Pratique du Shadowing: The Ideas of Chomsky - Bryan Magee & Noam Chomsky (1977) - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo
Choisissez un mode d'entraînement
Chaque mode ouvre une salle d'entraînement en plein écran.
499 phrases
Si les phrases sont trop courtes ou trop longues, cliquez sur Edit pour les ajuster.
1
Noam Chomsky has made two international reputations in unrelated or apparently unrelated fields.
2
The widest is as one of the national leaders of American resistance to the Vietnam War.
3
The deepest is as a professor of linguistics who, before he was 40 years old, had transformed the nature of his subject.
4
He's something of a joker in the pack as far as philosophy is concerned.
5
Many professional philosophers would insist quite sincerely that he isn't a philosopher at all, that linguistics is simply a different discipline, albeit a neighboring one.
6
Well, I'm not going to argue about that.
7
It's little more than a question of definition anyway.
8
The fact is, he was trained as a philosopher, his work has enormous implications for philosophy, and in the writings of philosophers today,
9
I should say his name probably occurs as often as that of any living person.
10
The central point, really, is this.
11
If one problem, more than another, has dominated much of 20th century philosophy, it's that of the relationship between language and the world.
12
Wittgenstein, to give no more than a single instance, was in thrall to this problem throughout his life.
13
Well, now along comes the linguist Chomsky and argues that the way we actually acquire the use of language, and therefore its relationship to experience,
14
and therefore its relationship to the world, are radically different from what the Anglo -Saxon tradition in philosophy has always maintained.
15
He first put his ideas forward in the late 1950s as part of a critique of behavioral psychology.
16
It's not too unfair to say that the behavioral psychologists had tended to talk as
17
if the human individual came into the world as an undifferentiated lump of malleable stuff, which was then molded and shaped by its environment.
18
Through processes of stimulus and response, they said, penalty and reward, the reinforcement of rewarding responses, and the association of ideas,
19
the individual developed and learned, including the learning of language.
20
Now, Chomsky argued that this could not possibly explain how virtually all human beings,
21
regardless of their intelligence, do something as fantastically difficult as master the use of a language, even when they're not deliberately taught it,
22
as most people probably aren't and they do this at such an extraordinarily young age
23
and in such an extraordinarily short space of time.
24
He argued that for this to happen at all we must be genetically pre -programmed to do it
25
and therefore that all human languages must have in common a basic structure that corresponds to this pre -programming.
26
Now this also has some very important negative implications.
27
The chief of these is that anything that can't be accommodated to this structure, anything, so to speak, that can't be caught in the mesh of this particular network,
28
is linguistically inexpressible and unintelligible to us.
29
So the general principles common to all languages set vital limits to our capacity to understand the world
30
and communicate with each other.
31
Put like that, it sounds like a translation into linguistic terms of some of the basic ideas of Immanuel Kant, and I must say that's always how it's looked to me,
32
but even if so, it's Chomsky who's carried it out and no one else, and it's proved an enormously stimulating and fruitful thing to do.
33
Professor Chomsky, one of the difficulties about discussing your ideas is that in an obvious sense they're hybrid, in part their linguistics, in part their philosophy,
34
and in part their biology.
35
And in fact, you yourself first put them forward in what was really a dispute with biologists, with behavioral psychologists.
36
How did you come to start at that starting point?
37
Well, the reason was that this picture of the nature of language
38
and the way in which language is acquired was of such enormous prevalence over quite a wide spectrum of thought,
39
including not simply psychology but philosophy and linguistics as well.
40
The view that was dominant, say at the time when I was a student, say 25, 30 years ago,
41
the dominant picture of language was that it is essentially a system of habits or skills
42
or dispositions to act and that it is acquired through extensive training,
43
overtraining, through repetition, perhaps through procedures of induction or generalization or association,
44
and that one's knowledge, the system of habits that one develops simply grows through accretion incrementally.
45
experience is subjected to these processes of generalization and analogy.
46
And in fact, this picture, which plainly is a factual assumption, was presented as if it were virtually an a priori truth,
47
which it certainly is not.
48
I mean, it's obviously not necessary that language is a system of that sort, or that it's acquired in anything like that way.
49
One thing that you pointed out, which is in fact very obvious once it's pointed out, is that most people probably aren't actually taught language at all.
50
That is to say that most parents don't give any systematic instruction of any kind to their children, yet the children nevertheless learn.
51
Well, I would want to even go beyond that.
52
I think it's certainly the case that language is, in only the most marginal sense, is taught, and the teaching is in no sense essential to the acquisition of language.
53
But in a certain sense, I think we might even go on to say that language isn't even learned,
54
at least if by learning we mean any process that has those characteristics that are generally associated with learning.
55
For example, the characteristics that I mentioned.
56
It seems to me if we want a reasonable metaphor, we should talk about growth.
57
Language seems to me to grow in the mind rather in the way that familiar physical systems of the body grow.
58
So, we begin our interchange with the world with our mind in a certain genetically determined state
59
and through an interaction with experience, with an environment, this state changes until it reaches a mature state,
60
which we call a state of knowledge of language.
