Chomsky’s notion of “knowledge of language” has given rise to much debate, with the participation of not only linguists, but also philosophers (such as, e.g., Quine, Dummett, Searle, etc.) and cognitive scientists. Several philosophers has judged this notion as obscure: if it is a kind of implicit knowledge (such as Chomsky states), then “we need an account of how unconscious knowledge issues in conscious knowledge” (Dummett 1981). Furthermore, Kripke’s (1982) interpretation of Wittgenstein, while dealing with generative grammar only in a marginal way, helped to undermine the notion of “following a rule by an individual”, which underlay the notion of “knowledge of language” in Chomsky’s sense.

Chomsky’s answer has been that his theory of language and its knowledge is perfectly consistent with the standards of any scientific theory: it makes hypotheses about the nature of our “mental capacity” and these hypotheses can be falsified or corroborated by the facts. Skeptical objections in the style of Kripke or Wittgenstein can apply to any kind of science: then, if you accept them, you can not do science; if you want to do science, they can not be taken into account. As for the question of “unconscious knowledge”, if certain assumptions about the functioning of the language are not falsified by empirical evidence, this means that they are present in the mind of the speaker, even though “we do not, of course, have a clear account, or any account at all, of why certain elements of our knowledge are accessible to consciousness whereas others are not, or of how knowledge, conscious or unconscious, is manifested in actual behavior” (Chomsky 1986: 270).

In my view, Chomsky’s answers to his critics are fairly convincing, from his own point of view, which is that of a “militant” linguist, not of a “critical” philosopher of language; this does not mean, however, that all the problems are solved. For example, the issue of the “psychological reality of grammar”, hotly debated between the 1960s and the 1970s, and quickly dismissed by Chomsky (1980) by stating that a psychologically real theory is simply a true theory, should probably be reconsidered. As Pylyshyn (1991: 236-7) remarks, a true theory of the motion of planets “would not say that planets behave the way they do because they access and use a representation of the rules”. Can we say the same thing regarding our mental representations, and in particular language?

References:

Chomsky, N. (1980), Rules and Representations, New York, Columbia University Press

Chomsky, N. (1986), Knowledge of Language, New York, Praeger

Dummett, M. (1981), “Objections to Chomsky”, London Review of Books Vol. 3. no.16

Kripke, S. (1982), Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press

Pylyshyn, Z. (1981) “Rules and Representations: Chomsky and Representational Realism”, in A. Kasher (ed.), The Chomskian Turn, Cambridge, MA. – Oxford, pp. 231-251