Four Critiques of Chomsky's Universal Grammar

Chomsky’s Universal Grammar presupposes certain necessary characteristics for a language to posses which, I think, a skeptic could rightfully deny him. If you agree with any of the following criticisms of Chomsky’s so-called “poverty stimulus thesis,” than perhaps it might weaken the grip that universal grammar seems to have imposed, a priori, on our mind. I propose four criticisms below:

For Chomsky’s universal grammar to be accepted as an appropriate explanation of where we get our language from, than the virtues of our ‘language faculty’ become the very characteristics that we need to appropriately define language. What I mean by this is that in order for a language X to qualify as a language, it is not enough proof that it is spoken or written, but that it indeed follows from the ‘language faculty’ in our brains, and therefore abides by the rules of universal grammar. I think this closes the door for many systems of communication that we consider languages to qualify as such under Chomsky’s conception. This criticism, I’ll call the (1) problem of linguistic provinciality.

I would argue that UG supplants a broadly construed definition of language – an organized system of communication with some sort of meaningful consistency and coherence of terms – with a much more provincial one. For Chomsky, modern language is an evolutionary legacy of universal grammar. However, other linguistic communicative systems that have evolved in tandem with our spoken language, like mathematics, music, and computer science, ought also to qualify as language, because we use them as such. But it seems that do not, under Chomsky’s rule, because they are devoid of universal grammar. For in Math, there is no present or past tense, in music there is not subject/verb/object, and in programming, there need not be intentionality, especially if the ‘listener’ has a microprocessor instead of a brain. Are these things not then languages?

I would also point out Chomsky’s failure to consistently describe the language faculty’s location that he claims essential to the generation of universal grammar. This criticism we can call (2) the problem of locality. First he says, “… it is concerned with those aspects form and meaning that are determined by the ‘language faculty’ which is understood to be a particular component of the human mind,” (4) and yet, later in the same paragraph, he claims “UG may therefore be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty.” (5) Is universal grammar a product of the mind – and therefore presumably different in each mind that conceives it – or is it a deterministic product of our biology, and therefore consistently hard-wired within every human being. If the former, how can we claim to know anything about it at all beyond what we can analyze of our own minds? If the later, how can we account for the varicolored variety of languages, dialects, and means of expression across cultures and even in homogenous groups? Mere environmental factors? I don’t buy it…

An additional criticism I can offer is what we can refer to as (3) a circular assertion of triviality, which renders Chomsky’s thesis to be much less informative than he claims it is. To me, the language faculty is a murky, elusive property/organ (explained above), which doesn’t offer anything more interesting than the trivial fact: ‘languages are learned by humans through a language acquisition device, where the LAD is innate.’ If true, this is obvious, but since we haven’t found said ‘language faculty’ to be an organelle in the brain, claims of its existence are pseudoscientific. That said, it appears that the language faculty that Chomsky hypothesizes isn’t really a theory of language, but an explanandum in disguise, still looking for a theory to explain it.

My fourth and final criticism, called (4) the denial of future languages, is concerned with the first. Do the unconventional languages abovementioned qualify as languages? If they don’t, and Chomsky is right about the language faculty, wouldn’t all these language-esque constructions (like music, math, and programming), need their own brain faculties and universal structures in order to exist in such complex and endless variety? Is their an ‘art faculty,’ a ‘math faculty’ and so on… Yet, supposing that the aforementioned languages do posses some relationship with Chomsky’s universal grammar, why are they so fundamentally different to normative conception of language? Any rule of UG that we predict can surely be contradicted by some language, or linguistic system that approaches the structure of a language. Ultimately, my opinion is that, while universal grammar is attractive and seductive as an idea, it limits our means to create and instantiate new languages because of an evolutionary burden that Chomsky has rested upon our shoulders. And I’m not sure its even there in the first place.