to a minimum of experience at the requisite age, do not speak at all. Accordingly,
experience plays a necessary but limited role in language development.
What experience triggers is a series of ‘parameters’, which differentiate
languages and explain why the same biological endowment does not lead
Chinese children and English children to speak the same language (as regards
the development of arms and sight, we can in fact consider that there is hardly
any difference). However, it will be noted that this does not make the English
language a specific object – at least not for the linguist: add or subtract a
parameter or two, and we pass straight from German to Dutch and from
Dutch to English.
Chomsky might be open to the accusation of physical reductionism – i.e.
vulgar materialism. But he is careful. Certainly, the study of language is
characterised by him as ‘naturalist’: he is concerned with a portion of nature
like all scientists working in the hard sciences; and linguistics is a natural
science. Its object is an aspect of what Chomsky calls ‘the mind/brain’. The
solidus is a sign of hope: it indicates that there certainly is a connection even
if it remains obscure (but one day it will be established by science). Chomsky
has an interesting position on what the Anglo-American philosophical tradition
calls the ‘mind-body problem’: for him, the opposition is forced and the
concept of ‘body’ is as problematic as that of ‘mind’ (this suffices to distinguish
him from vulgar materialism). As we can see, Chomsky belongs to the Anglo-
American tradition of Quine, Davidson and Putnam, who are his natural
interlocutors and sometimes his opponents, and who continue to tackle the
problems of materialism in a way which seems old-fashioned to those of us
on this side of the Atlantic.
This position has a further consequence. Language is a faculty possessed
by all members of the human species in the same way. This universalist
position is to be welcomed: it rules out any form of linguistic paternalism
and racism (a common position in nineteenth-century thinking about language).
But this positive consequence itself has some negative consequences. I shall
suggest three. Firstly, the differences between languages are purely superficial
and, for the linguist, English and Japanese are practically (give or take the
odd parameter) the same thing. The following quotation is typical:
In the last twenty years or so, there has been a huge explosion of research
which has dealt with typologically quite varied languages. We can suspect,
and more or less know in advance, that they’re all going to be more or less20 • Chapter Two