Innateness: Old and New

Philosophical Review

Innateness: Old and NewAuthor(s): David E. CooperSource: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Oct., 1972), pp. 465-483Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183888 .

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DISCUSSION

INNATENESS: OLD AND NEW

I

M UCH of the interest that Noam Chomsky's work has for non- linguists derives from his claim that some linguistic research

is "a study of human intellectual capacities ... a subfield of psychology."' In his book on Chomsky, John Lyons writes:

It is for these later views (concerning linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology) ... that Chomsky is now best known.2

For philosophers the most interesting part of the claim is the view that the study of grammar lends support to the old theory that men are equipped with innate knowledge.3 I shall refer to the hypothesis(-es) of various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalists as the old innateness hypothesis(-es). Chomsky and some of his followers, notably Katz, argue that language acquisition would be impossible unless children possessed certain kinds of innate knowledge. This claim I shall refer to as the new innateness hypothesis.

Chomsky and Katz take it that their hypothesis is substantially similar to the old one. Having sketched his own hypothesis and what he takes to be the Descartes/Leibniz doctrine of innateness, Chomsky writes:

It seems to me that the conclusions regarding the nature of language acquisition, discussed above, are fully in accord with the doctrine of innate ideas so understood, and can be regarded as providing a kind of substantiation and further development of this doctrine.4

1 Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York, I968), p. 24. 2 Lyons, Noam Chomsky (New York, I970), p. 83. 3This interest is attested to by the Chomsky/Putnam/Goodman symposium

in Synthese (i967) and the dozen or more articles on the topic in Language and Philosophy, edited by S. Hook (New York, 1969).

4 "Recent Contributions to the Theory of Innate Ideas," Synthzse (i967), p. I0.

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DAVID E. COOPER

Chomsky, indeed, devotes a whole chapter of his book, Cartesian Linguistics, to establishing just this affinity with the old doctrine.5 And Katz writes:

The theory of language ... makes up for the vagueness of classical rationalist attempts to put forth their doctrine. Thus the principle defect of the rationalist position is removed.6

My aim in this paper is to show that Chomsky and Katz considerably exaggerate the similarities between their innateness hypothesis and the old one. The new is not, as Katz would have it, a more precise version of the old; on the contrary, it differs on substantial counts. Only by, first, biased selection and misinterpretation of older writings and by, second, employing crucial terms like "universal" or "necessary" in equivocal ways, is it possible to regard the new as a modern-dress version of the old. Once a fairer perspective of older writings is taken, and crucial terms disambiguated, any remaining affinities will not seem impressive.

I am not suggesting that Chomsky's account of language acquisition loses interest once its lack of similarity with older doctrines is high- lighted. His critique of the inductivist techniques of acquisition proposed by Skinner, Osgood, and others has the interest it does irrespective of what Descartes or Herbert of Cherbury might have said three hundred years ago. It is valuable to examine the relation- ship between old and new hypotheses, however, and not for purely historical reasons alone. For Chomsky and Katz, in their exposition of their own hypothesis, rely heavily on the reader being able to fill out their rather sketchy remarks on innateness through his acquaintance with the rationalist tradition. If it turns out that there is little resemblance to this older tradition, the reader is not going to be helped, and may be hindered, by reading into the new theory doctrines that belong to a quite different body of thought. Further, seventeenth- century discussions of innateness were paradigmatically philosophical, and if we assume Chomsky is merely resurrecting those discussions we shall also assume that the issues which concern him are essentially philosophical. But once the affinity is seen to be illusory, it might turn out that there is little of philosophical contention contained in Chomsky's doctrine-no more, perhaps, than in Lorenz' account of innate "imprinting" behavior.7

5(New York, I966), ch. 5. 6Jerrold Katz, The Philosophy of Language (New York, i966), p. 270. 7For Lorenz, "imprinting" behavior among young animals is behavior

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To be fair, Chomsky does have reservations about the affinity between his theory and older ones. He admits that "similarities have been stressed and divergences and conflicts overlooked."8 I shall, however, take at face value his interpretations of past theories and criticize these. No doubt I shall be stressing divergences and over- looking similarities; but this will serve as a useful antidote to the opposite distortion of which Chomsky is guilty.

