Excerpt from a YouTube interview (Dec 6, 2019) in which Noam Chomsky argues that language is an internal, species-specific faculty determined by genetic endowment, analogous to vision. He presents language as central to human cognition — the mode for constructing thoughts, enabling unbounded creativity and underpinning reasoning and other distinctive human capacities.
So how deep do the roots of language go in our brain, our mind? Is it yet another feature like vision? Or is it something more fundamental from which everything else springs in the human mind?
Well, in a way, it's like vision. There's a. You know, there's something about our genetic endowment that determines that we have a mammalian rather than an insect visual system. And there's something in our genetic endowment that determines that we have a human language faculty. No other organism has anything remotely similar. So in that sense, it's internal. Now, there is a long tradition which I think is valid, going back centuries to the early scientific revolution at least, that holds that language is the sort of the core of human cognitive nature. It's the source, it's the mode for constructing thoughts and expressing them. That is what forms thought. And it's got fundamental creative capacities. It's free, independent, unbounded, and so on. And undoubtedly, I think, the basis for creative capacities and the other remarkable human capacities that lead to the unique achievements and not so great achievements of the species.
The capacity to think and reason. Do you think that's deeply linked with language? Do you think the way we. The internal language system is essentially the mechanism by which we also reason internally?
It is undoubtedly the mechanism by which we reason. There may also be other. There are undoubtedly other faculties involved in reasoning. We have a kind of scientific faculty. Nobody knows what it is. But whatever it is that enables us to pursue certain lines of endeavor and inquiry and to decide what makes sense and doesn't make sense and achieve a certain degree of understanding of the world that uses language but goes beyond it. Just as using our capacity for arithmetic is not the same as having the capacity.
