1. JM: Switching topics slightly for a while in order to look at the issue from a different point of view . . . What's on the other side of language [the faculty]? If it has this capacity of integrating, coordinating, and innovating, what are we to think of what lies on the ‘other side’ of its [the faculty's] operations? You spoke of performance systems in some of your earlier works, and in the case of production and perception, it's pretty clear what those are. But what about the conceptual and intentional systems?

2. NC: . . . Those are internal systems; they're something that's going on in your head and my head.

3. JM: Those are internal systems. OK, but I'm trying to get clear about what role language has in contributing to agency, action. Let me put it this way: philosophers like to think of people as agents, as decision-makers who deliberate, who take into account various kinds of information and bring them to bear on making decisions in ways that satisfy desires, and the like. What about that notion of an agent? To a certain extent, it seems as though language is being given some of those roles (of gathering information, etc.).

4. NC: Language can be conceived of as a tool for agents, for agency – whatever that is. It's Descartes's point, basically, that you can use your linguistic abilities to say anything you want about any topic which is in your conceptual range, but when you do it, you're acting as a human agent with a human will, whatever that is.

5. Most scientists tend to accept the Cartesian dogma that only humans have this capacity, so that insects are automata. But we don't know that. If you ask the best theorists of ants why an ant decides at one point to turn left rather than right . . . well, the question can't even come up [for a scientific answer]. You can talk about the mechanisms, you can talk about the motivations, you can talk about the external and internal stimuli, but they don't predict what the ant's going to do. Maybe that's because we don't know enough and the ant's really an automaton. Or maybe we just haven't captured the notion of agency properly.

1. JM: I want to ask some questions about the ‘perfection’ of the language faculty. First, a background matter: if you speak of perfection and in particular perfection in design of the language faculty – or at least, the mapping to the SEM interface – you seem to be invited to answer the question, “design for what?”

2. NC: I think that's misleading. That's because of connotations of the word design. Design suggests a designer, and a function of the designed thing or operation. But in biology, ‘design’ just means the way it is.

3. JM: The structure, whatever it is . . .

4. NC: How is the galaxy designed? Because the laws of physics say that that's the way it's designed. It's not for anything, and nobody did it. It's just what happens under certain physical circumstances. I wish there were a better word to use, because it does carry these unfortunate connotations. In a sense – a negative sense – there's a function. If the structure were dysfunctional, it wouldn't survive. And OK, in that sense, it's designed for something. It doesn't mean it's well designed for survival. So take language and communication. Language is poorly designed for communication, but we get by with it, so it's not dysfunctional enough to disappear [or at least, disappear with regard to its use for communication, which isn't its only use, by any means]. Take, for example, trace erasure [or in the more recent terminology of copies, non-pronunciation of copies]. It's good for efficiency of structure, but it's very bad for communication. Anyone who tries to write a parsing program [encounters it] . . . most of the program is about how to find the gaps. Where are the gaps, and what's in them? If you just repeated – if you spelled out [or pronounced or otherwise exhibited] copies – the problem would be gone. But from a computational point of view, that would be poor design, because it's extra computation, so there's no point in it. So you cut it out. And there's case after case like that. So take garden path sentences and islands, for example. Islands prevent you from saying things you would like to say. You can't say, “who did you wonder why visited yesterday.” It's a thought; you know what it means.

1. JM: Let me pursue some of these points you have been making by asking you a different question. You, in your work in the 1950s, effectively made the study of language into a mathematical, formal science – not mathematical, of course, in the way Markov systems are mathematical, but clearly a formal science that has made very considerable progress. Some of the marks of that progress have been – for the last few years, for example – successive elimination of all sorts of artifacts of earlier theories, such as deep structure, surface structure, and the like. Further, recent theories have shown a remarkable ability to solve problems of both descriptive and explanatory adequacy. There is a considerable increase in degree of simplification. And there also seems to be some progress toward biology – not necessarily biology as typically understood by philosophers and by many others, as a selectional evolutionary story about the gradual introduction of a complex structure, but biology as understood by people like Stuart Kauffman (1993) and D'Arcy Thompson (1917/1942/1992). I wonder if you would comment on the extent to which that kind of mathematical approach has progressed.[C]

2. NC: Ever since this business began in the early fifties – two or three students, Eric Lenneberg, me, Morris Halle, apparently nobody else – the topic we were interested in was, how could you work this into biology? The idea was so exotic, no one else talked about it. Part of the reason was that ethology was just . . .

