Chomsky’s Language and Consciousness

Philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky revolutionized the theory of language, and although language-related theory of consciousness has not been a focus of his contributions, its relevance remains. Chomsky famously posited linguistic capacity, especially syntactic knowledge, as at least partially innate and mostly (if not entirely) unique to human beings. Thus, language acquisition in all human children is somewhat instinctual and surprisingly rapid, conditioned by language-specific features of diverse languages. Chomsky labels this core set of inherited grammatical rules “universal grammar” and characterizes these inborn, subconscious capabilities as “deep structure.”

Does Chomsky's universal grammar with its deep structure carry implications for consciousness? How does Chomsky approach the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness? His views are complex, not easily categorized (Section: Chomsky, 2022a, 2022b; Feser, 2010, 2022b).

Critiques of Behaviorism and the Hard Problem

Chomsky is an aggressive critic of behaviorism—it makes no sense, he says, to study internal phenomena by observing external manifestations. The study of language is entirely inconsistent with behaviorist principles. “Nothing there,” he says. To understand it, one must examine internal processes. Thus, the connection between the deep structure of language and the essence of consciousness.

Chomsky is also a critic of the hard problem, labeling it a “pseudo-problem.” Some questions, by their simple structures, are not real questions, he says, in that there is no logical way to answer them. His example question “Why do things happen?” cannot be answered in the general, while a similar-sounding question, say, “Why did this earthquake happen?” can be answered in the specific. Chomsky believes that the hard problem of consciousness is an example of the former and therefore is not a genuine question (while the “easy” problems of consciousness, discovering neural correlates, are examples of the latter).

Matter as the Main Mystery

Exemplifying Chomsky's unorthodox approach to consciousness, even though he commits to a materialism/physicalism ontology that the mind is generated only in the brain, rather than deflating the ontological status of the mental, his contrarian position is to challenge the ontological status of the physical—arguing that science does not know what matter really is. To Chomsky, matter, not mental, is the main mystery.

As Chomsky says, “The mind-body problem can be posed sensibly only insofar as we have a definite conception of body. If we have no such definite and fixed conception, we cannot ask whether some phenomena fall beyond its range” (Chomsky, 1987). Moreover, “The mind-body problem can therefore not even be formulated. The problem cannot be solved, because there is no clear way to state it. Unless someone proposes a definite concept of body, we cannot ask whether some phenomena exceed its bounds.”

As for clarifying the concept of the body, the physical, matter, Chomsky states, “the material world is whatever we discover it to be, with whatever properties it must be assumed to have for the purposes of explanatory theory. Any intelligible theory that offers genuine explanations and that can be assimilated to the core notions of physics becomes part of the theory of the material world, part of our account of body.”

To Chomsky, a mechanical model of the world, developed in early modern philosophy and inchoate science, could never account for aspects of the mental. Thus, while he understands Descartes' motivation to postulate a separate, nonphysical “thinking substance,” he rejects Descartes’ classic dualism and trains his analytic guns on the mechanical model in particular and on matter in general.

Open Questions and Mysteries

Chomsky feels no pressure to devise his own theory of consciousness. If anything, he shuns grand solutions. “There seems to be no coherent doctrine of materialism and metaphysical naturalism, no issue of eliminativism, no mind-body problem (Chomsky, 2020). In short, as Edward Feser notes, “if the problem has no clear content, neither do any of the solutions to it” (Feser, 2022b). Chomsky is content to allow science to do its work, advancing knowledge of the brain and of the mind, leaving to the future the construction of proper theories of consciousness irrespective of current notions of the physical and matter.

One may infer that Chomsky contemplates an expanded view of the physical, with matter having features now unknown, which then would “naturally” subsume the mental. (Note: Chomsky rejects panpsychism.) However, in an overarching sense, he remains unsure whether human beings have the capacity to solve what he believes are genuine mysteries about the nature of reality, but he is also unsure whether consciousness will prove to be an ultimate mystery.