II

Initial doubts over the affinity between old and new set in once it is realized how over-generous Chomsky and Katz are to the rationalists. They attribute both a uniformity and a coherence to their views which these views simply did not possess. In the passages already quoted, we see confident references to the doctrine of innate ideas, or the rationalist position. Yet a cursory glance at rationalist writings reveals no single, uniform doctrine of innateness. Most obviously rationalists disagreed as to which ideas and principles were innate. While the ideas of God and Identity appear on almost all lists, there the uniformity ends. Descartes, for example, seems to claim in the following passage that all ideas are innate, including those of colors and shapes:

In our ideas there is nothing which was not innate in the mind, or faculty of thinking . . . for nothing reaches our mind from external objects through our organs of sense beyond certain corporeal movements... [which] are not conceived by us in the shape they assume in the organs of sense.9

Leibniz, though, opts for a much more restricted list. He employs the criterion that innate ideas are those which permeate all thinking.

The ideas of being, of possibility, of identity, are so thoroughly innate, that they enter into all our thoughts and reasonings.10

which does not result from conditioning, learning, or imitation, and hence is assumed to be something toward which the animals are innately predisposed. The favorite example is the manner in which young geese follow at the heels of the farmer. See his "Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogels," Journal of Ornithology (I935).

8 Cartesian Linguistics, p. 73. 9 Notes Directed Against a Certain Programme, in The Philosophical Works of

Descartes, trans. by Haldane and Ross (Cambridge, I93i), I, 442-443. 10 New Essays on the Human Understanding, trans. by Langley (2nd ed.; La

Salle, Ill., i9i6), p. ioo.

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DAVID E. COOPER

When we turn to principles, there is even less uniformity. "Ex nihilo, nihil fit" is about the only one that figures on all lists. Lord Herbert, for example, counts only certain "Notitiae Communes" or "First Principles" as innate, whereas Leibniz argues that all necessary truths, including those of mathematics, are innate.11 And once we remember that most of the principles regarded as innate were practical ones, "formulations of the existing values of the society,"12 we indeed find ourselves with a motley list. It is difficult to suppose there can be much uniformity among doctrines which proclaim the innateness of "Ex nihilo, nihilfit" and of "The obscene parts and actions are not to be exposed to publick view."13

More important is the lack of uniformity in the various arguments for innateness which were proposed. Chomsky and Katz are both guilty of lumping together rationalists' arguments which are dissimilar and sometimes incompatible with one another. On page 49 of his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax Chomsky quotes a passage from Arnauld in which it is argued that all our ideas are innate since none of them resemble what the senses come in contact with.14 He then says (p. 50) that Leibniz argues "in the same vein." Yet in the relevant passage, Leibniz argues quite differently from Arnauld, to the effect that necessary truths are innate because they are universal, and the senses "never give us anything but ... particular and individual truths." The implication that only some truths are innate is incompatible with what Arnauld says, so hardly "in the same vein." Again, on pages 66-67 of Cartesian Linguistics, Chomsky quotes the passage from Des- cartes (quoted above), in which Descartes argues that no idea is derived from the senses since no idea resembles what is provided by the senses. Chomsky then says that "rather similar ideas are developed at length by Cudworth." Yet Cudworth is making the quite separate point that since sight informs us only of the surfaces of things, the ideas of the things themselves have been "actively exerted from within (the soul)."

Chomsky and Katz equally exaggerate the degree of coherence and intelligibility belonging to any single thinker's writings. Both stress that Descartes and Leibniz did not take innate knowledge to be

11 Specimen of Thoughts upon the ist Book of the Essay on the Human Understanding, in New Essays, p. 2I.

12 J.Y. Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford, I956), p. 28. 13 Sir Matthew Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, i677; quoted in

Yolton, op. cit., p. 28. 14 Cambridge, Mass., i965.

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"actual," but only "dispositional," so that Locke's "caricature" of the innateness doctrine does not fit them. Katz, for example, writes:

the rationalist is (not) claiming that all our ideas arise from innate forms in a way that is wholly independent of a selective effect of experience.15

But can the "dispositional" view be attributed unequivocally to Descartes or Leibniz? There are passages, which Chomsky and Katz are fond of quoting, which suggest they took this view. For example, there is Descartes's well-known analogy between innate knowledge and hereditary diseases which children are "born with a certain disposition or propensity for contracting."16 And Katz quotes Leibniz as saying:

ideas and truths are innate in us, as natural inclinations, dispositions, habits or powers, and not as activities.'7

Yet it is easy to find other passages of the writers which do not square with those above. Both of them often speak as if men literally and actually know certain truths prior to experience, the only unusual characteristic of such knowledge being that it is unconscious. Descartes replies to Gassendi as follows:

