There is no doubt that Chomsky’s impact on the field of linguistics was immense. As a young scholar he challenged the most basic precepts of the dominant tradition in linguistics at the time; and through the sheer newness and power of his ideas completely overthrew that tradition and established his own in it’s place. Not only did he change the way linguistics was done, he changed why it was done. Instead of limiting linguistics to simple taxonomy Chomsky suggested that linguistics could be used as a tool to derive explanations about the nature of human cognition. As a result of his revolution within linguistics he attracted more new scholars to the discipline than at any time in its history. His revolution was not limited to linguistics. By cutting through the dogmatic ideology that held them apart he allied linguistics more closely with adjacent disciplines, psychology in particular, and opened the door for potential interdisciplinary insight.

Chomsky once described the structuralist mindset that he was attacking as being “intellectually un-interesting.” (Chomsky 1979: 107). He said this because he believed that the philosophical tenets that the structuralists based their research on were fundamentally flawed. Structuralist linguistics was a discipline based in the intellectual tradition of empiricism. The most basic aspect of the empiricist point of view is that non-analytic knowledge can only be gained through actual experience. One immediate consequence of this position is that all learning must take place as an inductive generalization based on concrete data. That is to say our minds begin as “blank slates,” and all the knowledge that we attain is simply a collection of generalized rules based on our experiences. This concept of the nature of knowledge is central to the structuralist view of the nature of science; for a theory to be valid it must be directly related to some sort of actual data. The structuralists believed that real linguistic science was the “discovery,” or more accurately the description, of a grammar as a collection of one-to-one representations of actual utterances contained in a finite corpus. “Linguistics is a classificatory science…” (Hockett 1942: 3). Chomsky disagreed with the empiricist structuralists radically. He believed that it would be impossible to discover a true grammar if knowledge could only be gained by direction generalization from actual data. The reason he gives is that if a generalization is based only on actual data the number of possible generalizations is unlimited. In his own words “If we have a considerable number of theories that are comparable in credibility, that is virtually the same thing as having no theory at all.” (Chomsky 1979: 64). Chomsky believed that true linguistic science should be the business of creating theories that attempt explanation of the underlying structure of language and not simply to describe it superficially.

The intellectual tradition that Chomsky based his ideas on was that of rationalism. Rationalism originated in the work of the French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes. Like empiricism, rationalism is a theory concerned with the nature of knowledge, and thus has a great range of implications for the structure of scientific inquiry. Rationalists believe that as a consequence of our consciousness we have certain innate ideas, such as knowledge of self. Truth would then be deduced from our innate ideas through logical progression in much the same way that a mathematical proof is deduced from a set of axioms. As Descartes was also a great mathematician this philosophy is based heavily on the concept of a mathematical proof. To the rationalist mathematics is seen as the only example of real truth and the model that other disciplines should fit themselves to in their own searches for truth.

This theory of the nature of knowledge is at the heart of Chomsky’s ideas about an innate mental grammar as well as his method for determining the nature of that grammar. This mental grammar is an “innate idea” in the purely rationalist sense, an empiricist would say that the mind cannot have a priori knowledge and must have learned the grammar at some point. Following directly from this come Chomsky’s ideas about the way that a theory of linguistics should be devised. Basically that a scientist should start with a set of assumptions/axioms/”innate ideas” and from them deduce a correct theory using the evidence available. Thus according to Chomsky the tasks of the original language learner and the linguist are roughly parallel.

In his review of Chomsky’s debut Syntactic Structures, Robert Lees described Chomsky as having created “one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is normally understood.” (Lees 1957: 377). Chomsky says, “…one must start by identifying a cognitive domain… that is to say, a domain that can be considered as a system… Once that system is identified, one can try to determine its nature, to investigate theories concerning its structure.” (Chomsky 1979: 49). Language is just such a system for Chomsky. The goal that Chomsky has set for linguistics is that it should do what it can, with the techniques at its disposal, to determine “the underlying structure and abstract hidden principles” (Chomksy 1979: 107) involved in natural language. And that it should use that information, in conjunction with information gleaned about other systems, to compile a more complete understanding of the mind as a whole.

