Noam Chomsky (born 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher and political writer who transformed the study of language from the 1950s onwards with the idea that human beings are born with a capacity for language, a ‘universal grammar’ shared by all languages. For Chomsky, language is first of all an instrument of thought and the differences between languages lie mostly on the surface, whilst other linguists hold that the language we grow up speaking shapes what we habitually notice. Therapeutic Shamanism takes no side on the science, and teaches that the words we use shape what we experience.
Who is Noam Chomsky? #
A linguist who changed the study of language, and a leading political writer. He was born in Philadelphia in 1928 and joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955, where he taught for most of his working life, before moving to the University of Arizona in 2017. His book Syntactic Structures (1957) introduced generative grammar, the study of the rules by which a speaker can form and understand sentences never heard before, and he developed the argument that the capacity for language is inborn in the years that followed, in his 1959 review of the behaviourist B. F. Skinner and in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965).1
He is equally known as a critic of American foreign policy and of the mainstream media, most famously in Manufacturing Consent (1988), written with Edward S. Herman. Politically he favours anarcho-syndicalism,2 and he has pointed to the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid as an early argument that human nature evolved in ways suited to cooperative, communitarian living. He himself calls the links between his linguistics and his politics “abstract and speculative”.3
What is universal grammar? #
The idea that every human child comes equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages. In the 1950s psychology was dominated by behaviourism, which explained behaviour through stimulus and response and treated the mind as unscientific. The psychologist Steven Pinker describes Chomsky’s reply as resting on two facts. Almost every sentence we speak or hear is a new combination of words, so a language cannot be a list of learnt responses; and children master these complex grammars quickly, without being taught, so they must bring something to the task.4
The famous illustration is Chomsky’s sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”. It means nothing, yet any English speaker can tell it is a properly formed sentence, which suggests that grammar is a system of its own, separate from meaning.5
What does Chomsky think language is for? #
Thinking first, and talking second. In a 2008 interview he set out the idea that a change in the brain gave humans the ability to combine ideas without limit, which first served as an inner “language of thought” for planning, interpreting and reflecting, and only later came to be spoken. Communication, on this view, “probably has no special role in its design or evolution”.6 He quotes the biologists Salvador Luria and François Jacob, who thought what makes language unique is its role in “molding” our notion of reality and allowing the “mental creation of possible worlds”.6
So Chomsky does think language shapes thought, but he places the shaping in the human capacity everyone shares. The differences between languages lie, for him, in the way that inner language is turned into sound or sign, where “languages differ widely, and in which the mass of complexity of language resides”.6
Does the language we speak shape how we think? #
Linguists give a range of answers. At one end, Pinker, who shares Chomsky’s view that the capacity for language is inborn, calls the strong claim that thought is determined by one’s language “wrong, all wrong”: “People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought.”7 At the other end, linguistic anthropologists in the tradition of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf find that a mother tongue trains habits of attention. See What did Sapir and Whorf actually claim about language and thought?
The linguist Guy Deutscher takes a middle course. Languages do not stop their speakers understanding anything, but what a language obliges its speakers to say, every time they speak, can “settle into habits of mind with consequences for memory, or perception, or associations, or even practical skills”.8 A large study of twenty languages led by the psychologist Asifa Majid found no universal ranking of the senses in language: English fitted the familiar order of sight first and smell near the bottom, but most languages did not, and smell was much easier to put into words for the hunter-gatherer peoples in the study than for anyone else.9
What do critics say about Chomsky’s linguistics? #
A lot, from several directions. Lakoff and Johnson say that Chomsky’s picture of language as pure form, independent of the body, of perception and of culture, takes over a Cartesian split between mind and body, and that a grammar sealed off from the rest of the brain is impossible on what is known of how neurons connect.10 The linguists Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson, surveying the world’s six to eight thousand languages, found “vanishingly few universals of language” and concluded that the claims of universal grammar are “either empirically false, unfalsifiable, or misleading”.11
The sharpest single dispute concerns the Pirahã, a small people of the Brazilian Amazon who live mainly by hunting, fishing and gathering. The linguist Daniel Everett reported that their language lacks embedding, putting one phrase inside another, which would challenge the idea of a universal core. Others have challenged Everett’s report, as Chomsky notes, and Chomsky replies that it confuses embedding with recursion, that a people not using a capacity says nothing against their having it, and that Pirahã children brought up in Boston would speak Boston English.12 On the other side, Pinker points to experiments such as one by the psycholinguists Stephen Crain and Mineharu Nakayama, in which three- to five-year-olds forming questions never produced the ungrammatical strings a simple word-order rule would give, “as Chomsky would have predicted”.13
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
At a few points, though the Therapeutic Shamanism books do not discuss Chomsky. Chomsky holds that human language is “nothing like the signalling systems of other animals”.14 The books take a different view, that we are by no means the only animal with language.15 At the same time, human language is largely a middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer thing, which is why deep Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer journeys, among the other-than-human Peoples, are mostly beyond words, and full of sensation, imagery and metaphor instead.16 See Why are there no words or symbols in the Lower-World?
Both also see in language the power to imagine what is not here. Where Chomsky’s sources speak of the “mental creation of possible worlds”, Therapeutic Shamanism counts the same gift as a cost as well. Complex language let us think abstract thoughts, create stories and myths and invent belief systems, but it also meant we could believe things that were not true and lose our way. Animist tribes looked for guidance to the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer who do not lose their way, and they needed shamans, who did not fully buy into the tribe’s stories, to keep the good and true ones.17
Where Chomsky looks for what all languages share, Therapeutic Shamanism’s concern is with the words of a particular culture and what they do to us. Words define and shape how we perceive things, something the dominant culture understands very well, and shamans are very clear that words have power over how we experience reality.18 That is a teaching about noticing and changing our own language, and it does not depend on settling the scientific dispute either way.
