Shadowing Practice: The Ideas of Chomsky - Bryan Magee & Noam Chomsky (1977) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Noam Chomsky has made two international reputations in unrelated or apparently unrelated fields.
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The widest is as one of the national leaders of American resistance to the Vietnam War.
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The deepest is as a professor of linguistics who, before he was 40 years old, had transformed the nature of his subject.
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He's something of a joker in the pack as far as philosophy is concerned.
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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.
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Well, I'm not going to argue about that.
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It's little more than a question of definition anyway.
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The fact is, he was trained as a philosopher, his work has enormous implications for philosophy, and in the writings of philosophers today,
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I should say his name probably occurs as often as that of any living person.
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The central point, really, is this.
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If one problem, more than another, has dominated much of 20th century philosophy, it's that of the relationship between language and the world.
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Wittgenstein, to give no more than a single instance, was in thrall to this problem throughout his life.
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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,
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and therefore its relationship to the world, are radically different from what the Anglo -Saxon tradition in philosophy has always maintained.
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He first put his ideas forward in the late 1950s as part of a critique of behavioral psychology.
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It's not too unfair to say that the behavioral psychologists had tended to talk as
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if the human individual came into the world as an undifferentiated lump of malleable stuff, which was then molded and shaped by its environment.
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Through processes of stimulus and response, they said, penalty and reward, the reinforcement of rewarding responses, and the association of ideas,
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the individual developed and learned, including the learning of language.
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Now, Chomsky argued that this could not possibly explain how virtually all human beings,
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regardless of their intelligence, do something as fantastically difficult as master the use of a language, even when they're not deliberately taught it,
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as most people probably aren't and they do this at such an extraordinarily young age
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and in such an extraordinarily short space of time.
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He argued that for this to happen at all we must be genetically pre -programmed to do it
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and therefore that all human languages must have in common a basic structure that corresponds to this pre -programming.
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Now this also has some very important negative implications.
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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,
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is linguistically inexpressible and unintelligible to us.
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So the general principles common to all languages set vital limits to our capacity to understand the world
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and communicate with each other.
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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,
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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.
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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,
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and in part their biology.
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And in fact, you yourself first put them forward in what was really a dispute with biologists, with behavioral psychologists.
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How did you come to start at that starting point?
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Well, the reason was that this picture of the nature of language
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and the way in which language is acquired was of such enormous prevalence over quite a wide spectrum of thought,
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including not simply psychology but philosophy and linguistics as well.
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The view that was dominant, say at the time when I was a student, say 25, 30 years ago,
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the dominant picture of language was that it is essentially a system of habits or skills
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or dispositions to act and that it is acquired through extensive training,
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overtraining, through repetition, perhaps through procedures of induction or generalization or association,
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and that one's knowledge, the system of habits that one develops simply grows through accretion incrementally.
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experience is subjected to these processes of generalization and analogy.
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And in fact, this picture, which plainly is a factual assumption, was presented as if it were virtually an a priori truth,
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which it certainly is not.
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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.
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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.
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That is to say that most parents don't give any systematic instruction of any kind to their children, yet the children nevertheless learn.
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Well, I would want to even go beyond that.
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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.
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But in a certain sense, I think we might even go on to say that language isn't even learned,
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at least if by learning we mean any process that has those characteristics that are generally associated with learning.
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For example, the characteristics that I mentioned.
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It seems to me if we want a reasonable metaphor, we should talk about growth.
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Language seems to me to grow in the mind rather in the way that familiar physical systems of the body grow.
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So, we begin our interchange with the world with our mind in a certain genetically determined state
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and through an interaction with experience, with an environment, this state changes until it reaches a mature state,
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which we call a state of knowledge of language.
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This sequence of changes from the genetically determined initial state to the final state
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and in which we really have a quite complex system of mental computations.