3. JM: Excuse me; was that [putting the theory of language into biology] a motivation from the beginning?

4. NC: Absolutely: we were starting to read ethology, Lorenz, Tinbergen, comparative psychology; that stuff was just becoming known in the United States. The US tradition was strictly descriptive behaviorism. German and Dutch comparative zoologists were just becoming available; actually, a lot was in German. We were interested, and it looked like this was where linguistics ought to go. The idea was so exotic that practically no one talked about it, except the few of us. But it was the beginning of Eric Lenneberg's work; that's really where all this started.

1. JM: You've suggested many times that human cognitive capacities have limitations; they must have, because they're biologically based. You've also suggested that one could investigate those limitations.

2. NC: in principle.

3. JM: . . . in principle. Unlike Kant, you're not going to simply exclude that kind of study. He seems to have thought that it's beyond the capacity of human beings to define the limits . . .

4. NC: . . . well, it might be beyond a human capacity; but that's just another empirical statement about limitations, like the statement that I can't see ultraviolet light, that it's beyond my capacity.

5. JM: OK; but is the investigation of our cognitive limitations in effect an investigation of the concepts that we have?

6. NC: Well, it may be contradictory, but I don't see any internal contradiction in the idea that we can investigate the nature of our science-forming capacities and discover something about their scope and limits. There's no internal contradiction in that program; whether we can carry it out or not is another question.

7. JM: And common sense has its limitations too.

8. NC: Unless we're angels. Either we're angels or we're organic creatures. If we're organic creatures, every capacity is going to have its scope and limits. That's the nature of the organic world. You ask “Can we ever find the truth in science?” – well, we've run into this question. Peirce, for example, thought that truth is just the limit that science reaches. That's not a good definition of truth. If our cognitive capacities are organic entities, which I take for granted they are, there is some limit they'll reach; but we have no confidence that that's the truth about the world. It may be a part of the truth; but maybe some Martian with different cognitive capacities is laughing at us and asking why we're going off in this false direction all the time. And the Martian might be right.

1. JM: Continuing in the same vein, your understanding of computation seems to differ from the philosophically favored notion where it is understood as tied in with a representational theory of mind. Computation there is understood to be something like the operations of a problem-solving device that operates over symbols understood in traditional (not your) semantic terms, in terms of relationships of items inside the head that represent things outside in the world.

2. NC: The term “representation” is used in a kind of technical sense in the philosophical literature which I think basically comes back to the theory of ideas. You know there's something out there and the impression of it becomes an idea, and then there's a relation – so, say, in Jerry Fodor's representational theory of mind – there's a causal relation between the cat over there and the concept cat in your language of thought. And Kripke, Putnam, Burge have a picture roughly like that.

3. JM: Well, it's more than just causal – I mean, for Fodor, it really is a semantic relationship . . .

4. NC: Yes, but it is causal [in that something ‘out there’ causes the formation of an internal representation which is your ‘idea of’ what causes it]. I mean, that's how you get the connection. There is some causal relation, and then, yes, it sets up the semantic relation of reference. And there is a factual question as to whether any of that happens. Obviously there's some causal relation between what's outside in the world and what's in our head. But it does not follow that there's a symbol–object relationship, [something like the reverse of the causal one]. And the big problem with that approach is – what's the object? Well, here we're back to studying lexical concepts and it was pretty clear by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that there wasn't going to be a relation like that, even for the simplest concepts. We just individuate things in different ways.

5. Locke's discussion of personal identity is a famous example of how we just don't individuate things that way; [we, or rather, our minds, produce the concept PERSON]. That goes back to Aristotle and form and matter, but then it's very much extended in the seventeenth century; and then it kind of dropped. As far as I know, after Hume it virtually disappears from the literature. And now – these days – we're back to a kind of neo-scholastic picture of word–thing relations. That's why you have books called Word and Object [by W.V.O. Quine] and that sort of thing. But there's no reason to believe that that relation exists. So yes, the representational theories of mind are bound to a concept of representation that has historical origins but has no particular merits as far as I know.

