人物专栏 | Noam Chomsky教授访谈

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《理论语言学五道口站》（2022年第36期，总第239期）“人物专栏”与大家分享近期James McElvenny教授对Noam Chomsky教授的访谈，访谈以“the Beginnings of Generative Grammar”为主题。Noam Chomsky教授，享誉世界的语言学家、认知科学家、政治批评家、哲学家和历史学家。James McElvenny教授，德国锡根大学语言学家和科学历史学家。

本期访谈中，Noam Chomsky教授首先介绍了自己提出生成语法的背景和原因，然后谈及Harris教授对自己研究的影响，最后阐述了对逻辑实证主义和美国科学的看法。

访谈内容转自Hiphilangsci Podcast（语言科学历史与哲学博客）2022年3月第23期。本次访谈由本站成员赵欣宇、雷晨、聂简荻、郭思源、丁子意翻译。

访谈内容

01.

JMc教授：当您在1946年开始学习语言学时，美国主流语言学派是布龙菲尔德学派。受行为主义心理学理论的影响，他们将人类的语言视为一种可习得习惯，并运用实证方法来分析语言，局限在语料的表层形式中。您在提出生成语法时做出的一个重大突破就是寻求语法的解释充分性，这种理论能够剥离开表层结构，以揭示语言作为智人天赋的潜在原则。您那时是如何得出这个与当时语言学主流相悖的观点的？

