37.1565, Reviews: Generative Grammar's Grave Foundational Errors: Paul M. Postal (2025)

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Subject: 37.1565, Reviews: Generative Grammar's Grave Foundational Errors: Paul M. Postal (2025)

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Date: 26-Apr-2026
From: Keith Begley [kthbgly at gmail.com]
Subject: General Linguistics, Philosophy of Language: Paul M. Postal (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-2645

Title: Generative Grammar's Grave Foundational Errors
Series Title: Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: De Gruyter Brill
           https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en
Book URL: https://brill.com/display/title/72288

Author(s): Paul M. Postal

Reviewer: Keith Begley

SUMMARY
The book has xi + 191 pages, beginning with an editorial forward by
Brian D. Joseph, the managing editor for the series, Empirical
Approaches to Linguistic Theory, in which he outlines his prior
acquaintance and collaboration with the author, Paul M. Postal (PMP).
The book has five chapters comprising an introduction, three
substantive chapters, and a concluding chapter. The three substantive
chapters, Chapters 2–4, are revised versions of papers published on
LingBuzz by PMP in 2012, 2023, and 2019 respectively. The book takes
its place among many other related critical papers and books published
by him over a number of decades, some of which I shall mention in
passing. The book has an index of personal names and a general index.
One personal name, that of Gottlob Frege, escaped and is hiding in the
general index between ‘free expression’ and ‘French’. The book
contains some coloured images and text. A line of blurb on the back
cover of the hardback has a short-line formatting error.
Chapter 1 is a six-page introduction, which begins with an apt
description of the work: “This book advances an extremely negative
view of the intellectual status of the so-called *generative grammar*
movement in linguistics initiated by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s” (p. 2;
here and after, I use * to indicate emphasis by PMP). Chomsky’s work
is dissected throughout the book, and is for various reasons called
hubristic (p. 1), incoherent (esp. Chapter 2), make believe or
self-serving make believe (pp. 3, 22, 41, 159, 161), groundless (pp.
129, 153, 157, 166), fakery (pp. 3, 42, 167), legerdemain (p. 3),
hypocritical (pp. 30, 42, 163), grotesque intellectual corruption (p.
43), irresponsible (pp. 2, 28, 162, 166), farcical (p. 162),
preposterous (p. 16), in bad faith (pp. 19, 44), play acting at
science (p. 153), intellectually toxic (p. 171), etc.
In addition to previewing the book, PMP briefly takes issue with
statements Chomsky and others have made regarding their “hope” for
falsification as defensive rhetoric (pp. 3–5), and with Chomsky’s
‘Galilean’ method, which includes discarding some recalcitrant
phenomena (p. 4). PMP juxtaposes these with Richard Feynman’s
oft-quoted statement of the (naïve Popperian) scientific method from
his 1964 lectures at Cornell (p. 5). PMP misdates it as 1974 and in
the concluding pages of the book he quotes from Feynman’s ‘Cargo Cult
Science’ (1974), mentioning erroneously that he also did so in this
chapter (p. 170). There are other errors including two footnotes 2 and
two footnotes 3 (the second is attached to the Feynman quote), the
second of each it appears is missing its content. The very first
linguistic example is incorrectly described as containing “ten true
lexical elements” and an alexical coloured blot (p. 2), as it contains
only nine lexical elements. I mention these only because the error
rate drops significantly after this chapter, and the text is mostly
clean. So, it is surprising that these infelicities were not spotted
by the author, the editor, or anyone before going to press.
Chapter 2 is entitled ‘The Foundational Admission’. It is a revised
version of a paper published on LingBuzz as ‘Chomsky’s Foundational
Admission’ in July 2012 (Postal 2012). It is 38 pages of sustained
forensic attack upon Chomsky’s work and character, supported by
liberal quotation of sources. PMP dedicates the chapter “to the memory
of Jerrold J. Katz, whose insights underlie every page” (p. 7: n. 1).
This refers to Katz’s realist or Platonist view of the metaphysics of
natural language (NL), which he developed in a number of works
beginning in 1977, including an article co-authored with PMP in 1991
that is mentioned and at times reprised during the chapter. Despite
PMP’s statement that Katz’s “insights underlie every page”, it appears
that his views diverge somewhat from Katz’s later views, but that this
always remains unaddressed. For example, in this chapter, PMP says
that “*tokens* of sentences or sentence parts are physical objects or
events” (p. 11), but in 1998 Katz took tokens to be members of a
category of heterogeneous objects that he called ‘composite objects’.
I will return to this issue again when we discuss Chapter 3.
PMP attacks Chomsky’s statement that “Since the language *has no
objective existence apart from its mental representation*, we need not
distinguish between ‘system of beliefs’ and ‘knowledge’ in this case”
(Chomsky 1972, 169, n. 3; quoted at p. 8), which he says underlies
Chomsky’s dismissal of the Platonist view. As PMP rightly points out,
assuming the antecedent without argument clearly begs the question
against anyone who holds that language is mind-independent. He also
thinks that it offends against the definition of the English words
‘know’ and ‘represent’, which he says denote binary relations “between
a knower and something known” and “between thing and thing
represented” (p. 8). I find this direction of attack a little weak.
What would be required is rather that the relations be necessarily
irreflexive, that is, inapplicable between a relatum and itself.
However, it is not unheard of in the history of philosophy that the
knowledge relation can be reflexive, for example, in certain idealisms
in which objects have been taken to be identical with our ideas of
them. That is, the matter effectively coincides with the philosophical
question at issue, because it asks whether language is objective
beyond our ideas of language. So, one would need stronger grounds than
the definition of a word. It might have been better merely to note a
diplomatic and lexically acceptable reading of the contrapositive of
Chomsky’s principle: if we do need to make a distinction between
language and knowledge of language, then language has objective
existence apart from its mental representation. I say 'diplomatic'
because both sides of the debate should be able to agree to it,
without conceding anything or begging the question. Not that this
greatly assists either side, but this is no surprise.

