Noam Chomsky, Essay Example

The article offers a synopsis of the basic relationship between language and psychology, with a particular emphasis on how the learning of language affects child psychology. With this approach, the article reveals a certain determinative cause and effect link between language and psychology. Namely, language in a certain sense becomes a framework or structure for, so to speak, what thought itself thinks, and, furthermore, how thought thinks. In other words, how we think to a certain extent determines what we think: this, in turn, is a function of how we use language. In so far as this thesis holds, valuable psychological insights, such as those related to pathologies or learning, can be developed by further understanding the link between language and thought. This article endeavors to elucidate contemporary research and theories on precisely this link.

As the article states, grammar is a decisive aspect of the language-psychology relationship. The article recounts the theories of, for example, Noam Chomsky which places an emphasis on the grammatical structures that give form to what we can think. The presence of grammatical structures as well as their significance is demonstrated in the fact that young children have already learned before they enter schooling proper grammatical structures of their language. This is crucial, in so far as grammar itself indicates how we form sentences and in a more general sense thoughts. There are indigenous to every language proper ways of formulating such sentences. These are the grammatical rules which structure a language. Accordingly, a language will have a specific way to express the relationship between a subject and an object. In English, for example, this syntax is most often presented in terms of word order. For example, “Jane goes to school.” The inverse, “school goes to Jane” would present an entirely different thought. This syntax, of course, is not present in every language, for example, Slavonic languages have declinations, whereby changing word endings means that the word order does not convey the meaning, but rather these endings do. This shows how language’s syntax can directly influence how we formulate our thoughts, providing something like the framework in which our thoughts are then played out.

Arguably, the most significant aspect of this account is that it seems to imply a certain determination between linguistic syntax and psychology. In other words, if we learn certain grammatical rules in our language, does this in a certain sense mean that we are programmed to view the world in a corresponding way? Imagine, for example, a syntax that did not contain straight imperative forms of structuring commands, such as “Eat!” or “March!” What if there was a language that always formulated the imperative by instead introducing a word such as “please”, before it – i.e., “please eat” or “please march” Would this in turn effect the social arrangements of the group, for example, producing a group psychology that is perhaps less inclined to violence?

The sense in which language structures our thoughts clearly bears an importance for psychology. For example, pathologies, such as paranoia, may be formulated in the subject’s mind in words. A possible treatment, therefore, would be to unlearn the syntax and the language that is providing these thoughts, showing them, perhaps to be entirely contingent upon how thought is formulated. Certainly, this is a form of linguistic determinism which perhaps places too much of an emphasis on how “how we think” affects “what we think.” On the other hand, if as Chomsky argues, these grammatical rules are learned at an early age, this importance of early life is also re-iterated in psychological theories, such as psychoanalysis and behaviorism. In other words, we should not take the linguistic paradigm as trivial, but rather as central to understanding as psychologists not only why individuals have certain thoughts, but how these thoughts themselves are structured.