Noam Chomsky教授：首先说明下，我当时在宾夕法尼亚大学，当时的领军人物Zellig Harris，也是现代语言学的重要人物，和我关系非常亲近。他本人并不关心行为主义，而且对任何关于语言官能是什么的心理学解释都不感兴趣。他的方法基本上是以数据为基础的，对所有数据群的分析。他制定了相当复杂和详细的程序，原则上可以对任何材料进行结构分析。而所有这些在心理上意味着什么的问题基本上没有涉及；他并没有很认真地考虑这个问题。那时，Leonard Bloomfield也是语言学的领军人物，他是忠实的行为主义者，至少他本人是这么认为的。正如他所说，语言是训练和习惯的结果；遇到新的现象就进行类比。这种观点从根本上说就是教条，但Charles Hockett和其他语言学领军人物都认同这种想法。几年后的1951年，我在哈佛大学，也遇到了行为主义的“铁杆粉丝”。哈佛大学主要推崇的Skinner行为主义是一种非常僵化、狭隘的行为主义形式。Skinner在哈佛大学的William James系列讲座后来作为Verbal Behavior一书出版，可以说是当时盛行的心理学和哲学信条。最有影响力的哲学家W. V. Quine也完全忠于这些信条。几年后他的Word and Object一书问世，完全是Skinner式的、教条式的。我就是这个时候开始产生想法的。对我来说，这听起来很荒谬，但是如果你简单地回顾一下语言的基本事实，就不会这么认为了。甚至当我在宾夕法尼亚大学读本科时，我就已经开始认识到，这种程序化的方法是有严重缺陷的。语言学被描述成了所谓的分类科学。它只是根据类别、类型、元素的分布把数据进行分类，并根据这些数据对语言学进行分类。也就是说，分类语言学和行为主义让我觉得它们与几百年来科学一直在做的事情背道而驰。我认为科学寻求的是解释和理解，而不是堆砌数据。科学不接受行为主义的教条，行为主义只能看到现象，并不能探寻清楚现象的本质。在我看来，它们都是极端反科学的。幸运的是，我在哈佛大学时碰到了几位与我同样持怀疑态度的研究生同学，并和他们成为了很亲近的朋友。一位是Morris Halle，后来与我一起共事的同事。另一位是Eric Lenneberg，他多年后创立了现代生物语言学。即使是在上个世纪五十年代早期，我们已经看不到当时流行的行为主义的意义所在。事实上，行为主义开始出现了一些裂缝。例如，现代心理学的重要人物、认知心理学创始人之一的George Miller当时有一个实验虽然不受关注，但是却动摇了当时很多正在进行的研究的根基。他研究的是信号分析（在二战时期，这是一个常见话题）：如何从噪声中检测到语音信号?当然，如果你在一个嘈杂的环境中，检测到语音信号的可能性可能是这样的或者那样的。现在，如果仔细考虑这个问题，标准的想法是，当一个句子的第一个单词出现后，就会有一定的概率检测到它。第二个词出现，也会有相同的概率检测到它，将这两个概率相乘，就会得到正确检测出这两个单词的概率。也就是说，在句子输出的过程中，正确检测到每个单词，以及所有单词的概率会急剧下降——实际上是呈指数级下降。他就此做了实验，一直测试到句子的最后一个单词，小有成效。当句子的最后一个单词出现时，句子被检测到的概率突然上升了。这个结果非常明显，但是人们无法接受。人们理解句子之后很快就可以分清哪些是噪音。到目前为止，有相当复杂的研究表明，只有理解一个句子才能解读这个句子的前几个词。但这与实验结果及其假设完全相反。此外，著名的神经科学家Karl Lashley1951年发表的一篇关于序列顺序和行为关系的文章表明，如果观察相当复杂的行为，比如马疾驰的步态，在钢琴上演奏琶音和弦，或任何复杂的事情，就会发现这种属性完全不能用行为主义学说的框架解释。但是当时并没有人注意到这篇文章，事实上，几乎无人知晓。他是哈佛大学医学院教授，著名的神经科学家。这篇文章在脑科学领域中得到了非常多的认可，却在心理学领域中不为人所知。艺术历史学家Meyer Schapiro推荐我阅读，也让George Miller注意到了这篇文章。裂缝由此开始形成，但由于整个建筑都是用沙子建造的，所以裂缝刚出现，马上就消失了。不得不说，这并没有多大影响力。这些教条相当僵化，到现在仍然留有痕迹。但我认为在五十年代末六十年代初时，人们就已经清楚地知道这些完全是站不住脚的概念。尽管在这个问题上Quine与我讨论了很久，但他从未同意我的观点。总之，在四十年代末，就我个人的经历而言，作为一个年轻的学生，我是行为主义的忠实信徒:“你就是这样被教导的，它一定是正确的。因为权威人士都是这么说”。那段时间我还和哲学家Nelson Goodman一起学习，他当时研究的是构造系统，以及构造系统中的解释和简约性的概念。我对此很感兴趣。那时，我需要写一篇本科毕业论文，Harris建议我按照现代希伯来语的程序路线进行结构分析，因为我对这门语言有一定了解。于是我开始按照老师教我们的方式去做：找一个合作者，进行实地调查，问合适的问题，并据此完成分类分析。但几个星期后，我觉得这完全是荒谬的。首先，我知道他给出的所有答案，其次，我并不关心这些问题。我不关心语言的语音，因为它无法让我提起兴趣，所以我放弃了这个选题，决定做一些看起来合理的项目——为语言提供解释。我遵循Goodman的想法，尝试追求最简可能性，按照这一思路进行，就形成了解释性的理论。这就是后来所谓的“生成语法”，它本质上就是一种语言理论。当我开始着手进行这一计划，首先，我获得了许多有趣的发现；其次，解释性理论中的基本原理是无法从数据分析中得到的——这是科学研究中的一个常识。可能来自硅谷的人会这样做，但科学家是不会只整理数据资料，并希望从中得出一个理论的。理论的形成过程不是这样的。

02.