61
This sequence of changes from the genetically determined initial state to the final state
62
and in which we really have a quite complex system of mental computations.
63
This series of changes seems to me very much analogous to growth of organs,
64
and in fact I think it's not inappropriate to regard the mind as a system of mental organs, the language faculty being one,
65
each of a structure determined by our biological endowment with interactions also generally determined by the nature of our biological endowment
66
growing through the triggering effect of experience which shapes
67
and articulates the organs as they develop in the individual through the relevant period of his life.
68
So, as I say, it seems to me that not only is it wrong to think of language as being taught, but it's at least very misleading to think of it as being learned
69
if we carry with the notion of learning the associations
70
that generally go along with it in other words we are
71
pre -programmed to learn a language in the same way as we are pre -programmed to grow arms
72
and legs and reach puberty in our early teens
73
and all sorts of other sometimes delayed processes of growth yes and uh
74
reaching puberty is a good example since that's a a case
75
of biological development of autogenetic development that's plainly pre -programmed its essence
76
but takes place after birth and in fact we might say
77
that something that even death for that matter is genetically determined
78
that is it's we are biologically constructed so
79
that at a certain time our life processes stop but
80
and in fact the fact
81
that some development takes place after the organism has begun an
82
independent existence in the world has nothing to say it tells us nothing about whether it's a genetically determined development
83
or not now one thing that follows from your view is that
84
if we set out as you have done in the course
85
of your professional life to investigate the language faculty of human beings, then what you are investigating is as much a biophysical system,
86
I mean something that actually exists in matter, in stuff, in human tissue,
87
as would be the case if you were investigating human vision or human digestion or the circulation of the blood.
88
Well, I think that's certainly true, at least we believe it to be true in principle.
89
We are not at a stage now where, in the study of the neural basis for higher cognitive processes,
90
where it's possible to identify the physical structures that are involved in these operations.
91
Correspondingly, the actual study of this organ remains at an abstract level.
92
That is, we can try to investigate the principles by which it functions.
93
But there's very little to say right now about the ways in
94
which these principles are physically realized in the structures of the brain.
95
Quite correspondingly, one might study the visual system, let's say, as was done for a very long period,
96
knowing, say, nothing about how the principles that we are led to attribute to this system,
97
the, let's say, analyzing mechanisms that we are led to attribute to the system, knowing nothing about.
98
how these may be physically realized in our neural structures.
99
And I think it's quite appropriate to think of the contemporary study of language as being
100
analogous to a study of a vision at a period
101
when it's remained impossible technically or through the limitations of understanding technique and so on.
102
It was impossible to determine the actual physical elements
103
that entered into these systems which could be studied only in an abstract fashion.
104
There seems to be a special difficulty here.
105
I mean, we accept the fact that I can't, by introspection, however hard I try, say, observe the workings of my own liver.
106
I can't observe it in the act of secreting bile or whatever it does.
107
And similarly, presumably, I can't observe these language formation faculties of mine at work work.
108
But nevertheless, there is an important difference, because if we want to investigate the workings of the liver, we can observe other peoples.
109
I mean, bits of live peoples or the whole of dead peoples or animals' livers,
110
you can experiment with different inputs and see what difference they make to the output and so on and so forth.
111
But we can't do that with animals as far as their language -using faculty is concerned, because they haven't got language using faculties.
112
Now, doesn't
113
that shut off from us what is in fact the chief mode of investigation with all the other biological faculties
114
that we have?
115
It does very definitely stop a very natural mode of investigation.
116
That is, we are not, for ethical reasons, we do not conduct intrusive experiments with human beings.
117
So, for example, there are very natural modes of investigation that suggest themselves at once.
118
Suppose, Suppose, for example, I propose that language has some general property
119
and that every human language must have this property as a matter of biological necessity.
120
If we were dealing with a defenseless organism that we were allowed to study, say, the way we study monkeys or cats,
121
what we would do is employ the method of concomitant variation.
122
That is, we would design an artificial environment, let's say, in which this principle was violated and ask whether the system develops in a normal way under those conditions,
123
for example, to take one case.
124
Well, that we can't do in the case of humans.
125
We can't design artificial contrived environments
126
and see what happens to an infant in them just as we don't conduct ablation experiments with humans.
127
And it's important to recognize that this limitation raises no philosophical issue.
128
What it means is that we have to be clever and the kind of work we do, because a number of modes of inquiry are simply excluded, there being, as far as we know,
129
nothing analogous to the language faculty in the case of other organisms.
130
But that doesn't mean that we can't study the problem.
131
We have to study it more indirectly.
132
We often can't directly move to the experiments that would give us clear and precise answers to questions that we raise.
133
But if you think about the model that I put forth,
134
that is the model of an organ beginning in a genetically determined initial state and growing to a mature state of knowledge,
135
then it's obvious that that mature state of knowledge will be determined by two factors.
136
One, the initial genetic endowment, and secondly, the impinging experience.