You have a difficulty, however, you say as to whether I think the soul always thinks. But why should it not always think, when it is a thinking substance? Why is it strange that we do not remember the thoughts it has had in the womb or in a stupor, when we do not even remember most of those we have had when grown up, in good health, and awake.'8

Leibniz, too, says at one point that his sole disagreement with Plato's theory of reminiscence in the Meno is over the claim that the knowledge we have at birth has been acquired in a previous life. The theory, he says, is "very sound ... purged of the error of pre-existence.'9 Leibniz sees nothing else wrong with the view that we possess knowledge at birth. Surely, too, it is difficult to square the following passage with the one quoted by Katz:

I am of the opinion of those who believe that the soul always thinks, although often its thoughts are too confused and too feeble for it to be able to distinctly remember them.20

15 Katz, op. cit., p. 243. 16 Descartes, op. cit., I, 442. 17 Katz, op. cit., p. 244. 18 Descartes, op. cit., II, 2IO. 19 Discourse on Metaphysics, trans. by Lucas and Grant (Manchester, I953),

P. 45. 20 Specimen of Thoughts upon the 2nd Book, in New Essays, p. 24.

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DAVID E. COOPER

Only highly selective editing can lend an air of coherence to the views of Descartes and Leibniz. Both are tempted toward the Lockean "caricature" of the innateness doctrine, as well as toward the "dispositional" view. It is arguable, of course, that no real issue is involved in the "actual" versus "dispositional" debate. Chomsky, indeed, has said that when it comes to formulating his own thesis "no more is at stake than a decision to apply the term 'knowledge' in a rather obscure area."'21 There are two points to make about this. First, Chomsky is, at various points, anxious to defend Descartes and Leibniz against the Lockean "caricature"-in his replies to some of Goodman's criticisms, for example, which, he says, suffer "first from an historical misunder- standing."22 Surely it is a most peculiar tactic to spend time seeking affinity with earlier writers, defending them against critics, and then to turn round and say little is at stake in their being correct or not. Second, it is arguable that philosophical interest in the issues concerns precisely such questions as how to apply the term "knowledge" in a rather obscure area, whether to call something "actual" or "dispositional," or whether we can speak of unconscious propositional thought, and so on. If we are told these questions do not matter, we may begin to doubt the philosophical bearings of Chomsky's thesis. If there are no such bearings, it would be best for this to emerge at once. That it has not emerged may be due to his linking his work with some paradigmatically philosophical views of three hundred years ago.

It is not only the shaky interpretations of earlier writings that arouse initial doubts as to the affinity between old and new hypotheses. In addition there is the extreme discrepancy between the sorts of items postulated as innate on old and new hypotheses respectively. Theories which postulate the existence of very different types of items may still, of course, share interesting formal and structural characteristics. Yet when one type of theory postulates as innate such ideas as those of God or Evil, and such principles as "Ex nihilo, nihilfit," and the other theory such ideas as those of a Subject, and such principles as the A-over-A transformation rule, this becomes doubtful.

III

In this section I try to show in detail that any interesting similarities between the old and new hypotheses are illusory. I argued in the

21 In communication with J. Lyons. See Lyons, op. cit., pp. II3-II4. 22 Language and Mind, p. 70.

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last section that there is no single, uniform, or coherent doctrine of innateness among the rationalists. There are, however, certain salient features of their doctrines which were frequently stressed by most rationalists. It is these features, I shall argue, which find no significant parallels in the new hypothesis.

There are at least five propositions which, if left in the vaguest of forms, could be subscribed to by old and new innatists. No doubt it is the fact that both can subscribe to them that has encouraged the belief that the hypotheses are significantly similar. The propositions I have in mind are:

(i) Knowledge of what is universal is innate. (2) Knowledge of what is necessary is innate.

(3) Experience plays a role in, though it does not generate, knowledge in which an innate component also plays a role.

(4) Many of our ideas are too remote from experience to have been derived from experience.

(5) There is often a paucity in empirical data that prevents such data from sufficiently explaining aspects of our knowledge.

These propositions are extremely unclear. And indeed my whole point is that once they are disambiguated and made precise, there will not, in any of the five cases, be a single unequivocal proposition to which both old and new innatists would subscribe. Or rather, while old and new innatists might subscribe to them, there is nothing in their writings to suggest this. It will turn out that they are speaking about quite different things; that any affinity and agreement there appears to be is almost entirely verbal.