PMP argues that
Chomsky’s biolinguistics is incoherent because it posits that language
is a biological phenomenon while also employing talk of
set-theoretical objects, which are non-spatiotemporal abstracta (p. 10
ff.). Further, PMP argues that the view is incoherent because it
posits that NLs are discretely infinite, but no biological or physical
entity is infinite (p. 18 ff.). PMP also observes of Chomsky that “Put
bluntly […] he seems never to have grasped what an abstract object is
(or is not)” (p. 24). This is because Chomsky says both that “one can
construct abstract entities at will” and that the matter has “no
relevance to the real world” (Chomsky 1986; 1987; quoted at p. 16).
PMP insists on reading ‘abstract’ in the strong realist sense, and on
taking ‘real world’ to include all aspects of reality, where other
readers may not. 

I am largely on board with PMP’s incoherency
claims, if it is granted that abstract objects are more or less how he
grasps them. PMP’s argumentation is at its best when he shows that
Chomsky is inconsistent in his views. However, a more charitable
approach to Chomsky might point out that philosophers have proposed
various notions of ‘abstract’, some of which are deflationary, others
permissive of temporality, etc., and ‘abstract’ for Chomsky appears in
many cases to mean something mental at some level of description.

The
crux of PMP’s argument comes when he quotes Chomsky’s 2012 admission
that “We don’t have sets in our heads” so the internal processing
explained set-theoretically must be “something metaphorical” and so
merely a promissory note. Chomsky says that in order to be productive
it is necessary to “accept things that we know don’t make any sense”
at the moment, such as the neuronal realisation of those
set-theoretical operations (Chomsky 2012, 91; quoted at pp. 24–25). In
contrast to this instrumentalist stance, PMP is not happy to accept
such an incoherent note especially one that is “unavoidably *central*
to his [Chomsky’s] biolinguistic view” (p. 25). PMP suggests a
convincing analogy between computer hardware and biology. While there
can be an “elementary correspondence to some abstract structures coded
in that system” those abstract structures are realisable in multiple
ways in that system. So, “one can infer very little directly about
physical systems which code them or conversely” (p. 27). This shows
the inherent difficulty of the biolinguistic project to fulfil the
promissory note.
By the end of the chapter PMP turns Chomsky’s attitude to this
situation into an ethical concern (pp. 40 ff.). PMP concludes that:
“for decades Chomsky has successfully been knowingly *scamming* the
linguistics profession as well as many interested in NL outside of it,
exploiting his extraordinary influence and notoriety to spread a
foundational doctrine which was known to him to be false. This is
simply grotesque intellectual corruption” (p. 43).
To rub it in, PMP compares Chomsky’s conduct to a “Kinsley Gaffe” and
to “manufacturing consent”, a concept from Chomsky’s own
socio-political philosophy (p. 45). This latter charge is repeated in
Chapter 3 (p. 148). I am hesitant to follow PMP this far, as indeed I
am to report on people’s intentions generally. What Chomsky said in
2012 may well just be the way that he viewed his project. It is a
matter for philosophy of linguistics to work out whether what I am
calling his instrumentalist view is a tenable one. It might be part of
a degenerating research programme due to the centrality of the
incoherence, but a research programme nonetheless. Bizarrely, the only
other option offered by PMP is Graham Priest’s dialetheism, the
admittance of some true contradictions, but this is quickly discarded
(p. 44), and rightly so.
Chapter 3 is entitled ‘Natural Languages Are Not Generative Systems’.
It is a revised version of a paper published on LingBuzz in April 2023
(Postal 2023). It is 105 pages, comprising 19 sections arranged in
three parts. I believe that there are in-text cross-referencing
errors: “note 11” should refer to note 16 (p. 77), and “footnote 40”
should refer to footnote 44 (pp. 134 & 138). There is an indentation
error, which conflates PMP’s text with a Chomsky quote (p. 87).
The topic of the chapter will be familiar to readers of Chapter 6 of
PMP’s Skeptical Linguistic Essays (SLE, 2004), on ‘The Openness of
Natural Languages’ (which was dedicated to Katz), but takes a new and
more detailed form. PMP argues against the claim that NLs are
Z-languages, sets of finite sentences constructed from a finite set of
symbols, which is a necessary condition of an NL having a generative