JMc教授：请问Zellig Harris当时是怎样看待您所做的这项新研究的呢？

Noam Chomsky教授：他认为我的研究没有任何意义。我们是朋友，所以他没有过多评价，但后来他把自己的意见写了下来。1965年，他在期刊Language上发表了一篇文章，简要否定了我的整个方法，认为这一方法基于错误的社会学理论以及关于竞争理论的社会学观点。他说，“我对这个不感兴趣，简直是无稽之谈”。他将其归因于冷战时期的心理，即理论之间的相互对抗——这就是科学。所以那个时候，我们虽非常要好，但经常持不同维度的观点。他认为，而且人们也普遍认为，他那本关于结构语言学方法的书已经穷尽了关于语言学的研究。事实上，正是他这本书将我引入了这一领域，那时我还很小，才16岁，刚对语言学产生兴趣。我遇到了Harris，并对他的研究十分感兴趣，他也给了我这本书的手稿，这就是我学习语言学的方式，仅仅通过阅读而已。实际上，我为他的书做了校对工作。但当时我们推测，那基本上已经达到了语言学的“尽头”：我们有许多程序，也清楚如何用这些程序去获取数据，因此之后只需要把程序应用到不同语言就可以了。如今，大多数语言学家的研究基本上也逐渐转向数据收集，因为只需要把数据录入到程序中就可以了。上世纪四十年代末，我们的语言学课程并不真正是关于语言学的，而是关于语篇分析的。后来又尝试努力将这种语言分析方法扩展到更广泛的类似语篇分析的其他话题的研究上。事实上，上世纪五十年代，Harris在期刊Language上就发表了几篇相关文章，可以说行为主义领域并没有触及到语言的本质问题。同样，当时哈佛大学的行为主义心理学领域也出现了同样的问题，我们都非常清楚他们的问题所在。

03.

JMc教授：您认为这是否可能和逻辑实证主义的科学观念有关，即每一门科学都应该细化为更具体的问题，而只有把这些细化的问题结合起来才能展现科学的全貌？

Noam Chomsky教授：现今人们也会用这样观点来探寻所谓的“统一科学”，这是一个很重要的话题，在上世纪五十年代的剑桥大学更是如此。信息论就适用于这一点，尤其是Warren Weaver对其解释之后。看过Shannon和Weaver的书的人，如Shannon的一些技术资料和Weaver的文章，就会明白这一点。Weaver是个很优秀的科学家，在他的文章中，人们只通过运用概率统计方法就能够探索人类智能的多个领域。所以一切事物在某种程度上都能结合到一起。这对逻辑实证主义来说，就有些讽刺了，因为当时逻辑实证主义者已抛弃了这一观点。比如Rudolf Carnap，他在上世纪三十年代就开始写批评性的文章，如《可检验性与意义》（Testability and meaning）等，在这些文章中背离了正统。但这只是众多文化滞后的例证之一，有些理论会遭到其提出者的不断质疑，而这些理论逐渐取代了那些单纯研究原始材料的理论。所以Bloomfield本人对逻辑实证主义非常着迷。据我所知，当时Carnap还在探究精神分析，这真是对逻辑实证主义者的诅咒啊。当你回看真实的历史时，你就会看到这是多么的讽刺。

04.

JMc教授：我想在前面提过的行为主义和信息论中也出现过这样的变化，而且我猜测当时还有另一种概括性的学科即控制论，它与信息论紧密相连。所以除了您所提到的科学上的不足之外，您对这些理论有什么看法吗? 例如，Skinner非常清楚地提出了一个乌托邦式的计划。他写了《瓦尔登二世》（Walden Two）一书，在书中他提出了一种美好的愿景：通过塑造人的行为来创造一个更好的世界。而控制论来自于二战中对人机交互的研究，即高射炮瞄准的伺服机制。请问您的理论是着眼于智人独特的原由和人类的创造力吗？您的理论是否使得大众能更加自由地提出对行为主义、控制论和信息论等技术官僚科学等理论的反对观点呢?