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This series of changes seems to me very much analogous to growth of organs,
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and in fact I think it's not inappropriate to regard the mind as a system of mental organs, the language faculty being one,
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each of a structure determined by our biological endowment with interactions also generally determined by the nature of our biological endowment
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growing through the triggering effect of experience which shapes
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and articulates the organs as they develop in the individual through the relevant period of his life.
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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
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if we carry with the notion of learning the associations
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that generally go along with it in other words we are
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pre -programmed to learn a language in the same way as we are pre -programmed to grow arms
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and legs and reach puberty in our early teens
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and all sorts of other sometimes delayed processes of growth yes and uh
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reaching puberty is a good example since that's a a case
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of biological development of autogenetic development that's plainly pre -programmed its essence
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but takes place after birth and in fact we might say
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that something that even death for that matter is genetically determined
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that is it's we are biologically constructed so
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that at a certain time our life processes stop but
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and in fact the fact
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that some development takes place after the organism has begun an
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independent existence in the world has nothing to say it tells us nothing about whether it's a genetically determined development
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or not now one thing that follows from your view is that
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if we set out as you have done in the course
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of your professional life to investigate the language faculty of human beings, then what you are investigating is as much a biophysical system,
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I mean something that actually exists in matter, in stuff, in human tissue,
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as would be the case if you were investigating human vision or human digestion or the circulation of the blood.
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Well, I think that's certainly true, at least we believe it to be true in principle.
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We are not at a stage now where, in the study of the neural basis for higher cognitive processes,
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where it's possible to identify the physical structures that are involved in these operations.
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Correspondingly, the actual study of this organ remains at an abstract level.
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That is, we can try to investigate the principles by which it functions.
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But there's very little to say right now about the ways in
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which these principles are physically realized in the structures of the brain.
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Quite correspondingly, one might study the visual system, let's say, as was done for a very long period,
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knowing, say, nothing about how the principles that we are led to attribute to this system,
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the, let's say, analyzing mechanisms that we are led to attribute to the system, knowing nothing about.
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how these may be physically realized in our neural structures.
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And I think it's quite appropriate to think of the contemporary study of language as being
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analogous to a study of a vision at a period
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when it's remained impossible technically or through the limitations of understanding technique and so on.
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It was impossible to determine the actual physical elements
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that entered into these systems which could be studied only in an abstract fashion.
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There seems to be a special difficulty here.
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I mean, we accept the fact that I can't, by introspection, however hard I try, say, observe the workings of my own liver.
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I can't observe it in the act of secreting bile or whatever it does.
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And similarly, presumably, I can't observe these language formation faculties of mine at work work.
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But nevertheless, there is an important difference, because if we want to investigate the workings of the liver, we can observe other peoples.
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I mean, bits of live peoples or the whole of dead peoples or animals' livers,
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you can experiment with different inputs and see what difference they make to the output and so on and so forth.
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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.
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Now, doesn't
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that shut off from us what is in fact the chief mode of investigation with all the other biological faculties
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that we have?
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It does very definitely stop a very natural mode of investigation.
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That is, we are not, for ethical reasons, we do not conduct intrusive experiments with human beings.
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So, for example, there are very natural modes of investigation that suggest themselves at once.
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Suppose, Suppose, for example, I propose that language has some general property
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and that every human language must have this property as a matter of biological necessity.
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If we were dealing with a defenseless organism that we were allowed to study, say, the way we study monkeys or cats,
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what we would do is employ the method of concomitant variation.
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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,
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for example, to take one case.
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Well, that we can't do in the case of humans.
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We can't design artificial contrived environments
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and see what happens to an infant in them just as we don't conduct ablation experiments with humans.
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And it's important to recognize that this limitation raises no philosophical issue.
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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,
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nothing analogous to the language faculty in the case of other organisms.
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But that doesn't mean that we can't study the problem.
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We have to study it more indirectly.
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We often can't directly move to the experiments that would give us clear and precise answers to questions that we raise.
