Lingua Franca(s), Part I
On Noam Chomsky, doubt, the methodology of science, a "horrible mess," Alhazen and Galileo (again)
What is a Lingua Franca?
Greetings, dear readers. Today’s post is broadly on the topic of the lingua franca, but in a more experimental and figurative sense than you may have thought about before. If you are familiar with the term, you know that a lingua franca is a language used as a tool to connect many people who do not share a common native language. English is a widely used lingua franca; French and creole languages have served, too. We typically think of a lingua franca as a spoken dialect. But what other types of universalizing forces connect us?
A “Horrible Mess”
If, like me, you majored in linguistics at a university that is known for its strong generative linguistics program, you were exposed to the Chomskyian notion of “Universal Grammar.” Universal Grammar, or UG for short, sets out to establish the principle that all language structure is innate. Children need only learn the syntactic parameters and vocabulary for their language in order to communicate.
I will say that this notion has been disputed by some language scholars outside of the generative linguistics field. While there is evidence for the universality of human language and its structure, there have also been claims to the contrary—i.e., that all language structure is learned through experience. Addressing these counterclaims in a 1999 interview, Noam Chomsky, considered to be the father of modern linguistics, holds up 16th century Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei as a model [emphases mine]:
What was striking about Galileo, and was considered very offensive at that time, was that he dismissed a lot of data; he was willing to say “Look, if the data refute the theory, the data are probably wrong.” And the data that he threw out were not minor. For example, he was defending the Copernican thesis, but he was unable to explain why bodies didn’t fly off the earth; if the earth is rotating, why isn’t everything flying off into space? Also, if you look through a Galilean telescope, you don’t really see the four moons of Jupiter, you see some horrible mess and you have to be willing to be rather charitable to agree that you are seeing the four moons. He was subjected to considerable criticism at that time […].
[…T]he Galilean style […] is the recognition that it is the abstract systems that you are constructing that are really the truth[...], And so, it often makes good sense to disregard phenomena and search for principles that really seem to give some deep insight into why some of them are that way, recognizing that there are others that you can’t pay attention to. Physicists, for example, even today can’t explain in detail how water flows out of the faucet, or the structure of helium, or other things that seem too complicated. Physics is in a situation in which something like 90% of the matter in the Universe is what is called dark matter—it’s called dark because they don’t know what it is, they can’t find it, but it has to be there, or the physical laws don’t work. So people happily go on with the assumption that we’re somehow missing 90% of the matter in the Universe. That’s by now considered normal, but in Galileo’s time it was considered outrageous. And the Galilean style referred to that major change in the way of looking at the world: you’re trying to understand how it works, not just describe a lot of phenomena, and that’s quite a shift.
It must be tough to assert that abstract theory is more reliable than observable phenomena. I would like to acknowledge the courage of both Galileo and Chomsky in making claims about something that is invisible being, in fact, universal and true. It takes guts. And, perhaps, a little bit of faith?
Faith vs. Doubt
Of course, questioning things is the bedrock of scientific inquiry and has been for millennia. The irony here is that the scientific method, as described above, seems to contain a hybrid of questioning and faith. Making a claim about something invisible being true is a type of faith. Galileo had faith that his theories would be proven true by science later on, even when the data wasn’t all there yet. Chomsky asserts virtually the same, even if Universal Grammar cannot be completely proven by the observable science of today. Despite this seeming grain of faith, questioning everything reigns supreme in the sciences. The brilliant eleventh century mathematician, astronomer and Islamic Golden Age physicist Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) strongly influenced Newton, Kepler and Galileo. He writes:
Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them.
— Alhazen
Skepticism is essential—a bedrock of scientific inquiry. How much of science is supposed to be based on questioning, and how much on faith? The split might be closer to 99%/1% than 50/50, but I would still assert that faith is there in some form. And if it is good enough for the staunchest of scientists, why not the rest of us? Try having a little faith today, in whatever you believe as a universal. But don’t go all HAM and remember to question things, too.
My Encounter with Chomsky
I had the privilege of meeting Noam Chomsky in 2005. I was an undergraduate studying linguistics at the University of Maryland, and he came to campus to speak. Because I was one of only four students who were very active in the Linguistics Undergraduate Association, I was invited to both the private talk and the reception afterwards. At the reception, I saw Professor Chomsky humbly eating a sandwich at the host’s dining room table. I had the courage to strike up a conversation with him about our effort to get Fair Trade certified coffee served in the campus dining halls, and he asked me to email him. We exchanged emails back and forth several times over the course of the next few years. I once asked him about an anti-Universal Grammar researcher who was profiled in the New Yorker. Chomsky had some choice verbiage on the topic, but asked me not to quote him on it, so I will honor that request now. Suffice to say, I have faith in Universal Grammar, at least to the extent that I can understand it.
Speaking of which, advanced linguistic syntax was hard for me to understand—I actually failed the course. This was mostly a result of my not turning in the final paper. But it also may have been related to the fact that the class was a historical survey of syntactic theory without being explicitly stated as such (in my recollection). I think that explicitly framing the undergraduate syntax courses as an expository survey would have helped me get it. Or maybe I just hadn’t gotten a good hold on the methodology of science yet.
The Methodology of Science
Above: Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Justus Sustermans, 1636. Uffizi Museum, Florence.
In the same 1999 interview, Chomsky asserts that the “methodology of science” is not something that is explicitly taught in schools:
…All of this is part of what you might call the “Galilean style”: the dedication to finding understanding, not just coverage[…]. That’s all part of the methodology of science. It’s not anything that anyone teaches; there’s no course in methodology of physics at M.I.T.
First of all, I believe that Chomsky is distinguishing between something called the “methodology of science”—which is sometimes nebulous and not the same in every discipline—and the simple heuristic that is taught in elementary schools as the “scientific method.” The “scientific method,” according to one Reddit user, is taught as: “Question, research, hypothesis, experiment, analyze, report.” A physicist on the same thread replies,
That's a very simplified description of scientific work. Not everything can easily be put in these categories, and they don't always come in that order.
If you simplify science that much then yes, it works roughly that way everywhere. If you look at the actual day to day work, then different fields have very different approaches.
Second, saying no one teaches the methodology of science isn’t strictly true or it isn’t true anymore, at least. It has been 25 years since the interview took place, but there are places that teach the methodology or philosophy of science, among them: Methodology of Science - Biology | Stanford Online High School. I believe that society needs this type of teaching, especially when it is framed as a form of critical thinking. Science is a way of thinking. It is a way of speaking. Galileo agrees [my emphases]:
"Philosophy [i.e., physics] is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it..."
–Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore (The Assayer, 1623), as translated by Stillman Drake (1957), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo pp. 237–238, as quoted by di Francia (1981), p. 10.
For Galileo, science is a universal language.
For me, the methodology of science is a type of lingua franca.