Chomsky believes that the method with the most potential for determining “abstract hidden principles” is through the analysis of syntax. In pursuit of this aim he formalized a method of describing the syntax of natural languages called “generative grammar.” By “generative” Chomsky means that a grammar can be thought of as a “theory of language,” or system of rules able to generate an unlimited number of grammatical sentences and no ungrammatical ones. The accuracy of a particular “theory of language” would then be judged by it’s ability to match up with the intuitions of native speakers, which Chomsky believes is the primary data of concern to linguists. The hope being that by weeding out various inadequate grammars the fundamental rules that govern syntax could be discovered, and eventually a class of “possible” grammars could be discovered called a “universal grammar.”

What allows Chomsky’s generative grammar to be verified in a useful way is that it deals with language in an idealized abstract way, conceptually similar to the idealizations used in the physical sciences. This means that it can be tested against an unlimited number of intuitions, whereas the traditional grammars, with their one-to-one relationship with a corpus, are not relevant to anything outside the corpus, and thus have no explanatory power. According to Frederick Newmeyer “It is this scientific idealization… that has enabled linguistics to break from the grip of taxonomy and anecdotality. On the basis of this idealization, more has been learned about the nature of language in the past twenty five years than in the previous two thousand five hundred.” (Newmeyer 1980: 250).

Chomsky believes that the generative grammar that we have inside our heads must be a part of the biological processes of our brains determined by our genes. Thus he believes that by studying the nature of our grammars and discovering a universal grammar we might gain information about the biological processes that lead to them. Chomksy rejects what he calls the mind/body “dualism” (Chomsky 1979: 81) of the empiricist science advocated by the structuralists; the idea that the mind and the body are made of fundamentally different stuff and that while the body can be studied empirically the mind is a sort of mystical “tabula rasa” (Chomsky 1979: 81) not amenable to scientific inquiry. Chomsky compares the study of the mind and the study of the body by suggesting that “the mind, like the body, is in effect a system of organs – we would call them ‘mental organs’…” (Chomsky 1979: 83). The grammar that we have inside our heads would then be one such mental organ and should be as open to scientific study as the heart of the lungs. Thus the universal grammar would be a set of biologically determined “boundary conditions” (Chomsky 1979: 111); the discovery of which would then be useful in shedding light on the workings of the biologically determined language faculty. The tradition of empiricism that the structuralists based their work on was not limited to linguistics. Frederick Newmeyer calls it “The dominant intellectual force in the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s.” (Newmeyer 1980: 3). Its most basic concept that all knowledge must necessarily be gained through relatively direct inductive generalization has obvious implications for every field of scientific endeavor. For it is essentially a position on the nature of knowledge itself, and so must be pivotal in understanding what it is that science is in the business of doing, as well as determining the best ways of doing it.

Empiricism was not new in the period between the 1930s and the 1960s. Its origins lie hundreds of years in the past, in the work of eighteenth century British philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume. Empiricism was only a part of the much larger wave of intellectual change, called the Enlightenment, which was sweeping through Western society, beginning with the Italian Renaissance in the fourteenth century and continuing today. It was based on notions of rationality and objectivity that were reactions to the extreme religious dogmatism of the Middle Ages. It was a part of the general Scientific Revolution, attempting to define what science should be concerned with as well as the particulars of the scientific method.