(i) Chomsky and Katz argue that knowledge of certain universal aspects of language is innate; that the universality of these aspects is strong evidence for their innateness. For, according to Katz, if there are aspects of language whose universality cannot be explained in terms of common utility, economy, identity of origin, or similarity of environmental conditions, then

by this process of elimination, the only thing left that can provide the invariant condition that we want to connect with the universal features of language as their causal antecedent is the common innate endowment of human language learners, i.e. some component of their specifically human nature.23

Do older rationalists make some significantly similar claim?

23 Katz, op. cit., pp. 272-273-

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DAVID E. COOPER

First we must note that there is a serious ambiguity in the expression knowledge of what is universal. It might mean (a) knowledge which is universally or generally possessed. Or it might mean (b) knowledge of universal (that is, non-particular) truths, concepts, principles, and so forth. It is clearly sense (a) which Chomsky and Katz have in mind. Often, however, rationalists employed "universal" in sense (b). They argued that universal truths were known innately, whether or not knowledge of these truths was universally possessed. Descartes, for example, argues that since the senses inform us only about corporeal movements, then they cannot have given us knowledge of a "notion" such as "things which are equal to the same are equal to one another":

for all these movements are particular, but notions are universal having no affinity with movements and no relation to them.24

And Leibniz argues:

Primitive truths .. . do not come at all from the senses or from experience . . . and this is what I mean in saying that they are innate ... it must be admitted that experience never perfectly assures us of a perfect universality.25

Since, that is, experience only informs us of particular truths, then knowledge we possess of non-particular, universal truths cannot be derived solely from experience.

It must be admitted, however, that rationalists often regarded universal or general possession of knowledge as a mark of innateness. Here, like Katz, they are concerned with sense (a). Glanvill says that innate principles are characterized by their being "acknowledged by all sober mankind." 26 Indeed, the very term "Notitiae Communes" employed by Lord Herbert and Descartes testifies to the reasoning. An idea is innate if it belongs to a man simply in virtue of his human nature; hence it must belong to anyone of that nature; hence universality is a necessary condition of innateness.

But there are at least two major differences between what older rationalists and Chomsky or Katz say about universal acquaintance with truths or ideas. The first concerns the notion of acquaintance, and how it is related to innateness. All the seventeenth-century writers in

24 Descartes, op. cit., I, 443. 25 Specimen of Thoughts upon the ist Book, p. 22. 26Joseph Glanvill, Essays upon Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and

Religion (London, i676), p. 6.

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question seem to have meant that universal acquaintance is a mark of the innateness of a truth in the sense that all men will immediately assent to the truth once it is clearly presented to them. Henry More, for example, writes:

It is sufficient to make a thing true according to the light of nature, that no man upon a perception of what is propounded and the Reasons of it (if it be not clear at first sight and need Reasons to back it) will ever stick to acknowl- edge it for a truth.27

And Herbert speaks of "universal consent" as one of the six marks of innate knowledge. So a very general ingredient in older conceptions of innate truths is that these receive universal and immediate assent. This ingredient is completely missing from the new hypothesis. Chomsky is not suggesting that children immediately assent to various complicated observations on grammar as soon as these are clearly described to them. Presumably it is only professional linguists who are aware of these observations, and there is hardly universal and immediate assent among them to the claims of transformational grammarians. So there is no reason to suppose that older rationalists would accept that there is universal acquaintance with Chomsky's innate categories and forms in their sense of "universal acquaintance."

The second difference concerns the use of "universal." When Herbert or Glanvill spoke of universally known truths, they meant that no one-except perhaps for idiots-could fail to recognize them as truths. Chomsky, however, followingJakobson, employs "universal" in a different and unusual way. By "phonetic universals" Jakobson does not mean sounds which occur in every language, but a set of sounds some subset of which forms the phonetic system of any particular language. Any given language may lack one or more of the universals. Chomsky, similarly, stresses that various grammatical universals need not be found in each and every language.

A theory of substantive universals claims that items of a particular kind in any language must be drawn from a fixed class of items.28

And John Lyons writes:

Such syntactic categories as Noun or Verb or Past Tense ... belong to fixed sets of elements, in terms of which it is possible to describe the syntactic and

27 Quoted in Yolton, op. cit., p. 4I. 28 Aspects. . ., p. 28.

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semantic structure of all languages, although no particular language will necessarily manifest all the elements recognized as "universal" in the general theory.29

There is no reason to suppose Locke was misrepresenting his opponents when he ascribed to them the view that

Whatsoever is innate must be universal in the strictest sense; one exception is a sufficient proof against it.30

It follows that Chomsky's universals are not universal in the old sense. If something is innate only if it is universal in this old sense, then Chomsky's universals could not be innate by that criterion.

