For an Anarchist Chomsky Sure Loves Rules

One of the most interesting parts of Carnie's take on Grammar was his look at Generative Grammar. For one thing, it reveals a shaky understanding of the philosophical foundations common among most fields of social science. One example that particularly stood out to me was included in a box where Carnie was explaining the difference between cognitive psychology and neurology. He writes "psychology is concerned with the mind which represents the output and abstract organization of the Brain". It's interesting that someone like Carnie who seems so wedded to positivism in the rest of this paper decided to claim something so matter-of-factly, that is really impossible to empirically prove. One would expect that he avoids commenting on the nature of the mind in order to retain his empirical objectivity. The problem then returns further into the paper when he presents Chomsky's deductive argument for universal grammar as evidence for the concept. Carnie needs to pick a side. Either linguistics is an "empirical science" using only evidence that we can observe in data or it is not in which case we can use deductive arguments like Chomsky's. You can't espouse your Empiricism and "Sciencyness" and then turn around and present non-empirical deductive arguments as sound this is a contradictory viewpoint. This, of course, is but a mild gripe in what, otherwise, is a fascinating passage about the nature of Chomsky's idea of Generative Grammar. The idea that some kind of grammar format is innate in human beings is in itself a very interesting proposition that has some implications not mentioned by Carnie. One is that the idea that humans are naturally born with this kind of innate Language and not animals (All studies on dolphins and chimps and other species have proven that Language, at least in the formal sense used by linguists, is not present) lends credence to some forms of soft-anthropocentrism. Carnie himself seems to mention this when he says "Language seems to be both human-specific and pervasive across the species" although he does not address the "pervasiveness" of Language. Together these two points twist together a series of issues and philosophical jumping-off points from Carnie's coverage of Generative Grammar