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"The Father of Modern Linguistics"
Noam Chomsky is one of the most notable linguists in history. His belief is that all humans have one commonality within language and he suggests that language is "an innate faculty". He calls this faculty "Universal Grammar". YouTube -
Language and the Philosophy of Science
During Chomsky’s time at Harvard as a graduate student, he wrote his master’s thesis The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT). He adopted his “novel” viewpoint on language, formal systems and the philosophy of science from the many mentors he had as a junior fellow (McGilvray). His concepts of language and philosophy were met with great disdain amongst the rest of the philosophical and psychological community. -
Plato's Problem
While Noam Chomsky was diving into his work regarding linguistics, he formulated what he would call “Plato’s Problem”. This terminology is “applied to questions regarding how humans know what they know, and how our knowledge relates to our experience” (Goettel). Studying the “how” and “from where” parts of language development in children led Chomsky to question many of the widely accepted beliefs in the linguistic field. -
Solutions to Plato's Problem
During the early years of working to solve this conundrum, Chomsky wrote in “the ‘standard theory’ of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and the subsequent ‘extended standard theory’” (McGilvray). He posed that “the mind of the human infant is endowed with a ‘format’ of a possible grammar (a theory of linguistic data), a method of constructing grammars based on the linguistic data to which the child is exposed, and a device that evaluates the relative simplicity of constructed grammars” (McGilvray) -
Solutions to Plato's Problem (cont.)
The initial theory was deemed too difficult to prove and was improved upon through a better solution known as “’principles and parameters’, which Chomsky introduced in Lectures on Governments and Binding (1981) and elaborated in Knowledge of Language (1986)” (McGilvray). These hypotheses have now been supported by empirical evidence.
