Papastephanou (On Habermas)

 

Mentalism and Monologism

 
However, a comprehensive and systematic theory of language which is interested in
critique of ideology and exposure of distorted communication requires a strong
pragmatic aspect which is ill-fitting in accounts of language that see it only as
langue. Let us, then, follow this thread: Chomsky explains why he distinguishes
between competence and performance by stating that 'linguistic theory is
mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying
actual behaviour' (Chomsky 1965: 4). Although this distinction is of crucial
importance for Habermas, with regard to his aim to grant linguistics the status of a
reconstructive rather than descriptive science, the mentalistic implications Chomsky
draws from it would lead on to the kind of rationalism that Habermas would by no
means subscribe to - much against what many of his critics tend to assume.
Therefore, in its further development, Chomskian linguistics is not compatible
with the paradigm shift that Habermas as a pragmatic philosopher promotes.
Chomsky's Cartesian point of departure restricts him to a monologism that does not
leave room for intersubjectivity as understood by Habermas. The charge of
monologism represents one of Habermas' s most salient criticisms of transforma-
tional-generative linguistics. The thesis of monologism assumes that the universal
meaning components belong to the basic equipment of the solitary organism of the
speaking subject' (Habermas 1970: 363). Because an analysis of the speaker's
competence for Chomsky would exhaust itself within either psychologism or
physiologism, there seems to be no need within it for recourse to any communi-
cative-pragmatic models of explanation. Chomsky considers the analysis of the
impact of socio-cultural factors upon language competence as redundant: 'I

8 Hence, not only Skinner's behaviourism but also some of Lyotard's (1993) analyses and some of Deleuze's and Guattari's arguments (Frank 1989) are likewise vulnerable to Chomsky's criticisms, but this goes beyond the scope of this article. 9 As Allen and Van Buren (1971: ix) observe, for Chomsky, 'a theory of language is to be regarded as a partial theory of the human mind'.

emphasized biological facts, and I did not say anything about historical and social
facts. And I am going to say nothing about these elements in language acquisition.
The reason is that I think they are relatively unimportant' (Chomsky 1988: 173). He
reinforces the antagonism in the dualism regarding innateness and experience. In his
view, one fundamental contribution of Cartesian linguistics is the 'observation that
human language, in its normal use, is free from the control of independently
identifiable external stimuli or internal states and is not restricted to any practical
communicative function, in contrast for example, to the pseudo-language of
animals' (Chomsky 1966: 29). Even Chomsky's (1993) more recent and simplified
model of linguistics that revises the transformative-generative one does not tone
down his ultra-rationalist commitments, but rather strengthens them, as Christopher
Norris remarks, by making our linguistic uptake dependent on the possession of
innate ideas in a neo-Platonist manner (Norris 2010: 108).
A pragmatic philosopher of language would not be willing to regard language
only, or primarily, as a system of signs that expresses human thoughts. That would
appear as regression to solipsism. Hence Habermas reproaches Chomsky's
monologism. Chomsky's project is monological because 'it is founded in the
species-specific equipment of the solitary human organism' (Habermas 1970: 361)
(emphasis mine). In Steuerman's words, 'Habermas criticized Chomsky's monological
approach to competence, but he upheld the Chomskian idea of a universal grammar
that makes language possible' (2000: 24). Monologism is not compatible 'with the
proposition that semantic universals could also be parts of an intersubjectively
produced cultural system'. Moreover, 'universal semantic fields can also reflect the
universality of specific scopes of experience' (Habermas 1970: 363). At this
juncture, the paradigm Chomsky opts for obliges him to conceive of universality
only mentalistically, which in this context would mean only as a neurophysiological
product. Habermas thinks of universals not just as a priori species-specific
properties but also as a posteriori elements of a common response to a commonly
shared experience - shared by the whole of humanity understood as a species.
Therefore, from a Habermasian point of view, a theory of linguistic competence
cannot be expected to account for language as a whole. It must be accompanied by a
theory of communicative competence which is no less universal. 'The general
competence of a native speaker does not extend merely to the mastery of an abstract
system of linguistic rules, which - pre-programmed by his organic equipment and
the processes of stimulated maturation - he introduces into a communication in
order to function as a sender or receiver during the transfer of information'
(Habermas 1970: 366). What is Cartesian in Chomsky's model is the view that 'the
intersubjectivity of meaning - that is, the mutual sharing of identical meanings'
should be attributed 'to the fact that sender and receiver - each an identity for
itself - are previously equipped with the same programme' (Habermas 1970: 361).
An aftermath of monologism would be a difficulty in dealing with problems of
repetition in language without assuming a static self or a closed symbolic system,
and thus it would be vulnerable to criticisms like those directed by Derrida (1989) to
Searle in the former's Limited Ink .

