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So, it’s contributing to the atomization that people experience?

The interconnection among people that the Internet establishes is very positive in many ways, for organizing and just for human life. But it has its downside, too. I’ve spoken to friends whose teenage children go up to their rooms after dinner and start their social life with virtual characters, chat friends, and who make up fake personas and may be are living in some other country. This is their social circle. They are with their friends on–line who are pretending to be such–and–such and they are pretending to be so–and–so. The psychic effect of this is something I wouldn’t like to think about.

We are human beings. Face–to–face contact means a lot. Not having an affair with some sixty–year–old guy who’s pretending to be a fourteen–year–old girl in some other country. There’s an awful lot of this stuff going on. It’s exteremely hard to say what the net effect of the whole thing is.

However, this is all small potatoes. The real problem is totally different. The corporations have, only in the last few years, discovered that this public creation can be a tremendous tool for profit, for basically a home marketing service. And marketing means not just perfumes, but also attitudes, beliefs, consumerism, and so on. And they want to take control of it. Whether that’s technically possible is not so certain. But that’s being worked on.

Let’s move on to the Internet and issues of privacy. Unbeknownst to many Internet users, businesses are collecting profiles and amassing data on people’s preferences and interests. What are the implications of that?

The implications could be pretty serious, but in my view they are all secondary to another issue, which is Internet access. The huge mergers that are going on in the media megacorporations carry the threat which is not at all remote that they’ll be able to effectively direct access to favored sites, meaning turning the Internet system even more than it is now into a home shopping service rather than information and interaction. The megamergers like AOL and Time Warner offer technical possibilities to ensure that getting on the Internet will draw you into what they want you to see, not what you want to see. That’s very dangerous. The Internet, is a tremendous tool for information, understanding, organizing, and communication. There is no doubt at all that the business world, which has been given this public gift, intends to turn it into something else. If they’re able to do it, that will be a very serious blow to freedom and democracy.

You described the Internet to me once as a “lethal weapon”. Someone once wrote an article and put your name on it and circulated it on the Net.

That happened. The article was then picked off the Net and published. A lot of ugly things can happen.

Learning about Linguistics

Talk a little bit about linguistics. In layman’s terms, could you explain your theory of language?

First of all, theories aren’t personal. Nobody owns them. So there is an approach to language of which I’m one of the participants in studying it and there are contributors from lots of sources and plenty of interaction. It starts from the fact, and it’s not a very controversial fact, that the capacity for language is a species–specific property. That is, every normal human being has that capacity. As far as we know it is biologically isolated.

A capacity isn’t one thing. It has many strands. So for example, the fact that I’m using my tongue when I speak is not biologically isolated. Other organisms have tongues, like cats. And undoubtedly there are many other aspects of it that are shared by primates or mammals or maybe all of life.

But some particular crucial aspects of language do appear to be biologically quite isolated with properties that we don’t find elsewhere in the biological world. There’s nothing homologous, meaning same origins, or analogous, meaning roughly the same structure, among other species. So it’s some kind of unique aspect of human intelligence that may have developed in many hominid lines, but only one has survived, namely us.

The one that survived apparently came from a pretty small breeding group, maybe tens of thousands of people, may be a hundred or two hundred thousand years ago, something in that range. Since that time, there has been essentially no time for evolutionary effects to have become detectable and, as far as is known, there’s extremely little genetic variation among existing humans as compared with other species. So we’re a very homogenous species, and the language faculty in particular seems to be essentially shared. What that means is that if your kids grow up in East Africa they’ll learn Swahili as perfectly as anyone there. If their kids grow up in Boulder, Colorado, they’ll speak the Boulder dialect of English as well as anyone there.

These characteristics seem to be a shared and specific part of our genetic endowment. We want to find out what they are. What they are, whatever they are, they allow an infant, maybe even pre–birth, there’s evidence for that, but certainly very early on, to do some pretty astonishing things. First the infant has to pick out of the environment, which is a lot of undifferentiated noise and activity, the child has to somehow select out of that massive confusion the parts that are language. Nobody knows how to do that.

There are similar problems faced by other organisms. Insects, which seem to be more similar to humans in this respect than any other known organism – no relevant evolutionary relationship, obviously – a bee, for example, has to be able to pick out of all the activity that it observes just the parts which are what are called the “waggle dance”, the dance of the bees that’s used to communicate distance and the quality of the flower. Exactly how that’s done, nobody knows. When we look at bees dancing around, we don’t see it. You have to be a bee to see it. In fact to discover it is sophisticated enough a trick that you can get a Nobel Prize for it.

A human has a much more complicated task to pick out a language, and no other organism will do that. If you raise an ape in the same environment as a child without special training, and even with special training, the ape won’t pick out the linguistic activities as a category distinct from anything else. It’s just a mass of things happening. But somehow a human infant is designed to do exactly that.

The infant has some sort of mental faculty, some special component of the whole intellectual system, call it the language faculty, and that faculty picks out the stuff that’s linguistic, and that’s language–related, and then passes through various transitions and gets to the point where you and I are, where you use this system of knowledge freely and productively to talk about new circumstances in ways that are not caused by the circumstances in which you are nor caused by your inner state but are somehow appropriate to the circumstances and coherent. Those are the rough facts about language, which have been observed for hundreds of years.

The next question is, How is it done? What’s the nature of the initial state of the language faculty, the shared initial state, the genetically determined initial state? What are its properties? How do these get refined and shaped and modified in one way or another through interaction with the environment to lead to the mature state of what we call having a language? That’s the topic.

In order to investigate it, there are some upper and lower bounds that have to be satisfied by the theory of the initial state. It has to be at least rich enough to account for the fact that a child does – on the basis of the scattered evidence around it – arrive at a state of knowledge which is highly specific, very articulated, extremely detailed, applies to new circumstances, and does so in a very rich and complex way, as you can demonstrate.

So the initial state has to be at least rich enough to account for that transition. But it can’t be so rich as to exclude some of the options. So you can’t for example, say, The initial state is my dialect of English, or somebody speaking Japanese. So the upper bound that you can’t go beyond is as much complexity and richness as would rule out possible languages, not just actual ones, but possible ones that could be attained. The lower bound is that it has to be at least rich enough to account for the fact that in every linguistic community a normal child will acquire a rich, complex understanding and capacity to use the language of that community.
In between those bounds lies the truth about the initial state. You study it by looking at those two problems. What principles must it have in order to be able to be articulated as a particular complex system? The study of languages of widely different typology puts a constraint on whether you are going too far in imposing internal structure. That’s where the subject is.