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Truth to tell
Noam Chomsky talks to Domenico Pacitti about the pressures on academic
freedom and the advances in our
knowledge of language
Tuesday April 18, 2000
The Guardian
The US linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has taken to the
tranquillity of the Tuscan hills. His chosen retreat is the secluded
Certosa di Pontignano overlooking Siena, a finely restored 13th-century
Carthusian monastery now used by the university as an
exclusive international conference centre. As we are led through the
cloisters to a superbly frescoed reception room, he reveals that
the sublime silence is congenial to his hermitic nature and conducive to
serious thought.
I ask Chomsky how he feels academic freedom and the pursuit of truth are
faring in universities. Students, he replies, are not given
enough encouragement to challenge the basic assumptions of their
professors and the pre-established framework of their subject.
He accepts that the situation in Italy is particularly depressing but
points out that, when seen from a US perspective, it is true of
European universities generally, Britain included. But he stresses that
Britain is closer to the US than the continent in this respect.
"Continental Europe still retains a rather authoritarian structure in
the university system, with deference/authority relations built into
cultural patterns. I noticed it very strikingly when I was teaching at
Oxford. In the Oxford college where I was living there was an
incident over a man who was serving a young gentleman, and the way he
expected to be treated was just unimaginable.
"In the US, class differentiations are not particularly marked, so that
the guy who is fixing your car and you are on the same terms."
He recounts a story about an MIT colleague who, when asked by his
students what they were going to cover in their courses, replied
that it didn't matter what they covered, but rather what they
discovered.
"That's the way education should work," he says. "At the graduate level
in the sciences that's the way it does work. It's interaction
among students and faculty with not much tyranny - there can't be,
because most of the good ideas are coming from the students."
Mainstream academia, Chomsky complains, tends to be too resistant to
change. "I think you see this very clearly in the way that
modern linguistics developed. It did not develop in the major academic
centres because they were too conservative. They don't want
to be rattled - they want their peaceful existence to be unchallenged.
And that's why in France, where European linguistics took off,
it was at Vincennes and not the Sorbonne.
"It was in this little place outside Paris where they were sending all
the radical students to get rid of them, and since nobody was
paying attention to what happened there, it was possible to have
innovative creative work which to this day has not penetrated the
French university system. And the same pattern has replicated throughout
the world."
But it is subordination to external power in both US and European
universities which he sees as posing perhaps the most serious
threat. "Universities are always in a tension. At best, they are trying
to maintain intellectual integrity. Yet they cannot escape the
reality that they are parasitic on external power mainly in the form of
government and private corporations. These outside pressures
are obviously going to undermine intellectual integrity and so it's a
constant battle."
Over-generous funding for over-ambitious projects turns out to be a
characteristic speciality of US academia. Following Europe's
self-destruction in the second world war, Chomsky explains, the US found
itself with unprecedented power and prestige. This led to
the confidence, first expressed in the 1950s and still expressed today,
that with the US having conquered the world, its scientists
could now conquer the last frontier - the human mind.
"We've just finished a 'decade of the brain' programme backed by major
foundations. The closing conference at the United Academy
of Arts and Sciences produced the very confident statement that the
body/mind problem will soon be overcome and that the mind
will finally be understood.
"Well, firstly, there is no such problem, because there has been no
coherent concept of body since Isaac Newton, so there's nothing
to overcome. And secondly, the confidence is completely misplaced since
we can't even explain how the human visual system can
recognise a straight line. The truth is that there's still a huge gap
between current understanding and the mental aspects of the world
we're trying to account for."
Despite having revolutionised the way we think about language and the
mind and notwithstanding the considerable insights produced
by almost half a century of sustained research, Chomsky still finds his
work criticised outright as "mentalistic" and therefore
unscientific on the grounds that it cannot be reduced to physics.
Chemistry, he argues, was not reducible to physics, but that didn't
make it unscientific. Rather, it was physics which had to be
reconstituted so as to be able to incorporate a virtually unchanged
chemistry.
Many modern thinkers, he says, simply haven't understood the full
significance of Newton's discovery of gravity. "The possibility of
affecting objects without touching them just exploded physicalism and
materialism. It has been common in recent years to ridicule
Descartes' "ghost in the machine" in postulating mind as distinct from
body. Well, Newton came along and he did not exorcise the
ghost in the machine: he exorcised the machine and left the ghost
intact. So now the ghost is left and the machine isn't there. And
the mind has mystical properties.
"My feeling is that a study of the actual history of the modern sciences
would be a very salutary component of any university
curriculum."
Chomsky acknowledges with a broad grin that these views have earned his
approach the trade name of "MIT mentalism" among
colleagues. But why does the conception of the world as consisting in
bodies and minds have such a strong hold on people and why
are so many academics deceived into believing illusions about the
physical that were understood as such 200 years ago?
"So far we've been talking about fact, but now it's speculation. My
speculation is that somehow our intuitive mentality is
fundamentally dualist. Suppose you're looking at the sun setting over
the ocean. You can know all the relativity theory in the world,
but you still see the sun setting into the water. And if the moon is
near the horizon, you can't help seeing it larger than if it's up in the
sky."
So where does all of this leave truth, the cornerstone of all academic
research? Is there a final answer to the question: what is truth?
"There is an answer," says Chomsky, "but whether we can find it or not
is another matter. The human condition is such that we can
make our best guess as to what is true. We're organic creatures and we
have our limitations. We must see the world from a
particular point of view because that's the way we're built.
"But we're also reflective creatures, so we can reflect on our own
inadequacies and try to overcome them. That's what happened in
the Newtonian revolution. They had to reflect on the inability of common
sense, of ordinary intelligence to comprehend the nature of
the world and look at it from a different point of view. It's the same
with all our existence. We can use our resources as creatively and
critically as we can to try to overcome our special perspectives that
come from our nature. But whether we'll get the truth or not is
another question."
Meanwhile, Chomsky's new minimalist programme in linguistics is asking
just how well designed the human language capacity is to
carry out its essential functions. With complex grammar rules now
eliminated in favour of basic principles, he feels that more has
been learnt about language in the last 20 years than in the preceeding
2,000 years.
The trouble is, he says, that what we know intuitively seems to lie far
beyond what we can understand intellectually.
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.
2000
--
Mark Lobjoit
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
The American College of Thessaloniki
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GREECE
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