137
And as far as the final state of knowledge is concerned, uh what's called the grammar of the language the system of rules
138
and principles that determines what is a sentence and what it means
139
and how it sounds and so on uh that's as far as
140
that system is concerned we really can get tremendous amounts of
141
evidence in fact every utterance that's produced is is an experiment
142
if you like every reaction of a person to an utterance is an experiment
143
so there's no shortage of information concerning the mature state of knowledge achieved
144
if we can if we can then discern in the mature state of knowledge principles and properties
145
which are in no way presented in the experience that is present
146
that is available it's very plausible to propose those as properties
147
attributable to the initial state the main thing i want to
148
do in this discussion professor chomsky is go into the implications
149
of your work for philosophy i don't want to go pursue you into the nature of the work itself
150
because that's highly technical obviously
151
and it's not really feasible to discuss it in a in
152
a television program of this kind let us now as it were assume the truth of your theories
153
and start looking at the wider implications of them because this i'm sure is what will interest our our audience most
154
one consequence of your theories is
155
that we are as human beings very very rigidly pre -programmed There are certain things we can understand,
156
certain things we can communicate and anything that falls outside that, we simply can't.
157
Is that so?
158
That's certainly correct.
159
So, I mean, in a way, this is a rather alarming doctrine.
160
I mean, it certainly contravenes the way we want to feel about ourselves.
161
Well, that may be an immediate reaction, but I think it's not the correct reaction.
162
In fact, while it's true that our genetic program rigidly constrains us, I think the more important point is that the existence of
163
that rigid constraint is what provides the basis for our freedom and creativity. And the reason...
164
But you mean it's only because we're pre -programmed that we can do all the things we can do?
165
Exactly.
166
The point is that if we really were plastic organisms without an extensive pre -programming, then the state that our mind achieves would in fact be a reflection of the environment,
167
which means it would be extraordinarily impoverished.
168
Fortunately for us, we're rigidly pre -programmed with extremely rich systems that are part of our biological endowment.
169
Correspondingly, a small amount of rather degenerate experience allows a kind of a great leap into a rich cognitive system,
170
essentially uniform in a community, and in fact, roughly uniform for the species.
171
Which would have developed over countless evolutionary ages through the biological evolutionary process.
172
The basic system itself developed over long periods of evolutionary development.
173
We don't know how, really.
174
But for the individual, it's present.
175
As a result, the individual is capable of, with a very small amount of evidence, of constructing an extremely rich system,
176
which allows him to act in the free and creative fashion, which in fact is normal for humans.
177
We can say anything that we want over an infinite range.
178
other people will understand us though they've heard nothing like that before
179
we're able to do that precisely because of that rigid programming
180
but short of
181
that we would not be able to at all what account are you able to give of creativity
182
if we are pre -programmed in the way you say then
183
how is creativity a possibility for us well here i think
184
one has to be fairly careful uh i think we can
185
say a good deal about about the nature of the system that is acquired the state of knowledge that is attained,
186
we can say a fair amount about the biological, the basis, the basis in the initial state of the mind for the acquisition of this system.
187
But when we turn to a third question, namely, how is this system used?
188
How are we able to act creatively?
189
How can we decide to say things that are new but not random,
190
that are appropriate to occasions but not under the control of stimuli?
191
When we ask these questions, we really enter into a realm of mystery where human science, at least so far, and maybe in principle, does not reach.
192
We can say a fair amount about the principles that make it possible for us to behave in our normal creative fashion.
193
But as soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action, when those questions arise,
194
human science is at a loss it has nothing to say about them as far as I can see.
195
These questions remain in the obscurity that in which they were in classical antiquity.
196
Would you also accept this or not that that
197
having arrived at our present situation across millions of years of
198
evolution we must have been going through a continual process of innovation and new adaption and development of new abilities,
199
dispositions, organs, et cetera, might we not still be, as it were, plastic at the edges,
200
might we not still be developing and changing and genuinely evolving, if only on the margin?
201
Well, I think one has to be, again, very cautious here, because while it's true in a very vague sense,
202
it's correct to say that the systems that we now have have developed through evolution, through natural selection, it's important to recognize how little we we are saying when we say that.
203
For example, it is certainly not necessarily the case that every particular trait that we have is the result of specific selection.
204
That is, that we were selected for having that trait.
205
In fact, there are striking examples to the contrary, or at least apparent examples to the contrary.
206
Say, take for example our capacity to deal with abstract properties of the number system.
207
Now that's a distinctive human capacity, as distinctive as the capacity for language.
208
Any normal human, in fact,
209
down to pathological levels, can comprehend the properties of the number system and can move very far in understanding their deep properties.
210
But it's extremely difficult to believe that this capacity was the result of specific selection.
211
That is, it's hard to believe
212
that people who were a little better at proving theorems of number theory had more children, let's say.
213
That didn't happen.
214
In fact, through most of human evolution.
215
In fact, essentially all of human evolution, it would have been impossible to know that this capacity even existed.
216
The contingencies that allowed it to be exercised never arose.
217
Nevertheless, the trait is there.
218
The capacity is there.