grammar. He also argues against the Finite Lexicon Hypothesis (FLH),
which requires that both the set of alphabetic elements (phonological,
gestural, or graphic) and the set of morphemes and more complex
lexical items be finite (p. 71). PMP unleashes a horde of examples of
alexical constituents including untypeable constituents (constituents
that cannot be characterised using the finite set of symbols of the
language as if on a typewriter), which are intended to show that the
FLH is false for NLs, and show that NLs could not be Z-languages and
so cannot have generative grammars. Kinds of examples treated include:
names; descriptions of foreign NLs (which include foreign words);
gestural and iconic constituents; untypeable constituents;
constituents with acoustic tokens; samples of colours; examples from
the philosophy of language literature; etc. To take one example,
consider descriptions of foreign NLs, which are sentences that often
contain elements derived from those languages and not from English (or
the metalanguage in question). So, there are English sentences that
are not derived entirely from the finite lexicon of English.
Therefore, the FLH is false. I refer the reader to the chapter for
counterarguments to rebuttals. Not everything said about some of these
examples is fully informed. For instance, there is more to colour than
simply wavelengths of light, so it is questionable that the formal
denumerability of wavelengths (according to a Stack Exchange post)
entails the denumerability of colours (p. 116 ff.). In any event, the
argument generally is thorough, and PMP does a good job of attending
to various potential objections as they arise.
Section 4 is a discussion of the type-token distinction that is
further employed in later sections, such as Section 9 on alexical
constituents with acoustic tokens. I am continually bemused by the
fact that, despite his strong recommendations of Katz’s realism and
his collaboration with him, PMP appears not to take much account of
the later development his type-token ontology put forward in Chapter 5
of Realistic Rationalism (1998), beyond providing mere reference to
the book (cf. p. 57: n. 6). (Strangely, PMP has consistently mistitled
the work ‘Realistic Realism’ in bibliographies for over 20 years). So,
I am disappointed by the continuing trend in the current book, and
remain unsure whether PMP thinks this prior work irrelevant for some
reason.
The only pertinent discussion I have found is from 2003 and is brief.
It refers to how, in the aforementioned Chapter 6 of SLE, PMP
presented a precursor to his current view, which handled direct
discourse/speech phenomena by including some physical tokens as
members of some sentences, thereby impure sets. In effect, PMP denied
that languages are abstract objects, and cited Chapter 5 of Katz 1998,
on the principle of the necessary existence of abstracta, as partial
support (Postal 2003, 237: n. 7). PMP now deprecates his former view
as being “entirely confused” (p. 111), as indeed it was, and employs
“sound types” and their sequences instead of physical sounds. He
attributes the origin of this new view to correspondence with David E.
Johnson in 2011 (pp. 112 & 118). However, the same notion and a
similar view is available in Katz’s 1998 work along with other
physical types like shapes, and their sequences or “progressions” (cf.
e.g. 1998, xxvi, 126, 152, 163, 167, etc.), but tokens are handled
very differently by Katz. So, it is not clear why PMP did not engage
with this work in 2004, in Chapter 2 of the present work, or again in
the present Chapter 3, despite being aware of it. Consider the
following further points of comparison between Katz’s work and what
PMP says in Chapter 3, especially in Section 4, and in other recent
work, but which is not discussed there (for further discussion of Katz
1998, see Begley 2023):
—PMP takes tokens to be (concrete) physical objects (pp. 11, 62). Katz
instead argued that tokens should be taken to be ‘composite objects’,
which are heterogeneous objects having both abstract and concrete
constituents.
—PMP points out that the relation between linguistic tokens and types
is often not based on an intrinsic property of physical tokens, as
noticed by Wetzel (2006) (p. 64). The point was made earlier in a
different way by Katz, who gives the intention of the speaker or
hearer a role in the creative tokening relation.
—PMP is led to the conclusion that the relation between milk samples
and the type [MILK] is not the same as that between tokens and types