The rationalists, then, were either using "universal" in a patently different way from Chomsky (sense [b]), or in a way which, while superficially similar, nevertheless conceals two major differences.

(2) Katz says:

the language acquisition device contains a stock of innate ideas that jointly specify the necessary form of language (realized in any actual natural language) and thus the necessary form of a speaker's internal representation of the rules of his language. 31

This suggests that, in two ways, innately known elements of language are necessary. First, any actual natural language must contain these elements. Second, children must be acquainted with them for language learning to take place. Chomsky is also making this latter point when he says:

Evidently, for language learning to take place the class of possible hypotheses- the schema for grammar-must be heavily restricted. 32

Were older rationalists making an analogous point when they said that knowledge of what is necessary is innate?

First we must note a severe ambiguity in the term "necessary." It might mean (a) that which is requiredfor. It is in this sense that Katz uses it; certain elements are required for something to be a language, and knowledge of these is required for learning to take place. But it

29 Lyons, op. cit., pp. 99-100. 30 Third Letter to Stillingfleet, quoted in An Essay Concerning Human Under-

standing (Oxford, 1934), p. 26. 31 Katz, op. cit., pp. 247-248. 32 Synthkse, p. 8.

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might mean (b) what is not contingent. In this sense all mathematical truths are necessary.

Older rationalists normally had sense (b) in mind. For Herbert the "necessitas" of a truth was one of the marks of its innateness. For More it is necessary truths which are shown us by "the light of nature." Experience only informs us of matters of fact that might have been otherwise; so knowledge of truths which could not have been otherwise cannot be based upon experience. As Leibniz puts it:

Experience never perfectly assures us of a perfect universality, and still less of necessity. 3 3

It must be admitted, however, that some rationalists, including Leibniz, employ "necessary" in a sense more like (a). He says that innate principles

enter into our thoughts. .. (and) they are as necessary thereto as the muscles and the sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them. 3

Although we have here the sense of requiredfor, it can be shown that the connection between Leibniz' point and Katz's is remote. To see this, let us note a second general difference in the uses of "necessary" by old and new innatists respectively. It is clear that the rationalists' innate truths or principles were logically necessary. For Descartes and Leibniz-who here follows Plato in the Meno-certain mathematical truths are the paradigms of innate propositions since, in Leibniz' words, they can be established "without making use of any truth learned through experience."35 Chomsky and Katz's innate elements, however, are only empirically necessary. It is a fact, allegedly established by empirical research, that a child unacquainted with these would not be able to learn language. Nor can it be said that the presence of these elements in language is definitionally required by the meaning of "language." Chomsky insists that

There is no a priori reason why human language should make use exclusively of structure-dependent operations.36

What he is denying to be a priori necessary-the form of transformation

33Specimen of Thoughts upon the ist Book, p. 22. 34 New Essays, p. 74. 35 New Essays, p. 78. 36 Language and Mind, p. 52.

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rules-is precisely one of the universals he claims to be innate. So language does not have to possess such characteristics by definition.

We can now see that Leibniz is not making a point similar to Chomsky or Katz when he says that innate principles are required for further knowledge. For him, knowledge of an innate principle A is necessary for knowing B if it is logically impossible to know B without first knowing A. For example, unless one knew the law of contradiction it would be impossible to recognize the certainty of those propositions, like "A square is not a circle," whose certainty derives from their being instances of that law.37 At one point he says that knowledge of innate principles is necessary for further knowledge in the way that a minor premise, even if suppressed, is necessary for the conclusion of a syllo- gism.38 So, for Leibniz, innate principles are logically required for further knowledge, whereas for Chomsky and Katz this is not so. They are not suggesting, for example, that a child's recognition of ambiguity logically entails his innate acquaintance with elements in deep structure.

(3) The next three points of alleged affinity concern the role experience plays in knowledge which is not purely empirical. Old and new innatists could agree that experience plays a role in, but does not generate, such knowledge. Let us now focus upon the role it can play.