Noam Chomsky教授： Norbert Wiener的版本没有涉及控制论。很多人都是那样宣传自己的，但Wiener本人却没有这样做。事实上，他对此还提出了尖锐的批评。我认识的一位研究信息论的数学家Claude Shannon也对这些想法不感兴趣。你说的没错，Skinner这样做了，他的所作所为让我觉得很怪诞。我后来写过这些，但当时没有。所以我基本上只是把它当作无稽之谈。实际上，美国马萨诸塞州的哈佛大学和麻省理工学院确实是这些想法的聚集地，且这些思想正在这个地方不断发展，那是一个繁荣时期。大家都认为，“我们已经打破了所有的障碍”。这是在一个有趣的社会政治背景下进行的。二战前，美国在科学上几乎是一潭死水。想学习物理学、工程学、哲学的人可以去欧洲。想成为作家的人可以去法国。我们有美国科学，但只是一种边缘现象。事实上，当我在上个世纪五十年代中期进入麻省理工学院时，我的工作之一是教研究生如何通过法语和德语阅读考试来包装自己，这是不合时宜的。二战前，是文学的时代。二战后，是英语的时代。人们终于可以不再伪装。有一种感觉，欧洲时代已经结束了，美国正在崛起，我们赢得了战争——成为最富有的国家——战时技术的许多进步给人一种美国和全球科学体系领导美好未来的感觉。1953年的克里克和沃森将生物学与化学紧密地联系在一起，这看起来似乎是以信息论和行为主义的方式将神秘主义的心理现象这种前沿科学与自然科学相结合。人们也因此感到十分兴奋。实际上，正如我所说，这一切都建立在沙子上，是非常反科学的，需要花一些时间和一些智力斗争来克服。认知科学在上个世纪五十年代才刚刚开始起步，信奉者如George Miller、Jerry Bruner、我所提到的那些研究生，但仅此而已。George Miller实际上在学术上发生了转变......在1950年时他还是一位坚定的行为主义者。你可以看看他1950年左右关于语言和交流的书，这是典型的Skinner式的写作，但与其他人不同的是，他思想开放，对思考新的想法和方法感兴趣，他只是改变了自己的想法和态度。一半是因为他自己的实验，就像我所描述的那样，一半是因为新理论的出现。到1950年代中期，我们还在共同发表论文等等，这是学术界的一种开放，当然麻省理工学院也相当开放。麻省理工学院只是一所科学大学。他们根本不在乎你是否有什么证书，这对我来说很幸运，因为我没有证书，但只要研究看起来有趣，他们就不会介意。所以生成语法就是在这里腾飞的。

English Version

01.

Prof. JMc: When you began studying linguistics in 1946, the dominant school in America was that of the Bloomfieldians. They were committed to the psychological doctrines of behaviourism, which saw human language as a kind of learned habit, and to a highly empirical approach to analysing languages, which limited itself to describing surface patterns attested in corpora. One of the great breakthroughs that you made in introducing generative grammar was to seek explanatorily adequate grammars that abstract away from surface details in order to capture the underlying principles of language as an endowment of the species Homosapiens. So how did you arrive at this position, at odds with the mainstream of linguistics at the time? 

