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How is it possible, asks Chomsky, that a child’s brain could absorb something so complex as Chinese or English, just from the environment and just through cycles of reinforcement? And how is it that we can “constantly read and hear new sequences of words, recognize them as sentences, and understand them?”

This also returns us to the question of the black scorpion which, as Whitehead pointed out, was not falling on his and Skinner’s dinner table.^§MS3.1.2d How can humans make sense of things that have not yet been experienced in material reality, and for that matter, may not ever be?

Chomsky’s answer: “It appears that we recognize a new item as a sentence not because it matches some familiar item in any simple way, but because it is generated by the grammar that each individual has somehow and in some form internalized.” (“[I]n some form internalized” – this is a strangely vague formulation.) Early in their acquisition of speech, a young learner has acquired the “ability … to distinguish sentences from nonsentences, detect ambiguities,” and this “apparently forces us to the conclusion that this grammar is of an extremely complex and abstract character, and that the young child has succeeded in carrying out what from the formal point of view, at least, seems to be a remarkable type of theory construction.”⁹⁶

This is strangely unclear – the learner has constructed the grammar, remarkably, or is it so remarkable that they could never themselves have constructed it? Or, if not “internalization” or “construction,” perhaps some mystery source? – “a variety of motivational factors about which nothing serious is known in the case of human beings.”⁹⁷

Behaviorism had set out to account for the sources of human meaning in terms of the patterns of ordinary experience – perhaps unconvincingly, or even scarily at times. But Chomsky’s alternative mechanisms to account for the sources of speech are not at all clear.

As we will see, this vagueness proves troublesome.^§MS3.1.2j Half a century later, Chomsky is still struggling for answers to the question of what makes grammaticalness and the sources of human meaning. He is still working in a region that Watson would have considered to be the self-referential space of consciousness. This turns out to be the self-enclosed space of a static language system, not dissimilar in its essential form to the structuralist system of meaning theorized by Saussure.^§MS3d Chomsky and Saussure alike build ideal geometries of meaning whose origins are obscure and that are disconnected from the meanings-in the material world.

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⁹⁶ Noam Chomsky, 1959, “Review of ‘Verbal Behavior,’ by B.F. Skinner,” Language 35(1):26–58, pp. 44, 56, 57.

⁹⁷ Ibid., p. 43.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 288–290. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Noam Chomsky’s Review of “Verbal Behavior” §MS3.1.2e