Though Chomsky describes the empiricist philosophy as “dogmatic” (Chomsky 1979: 88) it is clear that it was not always so. Though the empiricist philosophy has been assumed to be the framework within which research and thinking in general must take place for some time, initially it had to fight against a much different philosophy to establish itself. The intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment that empiricism was a part of was fighting against the extreme religious dogma that had characterized civilization for over a thousand years. When compared to the religious doctrine with absolutely no basis in reality whatsoever that controlled society completely the concept of describing the world simply through direct observation was rational and revolutionary. Early empiricist thought suggested rejecting the arbitrary claims about the nature of the universe found in various religious texts in favor of starting anew with no preconceptions of truth and describing and categorizing the world in specific reproducible ways. When the alternate rationalist approach to science was suggested it is then perhaps not surprising that the empiricists viewed it as at least a partial step backward into the baseless religious doctrine of the Middle Ages rather than a step forward as an addition to and a refinement of scientific thought. However, this is attributable to the fact that empiricism was a reaction to religious dogmatism rather than a true understanding of the nature of the rationalist position. David Hume described the empiricist position when he said, “If we take in hand any volume – of divinity of school metaphysics for instance – let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning fact or existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” (Hume 1961: 51). The fact that Hume refers specifically to “divinity or school metaphysics” illustrates the reactive nature of the empiricist position. So though empiricism may be rooted in the dissolution of baseless dogma, by limiting the scope of scientific development unnecessarily it becomes dogmatic itself.

The lines that Hume wished to draw between reality and “sophistry and illusion” were perhaps extreme, and empiricism retreated before the humanistic ideals of the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century. However, in the early twentieth century, particularly within the American intellectual community, empiricism once again began to flavor the majority of scientific discourse. Frederick Newmeyer stated that this was “a result of work on the foundations of logic.” (Newmeyer 1980: 4). While Hume’s demarcations between reality and illusion were somewhat fuzzy “Many philosophers believed that mathematical logic would give them the apparatus they lacked to formalize the distinction between mathematical truth, synthetic statements, and metaphysical nonsense.” (Newmeyer 1980: 4). Specific to structuralist thought, this mathematical logic could be seen as a way of formalizing the direct relationship between a theoretical statement about language and the concrete evidence the structuralists say it is necessarily generalized from.

This restriction to only dealing with directly observable phenomenon had a profound impact on all areas of scientific inquiry, but in particular it affected the closely related fields of linguistics and psychology. When the linguist operated under the assumption that language must be understood by induction from example, it was natural for the psychologist to make similar assumptions about the way that children learn their first language. Hockett equated the two by saying “The analytical process (of the linguist) thus parallels what goes on in the nervous system of the language learner.” (Hockett 1948: 269).

Though both linguistics and psychology at the time were operating from an empiricist perspective the two disciplines rarely intersected in their research aims. This was because the behaviorist psychologists of the time were dominated by such an extreme form of empiricist philosophy that they were not even able to tolerate the mild abstractions of the structuralists (Newmeyer 1980: 11). Only when a form of empiricist behaviorism, relatively weakened from that of Skinner and his followers, came into being with the work of a psychologist named Clark Hull, were psychologists able to study language in a way compatible with the methods of the structuralists (Newmeyer 1980: 11). The various hierarchical categories of the structuralists could then be fit into the framework of behaviorist psychology using notions such as “mediating response,” “transition probability,” and “associative set” (Newmeyer 1980: 12). The term “mediating response” was developed by Hull to mean some part of the chain between the stimulus and the response that is not directly observable. This represented a significant break from strict Skinnerian behaviorism and allowed psycholinguistics to define the structuralist hierarchy of “phoneme,” “morphem,” etc. as mediating responses. Each level of mediating response would then have a “transition probability” that governed movement between them and could be calculated using recent advances in information theory. This set of all the mediating responses associated with a particular stimulus would then be defined as an “associative set” (Newmeyer 1980:12). This was the state of the interdisciplinary field of psycholinguistics when B.F. Skinner wrote his definitive behaviorist take on language, Verbal Behavior. Skinner wrote it from the position of extreme empiricist behavioral psychology. He rejected the vague concept of “mind” altogether, saying that the only properly scientific, that is empirical, area of study was the actual observable behavior of the organism in question. In this he closely mirrored the structuralist insistence on concentrating only on a specific corpus of actual utterances. Both of these attitudes are in accordance with the empiricist position about the dualism of the mind and the body. When Chomsky wrote his 1959 review of Verbal Behavior he attacked these concepts as an extension of his attack on the structuralists and on the empiricist model of inductive learning in general.