Prof. Noam Chomsky: Well, first, to clarify the facts, I was actually at the University of Pennsylvania. The leading figure there was Zellig Harris, a major figure in modern linguistics and a person who I was quite close to, followed him closely. He himself was not particularly taken with behaviourism, and he wasn’t interested in any of the psychological interpretations of what the language faculty is. His approach was basically data-oriented, procedures of analysis for any corpus of data. He worked out the most sophisticated and detailed procedures which you could, in principle, use to apply to any material to get some structural analysis of it. And the question of what all of this meant psychologically just basically didn’t arise; he didn’t take it very seriously. Now, Leonard Bloomfield, who was the leading figure in linguistics in that period, he himself was a dedicated behaviourist, at least in one side ofhis brain. His view was that, as he put it, language is a matter of training and habit; if there’s anything new, it’s analogy, whatever… . And that was basically dogma. Charles Hockett and other leading figures all accepted that. Now, I myself ran into hardcore behaviourism a couple years later when I went to Harvard. Harvard was dedicated to really, basically to Skinnerian behaviourism, a very rigid, narrow form of behaviourism. I got to Harvard in 1951.  Skinner’s William James Lectures, which later came out as his book Verbal Behavior, they were circulating at the time, and that was doctrine for psychology, for philosophy. W. V. Quine, the leading, the most influential philosopher, was completely committed to it. His book Word and Object came out some years later, was strictly Skinnerian, and that was basically dogma.  That’s where I really ran into it. And you ask… To me, it just seemed total absurdity, and if you simply look at the facts, the elementary facts, of language, then nothing like that is happening. I also came to recognize even when I was an undergraduate at Penn that the procedural approach is, it seemed to me, seriously flawed. Linguistics was described as what was called a taxonomic science. It just organized data into categories, types, distribution of the elements, and produced a kind of taxonomy of the language based on some data. That’s, both taxonomic linguistics and behaviourism struck me as sharp departures from anything that science has been doing for hundreds of years. I mean science seeks explanation and understanding, not arrangement of data, and it does not accept the behaviourist doctrine that you don’t look inside to see what’s causing the phenomena; you just look at the phenomena. Both seem to me radically anti-scientific. When I got to Harvard, I was lucky to have run quickly into a couple of fellow graduate students who were also sceptics. We became close friends. One was Morris Halle, who I worked with for the rest of my life. The other was Eric Lenneberg, who years later went on and founded modern biology of language. But even as young grad students in the early ’50s, we already just couldn’t see any sense to the prevailing doctrines. Actually, there were cracks beginning to show in the orthodoxy, so one of the major figures in actually modern psychology, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, George Miller — we later became friends, worked together — he was running some — he was an experimental psychologist, and he did an experiment which people didn’t pay all that much attention to, but it knocked the props out of a lot of the work that was happening.  He was working on signal analysis (which was a common topic then coming out of the Second World War): How do you detect signals from noise?  Well, if you have a noisy environment, the probability of detecting the signal is such and such. Now, if you think it through, the standard idea was, if you have a sentence, the first word comes along, you have a certain probability of detecting it. [ Second word comes along, same probability detecting that.  Multiply the probabilities, you get the probability of getting the two of them right. Well, what that means is, as you go through the sentence, the probability of getting the words correct, all the words correct, declines radically — sharply, in fact, exponentially. Well, he ran the experiments — sort of worked, until you got to the last word. ] When you got to the last word of the sentence, all of a sudden the probability shot up. Well, what was happening was pretty obvious, but you couldn’t accept it. What was happening is that people understood the sentence, and then figured out what those noises were early on. By now, there’s fairly sophisticated work on that which shows that you can’t interpret the first few words of a sentence until you figure out what the sentence is. All right, but that was completely contrary to anything that was happening, anything that was assumed. There was also other work. Karl Lashley, great neuroscientist, in 1951, published an article on serial order and behaviour where he showed that if you look at fairly complex actions like the gait of a horse, you know, galloping, or playing arpeggios on a piano, or anything that has any complexity, you find properties that just totally can’t be fitted into the framework of behaviourist doctrine. And nobody paid attention to that article. In fact, it was unknown. He was a Harvard Medical School professor, famous neuroscientist, and the article had a lot of that recognition in the brain sciences, unknown in psychology. I found out about it from an art historian, Meyer Schapiro, who suggested I look at it, brought it to George Miller’s attention. So cracks were beginning to develop, but the whole edifice was based on sand, and as soon as you began looking at it, it all fell apart. This did not have much effect, I should say. The doctrines remained pretty rigid.  There are still replicas of them, but I think by late ’50s, early ’60s, it was, should have been clear that these are totally untenable notions. Quine never agreed ; we had long discussions about this. Anyhow, in the late ’40s, just to go back to my own personal experience, as a young student, I was kind of a true believer: “This is what you’re taught. It’s got to be right. Important people,” you know. I was also studying with Nelson Goodman, the philosopher, who was working on constructional systems and the concept of explanation, explanation and simplicity in constructional systems. I was interested in that. I had to write an undergraduate thesis, and Harris suggested to me that I do a structural analysis along procedural lines of Modern Hebrew, which is a language I pretty much knew, sort of knew, so I started doing it the way we were taught to do: get an informant, do fieldwork, you know, ask the right questions, do the taxonomic analysis. But after a couple of weeks of this, it struck me as completely ridiculous. First of all, I knew all the answers he was giving, and secondly, I didn’t care about them. I didn’t care about the phonetics of the language; it just didn’t interest me. So I sort of dropped it and decided to do what just seemed reasonable — write an explanatory theory of the language — and, following Goodman’s ideas, tried to pursue the simplest possible theory, well, as soon as you started—that becomes an explanatory theory. That’s what was later called a generative grammar, which is basically a theory of the language, and as soon as you did that, it turned out that, first of all, you start getting interesting results, and secondly, the elements that entered into the explanatory theory could not possibly be reached by procedures of analysis on the data — which is a familiar fact in the sciences, you know. You know, I mean, if you’re from Silicon Valley, maybe you do it, but if you’re a scientist, you don’t just do organization of data and hope somehow a theory will come out of it.  It’s not the way it works. 

02.

Prof. JMc: What did Zellig Harris think about this new work that you were doing? 

