NOAM
CHOMSKY
Linguitstic approach
Course: Rhetoric
Professor: Dr.Redouan El Ayadi
Prepared : Duali Zineb
• Outline:
REMINISCENCE THEORY
OF KNOWLEDGE.
PLATONIC IDEALISM.
CHOMSKY’S
RATIONALISM.
CHOMSKY AND THE
THEORY OF IMITATION.
LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY.
REMINISCENCE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
A theory propounded by Greek philosopher Plato (circa 429-
347 BCE) which states that all knowledge must originate in a
hypothetical existence before birth, wherein humans attain
knowledge of the true forms or essences of the material
world. This knowledge is accessed after birth with the mental
processes of recollection or reminiscence. Plato posited that
this hypothetical existence was the only way for a human to
have knowledge of certain concepts like perfect equality,
which cannot be gleaned from experience.
PLATONIC IDEALISM
RATIONALISM
A rationalist epistemology claims that knowledge is
possible only if it is based on self-evident and absolutely
certain principles. Such principles are not learned through
experience; instead, they are implicit in the very notion of
reasoning (in Latin: ratio) itself. Sense experience cannot
provide the certainty needed to guarantee that what we
claim to know is true. So, like mathematicians, we have to
rely on reason itself as the basis for determining whether
our opinions are justified true beliefs (that is, knowledge)
PLATONIC IDEALISM
RATIONALISM
Knowledge for the rationalist is what can be deduced from principles that are
undoubtable or are true by definition. Examples of such principles include: "A
whole is always greater than any one of its parts," "A thing cannot be and not
be at the same time in the same respect," "Bachelors are unmarried males,"
"Unicorns are imaginary animals,"and "Triangles have three sides." These
statements are known with certainty to be true because the very meaning of the
terms involved (e.g., wholes, parts, things, bachelors, unicorns, triangles)
requires that some judgments we make about them do not rely on sense
experience. We thus know about such things prior to any sense experience we
have or could have about them. This knowledge is called a priori. Any
knowledge that relies on (that is, comes after or is posterior to) sense
experience is called a posteriori.
PLATONIC IDEALISM
RATIONALISM
In order to have knowledge (justified true belief), we have to transcend the
ever-changing flux of the physical world and grasp a permanent rational order
behind the flux, an order that will demonstrate the universal in the particular.
This "grasping" is an intellectual act of the mind, which, in its purest
manifestation, is exclusively formal (i.e., mathematical). Such an intellectual
act can take place only if there are certain innate ideas upon which it can be
based. Knowing, then, is an act of making the observable world intelligible by
showing how it is related to an eternal order of intelligible truths.
CHOMSKY’S RATIONALISM
As a linguist, Noam Chomsky adheres to rationalism, in opposition
to empiricism. His philosophy of language shows a clear influence
of rationalistic ideology, which claims that reason or rationality as a
property of mind is the primary source of knowledge or way to
knowledge.
CHOMSKY’S RATIONALISM
Two important aspects of this Rationalism were (1) the view that
human beings are not blank slates as in radical (and mistaken)
empiricism, and (2) the observation that human language learning
in children appears to be an innate biological trait, with universal
syntactic structures (Schwartz 2012: 180–181).
RATIONALISM AND
EMPIRICISM
Rationalism is the theory that we can know reality a priori, that is, without
relying on our experience. In other words, rationalists believe that reason, by
itself, can furnish the mind with knowledge. In fact, ratio means reason in
Latin. Empiricism is the theory that we can only know reality as a posteriori,
that is, with the aid of our senses. Reason versus senses is the basic dichotomy
in epistemology.
CHOMSKY AND THE THEROY
OF IMITATION
before Chomsky, most linguists would have agreed with you, and claim that
children learn to speak by hearing what grown-ups say and then repeating
it. This theory of language acquisition is consistent with empiricism.
Empiricists believe in the Blank Slate Theory. In regards to language
acquisition, the theory says that babies are born with no knowledge of
language at all, their little brains being totally empty of linguistic structure.
They just copy what they hear, and then it is just a matter of recombining the
different words to create new sentences.
CHOMSKY AND THE THEROY
OF IMITATION
Chomsky brought the Kantian revolution to the field of linguistics. Kant
suggested that there are certain a priori features of our mind to which all our
experiences and knowledge conforms. That is, he didn’t believe our mind
adjusted to reality, like the empiricists and the rationalists claimed, but that the
reality we know adjusts to our mind. Chomsky’s hypothesis is that some
aspects of language are a priori.