in language (p. 65). Katz came to a similar conclusion and
distinguished between instantiation and tokening.
—PMP advocates for a more deep segmental analysis of NL using the
type-token distinction (p. 65). Katz also envisaged this depth and saw
his composite object ontology as encompassing “the stratification of
linguistic types” (1998, 153: n. 16).
—Later, PMP also provides a realist conception of language change in
terms of change of knowledge systems regarding sets of languages (pp.
72–73), which is in tune with what Katz said in 1998 (cf. Begley 2023,
Section 4).
—By the way, in PMP’s related LingBuzz paper ‘Books’ (2019a), he
focused on a topic that was dealt with similarly by Katz using the
same ‘progressions’ of types as above for books and other such
linguistic compounds—absent Katz’s composite object ontology.
In Section 15, PMP advocates for a model-theoretic foundation for
grammars as opposed to the proof-theoretic one at the heart of
generative grammar. Crucially, he argues that model-theoretic grammars
can handle the examples of alexical constituents that confound
generative grammars.
In Section 17, entitled ‘Salvage’, a positive aspect emerges:
“Certainly, one must avoid the facile conclusion that the
impossibility of generative grammars of NLs like English shows that
the body of descriptive and theoretical work done within the
generative grammar framework is thereby uniformly mistaken and subject
to dismissal. *Nothing like such a conclusion could be justified*.
[….] The valid conclusion, I believe, is that a great deal (but
certainly not all) of the conclusions of the work which has been done
can be salvaged. The criterion for a tenable salvage will be the
possibility of successfully *translating* claimed results into a
nongenerative framework, one capable of accounting for (untypeable)
alexical sentences.” (p. 145)
PMP has in mind here translation into a framework employing the
model-theoretic conception of grammars. The statement comes very late,
almost as a surprise at the end of a chapter, three quarters of the
way through the book. This is clearly a part of the frame of the work,
which was not hung together with the “extremely negative” picture
painted in the introduction.
The chapter ends with an addendum to cover recent work by Chomsky and
various collaborators on the mathematics of the Merge operation (cf.
Marcolli, Chomsky, and Berwick 2024; Chomsky et al. 2024). PMP argues
that since this work maintains the same foundational assumptions, such
as the FLH, it does not escape the arguments put forward in the
chapter.
Chapter 4 is entitled ‘The One Language Claim’ and is 19 pages. It is
a revised version of a paper published on LingBuzz as ‘Chomsky's One
Language/Extraterrestrial Scientist Claims’ in August 2019 (Postal
2019b). PMP quotes seven versions of the claim from 1984–2001, that an
extraterrestrial scientist would conclude that in a sense there is
only one language, the many NLs being but variations of it. PMP argues
that the statements of the One Language Claim (1L) all employ various
hedges so “no version of 1L is precise enough to be assigned a truth
value” (p. 154). PMP also provides sources showing that there are
considered to be many thousands of NLs and that many of them have
differing properties that cannot be considered “peripheral” or
“marginal”, especially if 1L is to be a testable claim at all (p.
156). As he points out, it is not surprising then that no statement of
1L is published in a refereed linguistics journal (p. 159). Rather, he
thinks this is mere “play acting at science” for general audiences (p.
160). He shows this in part by citing publications and interviews in
which Chomsky himself refers to there being many types of languages,
and does not list 1L among his scientific achievements when asked. PMP
says that “in Chomsky’s mind, 1L follows from the assumed existence of
an innate faculty of NL permitting normal child NL learning. But the
two are independent”. This is due to there being no a priori reason
why such a faculty should define one rather than many types of NL (p.
163).
The chapter ends with a somersault. PMP shows that 1L is sometimes
parroted by other authors, but it is not in fact very influential
among linguists. So, I imagine that many who read the chapter will be
left wondering what all the fuss was about and pondering a question:
could it be simply that 1L is just a way, admittedly an inadequate
one, of broaching the notion of an innate language faculty for general
audiences who have no familiarity with the technical concepts
involved? That is certainly when it tends to come up.  