Skinner was attempting to create a “functional analysis” of language, or for him “verbal behavior.” By using the word “functional” Skinner refers directly to the empiricist position that there must be a one-to-one descriptive relation between a “theory” of behavior and the actual observed behavior. The word “functional” appeals to the hope that by using the terminology of mathematical logic that one-to-one relationship might be rendered explicit. Skinner attempts to reduce language/verbal behavior to the level of mathematical logic by using notions such as stimulus, response, reinforcement, deprivation etc. developed in his extensive experimentation with animal subjects. A “stimulus” is an event in the external world that impinges on an organism and thus elicits a response from that organism. An event can only lawfully be considered to be a stimulus if it is related, perhaps indirectly, to some response. As Chomsky says in his review “A part of the environment and a part of behavior are called stimulus (eliciting, discriminated, or reinforcing) and response, respectively, only if they are lawfully related; that is, if the ‘dynamic laws’ relating them show smooth and reproducible curves.” (Chomsky 1959: 31). Skinner distinguishes between several different types of response. A “respondent” is the basic form of a response and is defined by the relationship between a particular stimulus and the relevant response being clear and immediate. However, Skinner does not limit the definition of a response to particular instances of time. An “operant” is a response for which there is no obvious and immediate stimuli but for which there can be shown to be a functional relationship to some previous stimulus (Chomsky 1959: 28).

This is the main category of response that Skinner is concerned with as it is the only one that has any hope of defining human, or animal, behavior. What we do at any given time is rarely directly related to events at hand, but is rather a result of the combination of our past and present experiences. According to Skinner the majority of our behavior is nothing more than a collection of operants of varying degrees of strength. The strength of a particular operant is determined by the level of reinforcement the organism receives in relation to that operant. One of the mainstays of Skinner’s laboratory research involved a rat being placed in a box with some sort of method for releasing a pellet of food accessible. When the rat utilizes the method and a food pellet comes out that act is “reinforced” and the operant attached to the act is thus strengthened. The strength of a particular operant can be further strengthened or weakened with the use of “deprivation.” If the rat has not been fed for several days then, naturally, the operant it has developed for getting a food pellet will be strengthened. Conversely if the rat is very well fed the operant for releasing a food pellet will be significantly reduced (Chomsky 1959: 34).

Skinner discovered that behavior could be further modified by something called “stimulus discrimination.” If the effectiveness of an act is determined by some condition, such as the flashing of a light, an organism can learn this and only attempt the act when the condition is in effect. The operant thus created is called a “discriminated” operant. In addition if the method required to obtain the reinforcement is changed slightly the organism can be trained to perform quite complex behavior. Skinner calls this process “response differentiation” Chomsky 1959: 29). Skinner believed that by using this very specific terminology the vast array of human and animal behavior could be reduced to the level of formal logic and the functional relationship between behavior and it’s causes could be developed, or as Chomsky put it “the ‘dynamic laws’ relating them show smooth and reproducible curves.” (Chomsky 1959: 31).

Skinner’s assumption is that the behavior of humans is sufficiently similar to that of animals that a direct comparison can be made. One of Chomsky’s main attacks is that the behavior of humans in real life and animals in laboratory conditions is in fact fundamentally different and that no such direct comparison can be made. The essence of Skinner’s belief that human behavior and animal behavior can be treated in similar ways is the assumption that external factors, as opposed to internal structure, are of overwhelming importance in determining behavior. He believed that since the external factors of both human beings and animals could be studied using the concepts of stimulus, reinforcement, and deprivation etc. mentioned above, and that external factors are of overwhelming importance, the behavior of both human beings and animals was essentially the same and could be studied as such. (Chomsky 1959: 27). Chomsky states that “One would naturally expect that prediction of the behavior of a complex organism would require, in addition to information about external stimulation, knowledge of the internal structure of the organism, ways in which it processes input information.” (Chomsky 1959: 27). For example, how would we induce accurately the purpose of cows’ routine destruction of grass through mastication without first having knowledge of the internal structure, and existence of, a cow’s digestive system? Chomsky’s point is that it is as ridiculous to assume that the inner workings of the mind are irrelevant, as it would be to assume that the inner workings of a cow are irrelevant.

