340
J.
M. E.
MORAVCSIK
mind. For without the possibility of a formal characterization of the
rules of a language, philosophical and psychological claims for it could
not be made in any reasonably precise way.
Let me try to clarify the claim that the formal specifications of
the rules of grammar reveals something deep about the organization
of the human mind. Lyons emphasizes that, according to Chomsky, the
data to be explained by an adequate linguistic theory consist of the
linguistic intuitions of the competent speakers, i.e., intuitions about
what is or is not a well formed sentence and about the structural rela–
tion between sentences in a language. This by itself already establishes
a link between the study of language and the study of the human
mind, since the data to be considered have psychological reality.
It
also
shows a way in which linguistics connects the humanities with the social
sciences by linking them to the data. But in order to see the full signif–
icance of the proposal we must go beyond Lyons's analysis: the idea of
intuitions leads to a psychological reality for a set of rules.
If
linguistic
competence involves the mastery of a set of rules, then a human being
with that competence must have internalized it. Since the system of
rules has definite formal properties, we are able to ask what sort of a
structure must the human mind have if it can internalize such a
formalized system of rules? The general principle is that an analysis of
competence leads to a characterization of the instrument possessing
such competence. The significance or triviality of the connections will
depend on how thorough the analysis of the competence has been. For
example, if we view human language merely as systems that will
allow one creature to signal another in the presence of certain external
stimuli (e.g., danger), then we can only conclude that a human being
is the kind of entity that
is
capable of developing such a signaling
system. This capacity would hardly distinguish us from other animal
species, since many of them, like the deer, have developed such systems.
Once we move on to the kinds of specifications that Chomsky
offers - in terms of creativity and the unboundedness of length, etc.–
far more interesting and theoretically significant observations can be
made concerning the organization of the mind. For some time, it's been
assumed that a fairly simple automaton could handle the kinds of
rules that a language like English requires. Among Chomsky's early
successes was the demonstration that this is not the case. One
can correlate different types of sets of rules - grammars -with auto–
mata of various degrees of complexity. The specific requirements
for these correlations, along with Chomsky's insistence that English
requires rules with very special formal properties, so-called transfor–
mations, may lead to the conclusion that full linguistic competence
I
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