Chapter 5 is
a two-page concluding chapter that summarises the main points of the
three substantive chapters, and finishes with a quote from Feynman’s
‘Cargo Cult Science’ (1974).
EVALUATION
The book will be of most interest to linguists and philosophers
working on the foundations of linguistics and to historians of
linguistics. PMP’s intimate knowledge of the topic and his notably
impassioned and provocative style makes it an entertaining read from
start to finish. As may already be apparent to the reader, I am
sympathetic to many things that PMP says in the book, as I am to
Katz’s realist views. So, where I have offered some criticism in that
regard it has mostly been of a kind internal to the realist camp.
The level of invective directed at Chomsky at times will, no doubt,
not be to everyone’s taste. Indeed, while reading Chapter 2 one
wonders whether the whole book will go on in the same vein. PMP moves
on to arguments driven more by empirical linguistics in Chapter 3, as
is fitting for the book series. This constitutes the bulk of the book
and is a well-executed critique by counterexamples. The benefit of
PMP’s style is that his argument is unambiguous and its sources are
transparent, as they are largely verbatim or emphasised quotations. It
is somewhat disappointing that, in his revisions to Chapter 2, PMP did
not take the opportunity to address directly some of the responses
that his 2012 piece garnered on LingBuzz, be they easily addressed or
not.
The discussion of some issues in philosophy of science, e.g., in
Chapter 1, is rather thin and leaves one wanting more. Chomsky appears
to have espoused some kind of instrumentalism in 2012, coupled with
the ‘Galilean’ rationalist approach. PMP provides references to other
treatments, but deeper discussion of this combination including its
limits, could have been illuminating.
The nuanced aim of proposing a way to salvage the results of
generative grammar could also have been brought more to the fore,
highlighted earlier, and perhaps even developed further, tempering
what is avowedly a very negative book. As it is, PMP does not develop
the model-theoretic alternative for all cases, he merely suggests that
it has the features that would allow it to succeed.
PMP could fruitfully have picked another fish to fry in Chapter 4. 1L
might well be popular poppycock, but if a dispassionate (or Martian)
scientist were to read the chapter they would probably conclude, as I
did, that it is neither a foundational error nor very grave, and
certainly not as foundational or grave as those discussed in the first
two substantive chapters. 1L is perhaps still an example of bad public
science communication practice, but this commentary on it might have
been best left as a musing on LingBuzz.
The book was published only a few months before the revelations
regarding Chomsky’s interactions with the paedophile and sex
trafficker Jeffery Epstein, and will no doubt serve as grist to the
mill as Chomsky’s star wanes. Unfortunately, it is unlikely ever to
receive a response from Chomsky, both because of his state of ill
health and because he was not in the habit of responding to PMP at the
best of times.
REFERENCES