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But if you think about the model that I put forth,
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that is the model of an organ beginning in a genetically determined initial state and growing to a mature state of knowledge,
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then it's obvious that that mature state of knowledge will be determined by two factors.
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One, the initial genetic endowment, and secondly, the impinging experience.
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And as far as the final state of knowledge is concerned, uh what's called the grammar of the language the system of rules
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and principles that determines what is a sentence and what it means
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and how it sounds and so on uh that's as far as
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that system is concerned we really can get tremendous amounts of
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evidence in fact every utterance that's produced is is an experiment
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if you like every reaction of a person to an utterance is an experiment
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so there's no shortage of information concerning the mature state of knowledge achieved
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if we can if we can then discern in the mature state of knowledge principles and properties
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which are in no way presented in the experience that is present
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that is available it's very plausible to propose those as properties
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attributable to the initial state the main thing i want to
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do in this discussion professor chomsky is go into the implications
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of your work for philosophy i don't want to go pursue you into the nature of the work itself
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because that's highly technical obviously
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and it's not really feasible to discuss it in a in
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a television program of this kind let us now as it were assume the truth of your theories
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and start looking at the wider implications of them because this i'm sure is what will interest our our audience most
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one consequence of your theories is
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that we are as human beings very very rigidly pre -programmed There are certain things we can understand,
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certain things we can communicate and anything that falls outside that, we simply can't.
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Is that so?
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That's certainly correct.
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So, I mean, in a way, this is a rather alarming doctrine.
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I mean, it certainly contravenes the way we want to feel about ourselves.
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Well, that may be an immediate reaction, but I think it's not the correct reaction.
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In fact, while it's true that our genetic program rigidly constrains us, I think the more important point is that the existence of
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that rigid constraint is what provides the basis for our freedom and creativity. And the reason...
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But you mean it's only because we're pre -programmed that we can do all the things we can do?
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Exactly.
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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,
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which means it would be extraordinarily impoverished.
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Fortunately for us, we're rigidly pre -programmed with extremely rich systems that are part of our biological endowment.
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Correspondingly, a small amount of rather degenerate experience allows a kind of a great leap into a rich cognitive system,
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essentially uniform in a community, and in fact, roughly uniform for the species.
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Which would have developed over countless evolutionary ages through the biological evolutionary process.
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The basic system itself developed over long periods of evolutionary development.
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We don't know how, really.
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But for the individual, it's present.
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As a result, the individual is capable of, with a very small amount of evidence, of constructing an extremely rich system,
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which allows him to act in the free and creative fashion, which in fact is normal for humans.
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We can say anything that we want over an infinite range.
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other people will understand us though they've heard nothing like that before
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we're able to do that precisely because of that rigid programming
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but short of
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that we would not be able to at all what account are you able to give of creativity
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if we are pre -programmed in the way you say then
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how is creativity a possibility for us well here i think
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one has to be fairly careful uh i think we can
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say a good deal about about the nature of the system that is acquired the state of knowledge that is attained,
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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.
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But when we turn to a third question, namely, how is this system used?
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How are we able to act creatively?
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How can we decide to say things that are new but not random,
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that are appropriate to occasions but not under the control of stimuli?
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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.
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We can say a fair amount about the principles that make it possible for us to behave in our normal creative fashion.
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But as soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action, when those questions arise,
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human science is at a loss it has nothing to say about them as far as I can see.
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These questions remain in the obscurity that in which they were in classical antiquity.
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Would you also accept this or not that that
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having arrived at our present situation across millions of years of
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evolution we must have been going through a continual process of innovation and new adaption and development of new abilities,
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dispositions, organs, et cetera, might we not still be, as it were, plastic at the edges,
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might we not still be developing and changing and genuinely evolving, if only on the margin?
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Well, I think one has to be, again, very cautious here, because while it's true in a very vague sense,
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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.
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For example, it is certainly not necessarily the case that every particular trait that we have is the result of specific selection.
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That is, that we were selected for having that trait.