219
The mental organ, if you like, has developed.
220
Presumably, it has developed as a concomitant of some other properties of the brain which may have been selected.
221
For example, we can speculate,
222
say, that increase in brain size was a factor in differential reproduction, hence in evolution.
223
And it may be that for physical law, because of physical laws that we presently don't know,
224
that an increase in brain size under the specific conditions of human evolution simply leads necessarily to a system
225
which has the capacity to deal with properties of the number system.
226
Well, then that's a matter of physics, ultimately.
227
And then the mind that evolves, the brain that evolves, will have this capacity, but not because it was achieved through selection.
228
Now, I think it's at least likely that something of the sort is true of human language.
229
I mean, surely if it were dysfunctional, it wouldn't have been maintained.
230
It's obviously functional.
231
But it's a long leap to claim
232
that the specific structures of language are themselves the result of specific selection
233
and it's a leap that I don't think is particularly plausible.
234
What you say, though, about the limitations that this imposes on us prompts in me the following thought.
235
We're all very used, I think, to the idea that in social life, each one of us as individuals tends to construct a picture of the world around his own experience.
236
And indeed, it's difficult to see how we could do anything else.
237
We're bound to do that.
238
We've got no alternative.
239
But it does mean that each one of us forms a systematically distorted view of the world
240
because it's all built up on what accidentally happens to be the particular
241
and really rather narrow experience of the individual who does it.
242
Now, do you think that something of
243
that kind applies to man as a whole because of the reasons implicit in your theory?
244
That is to say that the whole picture that mankind has formed of the cosmos, of the universe, of the world,
245
must be systematically distorted and what's more drastically limited
246
by the nature of the particular apparatus for understanding that he happens to have.
247
Well, I think that is undoubtedly the case.
248
But again, I would question the use of the word limited, which carries unfortunate suggestions.
249
that is i assume that one of our faculties one of our mental organs
250
if you like is let's call it a science forming capacity a capacity to create intelligible explanatory theories in some domain
251
and if we look at the history of science we discover
252
that time after time when particular questions were posed at a particular level of understanding it was possible to make
253
very innovative leaps of the imagination to rich explanatory theories that presented an intelligible picture of that subdomain of the universe,
254
often wrong theories as we later discovered, but there's a course that's followed.
255
And this gives, this could have been the case only because we do have, and we in fact share across the species,
256
a kind of a science forming capacity that is
257
that limits us as you say
258
but at the same in the same by the same token provides the possibility of creating explanatory theories
259
that extend so vastly far beyond any evidence that's available i mean it's very important to realize
260
that it should be obvious to say but it's worth saying
261
that when when when a new theory is created and i don't necessarily mean Newton, I mean, even a small theory.
262
What the scientist is typically doing, first of all, he has very limited evidence.
263
The theory goes far, far beyond the evidence.
264
Secondly, much of the evidence that's available is typically disregarded, that is, it's put to the side in the hope
265
that somebody else will take care of it someday and we can forget about it.
266
So at every stage in the history of science, there's even normal science, not, you know, Kuhnian revolutions, there's a high degree of idealization that goes on.
267
So there's selection of evidence, distortion of evidence, creation of new theory, confirmation or refutation or modification of that theory, further idealization.
268
These are all very curious steps.
269
And we're capable of, nevertheless, we can often make them and make them in a way which is intelligible to others.
270
It doesn't look like some random act of the imagination.
271
And where that's possible, we can develop intelligible theories we can gain some comprehension of
272
the nature of this aspect of the world now this is possible only
273
because we are rigidly pre -programmed again because we have have somehow developed through evolution or however.
274
the specific faculty of forming very particular theories.
275
Of course, it follows at once, or at least it's reasonable to assume that this very faculty, which enables us to construct extremely rich and successful theories in some domain,
276
may lead us very far astray in some other domain.
277
For example, there may be some, again, a Martian scientist looking at us and observing our successes and errors from a higher intelligence, let's say,
278
might be bemused to discover
279
that whereas in some domains we seem to be able to
280
make scientific progress in other domains we always seem to be running up against a blank wall
281
because our minds are so constructive
282
that we just can't make the intellectual leap that's required we can't formulate the concepts we don't have the categories
283
that are required to gain insight into that domain
284
do you think that if our study of our language forming capacity and hence our cognitive capacities as you call them,
285
our abilities to know and understand and learn,
286
if these studies that you're pioneering result in an enormously amount of increased knowledge of all these human faculties,
287
do you think it's at all likely that that increased knowledge will enable us to change and indeed expand the faculties?
288
That I think is extremely unlikely because I think the faculties are a biological given.
289
we may study the structure of the heart but we don't do
290
so because we think it's possible to replace the heart by another kind of pump let's say
291
which might be more efficient
292
similarly here i think if
293
if we ever did gain a real comprehension of the mental organs we would not we might
294
that might help us in cases of pathology uh marginal cases in other words
295
but I wouldn't see how that could give any way, at least with our present science, or plausible science, of modifying these capacities.