Prof. Noam Chomsky: He didn’t see any point to it. We were friends, so he didn’t say much, but later he wrote about it. If you go to 1965, he had a article in Language which you can find in which he simply dismissed this whole approach as kind of, you know, based on mistaken sociology, sociological ideas about competing theories; he said, “I’m not interested in that, it’s nonsense.” He attributed it to Cold War psychology of pitting theories against one another — which is science, you know. So by that time, we were perfectly friendly, but often different dimensions. I should say that he assumed, and it was generally assumed, that linguistics had really reached its terminal point with his book on methods of structural linguistics. Actually, that was my introduction to the field when I was just getting interested in it as a young kid, 16-year-old kid. I met Harris, and I was interested, and he gave me the manuscript of the book, and that’s how I learned linguistics, just reading it. Actually, I was proofreading it for him. But it was assumed then that that is essentially the terminal point: We have the procedures, we know how to apply them to data; from now on, it’s just a matter of applying it to different languages. Now, there were actually major linguists who basically stopped working at that point and turned to data collection because you can just feed it into the procedures. Our courses in the late ’40s in linguistics were not on linguistics; they were on analysis of discourse. Efforts to extend the methods of linguistic analysis presumably finished to broader topics like analysis of discourse. Actually, Harris had a couple articles on this in Language in the early 1950s, so this was kind of often a… You know, the field was essentially — there were no fundamental questions in the field. Similarly, in the behaviourist psychology that I ran into at Harvard, there were fundamentally no serious questions left; we had the answers.

03.

Prof. JMc: Do you think that that might have been connected to a sort of logical positivist conception of science that each science should be compartmentalized with its own narrowly defined problems and then together maybe they will create a whole picture of science? 

Prof. Noam Chomsky: It was a period of search for what was called unified science based on those ideas. That was a very major topic, and especially in places like Cambridge in the 1950s. Information theory fit into it, especially Warren Weaver’s interpretation. If you look at Shannon and Weaver’s book, Shannon had the technical material, Weaver had an essay which, it was a — pretty good scientist himself — in which he essentially indicated you should be able to cover a whole, lots of domains of human intelligence, others, by just applying these probabilistic statistical measures. And so that all sort of fit together. Now, it’s kind of ironic about logical positivism, because the logical positivists themselves had by then abandoned it. If you look at, say, Rudolf Carnap, by the mid-’30s, he was already writing critical papers, ‘Testability and meaning’ and so on, where he was departing from the orthodoxy. But it’s one of these cases of cultural lag, the doctrines that were being questioned by the founders were taking over other disciplines that were looking at the original materials. So Bloomfield himself was very taken with logical positivism at a time when Carnap, who I knew, was actually talking about psychoanalysis, you know, which was anathema to the logical positivists. There’s a lot of irony when you look at the actual history. 

04.

Prof. JMc: So these movements, so we’ve spoken about behaviourism and information theory has also come up, and I guess, another sort of umbrella discipline that was around at the time is cybernetics, which interfaced closely with information theory. So all of these, apart from the sort of scientific inadequacy of these disciplines as you established, did you have any objections also to the way that these disciplines marketed themselves, the way they sold themselves? For example, Skinner was very clear about having a utopian project. He wrote Walden Two, for example, where he had this vision of shaping people’s behaviour to create a better world, and cybernetics, of course, came out of studying human-machine hybrids in World War II, you know, servomechanisms for aiming anti-aircraft guns. So do your own theories, which look to what it is that makes the species Homo sapiens unique, and look at human creativity, do your own theories promote freedom in opposition to these technocratic scientific theories like behaviourism and cybernetics and information theory? 