Chomsky, in his replies to Goodman, claims the rationalists did stress the role of experience. I have argued that his historical optimism here may not be justified. But let us grant that most of the rationalists, some of the time, did allot some role to experience in the acquisition of all knowledge. Is the role they allotted analogous to the one allotted by Chomsky or Katz? Katz describes the role of experience in the following passages:

The formal and substantive universals together permit the construction of a set of possible hypotheses . .. from which the child selects in arriving at his intern- alization of the rules of his language. 39

the role of experience is primarily to provide the data against which predictions and thus hypotheses are judged ... to help eliminate false hypotheses about the rules of a language.40

Experience, then, plays the role of testing hypotheses about the nature of language-hypotheses which the, child constructs in terms of the

37 New Essays, p. 84. 38 New Essays, p. 71. 39 Katz, op. cit., p. 276. 40 Katz, op. cit., p. 278.

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innate categories and forms. It is scarcely likely that Leibniz, for example, would construe the role of experience in this way. For him innate principles are those which are necessarily true; and a necessary truth is not one that can be tested against experience. In fact the rationalists had a very different picture of the role of experience. Leibniz says:

There are some ideas and some principles which do not come to us from the senses . . . although the senses give us the occasion to perceive them.41

And Lady Mashamn, echoing the words of Henry More's An Antidote Against Atheisme, writes to Locke that experience serves to "hint" things to the soul so that the soul "rises out into a more clear and large conception" of ideas which were already innate, but not "flaring and shining."42 From these, and many other passages, it becomes clear that the role of experience is either to provide occasions for making us conscious of innate ideas, or to make clear and precise innate ideas which were previously confused and murky. In Leibniz' famous analogy, experience serves to highlight what was there all the time in the way the sculptor's chipping reveals clearly the veins in the marble that have always been hidden inside. (Katz, incidentally, quotes this analogy with approval, but fails to see that the point of it is not the same as his own concerning the role of experience.)

Nowhere in rationalist writings do I find a hint of the view that experience serves to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses framed in accordance with innate categories or forms. Nor could most rationalists accept such a picture. For them, what is innate determines the possible shapes that experience can take; so we hardly have to await experience to determine what is innate. Whereas, for Chomsky, one cannot determine a priori what shapes linguistic experience will take on. Nor could Chomsky subscribe to the view that experience merely serves to bring to consciousness, or clear consciousness, what was previously unconscious or murky. He is not suggesting that a child's hearing sentences around him will make him clearly conscious of the deep structures of his language. Only the linguist is conscious of such structures, and it is not linguistic experience analogous to the child's that has made him conscious of them.

(4) Old and new innatists could, superficially, agree that experience is too remote from some knowledge to have generated it. By this claim

41 New Essays, p. 70 (my italics). 42 Quoted in J. Passmore, Ralph Cudworth (Cambridge, I95I), p. 39.

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Chomsky and Katz mean that innately known elements of deep structure are very remotely correlated with the observable aspects of sentences. The observable aspects are, first, the actual sounds produced in utterances and, second, elements of the surface structures which directly correlate with the sounds. But

The deep structure may be highly abstract; it may have no close point by point correlation to the phonetic realization.43

Hence, knowledge we come to have about the observable aspects of sentences will not suffice to explain our knowledge of those aspects which are, in the relevant sense, remote from these.

It is quite inconceivable that they [empirical inductive procedures] can be developed to the point where they can provide deep structures or the abstract principles that generate deep structures and relate them to surface structures.44

Earlier rationalists, it seems, had nothing analogous in mind when they regarded innate ideas as being remote from, or unlike, what we experience. One problem here is that different rationalists had different accounts of what it is that is given to us via the senses. For example, two importantly different accounts are provided by Descartes. He suggests at one point that it is only "corporeal movements" which reach us via the senses. Here the what in what is given us via the senses refers to what provides the stimuli to the senses, or sense organs. He then argues that our ideas "have no likeness" to what is given by the senses since, for example, our idea of a color is quite distinct from the physical movements which constitute the physical basis of that color. Remoteness, in this sense, has no resemblance to the Chomsky sense. If one were to construct an analogy, it would be this: observable elements of utterances would be sound waves (that is, the stimuli imposing upon the sense organs), and our ideas would be the sounds as heard which, being totally unlike the waves, would be remote from them. Plainly this has no relevance to the point that elements of deep structure are remote from observable elements of sentences.

Normally, though, rationalists gave a different sense to what is given us via the senses. The what refers to what we are "directly" or "immediately" aware of as a result of the activity of the sense organs. So the observable would include colors as seen, sounds as heard, and so forth.

43Language and Mind, p. 27. V Synthese, p. 9.