Let us unpack the above points step by step. A full shift of paradigm (from the
philosophy of consciousness to that of intersubjectivity) of the kind that Habermas
promotes can be realized only by returning to the study of ordinary language so as to
accommodate speakers' intentions. Austin and Searle have inaugurated such a turn
and provided a very influential account of meaning. Habermas wants a theory of meaning that does not stop at the analysis of the meaning of the propositional content of an utterance and finds in Austin and Searle many insights that assist his endeavours. To him, a theory of meaning should go on to search for the illocutionary force of the utterance itself, or, in his words, for a 'meaning which is linked to the speech situation as such'. The key for understanding Habermas' s views on language and meaning is, in my opinion, his decision to bring into play an idea of universality as a fact of both, biology and social life. Or, in other words, universality is seen as a fact of the conditions of an interwoven material and
symbolic reproduction of our lifeworlds. Although he has not pursued further the
tentative remarks of his early accounts, I cite some of them in order to show a
possible path opened by universal pragmatics concerning the problem of explaining
universality. This path has, regrettably, remained a counterfactual theoretical
possibility, as it has not been pursued further by Habermas or his followers, in my
view, due to later concessions to neo-pragmatist and anti-realist trends.10
Some meanings are a priori universal in as much as they establish the
conditions of potential communication and general schemes of interpretation;
others are a posteriori universal, in the sense that they represent invariant
features of contingent scopes of experience which, however, are common to
all cultures. For that reason we differentiate between semantic universals
which process experiences and semantic universals which make this process-
ing possible in the first place (a posteriori/a priori) (Habermas 1970: 363)
(emph. mine). This sort of universalism has the advantage of being flexible (since biology and society can, in their own, distinct ways, be subjected to historical change) and thus
of not suggesting absolute (in the old, metaphysical sense) standpoints or origins.
Otherwise, if one holds that in all natural languages there is a deep structure with
semantic components which are not affected by the surface structure (as Chomsky,
Katz and Postal in the Standard Theory do), then, one faces an uncomfortable
dilemma. One has to offer either the specific sets of rules that determine the
semantic components or a finite number of these components 'out of which the
basically solitary speaker can construct all possible semantic contents' (Habermas
1970: 362). In doing the latter, one attracts the charge of elementarism.
10 Although Habermas' s later work is sometimes at variance with statements like those that I will be quoting, which in any case even then appeared tentative, I believe that they could be further elaborated (cautiously so as to avoid reductionism, naturalism, or apriorism) and even backed up with more recent research in developmental psychology as well as in speculative or realist philosophy. I see no compelling argument against any further research in such directions.