296
What we might do, however, is gain, at least it's in theory imaginable,
297
that we might discover something about the limits of our science -forming abilities.
298
We might discover, for example,
299
that some kinds of questions simply fall beyond the area where we are capable of constructing explanatory theories theories.
300
And I think we even maybe now have some glimmerings of
301
insight into where this delineation might be between intelligible theories
302
that fall within our comprehension and areas where no such theory is possible.
303
Well, the case that we discussed before may be one.
304
Take the question of, if you go back to the early history of science, early origins of science, speculation, and people were raising questions about,
305
say, the heavenly bodies and about the sources of human action.
306
Well, we're asking exactly the same questions now about the source of human action.
307
There's been no progress.
308
We have no idea how to approach this question within the framework of science.
309
We can write novels about it, but we can't construct even false scientific theories about it.
310
We simply have nothing to say when we ask the question, how does a person make a decision in a certain manner
311
and not some other manner when it's a free decision
312
that we just have no way of dealing with that issue on the other hand
313
the history of physics let's say has had substantial advances
314
and very it's very likely i think that
315
that massive difference in progress in one domain and an absolute blank wall in another
316
reflects the specific properties of our science warming capacities we might even be able to show
317
that someday if it's true so far we've been rather talking in this discussion as
318
if all organized thinking is done in language, but of course that in fact isn't so, is it?
319
I mean, one can take all kinds of examples.
320
Music is one that appeals to me very much.
321
If you get a composer like Stravinsky
322
composing a fantastically complicated and original and indeed revolutionary score like that of the Rite of Spring for an enormous orchestra,
323
then he's celebrating at an original and complicated and very sophisticated level
324
and he's probably celebrating in as elaborate a way as anybody else is who's doing anything
325
and what's more he's creating a structure which is publicly articulated
326
and so on
327
and yet words don't come into this process at any point as far as one can gather does that fact
328
and other facts like it pose any threat to your theories
329
well not really i mean in fact quite the contrary my assumption is that the mind is not a uniform system
330
that it's a highly differentiated system.
331
In fact, like the body, it's essentially a system of faculties or organs, and language is simply one of them.
332
We don't have to go to the level of Stravinsky to find examples of thinking without language.
333
I'm sure that everyone who introspects, who thinks about what he himself is doing, will know at once that much of his thinking doesn't involve language.
334
Or, say, well, the thinking of a cat, let's say, plainly doesn't involve language.
335
There are other modes of thought.
336
There are other faculties.
337
And I think that the musical faculty is one, one which is particularly interesting, I think, because it's extremely likely.
338
In fact, here's an area, in a sense, like physics, that is where very rapid and rich development took place in a way which was over a long period of,
339
say, Western history, in a way which was very intelligible to others.
340
I mean, not immediately, but after a short period.
341
And strikingly, well, there is a striking feature of the 20th century in this respect.
342
That is, that the musical creation of the 20th century, I think, is qualitatively different from that of,
343
say, the 18th century, in that it lacks that immediate access or short -term access that was true of the past.
344
One would have to do an experiment to prove it, but I have no doubt that if we took a child of today, two children of today, let's say, two groups, and taught one of them,
345
say, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, and taught the other one, Schoenberg, and post -Schoenbergian music,
346
that there would be a very substantial difference in their capacity to comprehend it and deal with it.
347
And that may reflect, in fact, if that's correct, it would reflect something about our innate musical capacities.
348
points of this nature have been discussed for some time I
349
remember Paul Hindemith about 25 years ago I think in lectures argued
350
that to violate the tonal principle in music would be something
351
like an effort to violate the principle of gravitation I take it he meant by
352
that that it was an innate problem well we might say I don't pursue the musical analogy too far
353
because I was using that really only as an illustration what it illustrates is the fact
354
that you think we are pre -programmed, in fact, to a whole lot of things, don't you?
355
I mean, no doubt to use gesture or recognize faces or develop a common sense view of the world and so on.
356
Well, every area of human existence that's even worth studying is worth studying because
357
rich and complex structures are developed in a uniform way, otherwise it's not worth studying.
358
And those are precisely the cases where we expect to have, to discover pre -programming that makes possible these great achievements.
359
So, in other words, you think that everything that we do makes manifest our pre -programming – games, institutions, the way we dress, the way we eat, everything?
360
Well, here again, I think some caution is necessary.
361
For example, take games.
362
I'm speculating, obviously, but it seems to me reasonable to suppose that games are designed so as to be,
363
in a sense, at the outer limits of our cognitive capacities.
364
We don't make up games that are In which we are as skilled as we are in using words, let's say that wouldn't be an interesting game Everybody can do too much what we do it.
365
We make up games like say chess Which is an extraordinarily simple game that has its rule system is utterly trivial But nevertheless,
366
we're just not we're not very good at it as in the case of using language We're all extraordinarily good
367
and we're essentially undifferentiable one from another.
368
But when we get to something like chess, which I assume is at the borders of our cognitive capacity,
369
then individuals of very similar intellectual makeup will nevertheless diverge very significantly in their ability to deal with these exotic problems.
370
That's what makes it an interesting game.