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In fact, there are striking examples to the contrary, or at least apparent examples to the contrary.
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Say, take for example our capacity to deal with abstract properties of the number system.
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Now that's a distinctive human capacity, as distinctive as the capacity for language.
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Any normal human, in fact,
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down to pathological levels, can comprehend the properties of the number system and can move very far in understanding their deep properties.
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But it's extremely difficult to believe that this capacity was the result of specific selection.
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That is, it's hard to believe
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that people who were a little better at proving theorems of number theory had more children, let's say.
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That didn't happen.
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In fact, through most of human evolution.
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In fact, essentially all of human evolution, it would have been impossible to know that this capacity even existed.
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The contingencies that allowed it to be exercised never arose.
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Nevertheless, the trait is there.
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The capacity is there.
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The mental organ, if you like, has developed.
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Presumably, it has developed as a concomitant of some other properties of the brain which may have been selected.
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For example, we can speculate,
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say, that increase in brain size was a factor in differential reproduction, hence in evolution.
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And it may be that for physical law, because of physical laws that we presently don't know,
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that an increase in brain size under the specific conditions of human evolution simply leads necessarily to a system
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which has the capacity to deal with properties of the number system.
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Well, then that's a matter of physics, ultimately.
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And then the mind that evolves, the brain that evolves, will have this capacity, but not because it was achieved through selection.
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Now, I think it's at least likely that something of the sort is true of human language.
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I mean, surely if it were dysfunctional, it wouldn't have been maintained.
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It's obviously functional.
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But it's a long leap to claim
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that the specific structures of language are themselves the result of specific selection
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and it's a leap that I don't think is particularly plausible.
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What you say, though, about the limitations that this imposes on us prompts in me the following thought.
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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.
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And indeed, it's difficult to see how we could do anything else.
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We're bound to do that.
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We've got no alternative.
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But it does mean that each one of us forms a systematically distorted view of the world
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because it's all built up on what accidentally happens to be the particular
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and really rather narrow experience of the individual who does it.
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Now, do you think that something of
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that kind applies to man as a whole because of the reasons implicit in your theory?
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That is to say that the whole picture that mankind has formed of the cosmos, of the universe, of the world,
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must be systematically distorted and what's more drastically limited
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by the nature of the particular apparatus for understanding that he happens to have.
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Well, I think that is undoubtedly the case.
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But again, I would question the use of the word limited, which carries unfortunate suggestions.
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that is i assume that one of our faculties one of our mental organs
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if you like is let's call it a science forming capacity a capacity to create intelligible explanatory theories in some domain
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and if we look at the history of science we discover
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that time after time when particular questions were posed at a particular level of understanding it was possible to make
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very innovative leaps of the imagination to rich explanatory theories that presented an intelligible picture of that subdomain of the universe,
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often wrong theories as we later discovered, but there's a course that's followed.
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And this gives, this could have been the case only because we do have, and we in fact share across the species,
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a kind of a science forming capacity that is
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that limits us as you say
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but at the same in the same by the same token provides the possibility of creating explanatory theories
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that extend so vastly far beyond any evidence that's available i mean it's very important to realize
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that it should be obvious to say but it's worth saying
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that when when when a new theory is created and i don't necessarily mean Newton, I mean, even a small theory.
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What the scientist is typically doing, first of all, he has very limited evidence.
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The theory goes far, far beyond the evidence.
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Secondly, much of the evidence that's available is typically disregarded, that is, it's put to the side in the hope
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that somebody else will take care of it someday and we can forget about it.
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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.
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So there's selection of evidence, distortion of evidence, creation of new theory, confirmation or refutation or modification of that theory, further idealization.
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These are all very curious steps.
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And we're capable of, nevertheless, we can often make them and make them in a way which is intelligible to others.
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It doesn't look like some random act of the imagination.
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And where that's possible, we can develop intelligible theories we can gain some comprehension of
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the nature of this aspect of the world now this is possible only
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because we are rigidly pre -programmed again because we have have somehow developed through evolution or however.