Skinner’s assumptions are not so ridiculous when viewed within the specific bounds of his laboratory experiments with animals. He found that through careful administration of reinforcement and deprivation animals would develop specific reflex responses that Skinner termed operants. Using concepts such as association, routines could be developed that would shape the animals behavior in complex ways (Chomsky 1959: 29). So it is perhaps not unreasonable that Skinner would believe that such mechanisms are the basic ways that our, and all other organisms, behavior develops throughout our lives.

However, Chomsky’s point is that the laboratory conditions that these experiments were performed under have at best only a tenuous connection to the real life situations that behavior develops in. He contends “whether any physical event to which the organism is capable of reacting is to be called a stimulus on a given occasion…” (Chomsky 1959: 30) is not something that can be determined realistically outside the laboratory. That is, at any given time there is no way to determine which particular behavior is in response to which particular stimulus. The problem is further compounded when you consider that a stimulus for a current “response” can exist either in the present or the past. Chomsky goes on to question the validity of all Skinner’s most basic constructs in the context of human verbal behavior.

Newmeyer states, “Chomsky’s review represents, even after the passage of twenty years, the basic refutation of behaviorist psychology.” and that “behaviorist psychology has been on the retreat since it’s publication.” (Newmeyer 1980: 42). Chomsky finishes up the review with a general case for his model of a generative grammar, tying together this attack on empiricist behaviorism, his attack on empiricist structuralism, and on empiricist scientific philosophy in general (Chomsky 1959: 54-58). As complete a rejection of the dominant school in psychology at the time as Chomsky’s review was it was not completely rejected by the community of psychologists. At the time there had been a growing voice of dissent among psychologists, with many rejecting Skinner’s approach as extreme. And though Chomsky has not convinced the majority of working psychologists that his nativist explanation of human language is accurate he has convinced a growing number of the validity of such explanations in general. This has created the opportunity for a far more complete union of psychology and linguistics than had been previously possible.

Not only did Chomsky open the door to new interdisciplinary research in linguistics and psychology, as a part of his general philosophy he opened the door to interdisciplinary research among all the different fields devoted to the study of human cognition. This is because Chomsky defined a field of study not by its particular methodologies, but by its goal or subject of study. As Chomsky puts it, “…one should not define a discipline by its procedures. It should be defined, in the first place, by the object of its investigation.” (Chomsky 1979: 46). Therefore, by giving linguistics the goal of explanation Chomsky defined it as being a part of a much larger field devoted to the understanding of human cognition. All of the various disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, etc. are thus simply various parts of the same field, each using different techniques in studying different parts of their subject. Each discipline is therefore fundamentally linked to all the others and cannot work in isolation or ignorance of them.

Thus, the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics was a critique of, and a victory over, academic over-specialization. It is this over-specialization that caused Hockett to define, and thus restrict, linguistics as “classificatory.” Specialization is the often-restrictive delineation of various scientific disciplines into self-contained units, with interconnections of varying importance. This prevents academics, working within their rigidly defined disciplines, from “seeing the larger picture,” and thus gaining vital insight.

The practical result of this is that something that has long been known to be true in one discipline could be only now being discovered in another, with the proverbial left hand not knowing what the right is doing. To say that one particular discipline is relevant and another is not is to presuppose that one already knows the answers sought and is thus incompatible with the concept of keeping an open mind that has been the base for all science since Galileo. The term “discipline” itself implies that each field is defined by the training and methodology of its participants and not what they are actually studying.

