Mathematician speaks out on language and politics

Noam Chomsky, a well known mathematician and political activist, also gained notoriety for his work in linguistics. Computer scientists are generally still very familiar with Chomsky, as his name is found mixed in with many fundamental concepts in the field of computation. While Chomsky’s more philosophical works have proven to be his most solid and most formidable, his political works have also left a lasting impression. Many of them dealt with the Vietnam War or with the media-machine that Chomsky faults for driving more developed nations into corrupt modes of operation. In his book “Problems of Knowledge and Freedom,” Chomsky couples these ideas and provides a unique blend of linguistic theory bearing directly on active political issues.

The book is divided into two parts: the first discusses how one interprets the world, and the second discusses how to change the world. These are extremely ambitious tasks for any author, and even the great Chomsky only fulfills them marginally well. I tend to focus more on the first half of the book because it exclusively deals with the philosophy of language conventions, a topic which I personally find highly relevant. Chomsky makes some extremely interesting assertions about the development of language conventions.

For example, Chomsky disputes at length the claim made by the German philosopher Wittgenstein that “a word has the meaning someone has given to it.” Chomsky argues that this task of assigning meaning may not be a conscious one and thus not “accessible to introspection.” On this sort of basis, Chomsky goes on to articulate the point of view that language conventions themselves are biologically intrinsic things that merely take on some specific form induced by the organisms interpreting them.

More simply, Chomsky is saying that the rules and concepts that enable one to understand interconnections between real events were not pre-existing in the thoughts of the organism that makes use of such a rule. That is, according to Chomsky, the laws of physics themselves simply acted on matter to produce some arbitrary language conventions. As I read this argument, I could not help but to disagree strongly.

The major fault in this line of reasoning is the need for a priori conventions for assigning some kind of meaningfulness to a language convention. As an example, consider taking a bunch of pieces from the game Scrabble. Probabilistically speaking, it is horribly unlikely that if I throw down all of the wooden pieces, I will get anything that makes sense. Getting all the pieces to land right-side up and in an order such that I could make a string of letters out of them would be hard enough. Asking for that string of letters to make sense in English is nearly impossible. Nearly. There is that astronomically small chance that it could happen. So let’s suppose that it does.

Supposing that after centuries of throwing down the Scrabble pieces I finally get a long string that makes sense in English. Does this confirm Chomsky’s argument that the language conventions themselves arose unconsciously? No, of course not. If I viewed the very same long string of Scrabble pieces, but instead I only spoke Norwegian, then it would have made exactly as much sense as a completely random string of pieces (in fact, it would actually be a random string to a person who only speaks Norwegian). Thus, the conscious choice of using the rules of English constitutes a language convention that cannot arise unconsciously. Chomsky (slightly) admits this weakness when he concedes that “systems of knowledge and belief that underlie normal human behavior simply cannot be described in terms of networks of association, habit structures, and the like.” There is something teleonomic, planned, and intentional about language conventions. Otherwise they could be nothing but random collections of associations incapable of handling abstraction.

Phew, that concludes the boring, philosophical first half of the book. Sweet. Now we can move on to the boring, political second half of the book that is arrogantly titled “On Changing the World.” In general, Chomsky expounds on his political views about the Vietnam War and the evils of the flavor of democracy pursued in the West.

Chomsky’s comments on Vietnam are quite important historically, as he was among the first prominent intellectuals to openly challenge the moral underpinnings of the United States. But his discussion of Vietnam is not terribly relevant and certainly does not contain anything novel that was not either exposed earlier by other activists or polished later by his disciples. The interesting part of Chomsky’s analysis is his discussion of democracy. He puts forward the idea that in any centralized democracy, the government and media must necessarily move toward an equilibrium point such that the two co-manipulate the citizens. For example, in a democracy we are all lucky that we can go to a voting center and pick up a ballot and choose the candidate we prefer. But who gets to choose the names that go on the ballot? And who gets to choose those choosers? Obviously it is impractical for every decision to be put to a country-wide popular vote. Hence, someone must necessarily be in charge of determining who has the opportunity to win elections. Chomsky mainly believes that the media, indirectly fueled by capitalistic interest, acts as this ‘chooser of the choosers,’ an idea developed more fully in Chomsky’s later works. Surprisingly, it is very difficult to disregard Chomsky’s viewpoint out of hand. It leaves one with a lot of lingering questions regarding the sometimes dogmatic belief that American democracy is the absolute best form of government.

While Chomsky’s books are certainly not page turners, they have the advantage of being short and concise. The first half of this one is only going to be interesting to those who don’t mind highly technical reading. The second half of the book is extremely interesting to anyone with a penchant for politics. I encourage anyone considering the subtleties of language and their interplay into politics to look into this book. But it’s definitely not for general audiences or the casual reader.