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the specific faculty of forming very particular theories.
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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,
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may lead us very far astray in some other domain.
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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,
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might be bemused to discover
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that whereas in some domains we seem to be able to
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make scientific progress in other domains we always seem to be running up against a blank wall
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because our minds are so constructive
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that we just can't make the intellectual leap that's required we can't formulate the concepts we don't have the categories
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that are required to gain insight into that domain
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do you think that if our study of our language forming capacity and hence our cognitive capacities as you call them,
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our abilities to know and understand and learn,
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if these studies that you're pioneering result in an enormously amount of increased knowledge of all these human faculties,
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do you think it's at all likely that that increased knowledge will enable us to change and indeed expand the faculties?
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That I think is extremely unlikely because I think the faculties are a biological given.
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we may study the structure of the heart but we don't do
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so because we think it's possible to replace the heart by another kind of pump let's say
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which might be more efficient
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similarly here i think if
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if we ever did gain a real comprehension of the mental organs we would not we might
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that might help us in cases of pathology uh marginal cases in other words
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but I wouldn't see how that could give any way, at least with our present science, or plausible science, of modifying these capacities.
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What we might do, however, is gain, at least it's in theory imaginable,
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that we might discover something about the limits of our science -forming abilities.
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We might discover, for example,
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that some kinds of questions simply fall beyond the area where we are capable of constructing explanatory theories theories.
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And I think we even maybe now have some glimmerings of
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insight into where this delineation might be between intelligible theories
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that fall within our comprehension and areas where no such theory is possible.
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Well, the case that we discussed before may be one.
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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,
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say, the heavenly bodies and about the sources of human action.
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Well, we're asking exactly the same questions now about the source of human action.
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There's been no progress.
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We have no idea how to approach this question within the framework of science.
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We can write novels about it, but we can't construct even false scientific theories about it.
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We simply have nothing to say when we ask the question, how does a person make a decision in a certain manner
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and not some other manner when it's a free decision
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that we just have no way of dealing with that issue on the other hand
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the history of physics let's say has had substantial advances
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and very it's very likely i think that
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that massive difference in progress in one domain and an absolute blank wall in another
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reflects the specific properties of our science warming capacities we might even be able to show
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that someday if it's true so far we've been rather talking in this discussion as
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if all organized thinking is done in language, but of course that in fact isn't so, is it?
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I mean, one can take all kinds of examples.
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Music is one that appeals to me very much.
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If you get a composer like Stravinsky
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composing a fantastically complicated and original and indeed revolutionary score like that of the Rite of Spring for an enormous orchestra,
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then he's celebrating at an original and complicated and very sophisticated level
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and he's probably celebrating in as elaborate a way as anybody else is who's doing anything
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and what's more he's creating a structure which is publicly articulated
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and so on
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and yet words don't come into this process at any point as far as one can gather does that fact
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and other facts like it pose any threat to your theories
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well not really i mean in fact quite the contrary my assumption is that the mind is not a uniform system
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that it's a highly differentiated system.
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In fact, like the body, it's essentially a system of faculties or organs, and language is simply one of them.
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We don't have to go to the level of Stravinsky to find examples of thinking without language.
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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.
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Or, say, well, the thinking of a cat, let's say, plainly doesn't involve language.
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There are other modes of thought.
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There are other faculties.
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And I think that the musical faculty is one, one which is particularly interesting, I think, because it's extremely likely.
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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,
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say, Western history, in a way which was very intelligible to others.
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I mean, not immediately, but after a short period.
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And strikingly, well, there is a striking feature of the 20th century in this respect.
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That is, that the musical creation of the 20th century, I think, is qualitatively different from that of,
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say, the 18th century, in that it lacks that immediate access or short -term access that was true of the past.
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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,
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say, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, and taught the other one, Schoenberg, and post -Schoenbergian music,
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that there would be a very substantial difference in their capacity to comprehend it and deal with it.