Prof. Noam Chomsky: Well, cybernetics, at least Norbert Wiener’s version of it, didn’t have that property. A lot of the marketing did, but not Wiener himself. In fact, he was sharply critical of it. Claude Shannon, who I also knew, also had no interest in any of these ideas. He was a mathematician working on theory of information. Skinner did, you’re right, and what he was doing just struck me as humanly grotesque. I wrote about it in later years but didn’t at that time. So I basically just disregarded it as complete nonsense. Actually, Cambridge, MA, was really the centre of most of these ideas. That’s where these things are being developed, and it was a very euphoric period. The assumption, general assumption, was, “We’ve broken all the barriers.” This is against the background of, a sociopolitical background which is interesting. Pre-World War II, the United States was pretty much a scientific backwater. If you wanted to study physics, engineering, philosophy, you went to Europe. You wanted to be a writer, you went to France, you know. There was American science, but it was kind of a fringe phenomenon. In fact, when I got to MIT in the mid-’50s, one of my jobs was to teach graduate students how to fake their way through French and German reading exams, which was an anachronism. Pre-World War II, that’s where the literature was. Post-World War II, it was in English. They finally abandoned the pretence. There was a sense that Europe was finished, US is taking over, we won the war — richest country — lot of advances in wartime technology which gave a sense of a great future ahead led by the United States and the global system in the sciences as well. When you got to Crick and Watson 1953, you know, and a way of relating biology to chemistry, it looked as if the next frontier was taking mental phenomena regarded as mysticism and integrating them with the natural sciences by the means of information theory and behaviourism. So there was tremendous euphoria about that. Actually, as I said, it was all built on sand, very anti-scientific. But it took some time and some intellectual struggles to get over this. Cognitive science was just barely beginning to emerge in the ’50s. George Miller, Jerry Bruner, a couple of grad students, those I mentioned, but not much else. The one academic connection was actually George Miller, who shifted…In 1950, he was a committed behaviourist. You read his book on language and communication around 1950, it’s pretty strict Skinnerian, but as distinct from any of the others, he was open-minded and interested in thinking about new ideas and approaches, and he simply changed his mind and attitude. In part, it was his own experiments, like I describe, in part just new things coming in. By the mid-1950s, we were working jointly publishing papers together and so on, and that was kind of an opening in the academic world, and of course MIT was quite open. MIT was just a science university. They didn’t care if you had any credentials at all, which was lucky for me, because I really had no credentials, but they didn’t care as long as the work looked interesting. So that developed, took off there. 

采访人物简介

Noam Chomsky教授

诺姆·乔姆斯基（Noam Chomsky）教授全名Avram Noam Chomsky，是享誉世界的著名语言学家、认知科学家、政治批评家、哲学家和历史学家。乔姆斯基1928年12月7日出生于美国宾夕法尼亚州费城的一个中产阶级犹太家庭。1945年，16岁的乔姆斯基进入宾夕法尼亚大学学习哲学、逻辑学与语言，后来在Harris的指导下学习研究生课程，并在Harris的推荐下，向Nelson Goodman和Nathan Salmon学习哲学，向Nathan Fine学习数学。1951年，他完成硕士论文《现代希伯来语语素音位学》，1951年至1955年，他在哈佛大学以学术协会会员的身份从事语言学研究工作，在此期间以《语言理论的逻辑结构》(LSLT)中的部分章节作为其博士论文，取得博士学位。乔姆斯基在该论文中采用了Harris的语言研究方法以及Nelson Goodman对形式系统和科学哲学的观点。但在研究过程中发现了结构主义语言学的局限性，转而探索新的方法，逐步建立起“转换生成语法”。1957年，他在其博士论文的基础上做出了新的发展，完成了《句法结构》，成为“乔姆斯基革命”开始的标志。他的开创性著作包括《句法结构》、《语言与心智》、《句法理论的若干问题》以及《最简方案》等。

乔姆斯基提出了“转换生成语法”，其理论在美国被称为理论语言学领域主流的学问。他倡导生物语言学理论，认为人生来就有与普遍语法相关的语言官能，普遍语法由原则和参数组成。这一观点解释了为什么儿童可以很容易地习得母语。乔姆斯基针对行为主义的批判性研究开创了语言学和心理学的“认知革命”，他在很大程度上将语言学建立成一门正式的自然科学。他建立了数理科学和计算机科学领域的“乔姆斯基等级”，根据方法生成力的不同对形式语言进行了分类，这一理论目前仍是计算机科学中的有机组成部分。