Chomsky's notion of an I-language was introduced in part (in 1986) by appeal to a contrast with what he called an “E-language” approach to the study of language. An E-language approach is one that studies language that is ‘externalized.’ One form that externalization might take is found in a philosophers’ favorite, the notion of a public language. What is a public language? David Lewis and Wilfrid Sellars, among many others, assume that a language is an institution shared by individuals in a population, taught by training procedures with the aim of getting the child to conform to the rules for word and sentence usage (for Lewis, “conventions,” and for Sellars, “practices”) of the relevant population. This view turns out to be hopeless as a basis for scientific research for reasons taken up in appendices VI and XI. It does, however, conform quite nicely to a commonsense conception of language.

Another version of an E-language approach is found in Quine, where he insists that there is no “fact of the matter” with regard to deciding between two grammars for ‘a language,’ so long as they are “extensionally equivalent.” To say that they are extensionally equivalent, each would have to generate all and only the same set of sentences, where a sentence is understood to be a ‘string’ of ‘words.’ To make sense of this, one must think that it is possible to identify a language for purposes of scientific investigation with a set – an infinite set – of strings. However, that belief is erroneous, for several reasons that become clear below; essentially, a language is a system in the head that has the competence to generate a potential infinity of sound–meaning pairs, where these pairs are defined by appeal to the theory, as is the recursive procedure that can yield them. What a person actually produces in various contexts during his or her lifetime is a very different creature: in Chomsky's terminology, it is an “epiphenomenon,” not a grouping of strings that can be the subject matter of a naturalistic scientific effort.

1. JM: Looking at how you have studied human nature now, could we begin by looking at some apparent differences between your approach to the biological study of human nature and that pursued by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists such as Wilson, Pinker, Dawkins, and many others. They seem to think that the science of human nature should aim to explain human behavior, and they conceive of the various biologically based affects and cognitive capacities on which they focus as biologically evolved in the long-term selectional way that neo-Darwinists favor. Your approach to the science of human nature pays scant attention to the explanation of behavior – in fact you've maintained since at least the late 1950s that while our everyday intentional, commonsense accounts of behavior might be successful enough for practical purposes, the scientific explanation of behavior is a hopeless project, except perhaps for extremely simple organisms. And while you have no objection to seeking selectional accounts of the development of affects and cognitive capacities, you emphasize in the case of human language – certainly the most distinctive and central mental faculty, one that no other creature has, and that seems to underlie many of our cognitive accomplishments – there is no evidence that a long-term selectional story will work. There are reasons to think that language was introduced at a single stroke with the introduction of Merge, perhaps some fifty or sixty thousand years ago. Could you comment on these apparent differences, and on what we might hope to accomplish in a naturalistic science of human nature?

2. NC: First of all, just to be historically accurate, what's now called evolutionary psychology or sociobiology begins with Kropotkin in his critique of social Darwinism. But he was a Darwinist. He argued on selectional grounds that you would expect what he called “mutual aid” – cooperative societies that happened to be his vision of communitarian anarchism. Well, why is Kropotkin disregarded? – because people don't like his conclusions. If you mention him to Dawkins and so on, they'll just ridicule him. Now is it because he didn't have any evidence? Well, he didn't have any relevant scientific evidence. Does anyone have such evidence for anything else? Barely. They don't like his conclusions.

3. There are several different questions here. What is the nature – what is human nature, or ant nature? Well, those are scientific questions. Separate from that is the question of what role selection had in developing them. And those are just two different scientific questions, not to be intermingled. Part of the problem with the kind of pop biology that's common today is they're just intermingled – it's assumed that if there's a nature, it's got to be selected. It doesn't make any sense – it doesn't make any sense for the kidney or the visual system or anything else, and it doesn't make any sense here.

1. JM: Noam, let me ask about what you take to be your most important contributions. Do you want to say anything about that?

2. NC: Well, I think that the idea of studying language in all its variety as a biological object ought to become a part of future science – and the recognition that something very similar has to be true of every other aspect of human capacity. The idea that – there was talk of this in Aspects, but I didn't really spell it out – the belief . . .