Begley, Keith. 2023. Katz got your tongue? The metaphysics
of words. Synthese 202, 107.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04324-x
Chomsky, Noam. 1972. Language and mind. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanavich
Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of language, New York: Praeger
Scientific.
Chomsky, Noam. 1987. Language in a psychological setting. Tokyo:
Sophia Linguistica,
Working papers in linguistics 22, Sophia University.
Chomsky, Noam. 2012. The science of language: interviews with James
McGilvray. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, Noam, T. Daniel Seely, Robert C. Berwick, Sandiway Fong,
M.A.C. Huybregts,
Hisatsugo Kitahara, Andrew McInnerney and Yushi Sugimato. 2024. Merge
and the
strong minimal thesis. In Robert Freidin (ed.) Elements in generative
syntax. Cambridge,
United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Feynman, Richard P. 1964. Richard Feynman on Scientific Method (1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KmimDq4cSU
Feynman, Richard P. 1974. Cargo cult science.
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
Katz, Jerrold J. 1998. Realistic Rationalism. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Katz, Jerrold J. and Paul M. Postal. 1991. Realism vs. Conceptualism
in Linguistics. Linguistics
and Philosophy 14, 515–554.
Marcolli, Mathilde, Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick. 2024.
Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press.
Postal, Paul M. 2003. Remarks on the Foundations of Linguistics. The
Philosophical Forum, 34: 233-252.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9191.00137
Postal, Paul M. 2004. Skeptical Linguistic Essays, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Postal, Paul M. 2012. Chomsky’s Foundational Admission. LingBuzz.
https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001569
Postal, Paul M. 2019a. Books. LingBuzz.
https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004733
Postal, Paul M. 2019b. Chomsky's One Language/Extraterrestrial
Scientist Claims. LingBuzz. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004735
Postal, Paul M. 2023. Natural Languages Are Not Generative Systems.
LingBuzz. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007222
Wetzel, Linda. 2006. Types and tokens. Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens/
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Keith Begley is an Honorary Associate of the Department of Philosophy
at Durham University, and a Doctoral Student in the School of Computer
Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin. He does research in
AI-assisted programming and education; philosophy of computer science
and artificial intelligence; philosophy of language and linguistics,
especially the work of Jerrold J. Katz; history of philosophy,
especially ancient (Heraclitus) and analytic philosophy
(Wittgenstein); and computational philology, applying computer
programs to parse ancient Greek texts. He holds an M.A. (Dubl.) and a
Ph.D. in philosophy from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), The University
of Dublin (2016), and a H.Dip. (2021) and an M.Sc. (2022) in computer
science from University College Dublin (UCD), The National University
of Ireland, Dublin. He has held positions including Teaching Assistant
in Computer Science at TCD (2025–Present); Senior Postdoctoral
Researcher in the School of Law and Criminology at Maynooth University
(MU) (2025); Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at Durham University
(2023/24); Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy at MU (2022/23);
Demonstrator in Computer Science at UCD (2021/22); and Adjunct
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at TCD (2017–2020).



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