1961年乔姆斯基获聘MIT语言学系教授，1976年被聘为MIT“校聘教授”，2002年作为“荣休教授”从MIT退休，但是他并没有因为退休而停止研究的脚步。2017年秋，他又加入亚利桑那大学，受聘为社会和行为科学学院语言学系“桂冠教授”。他曾获京都奖——“基础科学”类、亥姆霍兹奖和本杰明·富兰克林计算机与认知科学奖。McGilvray认为乔姆斯基开创了语言学的“认知革命”，他在很大程度上将语言学建立成一门正式的自然科学。Micheal Egnor认为乔姆斯基是过去半个世纪中最伟大的科学家。也有人称乔姆斯基为“现代语言学之父”。语言学家John Lyons曾指出，在几十年的出版中，乔姆斯基语言学已经成为该领域“最具活力和影响力的”学派。他出版有150多部专著，根据艺术和人文引文索引，在1980年到1992年，乔姆斯基是被文献引用数最多的健在学者，并是有史以来被引用数排名第八多的学者。

Brief Introduction of Interviewee

Noam Chomsky, in full Avram Noam Chomsky, is a distinguished linguist, cognitive scientist, political dissident, philosopher and historian. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family, on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US. In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy, logic and language. He took graduate courses with Harris and, at Harris’s recommendation, studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Nathan Salmon and mathematics with Nathan Fine. In his 1951 master’s thesis, The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew. In The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT), written while he was a member of Academic Association at Harvard (1951–55), Chomsky adopted aspects of Harris’s approach to the study of language and of Goodman’s views on formal systems and the philosophy of science. However, during the research, he found the limitations of structural linguistics. In this way, he explored something novel and gradually established “Transformational-Generative Grammar”. In 1957, he made a new development on the basis of his doctoral thesis and completed Syntactic Structures, which marked the beginning of “Chomskyan Revolution”. Among his groundbreaking books are Syntactic Structures, Language and Mind, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and The Minimalist Program.

Chomsky introduced “Transformational-Generative Grammar” to the linguistics field, whose theory is considered as the mainstream knowledge in theoretical linguistics in the United States. According to the biolinguistic theory he advocated, children are born with language functions related to universal grammar, which consists of principles and parameters and explains why children could acquire their native languages easily. Based on his critical analysis on Behaviorism, Chomsky inaugurated the “cognitive revolution” in linguistics and psychology, and that he is largely responsible for establishing the field as a formal, natural science. He established the “Chomsky hierarchy” in the fields of mathematical science and computer science, and classified formal languages according to the different generative power of methods. This theory is still an integral part of computer science.

He was appointed full professor at MIT in 1961, Institute Professor in 1976 and retired as professor emeritus in 2002, but his researches are still continuing. He joined the UA faculty in fall 2017, is a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He has received the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal and the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. McGilvray observes that Chomsky inaugurated the “cognitive revolution” in linguistics, and that he is largely responsible for establishing the field as a formal, natural science. Micheal Egnor believes that Chomsky is the best scientist of the past half-century. As such, some have called Chomsky “the father of modern linguistics”. Linguist John Lyons further remarked that within a few decades of publication, Chomskyan linguistics had become “the most dynamic and influential” school of thought in the field. He has published more than 150 monographs. According to the Art and Humanities Citation Index, from 1980 to 1992, Chomsky was the most cited living scholar in the literature and the eighth most cited scholar in history.

采访者简介

James McElvenny教授

James McElvenny教授，德国锡根大学语言学家和科学历史学家。2013年在悉尼大学获得博士学位后，于2015年至2017年在德国波茨坦大学担任洪堡学者，2018年至2020年担任英国爱丁堡大学英国科学院的牛顿国际研究员。自2020年以来，他是锡根大学“合作媒体”特别合作研究中心的研究员。他还是语言科学历史与哲学博客（History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast）主编和主持人，语言科学出版社（Language Science Press）主编。他的研究兴趣包括：现代语言学史、科学史、语言学、语言哲学。

Brief Introduction of Interviewer

James McElvenny is a linguist and historian of science in the University of Siegen. After completing his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2013, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Potsdam from 2015 to 2017, and then from 2018 to 2020 a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy at the University of Edinburgh. Since 2020 he is a researcher in the Special Collaborative Research Centre “Media of Co-operation” at the University of Siegen. He is also series editor and host of the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast and series editor of Language Science Press. His research interests include History of modern linguistics, History of science, Linguistics and Philosophy of language.

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