Chomsky on the Mind & Limits of Understanding

Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding

Friedrich Lange, in his classic 19th century history of materialism, observed that we have “so accustomed ourselves to the abstract notion of forces, or rather to a notion hovering in a mystic obscurity between abstraction and concrete comprehension, that we no longer find any difficulty in making one particle of matter act upon another without immediate contact,…through void space without any material link. From such ideas the great mathematicians and physicists of the seventeenth century were far removed. They were all in so far genuine Materialists in the sense of ancient Materialism that they made immediate contact a condition of influence.” This transition over time is “one of the most important turning-points in the whole history of Materialism,” he continued, depriving the doctrine of much significance, if any at all. “What Newton held to be so great an absurdity that no philosophic thinker could light upon it, is prized by posterity as Newton’s great discovery of the harmony of the universe!”

Similar conclusions are commonplace in the history of science. In the mid-twentieth century, Alexander Koyré observed that Newton demonstrated that “a purely materialistic pattern of nature is utterly impossible (and a purely materialistic or mechanistic physics, such as that of Lucretius or of Descartes, is utterly impossible, too)”; his mathematical physics required the “admission into the body of science of incomprehensible and inexplicable `facts’ imposed up on us by empiricism,” by what is observed and our conclusions from these observations.

With the disappearance of the scientific concept of body (material, physical, etc.), what happens to the “second substance,” res cogitans/mind, which was left untouched by Newton’s startling discoveries? A plausible answer was suggested by John Locke, also within the reigning theological framework. He wrote that just as God added to matter such inconceivable properties as gravitational attraction, he might also have “superadded” to matter the capacity of thought. In the years that followed, Locke’s “God” was reinterpreted as “nature,” a move that opened the topic to inquiry. That path was pursued extensively in the years that followed, leading to the conclusion that mental processes are properties of certain kinds of organized matter. Restating the fairly common understanding of the time, Charles Darwin, in his early notebooks, wrote that there is no need to regard thought, “a secretion of the brain,” as “more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter” – all inconceivable to us, but that is not a fact about the external world; rather, about our cognitive limitations.

See also this lecture, previously posted in the Multimedia Resources Thread:

Noam Chomsky discusses some philosophical issues involving the limits of language and mind. In particular, he considers three intellectual problems: what he calls Plato's problem, Orwell's problem, and Descartes's problem. Plato's problem has to do with how human beings, whose contacts with the world are limited and brief, are nevertheless able to know so much (i.e. issues involving innate knowledge & the poverty of the stimulus). Orwell's problem is the opposite: how human beings, with amble and reliable information, nonetheless know and understand so little. And finally Descartes' problem, which has to do with issues of freedom of choice and action. This talk is from the College de France.