The a priori component of language is what Chomsky calls Universal
Grammar.
LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY
Chomsky began to mention the creative aspect of
language use in the early 1960s; his 1964 Current
Issues discusses it. In 1966, Cartesian Linguistics takes
it up in detail. Among the Cartesian philosophers, the
influence of Rene Descartes on Chomsky’s toughts is
perhaps the most significant. Chomsky openly
expressed his indebtedness to Descartes. This
indebtedness arises mainly due to two particular views
that Descartes upheld.
LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY
These two views are
First, language is the medium of expressing one’s thoughts.
Second, the thesis that there are innate ideas.
The creative aspect of language use
LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY
The creative aspect of language use provides a set of phenomena that a science of
language must explain. It is the “central fact to which any significant linguistic
theory must address itself” and thus “a theory of language that neglects this ‘creative’
aspect is of only marginal interest” (Chomsky 1964: 7–8).
Chomsky (2002 [1966]: 53) summarises Descartes’s views as follows:1 […] it is the
diversity of human behavior, its appropriateness to new situations, and man’s
capacity to innovate — the creative aspect of language use providing the principal
indication of this — that leads Descartes to attribute possession of mind to other
humans, since he regards this capacity as beyond the limitations of any imaginable
mechanism. Thus [according to Descartes] a fully adequate psychology requires the
postulation of a ‘creative principle’ alongside of the ‘mechanical principle’ that
suffices to account for all other aspects of the inanimate and animate world and for a
significant range of human actions and ‘passions’ as well.
LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY
“Within traditional linguistic theory, furthermore, it was clearly understood that one
of the qualities that all languages have in common is their “creative” aspect. Thus an
essential property of language is that it provides the means for expressing indefinitely
many thoughts and for reacting appropriately in an indefinite range of new
situations.” (Chomsky, 1965, p. 6)
Through his theories of generative and transformational grammar Chomsky attempts to argue
first, that there is creativity in language use; and second that his grammar, since it is
generative and transformational, can account for and serve as evidence in demonstrating
the infinite variety of linguistic expressions. He describes his own theories as
generative and transforma-tional grammar. The word 'generative' symbolizes the human ability
to select or generate novel expressions. Generative grammar, as a theory, implies that language
is a living and creative form rather than a lifeless mechanism that can only be formed and
shaped by external forces and stimulation. Chomsky's emphasis on the generative adequacy of a
gram-mar focuses on the issue of constructing a grammar that is not closed in its forms and
structure, but a grammar that is open to the diversity of human creativity.
This brings us back to the dichotomy of competence versus performance
Competence
Person’s knowledge of his Performance
language. A term used in the linguistic
As you acquire a language, your theory of transformational
brain creates an unconscious model as generative grammar, refer to
er e
of how that language works. h language is seen as a set of
W specific utterances produced by
Competence refers to this
unconscious model. It encompasses native speaker.
all aspects of language, including
vocabulary usage and idioms,
grammar, and pronunciation.
Consciously, you access your
competence in the form of intuition.
It’s that sense you have of what’s
correct and what’s not.
Chomsky separates competence and performance; he describes 'competence'
as an idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property or
function and ‘performance’ as the production of actual
utterances. Performance, is “an imperfect reflection of competence”. In
performance, people may, and do, make ‘errors’, ‘slips of the tongue’, etc...
Speaking is a combination of four different skills:
1.Comprehending the person you're conversing with.
2.Quickly converting your thoughts into words.
3.Physically moving your mouth to pronounce the language.
4.Embodying natural mannerisms and styles of expression.
For example, let's say you are a native speaker of English and utter the
following:
'We swimmed in the ocean this weekend’
Is this error due to competence or performance?
It is most likely that as a native speaker you are aware how to conjugate irregular
verbs in the past but your performance has let you down this time.
Such errors are attributed to performance factors (e.g., tiredness, distractions,
drunkenness, drugs or medication, sleeplessness, etc.). Performance phenomena
such as these are deemed to be outside the scope of linguistics.
Chomsky argues that there might be a considerable difference among
speakers in terms of their ability to use language in a particular
situation. “Grammatical competence, in contrast, is largely
homogeneous across a given speech community.”
THANK YOU