371
And in fact, I think there are also tasks that can be constructed that are really outside our cognitive capacities.
372
And in fact, I think there's even a field that's devoted to developing such tasks, it's called psychology.
373
Much of modern psychology has been concerned to discover tasks which would yield species uniform laws,
374
that is, laws that essentially hold across a number of species, or to construct good experiments,
375
that is, experiments that have slow learning curves with regular increments and so on and so forth.
376
And there are such tasks, a maze running, in which rats are about as good as humans and both are quite terrible.
377
And these I think are in fact precisely tasks
378
that do lie outside of our cognitive capacity so we do proceed by trial and error and by induction and so on.
379
But centrally your whole approach represents a rejection of the empirical tradition in philosophy, doesn't it?
380
Because I mean the very fact that you think
381
that the empiricists are wrong about how we learn must mean
382
that they're wrong about knowledge and the nature of knowledge
383
and the nature of knowledge has been the central problem in the whole empirical tradition of philosophy.
384
Well, the classical empiricist tradition, which I think was the tradition that's represented, let's say, perhaps in its highest form by Hume,
385
seems to me to be a tradition of extreme importance in
386
that a particular theory of the origins of knowledge in fact
387
of the science of human nature in Hume's phrase was put forth
388
an empirical theory
389
and i think hume for example would regard it as an empirical theory did regard it
390
so when we investigate it i think we discover
391
that it's just completely false that is that the mechanisms
392
that he discussed are not the mechanisms by
393
which the mind reaches states of knowledge
394
that the states of knowledge attained are radically different than the kinds
395
that he discussed for example for hume the mind was in his image a kind of a theater in which ideas
396
paraded across the stage and it therefore followed necessarily
397
that we could introspect completely into the contents of our mind
398
if an idea is not on the stage it's not in the mind
399
and the ideas may be connected
400
and associated in fact he went on to say there isn't even any theater there's just the ideas in
401
that respect the image is misleading well that's a that's a theory
402
and in fact it's a theory that has had a an enormous grip on the imagination throughout most of the history, to my knowledge, most of the history of Western thought.
403
For example, that same image dominates the rationalist tradition as well, where it was assumed that one could exhaust the contents of the mind by careful attention.
404
You know, you could really develop those clear and distinct ideas and their consequences and so on.
405
And in fact, even if you move to someone, let's say, like Freud, with his evocation of the unconscious still i think
406
that a careful reading suggests that he regarded the unconscious as in principle accessible
407
that is we could really perceive that theater and stage
408
and the things on it carefully if only the barriers of uh repression
409
and so on could be overcome well
410
if what i've been suggesting is correct that's just that's radically
411
wrong i mean even wrong as a point of departure there is no reason at all
412
that i can see for believing that the the principles of mental computation
413
that enter so intimately into our action or our interaction
414
or our speech to believe
415
that those principles have are at all accessible to introspection any more than the analyzing mechanisms of our visual system
416
or for that matter the nature of our liver is accessible to introspection it seems to me
417
that over and over again you come back to the same point
418
that is to say that many of the particular problems discussed
419
and theories put forward by philosophers in the main but also psychologists
420
and you've just mentioned Freud
421
and in your writings you mentioned many others are in fact
422
theories about physical processes they are therefore open to checking by investigation
423
and when you check by investigation you find out
424
that the theories are wrong and therefore you are as it were radically subversive of a lot of
425
very well -established theories in our tradition.
426
It seems to me that what you put forward in their place over and over again, in fact, does parallel the rationalist tradition.
427
I said in my introduction to this program that what I'm always reminded of by your work is the theories of Kant.
428
You seem to me to be almost redoing, in terms of modern linguistics, what Kant was doing.
429
Do you accept any truth in that?
430
Well, I not only accept truth in it, but I've tried to bring it out in a certain way however i haven't myself specifically referred to kant
431
but rather to the primarily to the 17th century tradition of the continental cartesians
432
and the british neoplatonists who developed many of the ideas
433
that are now much more familiar in the writings of kant
434
for example the idea of experience conforming to our mode of cognition or the uh well particularly in the british platonists Cudworth, for example, there are, I believe,
435
there's a rich mine of insight into the organizing principles of the mind by which experience is structured.
436
In fact, I think that's some of the richest psychological, source of psychological insights that I know. And that's the one,
437
it's this tradition that I think can be fleshed out
438
and made more explicit by the kinds of empirical inquiry that are now possible.
439
Of course, I think we also have to diverge from that tradition in a number of respects.
440
I've mentioned one, namely the belief that the contents of the mind are open to introspection.
441
Similarly, there's certainly no reason to accept the metaphysics of that tradition, to believe that there's a dualism of mind and body.
442
I mean, you can see why the Cartesians were led to that.
443
It was a rational move on their part, but it's not a move that we have to follow.
444
We have other ways of approaching that question.
445
Another thing that I mentioned in my introduction was the fact that you've made two international reputations, the other one, besides linguistics, being as a political activist.
446
And it does seem to me that there is a connection between these two careers of yours.
