structure; generalisations from experience such as connectionism – that
contemporary variant of behaviourism – envisages them; a parallel between
the learning of language by infants and the construction of theories by the
adult scientist (what is called the ‘theory of theory’). In short, there is never
only one possible explanation, any more than there is only one possible politics.
The result is that Chomsky’s scientific practice is indeed governed by what
Althusser calls a SPS, with two contradictory tendencies: a materialist aspect
and an idealist aspect. And, as the idealist aspect is dominant and the materialist
aspect, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, dominated – that is,
contaminated by idealism, of which it is only the flip side – we find ourselves
faced, on the one hand, with an admixture of Platonic epistemology (the child
speaker is like slave in Meno– his discovery is recollection) and Leibnizian
monadology (the share of the innate in linguistic activity is unduly extended);
and, on the other, a mechanistic materialism which reduces the phenomena
of language to the physical, the individual, the a-historical. (Here, the contrast
with Saussure, whose concept of langueavoids at least some of these defects,
is glaring.)
Since there is philosophy of language, and it is inevitable (language is too
serious a business to be left to the linguists), we shall look for it in a different
form of materialism: historical and dialectical materialism. On condition, of
course, that these entities exist: it is not enough to mouth old slogans. The
rest of this book will be devoted to it, following a detour via another, more
explicitly philosophical version of the dominant philosophy of language.
44 • Chapter Two