But contemporary UG is a theory of the initial state of the language faculty, and its principles are not directly expressed in the form (3), though they may underlie generalizations that do have this form. I think the general comments carry over to the visual system and others. 10. C. & M. May we establish a difference between the syntactic and lexical systems of languages in the sense that lexical systems tend to reflect cultural invariants (particularly in the case of the open-class lexicon: verbs, nouns, adjectives), whereas syntactic systems tend to reflect universal categories of species (the category of instrument, for instance)? N.C. Putting aside complexities, we can say that the initial state of the language faculty makes available an array of invariant properties (called features), and two operations: assembly operations that form lexical items from features, and computational operations that form more complex expressions out of lexical items. Languages vary in both of these dimensions, and on the surface the variation seems very great; not too long ago it was commonly assumed by professional linguists that languages could vary without limit in both respects, which cannot literally be true, or no child could ever acquire a language. By now there is a fair amount of understanding of factors that sharply restrict the ways the computational operations can function, leading to apparently dramatic typological variation as a result of small changes, typically in morphological systems. I might add that these conclusions have roots in the traditional study of language, which was largely swept aside by structuralist and behaviorist currents, and forgotten. Its last great representative was perhaps the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, who argued that there might be a universal syntax, though no one could conceive of a universal morphology. Rephrasing that conclusion in terms he might have accepted, the computational operations may well be invariant, while changes in inflectional features and the like may have large-scale consequences as they proliferate through the computation of complex expressions. It is also reasonable to suppose, as you suggest, that the computational operations and the factors that enter into them are relatively (or maybe completely) independent of cultural variation; and the same seems to be true of at least some of the variety of morphological systems, though many questions arise, particularly when we look at a broader class of languages. Thus languages are known that require that an action be specified in terms of
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its relation to the rising and setting sun, and objects are identified by affixes that specify whether they are pointed, moving to the distance, acquired through effort, and so on. Such properties abound in more familiar languages too, but we do not know how or whether they relate to cultural systems in any nontrivial way. As has long been recognized, the assembly operations are in a certain sense arbitrary: properties of the initial state do not determine whether a language will use the word book or libro, or whether the copula will resemble English be or Spanish ser/ estar. Each lexical item is a collection of the primitive features, some of them functioning at the phonetic interface as instructions for sensorimotor systems, some of them functioning at the semantic interface as instructions to the conceptual/ intentional systems of the mind/brain that use them for thought and reflection, talking about the world, asking questions, and much else. There are also structural features of lexical items, and the whole complex combines with inflectional properties in various ways. The primitive features determine a rich array of interpretations of lexical items, and by the same token, sharply restrict their variety; the example of book is typical. But we often find that languages do not match up point-bypoint, either at the phonetic or semantic levels. The observation is familiar, but sometimes overlooked. Thus, the logical/philosophical literature uses such standard examples as (11) to illustrate the non-vacuity of truth-theoretic theories of meaning: (11) the German sentence Schnee ist weiss is true if and only if snow is white. The English sentence (11) is plainly informative; it tells us something nontrivial about German. But the force of the illustration declines considerably if we extend the paradigm in the slightest way. Thus, the English sentence snow is white is easily translated into many languages, but that is not true of the paradigm illustrated by (12): (12) Snow looks (feels, tastes, smells) good. To formulate a standard truth theory for English in some other language is no small task, when we consider such examples. There are many other kinds of variation, some fairly systematic. Thus English tends to use verbs with little semantic content as a way of forming verbal constructions that often have single lexical items as counterparts in languages like Spanish (take in, take out, take away, etc.). Similarly, we find that such properties as instrument can appear within lexical items or can be expressed by inflection or computational operations, with many consequences for interpretation. These are among the many problems that bedevil translators and language learners. In some respects, the assembly of features to lexical items reflects cultural variety. English and Spanish, for example, lack lexical counterparts to words
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that are found in languages of the Amazon region or New Guinea, and conversely; and translation is often no simple matter. But again, not too much is understood about what any of this means. For example, is it a significant cultural fact about English and Chinese that they tend to use semantically vacuous verbal items, or that English has the paradigm (12) but other similar languages do not? References
CHOMSKY, N. 195556, 1975. Logical structure of linguistic theory. Ms. Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. [1975: New York: Plenum Publishing Corp.] CHOMSKY, N. 1995. Language and nature. Mind 10 4: 161. CRICK, F. & KOCH, C. 1990. Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness. Seminars in the Neurosciences 2: 263275. CRICK, F. & KOCH, C. 1995. Are we aware of neural activity in primary visual cortex? Nature 375: 121123. DAMASIO, A. 1995. Descartes error: emotion, reason and the human brain. New York, NY: G.P. Putnams Sons. DEECKE, L. 1996. Readiness for action. The Fifth Annual Appalachian Conference on Behavioral Neuroscience. Abstract. FREEMAN, W.J. 1995. Societies of brains. A study in the neuroscience of love and hate. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. GALLISTEL, C.R. 1980. The organization of action. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. GELLATLY, A. 1995. Colourful Whorfian ideas: linguistic and cultural influences on the perception and cognition of colour and on the investigation of them. Mind and Language 10: 199225. KORNHUBER, H.H. & DEEKE, L. 1965. Hirn potential-aenderungen bei Willkuerbewegungen, und passiven Bewegungen des Menschen: Bereitschafts potential. Pfluegers Arch. ges. Physiol. 284: 117. LEGROS CLARK, W.E. 1964. The fossil evidence for human evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. PENROSE, R. 1994. Shadows of the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. SMYTHIES, J. 1994. The walls of Platos cave. Aldershot: Avebury Press. Camilo J. Cela-Conde Department of Philosophy ` le Marty Gise Department of Psychology Universidad de las Islas Baleares Palma, Spain Correspondence: Camilo J. Cela-Conde, Department of Philosophy, Universidad de las Islas Baleares 07071 Palma, Spain e-mail: dflccc0@ps.uib.es

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