3. [Wait; I'll start over. B. F.] Skinner's observation is correct that the logic of behaviorism and the logic of evolution are very similar – that observation is correct. But I think his conclusion – and the conclusion of others – is wrong. Namely, that that shows that they're both correct. Rather, it shows that they're both incorrect, because the logic of behaviorism doesn't work for growth and development, and for the same reason, the notion of natural selection is only going to work in a limited way for evolution. So there are other factors. As I said in Aspects, there's certainly no possibility of thinking that what a child knows is based on a general procedure applied to experience, and there's also no reason to assume that the genetic endowment is just the result of various different things that happen to have happened in evolutionary history. There must be further factors involved – the kind that Turing [in his work on morphogenesis] was looking for, and others were and are looking for. And the idea that maybe you can do something with that notion is potentially important. It's now more or less agreed that you can do something with that notion for, say, bacteria. If you can also do something with it for the most recent – and by some dimension most complex – outcomes of evolutionary history like language, that would suggest that maybe it holds all the way through.

1. JM: Incidentally, your LSA paper and the emphasis on the third factor threw a bit of a monkey wrench into my efforts to write a chapter on innateness as a contribution to a book on cognitive science . . .

2. NC: Well, you just don't know . . . The more you can attribute to the third factor – which is the way that science ought to go; the goal of any serious scientist interested in this is to see how much of the complexity of an organism you can explain in terms of general properties of the world. That's almost like the nature of science. Insofar as there is a residue, you have to attribute it to some specific genetic encoding; and then you've got to worry about where that came from. Obviously, there's got to be something there; we're not all amoebas. Something has got to be there; so, what is it?

3. JM: It might be nice to have answers.

4. NC: I'm not sure; I like the edges of the puzzle.

5. JM: OK, you're right. They're much more fun.

6. NC: Think of how boring the world would be if we knew everything we can know, and even knew that we can't understand the rest.

7. JM: Yes, Peirce's millennial form of science does sound boring.

8. NC: Well, the nice thing about it is that his view can't be true, because he was making a serious error about evolution – assuming that we're basically angels by natural selection. But you could have something like it. You could imagine that the species would reach the point that everything knowable is known, including the limits of knowledge. So you could know that there are puzzles out there that can't be formulated. That would be ultimate boring.

9. JM: Yes, worse than heaven.[C]

1. JM: You mentioned that some who would be scientists are too data-oriented – that they are unwilling to abstract and idealize in the ways needed in order to simplify and construct a science. Is the phenomenon that you've quite often remarked upon – that even distinguished chemists [and other scientists] early in the twentieth century wanted to deny that their theoretical work had anything more than an instrumental value – is this an aspect of what happens in studying human languages, that we wish to talk about what people say, and the circumstances in which they say it – their behavior – and not the principles and systems that underlie it and make it possible?

2. NC: There's some connection there, but it seems to me a different issue. There was a strong Machian tradition in the sciences, which was that if you can't see it, it's not there – [that theoretical principles] are just some hypotheses you're making up to make your computations work better. This was true in physics too, like in chemistry, late into the 1920s. Poincaré, for example, dismissed molecules and said that the only reason we talk about them is that we know the game of billiards, but there's no basis for them – you can't see them, they're just a useful hypothesis for computing things. And this goes on into the 1920s – leading scientists were saying that Kékulé's structural chemistry or Bohr's atom were simply modes of computation. And their reason was an interesting one: you couldn't reduce [them] to physics. I've quoted Russell in 1929. Russell knew the sciences quite well, and he says that chemical laws cannot at present be reduced to physical laws – the assumption being that the normal course of science is to reduce to physical laws. But as long as they aren't [reduced], it's not real science. Well, we know what happened; they were never reduced. Physics underwent a radical change, and it was unified with a virtually unchanged chemistry. Well, at that point, it was recognized – well actually, it was never explicitly recognized, it was just tacitly understood – that the entire discussion of the last century or so was crazy; it was just sort of forgotten and nobody talked about it anymore. And the history was forgotten. But it's an interesting history.