Wittgenstein and Chomsky's Different Subject Matters: Some lessons from Descriptive Psychology

In 1973 in early meetings with Peter Ossorio, I asked what might assist my understanding Descriptive Psychology’s Person Concept. He suggested Wittgenstein. During Wittgenstein’s life, he published one book, the 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, dying before the 1953 publication of his second, the Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus starts with “The world is all that is the case” and asserts “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” A prime mission of the Investigations was amending and expanding this concept of World to include the themes that Wittgenstein previously thought required philosophical silence. I read, and Pete and I discussed what we thought was at stake for Wittgenstein as he assembled a methodology of reminders and maxims in the service of describing the fully connected but irregular terrain of language and world; that “there is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were.” 

 

The year before I met Ossorio, I struggled with Noam Chomsky’s 1966 Cartesian Linguistics. I had difficulty with the implications of his “universal transformational grammar”.  That was some time ago. A few weeks back, strolling through the wonderful Stand Bookstore in NYC, I picked up Chomsky’s 2015, What Kind of Creatures Are We? Starting with the first chapter “What is Language” I experienced clarity I didn’t possess before my immersion in the lessons Ossorio taught.

 

A foundational lesson of the pre-empirical Person Concept is that it is not an empirically vindicated theory: it is not a theory at all.  Instead, The Person Concept identifies the interdependent concepts of an Individual who can engage in Deliberate Action in a Dramaturgical fashion that is fully expressible in Verbal Behavior that reflects the Social Practices of the Individual's Culture and Communities as the Person goes about their life in a World of worlds. That’s not a theory, it’s a conceptualization that we have the option to agree to use or not. Arguably, the interdependence of person, action, language, community, culture, and world reflects the state of affairs of a Paradigmatic Person.

 

On the other hand, Chomsky’s “biolinguistics framework” is both a pre-empirical formulation of language and an embodiment theory regarding the potential for linguistic competence. As theory it is subject to empirical challenge and vindication.  

 

Here a key technical distinction is the idea that 1) conceptualizations identify and formulate a subject matter; 2) the empirical identifies instances/instantiations of the subject matter in a real historical world, and 3) the job of theory is to sort out why, given the full range of a subject matter’s possibilities, only particular patterns of instances are found.

Below is an abstract of the three subject matters: 1) Ossorio's pre-empirical conceptualization of Verbal Behavior: 2) Wittgenstein's Language Games as Forms of Life; and 3) Chomsky's theory of a universal substrate that provides grammar.

1)  Ossorio’s subject matter is the Concept of Verbal Behavior.

He identifies the parameters of Verbal Behavior in his pre-empirical Formula as a set of grammar linked Concepts, expressed in symbolic Locutions; that signify specific Behaviors and Social Practices. 

2)  Wittgenstein’s Equivalences and Interconnections 

96. Other illusions come from various quarters…Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts:  proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each. (But what are these words to be used for now? The language-game in which they are to be applied is missing).

Wittgenstein’s Language Games are family resemblance groups akin to his ‘Forms of Life’:  anthropological, social, intellectual, and aesthetic social practices. Forms of Life are akin to Ossorio's Behavior as Social Practices.

3)  Chomsky’s Theory concerns 'I'(nternal) and 'E'(piphenomenal) Language. 'I' Language is the specific, universal bio-linguistic substrate, mostly provided by the human brain; a basic property of thought, a “deep structure” universal within humans that provides a generative transformational potential for the full range of grammar necessary for linguistic competence. 'E' language is external communication. Chomsky appears less interested in communication and social practice.

Wittgenstein's focus is on the grammar that links concepts that correspond to utterances that reflect the range of distinctions that inform action. Chomsky has an embodiment theory, a theory of a brain's provision for grammar that allows an infinite array of possible expressions.  

Ossorio's Verbal Behavior Formula presents these differences as involving different parameters. 

If you’re interested, here’s the presentation at the 45^th Annual Conference of the Society for Descriptive Psychology:

Wittgenstein and Chomsky's Different Subject Matters: Some lessons from Descriptive Psychology.