Chomsky’s effect on linguistics has been not only fundamental it has been immense. According to Frederick Newmeyer “In the mid and late 1960s… New linguistics departments sprung up in a dozen locations and some existing ones literally quadrupled in size. In fact, linguistics grew at a much greater rate than almost any other field – a testament to the intellectual appeal of the (Chomsky’s) theory.” (Newmeyer 1980: 20). In America in the period between 1956 and 1973 the number of doctorates awarded in linguistics relative to other disciplines increased threefold from .18% in 1956-57 to .51% in 1972-73. In the period between 1963 and 1972 the number of linguistics departments increased from 13 to 42. In the period between 1957, the year Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures was published, and 1978 the membership of the Linguistic Society of America increased from 1354 to 4258 (Newmeyer 1980: 21).

As can be seen from the huge growth of the field since Syntactic Structures, Chomsky did not simply change the course of linguistics; he injected it with new life. By giving linguistics the goal of explanation, and not simply description, Chomsky has attracted far more aspiring academics to the field than the taxonomy of the structuralists. It is perhaps purely attributable to Chomsky that the number of academics working in the field of linguistics today is several times the number when he entered the field. The power of his ideas to inspire the minds of his colleagues and to attract new minds to the field has been almost solely responsible for it’s huge growth over the past decades. This power originates in the fundamental shift in goals and methodology that Chomsky set for the field. Where before linguistics was restricted to simple taxonomy, because of Chomsky linguistics has become a science with potential explanatory power on par with chemistry or physics. It is this potential for explanation that has inspired so many. An empiricist’s criticism of Chomsky’s revolution could be that it represents little more than a descent into vague mysticism about “the mind” and it’s supposed inherent qualities. The empiricist would say that such qualities are inherently unverifiable and therefore hold little scientific validity. The limitation of the empirical philosophy that makes this incorrect lies in their criteria for determining what is and what is not verifiable. The empiricist relies purely on observation of actual phenomena to verify the truth of a particular statement. As important a step this is in determining the truth to restrict science to it ignores a vast range of deductive techniques in determining truth. A model for this deductive technique is the field of mathematics. Mathematics relies on a set of axioms and then uses deductive logic to determine the abstract hidden principles behind the numbers that it deals with. In the physical sciences these axioms could be compared to the empirical evidence that must be at the base of any theory. However, to restrict science to those observations would be analogous to restricting mathematics to its axioms, and equally ridiculous. The rationalist tradition founded by Descartes stood firmly in the tradition of the scientific method. By developing techniques of deduction it did not refute the necessity for empirical evidence, it expanded on it and amplified it’s ability to reveal causes immensely. Therefore a more accurate view of Chomsky’s revolution is that it represented an addition and a complement to the empiricist position rather than an opposition. By emphasizing the creation of theories Chomsky does not deny the usefulness of concrete empirical evidence, he simply focuses that evidence in more useful ways. Chomsky’s contribution was an advance over the structuralist empiricist position because it serves to expand the range of human knowledge rather than restrict it.

Chomsky’s work has been defined by rigorous intellectual honesty, questioning all assumed precepts in the pursuit of a better understanding of the truth. By ignoring dogmatic assumptions about the “appropriate” realm of study for each field Chomsky has helped to unify the disciplines devoted to the study of human cognition. It is this ability to cut through dogma, which can be seen in both his work in linguistics and politics, which has been the source of the revolutionary nature of everything that Chomsky has done. We might wonder if the Chomskyan paradigm’s current domination of the field could be attributed at least as much to it’s power to attract new minds as to its power to convert the mind of established linguistics, though he has certainly done both. This power to attract the minds of the young is also a danger, in that it runs the risk of creating a new dogma. With this in mind we must be careful not to lionize him too much, lest we forget his reminder of the basic principles of scientific skepticism that are necessary for any real inquiry to be possible.

In conclusion, Chomsky’s linguistic theories, and the basic philosophical principles that underlie them, have had a great effect on the field of linguistics as well as its related disciplines, particularly psychology. Though it may not yet clear whether his specific contributions will be validated as time goes on, it is clear that he has helped to set linguistics, and cognitive studies in general, on a course where truth might eventually be discovered.