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Different rationalists, unfortunately, gave different interpretations of the way in which what is observable in this sense is remote from, or unlike, our ideas. Here are two interpretations:

(a) Leibniz, and Descartes at times, urge that some concepts are such that, by their very nature, what falls under them cannot be observed. A Euclidean triangle, for example, is not something we can observe since no observable figure will have angles adding up to exactly i8o degrees. The concept, then, must be innate since instances falling under it, not being observable, cannot resemble what is observed. God, too, is an idea which by its very nature precludes observation of what it is an idea of.

Observation has nothing in it which can have reference to God ... (since) it presents nothing beyond pictures. . . voices, or sounds.45

(b) Cudworth, and Descartes at other times, produce the following argument. When we look at a man, all we can observe are surfaces. Since only the idea of a surface could resemble what we observe, the idea of the man himself could not. So the idea of the man must be one of those

intelligible forms by which things are understood or known ... not stamps or impressions passively printed upon the soul from without.46

I find it impossible to relate either (a) or (b) to Chomsky's thesis in any significant manner. In sense (a) something is remote from experience if in principle it is unobservable. Chomsky, though, does not suggest that elements of deep structure are in principle unobservable- not closely correlated, that is, with phonetic realization. There do not have to be structure-dependent transformation rules; and if there were not, elements such as Subject or Object could be given direct phonetic realization by the application of morpho-phonemic rules. (It might be the rule, for example, that the first noun uttered was always the Subject.) In such a language, of course, one would not speak of there being a deep structure. But the point is that elements which, as a matter of fact in natural languages, belong to deep structure need not do so. That languages have deep structures is a matter of empirical fact, not of principle.

45 Descartes, op. cit., I, 446. 46 Cudworth, quoted in Cartesian Linguistics, p. 68.

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Now consider (b). One of the major motives for describing elements in deep structure as unobservable is that the observable surface structures may vary a great deal while the underlying grammar remains the same (for example, "John is easy to please" and "Pleasing John is easy"). When Cudworth insists that the man himself is unobservable he does not mean, however, that his surface alters a great deal while he remains unchanged. Of course, how the surface appears to us may vary according to light, perspective, and so forth, while the man remains the same. But even if this were not so-if, in some uncanny manner, the surface always appeared the same-Cudworth would still insist that only the surface, not the man, was observable. Implicit in his reasoning is the Berkeleyan point that we do not actually observe that which involves an element of inference. Applying this to utterances, we should have to conclude that nothing but the sounds were observable, in which case elements of surface structure, such as Word, would be unobservable because inferred from the sounds. In Cud- worth's sense of "observable," elements of deep structure would be no more unobservable than elements of surface structure. So sense (b) is not close to Chomsky's either.

(5) Old and new innatists could agree, again superficially, that experience also suffers from a paucity which prevents it from generating some types of knowledge. Chomsky's point in this connection is that the number of sentences a child has heard prior to the attainment of linguistic competence is far too small and degenerate to provide an adequate basis from which he could generalize, by induction, as to the nature of his grammar.

Such observations as these lead one to suspect from the start, that we are dealing with a species-specific capacity with a largely innate component.47

In so far as any one thesis concerning the insufficiency of experience to account for knowledge can be attributed to the rationalists, it is a quite separate one from Chomsky's. When they speak of experience being insufficient they seem to mean one of the points already discussed -that experience cannot explain knowledge of universal truths, necessary truths, or truths concerning unobservable entities. For them the paucity of experience is a matter of logic. Only an infinite number of observations could establish a universal truth; only observations of noncontingent matters of fact could establish necessary truths; only

47 Synthhse, p. 4.

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observations of what is in principle unobservable could establish truths about God. No such observations are logically possible. For Chomsky, though, the paucity of the child's experience is a contingent matter. It is not a matter of logic that empiricist learning theories are incapable of explaining language acquisition. It is arguable that these theories do explain how, as adults, we acquire foreign languages.

There is a further point of possible similarity between a view of Chomsky's and an older rationalist's which, at a squeeze, might be fitted under the heading of the insufficiency of empirical data to generate knowledge. Passmore attributes the following argument to Cudworth. We cannot derive concepts from abstracting relevant characteristics of particulars we observe since, unless we already possessed the concepts, we should not know which were the relevant characteristics to abstract from the rest. I could not, for example, form the concept of man by abstracting from the observable characteristics of men, since unless I knew what a man was, I would not know which characteristics to take.48

One finds echoes of this argument in Chomsky. He would say, for instance, that we do not grasp what an imperative is by noting observable similarities between particular imperatives. There may be no such similarities (for example, in word order); and if there were, how would we know which were the relevant ones? A person who did not grasp imperatival deep structure would be in no position to recognize which observable aspects of surface structure provide, in different ways, the vehicles for uttering imperatives.