447
And I want to put this to you, really, in the form of a question.
448
Liberalism grew up in the history of European thought in very close relationship to empirical philosophy and scientific method.
449
The battle cry, really, in all three was, don't accept anything on the say -so of established authority.
450
Look at the facts and judge for yourself.
451
And this was revolutionary in politics, science, and philosophy.
452
And because of this, liberalism has always been regarded in the Western tradition as the main anti -authoritarian political creed.
453
But just as you've rejected empiricism, you've also rejected liberalism.
454
And you now say in your writings that whatever may have been true in the past, liberalism has now become the ally of authority.
455
Would you accept that there is this underlying connection between your work in linguistics and, well, to put it dramatically, your opposition to the Vietnam War?
456
Well, this raises quite a welter of questions.
457
Let me begin by saying something about liberalism, which is a very complicated concept, I think it's correct surely
458
that liberalism grew up in the intellectual environment of empiricism
459
and the rejection of authority and trust in the evidence of the senses
460
and so on however liberalism has undergone a very complex evolution as a social philosophy over the years
461
if we go back to the
462
classics or at least what i regard as the classics say for example humboldt's limits of state action
463
which inspired mill and is a true libertarian liberal classic if like the the world that Humboldt was considering,
464
which was partially an imaginary world, but the world for which he was developing this political philosophy was a post -feudal but pre -capitalist world,
465
that it was a world in
466
which there is no great divergence among individuals in the kind of power that they have and what they command, let's say.
467
But there was a tremendous disparity between individuals on the one hand and the state on the other.
468
Consequently, it was the task of a liberalism that was concerned with human rights and equality of individuals and so on.
469
It was the task of that liberalism to dissolve the enormous power of the state, which was such an authoritarian threat to individual liberties.
470
And from that, you develop a classical liberal theory in, say, Humboldt's or Mill's sense.
471
Well, of course, that is pre -capitalist.
472
He couldn't conceive of an era in which, a corporation would be regarded as an individual, let's say, or in which such enormous,
473
in which enormous disparities in control over resources and production would distinguish between individuals in a massive fashion.
474
Now, in that kind of a society, to take the Humboldtian view is a very superficial liberalism,
475
because while opposition to state power in an era of such divergence conforms to Humboldt's conclusions, it doesn't do so for his reasons.
476
That is, his reasons lead to very different conclusions in that case.
477
Namely, I think his reasons lead to the conclusion that we must dissolve the authoritarian control over production and resources,
478
which leads to such divergences among individuals.
479
In fact, I think one might draw a direct line between classical liberalism and a kind of libertarian socialism,
480
which I think can be regarded as a kind of an
481
adapting of the basic reasoning of classical liberalism to a very different social era now
482
if we come to the modern period here liberalism has taken on a very strange sense
483
if you think of its history now now liberalism is essentially
484
the theory of state capitalism of state intervention in a capitalist economy well
485
that has very little relation to classical liberalism in fact classical liberalism is what's now called conservatism i suppose
486
but this new view i think really is it in my my view at least a highly authoritarian position That is,
487
it's one which accepts a number of centers of authority and control, the state on the one hand,
488
agglomerations of private power on the other hand,
489
all interacting with individuals as malleable cogs in this highly constrained machine, which may be called democratic,
490
but given the actual distribution of power is very far from being meaningfully democratic and cannot be so.
491
So my own feeling has always been
492
that to achieve the classical liberal ideals for the reasons that led to them being put forth in a society so different,
493
we must be led in a very different direction.
494
It's superficial and erroneous to accept the conclusions
495
which were reached for a different society and not to consider the reasoning that led to those conclusions.
496
The reasoning, I think, is very substantial.
497
I'm a classical liberal in this sense, but I think it leads me to be a kind of an anarchist you know, an anarchist -socialist.
498
Well, I'd love to pursue you down that road, Professor Chomsky, but that would be a new discussion and a new program, so I think we must, alas, end there.
499
Thank you very much.
Télécharger l'application
Tout pour parler couramment
Prononciation IAChaque phrase notée
Phonétique (IPA)Maîtrisez chaque son
VocabulaireEnrichissez votre lexique
Jeu de vocabulaireApprenez en jouant
Même chaîne
FOR YOU
Vidéo recommandée
C123
17 phrases
Noam Chomsky on Language Aquisition
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C12
198 phrases
Hannah Arendt: The Banality of Evil Explained
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
159 phrases
Meet Your Master - Getting to Know Your Brain: Crash Course Psychology #4
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C223
689 phrases
Noam Chomsky on Philosophy of Mind
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
654 phrases
Stuart & Cliffe Knechtle | Do Agnostics Just Want To Have Control? | Give Me an Answer
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
65 phrases
Espacio y tiempo, una cuestión de lengua. Lera Boroditsky, psicóloga e investigadora
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C16
83 phrases
Plato’s Philosophy of Education
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C13
462 phrases
Cohesion 3 - Substitution
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C1224 phrases
Fluent Forever
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1117 phrases
La rebeldía, según Albert Camus
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C13
159 phrases
Episode 1: "What is social ontology?" - Prof Brian Epstein
Daily ConversationUniversity Students
C11
202 phrases
What is Marxism? (And Why The Outrage is Wrong)
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon
Cette leçon d’expression orale s’appuie sur la vidéo « The Ideas of Chomsky - Bryan Magee & Noam Chomsky ». Cette vidéo contient 108 phrases et 7220 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 44:40. Le locuteur parle à un rythme naturel d’environ 162 mots par minute, proche d’une conversation courante. 82 % des mots font partie des 3 000 mots les plus courants en anglais ; le reste mérite d’être vu avant de commencer. 18 de ses 108 phrases sont des questions : un bon entraînement pour l’intonation interrogative et les réponses courtes.
