very outset Chomsky adopts a realist interpretation of grammar.” So, it is obvi-
ous that in the cognitive revolution of the 1950s, the instrumentalist attitude
to linguistic analysis was replaced with a realist attitude, as in new astronomy
during the Scientific Revolution.
Second, like Galileo, Chomsky also stopped seeking the causation of verbal
behavior, as indicated in the passage from Chomsky (1959: 55):
The questions to which Skinner has addressed his speculations are hope-
lessly premature. It is futile to inquire into the causation of verbal behavior
until much more is known about the specifi c character of this behavior; and
there is little point in speculating about the process of acquisition without
much better understanding of what is acquired.I will discuss consequences of this shift in the goal for the method of biolin-
guistics in section 3.3.
Third, Chomsky (1980: 218) states that “it is com mon to adopt what has
sometimes been called ‘the Galilean Style’ – that is, to construct “abstract math-
ematical models of the universe to which at least the physicists give a higher
degree of reality than they accord the ordinary world of sensations.’” The Galilean
Style – the characterization of the method of physics by the theoretical physicist
Stephen Weinberg – elegantly captures modern science’s way of understand-
ing the physical world. However, it is also interesting to note that although it
explicitly states that the inner reality of the universe is better captured in terms
of mathematical models than sensation, their causal structure is not specifically
mentioned, or at best remains implicit in it. I will turn to this point in section 3.3.
Although the Galilean Style is characterized on the basis of physics, Chomsky
(1980: 118), like mechanical philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, such as
Descartes, claims as follows:
A comparable approach is particularly appropriate in the study of an organ-
ism whose behavior, we have every reason to believe, is determined by the
interaction of numerous internal systems operating under conditions of
great variety and complexity.Chomsky (1980: 223) further notes that, under thi s approach, “the grammar of a
language, conceived as a system of rules that weakly generates the sentences of a
language and strongly generates their structures, has a claim to that ‘higher degree
of reality’ that the physicist ascribes to his mathematical models of the universe.”
Finally, let us briefly discuss the role that mathematics plays in biolinguistics.
In the interview included in Chomsky (2004), when asked why mathematics does
“no t seem to work so extensively for human language,” Chomsky (2004:174)
answered as follows:
Well, it do esn’t work for anything. There’s no mathematics in biology. Not
even in chemistry. Mathematics is of course used, but not in the sense we
are talking about here, at least as far as I know.178 Masanobu Ueda