Since I have thoughtlessly and offhandedly insulted someone
[Magee] who is apparently a good guy, let me begin by apologizing to him and to
all of you. Now, if I can extract my foot
from my mouth, I will try to explain what prompted my casual insult. One of Chomsky’s most striking and powerful
insights, I believe, is his observation that every normal speaker of a natural
language has the ability to utter well-formed sentences that no one has ever
uttered before and which are immediately understandable by the other speakers
of his or her natural language.
Furthermore, with suitable definitions of terms that may not be found in
some second language, every one of those utterances is translatable into any
other natural language and is comprehensible to a native speaker of that second
language. When you think about it, this
is really astonishing, and I believe, though I may be wrong, that Chomsky was
the first linguist to grasp this fact in its full significance.
MaGee kept pressing Chomsky on what he thought were the
constraints placed on what we could say by the innate hard-wired nature of
human linguistic capabilities. But he
was unable to say what we could not
say, because of course to do so he would have had to say it, and in saying it,
he would have been immediately comprehensible by Chomsky and everyone watching
the video. And MaGee seemed not to get
that.
That is what prompted my rude remark.
4 comments:
Billie Holliday sang on how saying one cannot say something is actually saying something (her commentary on the Tractates):
You're just too marvelous
Too marvelous for words
Like glorious, glamorous
And that old standby amorous
It's all too wonderful
I'll never find the phrase
That says enough, tells enough
I mean just aren't swell enough
You're much too much, and just too very very
To ever be, to ever be in Webster’s dictionary
And so I'm borrowing a love song from the birds
To tell you that you're marvelous
Too marvelous for words
Auto correct changed Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" to the Talmud's "Tractates". Hmm.
There are many wonderful renditions of that Mercer lyric: here's one: Doris Day
and there's a great Sarah Vaughn one.
Finite lexicon and finite rules of combination. Chomsky's honking about some alleged unbounded human capacity for creative expression reduces to iteration (mostly of adjectives, adverbs and conjunction ) and recursion of phrase structures. Limitations on the reach of working-memory, however, with respect both to the production and comprehension of natural language speech, preclude much in the way of iterative or recursive "creativity". True creativity lies in the realm of metaphor and and analogy---in the plasticity, if you will, of human conceptual competence, about which Chomsky has nothing to say. He should stick to politics!
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