To do justice to Chomsky, we have to say that (a) he is well-aware of the
weakness of his semantics;11 (b) he does not have recourse to a Jakobson-type
universalism to offer an elementarist, finite number of semantic units that would
produce the léxica of all languages. Chomsky does not provide any substantive
linguistic universals as Roman Jakobson did when speaking about a finite number of
phonemes. Instead, Chomsky suggests formal linguistic universals as a general
property of natural languages consisting only of a sequence of rules. Consequently,
it is not necessary to assume, as some postmodernist thinkers do, that, because an
actual language may not include the same conception of a noun or a verb, there are
no linguistic universals. The formal universals which constitute Chomsky's choice
involve 'the character of the rules that appear in grammars and the ways in which
they can be interconnected' (Chomsky 1965: 28-29). Also, (c) Chomsky has
reformulated the Standard Theory in a modified one, after some research showed
that the surface does affect the deep structure, therefore, the meaning is not fixed
once and for all. Ultimately, Chomsky neither treats the grammar and the lexicon as
two separate entities nor does he defend an absolute identity of meaning.12
However, if the surface structure can affect the meaning of a sentence, then the
meaning may not be explained totally by a dictionary that belongs to the deep
structure. If this is the case, then the idea that semantic universais arise from pre-
given properties of a subject whose thinking is expressed through language is
untenable. Perhaps this is the reason why Chomsky argues as follows: 'General
properties of language, if not merely historical accident, and thus of no real interest,
must be attributable to an interaction of (1) genetically determined mechanisms of
mind and (2) uniformities in the empirical conditions of language use and
acquisition' (Chomsky 1977a: 37). The second point is rather baffling for the
comprehension of Chomsky's project if one considers what he had to say about the
role of experience in his theory. It is worth citing here a lengthy quotation showing
the role of experience in language acquisition in Chomsky's work and the difference
between his and Habermas' s account of experience as we have indicated in the
previous section.

The child approaches language with an intuitive understanding of such concepts
as physical object, human intention, volition, causation, goal, and so on. These
constitute a framework for thought and language and are common to the
languages of the world [. . .] The extent to which this framework can be modified
by experience and varying cultural contexts is a matter of debate, but it is beyond
question that acquisition of vocabulary is guided by a rich and invariant
conceptual system, which is prior to any experience (Chomsky 1988: 32).

 
11 As Searle writes: 'the weakest element of Chomsky's grammar is the semantic component, as he himself repeatedly admits' (Searle 1974: 23). 12 Allen and Paul Van Buren give a detailed explanation of the transition from the Standard Theory to the modified one (1971: 102-105). The idea that the surface structure does not decisively affect the deep structure belonged mainly to Katz and Postal (see Chomsky 1977a: 22), and Chomsky seems rather reluctant to subscribe to this. As he writes, Katz believes that 'linguistic theory provides a system for representation of meaning'. 'My own view is more skeptical' and further 'it is also questionable whether the theory of meaning can be divorced from the study of other cognitive structures' (Chomsky 1977a: 23).

Habermas is justified then in claiming that the model Chomsky offers presents itself as
prior to all communication. We have already seen how Habermas rejects apriorism and
attempts to combine experience and mind in a quasi-transcendental concept of
language, but let us provide textual evidence once more: 'semantic fields can be formed
and shifted in structural association with global views of nature and society' (Habermas
1970: 363). For Habermas, the semantic universals are intersubjectively a priori
universal (dialogue constitutive universals), intersubjectively a posteriori universal
(cultural universals), monological a priori universal (universal cognitive schemes of
interpretation), and monological a posteriori universal (universals of perceptival and
motivational constitution) (Habermas 1970: 364). 13 Dialogue-constitutive universals
are intersubjective a priori and that means that they are species-specific. They are not
a priori in Kant's terms, because they do not emerge from human subjectivity and they
determine not primarily our relation with the objective world but our relation with, and
apperception of, the Other: in Habermas's parlance, 'it is the dialogue-constitutive
universals, as we now prefer to say, that establish in the first place the form of
intersubjectivity between any competent speakers capable of mutual understanding'
(Habermas 1970: 369). The example Habermas provides, personal pronouns as
dialogue-constitutive universals, shows how intersubjectivity can be grounded in our
capacity to perceive others as well as ourselves within a society and can motivate very
far-reaching debates in the field of developmental psychology.

Marianna Papastephanou