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And that may reflect, in fact, if that's correct, it would reflect something about our innate musical capacities.
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points of this nature have been discussed for some time I
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remember Paul Hindemith about 25 years ago I think in lectures argued
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that to violate the tonal principle in music would be something
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like an effort to violate the principle of gravitation I take it he meant by
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that that it was an innate problem well we might say I don't pursue the musical analogy too far
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because I was using that really only as an illustration what it illustrates is the fact
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that you think we are pre -programmed, in fact, to a whole lot of things, don't you?
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I mean, no doubt to use gesture or recognize faces or develop a common sense view of the world and so on.
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Well, every area of human existence that's even worth studying is worth studying because
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rich and complex structures are developed in a uniform way, otherwise it's not worth studying.
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And those are precisely the cases where we expect to have, to discover pre -programming that makes possible these great achievements.
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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?
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Well, here again, I think some caution is necessary.
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For example, take games.
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I'm speculating, obviously, but it seems to me reasonable to suppose that games are designed so as to be,
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in a sense, at the outer limits of our cognitive capacities.
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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.
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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.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “The Ideas of Chomsky - Bryan Magee & Noam Chomsky”. This video has 108 sentences and 7220 words to shadow. The speech runs for 44:40. The speaker talks at a natural 162 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start. 18 of its 108 sentences are questions, so it is good practice for question intonation and short answers.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| principle noun | /ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pəl/ | A fundamental assumption, fundamental law or guiding belief. |
| faculty noun | /ˈfæk.əl.ti/ | The academic staff at schools, colleges, universities or not-for-profit research institutes, as opposed to the students or support staff. |
| liberalism noun | /ˈlɪ.b(ə.)ɹə.lɪz.əm/ | The quality of being liberal. |
| organ noun | /ˈɔːɡən/ | The larger part of an organism, composed of tissues that perform similar functions. |
| experiment noun | /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/ | A test under controlled conditions made to either demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of… |
| classical adjective | /ˈklæs.ɪ.k(ə)l/ | Of or relating to the first class or rank, especially in literature or art. |
| construct verb | /ˈkɑn.stɹʌkt/ | To build or form (something) by assembling parts. |
| evolution noun | /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/ | A manoeuvre of troops or ships. |
| regard noun | /ɹɪˈɡɑːd/ | A steady look, a gaze. |
| biological adjective | /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/ | Of or relating to biology. |
| domain noun | /ˌdəʊˈmeɪ̯n/ | A geographic area owned or controlled by a single person or organization. |
| essentially adverb | /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/ | In essence: by nature. |
| discover verb | /dɪˈskʌvə/ | To find or learn something for the first time. |
| enormous adjective | /ɪˈnɔː.məs/ | Extremely large; greatly exceeding the common size, extent, etc. |
| cognitive adjective | /ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/ | Relating to the part of mental functions that deals with logic, as opposed to affective which deals with emotions. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. | |
| make up verb | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | To constitute, to compose. |
| point out verb | To identify among a group of similar subjects, or in a scene where the subject might not be readily seen or noticed, with a gesture of the body. | |
| carry out verb | /ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/ | To hold while moving it out. |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| go along with verb | To acquiesce to or comply with a proposal, despite lacking a desire or value for it. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| put forward verb | To propose for consideration. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- 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?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has made · has dominated · has always maintained |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was trained · was then molded · can't be accommodated |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | stuff, which was · out, which is · people who were |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 83 contractions and reduced forms, such as can't, don't, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: nevertheless /ˌnɛvɚðəˈlɛs/, authoritarian /əˌθɑ.ɹəˈtɛɹ.i.ən/, theater /ˈθi(ə)tɚ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/, substantial /səbˈstænʃəl/
- Long words — get the stress right: liberalism /ˈlɪ.b(ə.)ɹə.lɪz.əm/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/, biological /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like principle, faculty, liberalism.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.