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Truth to tell Noam Chomsky
talks to Domenico Pacitti about the pressures on academic freedom and the
advances in our knowledge of language I ask
Chomsky how he feels academic freedom and the pursuit of truth are faring in
universities. Students, he replies, are not given enough encouragement to
challenge the basic assumptions of their professors and the pre-established
framework of their subject. He accepts that the situation in Italy is
particularly depressing but points out that, when seen from a US perspective, it
is true of European universities generally, Britain included. But he stresses
that Britain is closer to the US than the continent in this respect. "Continental
Europe still retains a rather authoritarian structure in the university system,
with deference/authority relations built into cultural patterns. I noticed it
very strikingly when I was teaching at Oxford. In the Oxford college where I was
living there was an incident over a man who was serving a young gentleman, and
the way he expected to be treated was just unimaginable. "In the
US, class differentiations are not particularly marked, so that the guy who is
fixing your car and you are on the same terms." He recounts
a story about an MIT colleague who, when asked by his students what they were
going to cover in their courses, replied that it didn't matter what they
covered, but rather what they discovered. "That's
the way education should work," he says. "At the graduate level in the
sciences that's the way it does work. It's interaction among students and
faculty with not much tyranny - there can't be, because most of the good ideas
are coming from the students." Mainstream
academia, Chomsky complains, tends to be too resistant to change. "I think
you see this very clearly in the way that modern linguistics developed. It did
not develop in the major academic centres because they were too conservative.
They don't want to be rattled - they want their peaceful existence to be
unchallenged. And that's why in France, where European linguistics took off, it
was at Vincennes and not the Sorbonne. "It was
in this little place outside Paris where they were sending all the radical
students to get rid of them, and since nobody was paying attention to what
happened there, it was possible to have innovative creative work which to this
day has not penetrated the French university system. And the same pattern has
replicated throughout the world." But it is
subordination to external power in both US and European universities which he
sees as posing perhaps the most serious threat. "Universities are always in
a tension. At best, they are trying to maintain intellectual integrity. Yet they
cannot escape the reality that they are parasitic on external power mainly in
the form of government and private corporations. These outside pressures are
obviously going to undermine intellectual integrity and so it's a constant
battle." Over-generous
funding for over-ambitious projects turns out to be a characteristic speciality
of US academia. Following Europe's self-destruction in the second world war,
Chomsky explains, the US found itself with unprecedented power and prestige.
This led to the confidence, first expressed in the 1950s and still expressed
today, that with the US having conquered the world, its scientists could now
conquer the last frontier - the human mind. "We've
just finished a 'decade of the brain' programme backed by major foundations. The
closing conference at the United Academy of Arts and Sciences produced the very
confident statement that the body/mind problem will soon be overcome and that
the mind will finally be understood. "Well,
firstly, there is no such problem, because there has been no coherent concept of
body since Isaac Newton, so there's nothing to overcome. And secondly, the
confidence is completely misplaced since we can't even explain how the human
visual system can recognise a straight line. The truth is that there's still a
huge gap between current understanding and the mental aspects of the world we're
trying to account for." Despite
having revolutionised the way we think about language and the mind and
notwithstanding the considerable insights produced by almost half a century of
sustained research, Chomsky still finds his work criticised outright as
"mentalistic" and therefore unscientific on the grounds that it cannot
be reduced to physics. Chemistry, he argues, was not reducible to physics, but
that didn't make it unscientific. Rather, it was physics which had to be
reconstituted so as to be able to incorporate a virtually unchanged chemistry. Many modern
thinkers, he says, simply haven't understood the full significance of Newton's
discovery of gravity. "The possibility of affecting objects without
touching them just exploded physicalism and materialism. It has been common in
recent years to ridicule Descartes's "ghost in the machine" in
postulating mind as distinct from body. Well, Newton came along and he did not
exorcise the ghost in the machine: he exorcised the machine and left the ghost
intact. So now the ghost is left and the machine isn't there. And the mind has
mystical properties. "My
feeling is that a study of the actual history of the modern sciences would be a
very salutary component of any university curriculum." Chomsky
acknowledges with a broad grin that these views have earned his approach the
trade name of "MIT mentalism" among colleagues. But why does the
conception of the world as consisting in bodies and minds have such a strong
hold on people and why are so many academics deceived into believing illusions
about the physical that were understood as such 200 years ago? "So far
we've been talking about fact, but now it's speculation. My speculation is that
somehow our intuitive mentality is fundamentally dualist. Suppose you're looking
at the sun setting over the ocean. You can know all the relativity theory in the
world, but you still see the sun setting into the water. And if the moon is near
the horizon, you can't help seeing it larger than if it's up in the sky." So where
does all of this leave truth, the cornerstone of all academic research? Is there
a final answer to the question: what is truth? "There is an answer,"
says Chomsky, "but whether we can find it or not is another matter. The
human condition is such that we can make our best guess as to what is true.
We're organic creatures and we have our limitations. We must see the world from
a particular point of view because that's the way we're built. "But
we're also reflective creatures, so we can reflect on our own inadequacies and
try to overcome them. That's what happened in the Newtonian revolution. They had
to reflect on the inability of common sense, of ordinary intelligence to
comprehend the nature of the world and look at it from a different point of
view. It's the same with all our existence. We can use our resources as
creatively and critically as we can to try to overcome our special perspectives
that come from our nature. But whether we'll get the truth or not is another
question." Meanwhile,
Chomsky's new minimalist programme in linguistics is asking just how well
designed the human language capacity is to carry out its essential functions.
With complex grammar rules now eliminated in favour of basic principles, he
feels that more has been learnt about language in the last 20 years than in the
preceeding 2,000 years. The trouble is, he says, that what we know intuitively seems to lie far beyond what we can understand intellectually. Note: This interview was published by JUST Response on May 20 2002. It originally appeared in The Guardian (London & Manchester) on April 18 2000.
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