N. CHOMSKY: New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Foreword by N. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xvii + 230 pp. ISBN 0 521 65147 6 hardback, 051 65822 5 paperback.

Reviewed by
M. J. FRÁPOLLI, Departamento de Filosofía, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, B. Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain.

This book is a collection of seven essays in which Noam Chomsky discusses his latest ideas about the relationships between language, mind and world. The essays are independent in the sense that they are self-contained although their contents overlap occasionally. The book also includes a foreword by Neil Smith in which the most salient features of Chomsky’s most recent view are explained and assessed and an index of names and subjects. The content of the seven essays is not completely new, some of them have been previously published as papers and the others delivered as lectures.
Three are the enemies against which Chomsky fights throughout the book: internalism, anti-individualism and methodological dualism. He defends that a language is a biological object and, as such, it is internal to the human mind, it is a part of our biological heritage and the responsibility of its study belongs to psychology, and so to biology, and cognitive sciences. Being, as Chomsky says, “a species property” (p.3), language is common to all humans with small variations. Humans are born with a “language acquisition device” and the task of linguistics is determining its initial state and the states this device will subsequently assume . If we want to analyse the language of a particular person at a particular time, what we have to study is the state at that time of her language organ. And a grammar of a natural language will be the initial state of this device. Thus the study of a grammar is a part of the study of the brain of human beings. In this sense, Chomsky argues against Putnam’s and Burge’s externalism, i.e., against the thesis that meanings and contents of our mental states are only understandable taking into account our natural and social surroundings.
His fight against methodological dualism focuses on the theses put forward by Quine. Chomsky defines himself as a naturalist and considers his enquiry about language as a scientific discipline. For this reason, he claims that the study of the faculty of language should not be subject to special constraints different from that usual in other scientific disciplines, such as physics. Therefore Chomsky advocates for a methodological monism: all scientific enquiries must be pursued using similar methodologies and aims.
In New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind the author insists in his rejection of part of the theses that made of him one of the most recognized and most widely commented scientists in the XXth Century, i. e., the idea that language is a complex system of rules, including generative rules, and the distinction between deep and surface structure. His new proposal is what he calls “Principles and Parameters”, and the leading idea behind it is that there must be some general rules or principles, common to the species which determine the faculty of language, and some parameters, settled by the speaker’s experience and which are responsible for the differences observable among the particular human languages. This proposal, Principles and Parameters, is inserted in a general research program, which Chomsky calls “The Minimalist Program”, not yet fully developed. The Minimalist program is considered by Chomsky as the first really new approach into language in the last two thousand years and the first outline of a genuine theory of language.
The scientific personality of Chomsky and the evolution of his proposals in the last decades, make of New Horizons a highly commendable research work, and an invaluable tool for historians, philosophers and scientists of language and mind.