Vocabulaire clé de cette vidéo
15 mots de la vidéo à retenir, avec leur prononciation et leur sens :
| Mot | Prononciation | Sens |
|---|---|---|
| principle nom | /ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pəl/ | principe |
| faculty nom | /ˈfæk.əl.ti/ | faculté, composante |
| liberalism nom | /ˈlɪ.b(ə.)ɹə.lɪz.əm/ | libéralisme |
| organ nom | /ˈɔːɡən/ | organe |
| experiment nom | /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/ | expérience |
| construct verbe | /ˈkɑn.stɹʌkt/ | construire |
| evolution nom | /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/ | évolution |
| biological adjectif | /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/ | biologique |
| domain nom | /ˌdəʊˈmeɪ̯n/ | domaine |
| essentially adverbe | /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/ | essentiellement, en essence |
| discover verbe | /dɪˈskʌvə/ | découvrir |
| enormous adjectif | /ɪˈnɔː.məs/ | énorme |
| cognitive adjectif | /ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/ | cognitif |
| investigate verbe | /ɪnˈvɛs.tə.ɡeɪt/ | étudier |
| nevertheless adverbe | /ˌnɛvɚðəˈlɛs/ | cependant, pourtant |
Les verbes à particule que vous entendrez
| Mot | Prononciation | Sens |
|---|---|---|
| make up verbe | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | constituer, composer |
| point out verbe | pointer | |
| carry out verbe | /ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/ | sortir, transporter dehors |
| find out verbe | découvrir, savoir | |
| go through verbe | traverser | |
| set out verbe | /ˈsɛt‿aʊt/ | expliquer |
Des phrases à répéter
Des phrases courtes et complètes de la vidéo, à réutiliser dans la conversation de tous les jours :
- How did you come to start at that starting point?
- We don't know how, really.
- What account are you able to give of creativity?
- How are we able to act creatively?
- Do you accept any truth in that?
La grammaire de cette vidéo
Les structures que le locuteur utilise le plus, avec les mots exacts de la vidéo :
| Structure | Dans la vidéo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + participe passé — une action passée qui compte encore maintenant | has made · has dominated · has always maintained |
| Voix passive be + participe passé — l’accent est mis sur ce qui arrive, pas sur qui le fait | was trained · was then molded · can't be accommodated |
| Propositions relatives who / which + proposition — une précision sur une personne ou une chose | stuff, which was · out, which is · people who were |
Prononciation à surveiller
Le locuteur utilise 83 contractions et formes réduites, comme can't, don't, we're. Prononcez-les sous leur forme courte, telles que vous les entendez.
- Les sons « th »: nevertheless /ˌnɛvɚðəˈlɛs/, authoritarian /əˌθɑ.ɹəˈtɛɹ.i.ən/, theater /ˈθi(ə)tɚ/
- Les sons « sh » et « zh »: evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/, substantial /səbˈstænʃəl/
- Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: liberalism /ˈlɪ.b(ə.)ɹə.lɪz.əm/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, biological /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/
Les sons difficiles pour les francophones :
- /h/ — il se souffle, il n’est pas muet: behavioral /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/, comprehension /ˌkɑmpɹɪˈhɛnʃn̩/, hence /ˈhɛns/, habit /ˈhæb.ɪt/, comprehend /ˌkɑmpɹɪˈhɛnd/
- /tʃ/ et /dʒ/ — à ne pas adoucir en « ch » et « j »: biological /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/, genetically /d͡ʒəˈneɾɪkli/, mature /məˈt͡ʃʊ(ə)ɹ/, psychology /saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, imagination /ɪˌmæd͡ʒəˈneɪʃən/
- /r/ anglais — langue recourbée, sans frotter la gorge: principle /ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pəl/, liberalism /ˈlɪ.b(ə.)ɹə.lɪz.əm/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, construct /ˈkɑn.stɹʌkt/, regard /ɹɪˈɡɑːd/
Comment s’entraîner avec cette vidéo
- Écoutez la vidéo en entier une fois sans parler et notez les mots que vous ne connaissez pas.
- Commencez à la vitesse 0,75×, répétez phrase par phrase, puis revenez à la vitesse normale quand cela devient facile.
- Enregistrez-vous et comparez avec l’original, en faisant attention à des mots comme principle, faculty, liberalism.
Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?
Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.