But these are mere echoes of Cudworth; quite distinct issues are involved. Chomsky regards it as a contingent aspect of language that imperatives are not sufficiently characterized in terms of observable features (for example, word order); that not all imperatives share similar surface structures. Cudworth, however, would argue that even if all X's shared definite observable features, it would still be impossible to construct the concept of X by abstracting these from the rest. Chomsky is making the type of common-sense point made by Stuart Hampshire to the effect that if there are no obvious observable similarities among members of a class then the concept of that class cannot have been arrived at by noting such similarities.49 (Where, for example, are the observable similarities among all those items we call "money"?) Cudworth, though, is not making this common-sense point at all. His

48 Passmore, op. cit., p. 36. 49 Thought and Action (London, i965), ch. i.

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argument, if correct, would apply as much to a concept like chicken's egg, whose instances do share obvious similarities, as to concepts like money or imperative.

IV

The old and new hypotheses, then, differ almost entirely both as to the nature of, and arguments for, an innate component in knowledge. It would be useful if we could provide just one or two ways of describing these differences, ways of showing that we should never have expected any significant affinity.

In different disciplines, radically distinct motives may lie behind the postulation of an innate component. Among psychologists the most common motivation is this: attempts to explain some aspect of behavior in terms of learning-classical conditioning, for example-fail, so that unlearned predispositions to behave in this way are postulated. Lorenz' "imprinting" hypothesis is a good example. It is this type of motivation that lies behind the innateness hypothesis of various psycholinguists. One of them writes:

the young child, certainly within three years of birth, accomplishes the perfectly astounding feat of acquiring the essential structure of the speech he hears about him, and begins to invent a grammar. . . in order to produce his own sentences. It is literally impossible to see how he could accomplish all this simply by conditioning, discrimination learning, or anything else that calls upon only the general and elementary principles of learning.50

The motivation behind rationalists' postulation of an innate component appears quite different. It derives from considerations concerning the logical status of various truths and principles which men know. The argument is typically as follows. A truth-say, a necessary one-is not one that can be confirmed or otherwise by observation; in which case it is impossible to see how our knowledge of it was derived from observations alone. Leibniz writes:

if (the mind) had only the simple capacity of receiving knowledge .., as indeterminate as that which the wax has for receiving figures ... it would not be the source of necessary truths . . . for it is incontestable that the senses do not suffice to show their necessity.5'

50 J. Deese, Psycholinguistics (New York, 197 I), pp. 54-55. 51 New Essays, p. 8i.

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This interest in the status of truths which men know is not part of the psycholinguist's concernwith innate components in behavior. Chomsky, for example, does not base his theory upon the logical status of a truth such as "Sentence S is ambiguous" or "Si is the passive of S2." His concern is solely with how, if at all, children can come to have learned such truths, and with the data recalcitrant to traditional learning theories.

This basic difference in motivation behind different innateness hypotheses goes a long way in explaining the lack of affinity examined in the last section. It explains, first, why there is mere verbal similarity in the use of such concepts as necessity, or universality. The rationalists employ these concepts in connection with the status of propositions; it is these which are necessary or universal. Chomsky, however, uses them in connection with aspects of linguistic competence. Knowledge of this, for example, is said to be necessary for competence in that. Second, the difference in motivation explains the vast differences in arguments marshaled for innateness. Rationalist arguments typically take the form of showing why a certain type of proposition is independent of empirical testing; and this, together with an identification of logical and genetic priority, would establish the innateness of such a proposition. Chomsky's arguments, on the other hand, take the form of showing that such and such an aspect of linguistic behavior cannot be accounted for on learning-theory models.

The difference in motivation, finally, explains why rationalist discussions of innateness were paradigmatically philosophical, and why this is much more dubious in the case of Chomsky's discussions. Concern with the logical status of propositions is philosophical if anything is. Chomsky no doubts adds bones of philosophical contention to his basic hypothesis that there is an innate linguistic component- when, for example, he says that children have knowledge of underlying aspects of grammar, and not mere predispositions to learn and speak in certain ways. But the bare postulation of an innate component is not philosophically contentious. To take an analogy, no philosopher will be disturbed if Lorenz tells him that young geese follow the farmer around without previous conditioning or training. If Lorenz were to add that the young goose knows that it should follow the farmer, or that the farmer is a friend, philosophical ears would be pricked.

DAVID E. COOPER

University of London, Institute of Education

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Innateness: Old and New