The Case Against Noam Chomsky -
Mental Processing

This biological philosophy depicts a unified theory of natural and social sciences showing the continuity between the biological and social phenomena of life, the latter representing reflections of the biological expressions of life. I argue that most fundamentally all phenomena of life are functions of the organic activity of an organism relating itself to its environment, which means that an organism is constantly interpreting the stimuli that it has become genetically endowed to detect. The stimuli are interpreted in neural processes, which on a higher evolutionary scale may be called mental processes. This mental interpretation yields feelings which represent a mental, cognitive, dimension of the organic homeostatic system. In higher level mental processes feelings become conceptualized cognitive feelings which on the level of the human organism are expressed by a range of bodily expressions and ultimately by speech, which thus represents interpretation of feelings.

Both biological and social phenomena are reflections of expressions and interpretations. The continuous interactions between human cognitive expressions and interpretations amount to social practices, to all what we understand as human culture, and the material achievements of human culture. At the social level expressions stand for immaterial ideas which the human enacts by material bodily expressions, of which speech represents the most sophisticated means. The expressions themselves remain immaterial reflections of the mental processes. For a proper understanding of all social phenomena, we need to recognize that speech corresponds to a concrete biological activity whereas language represents the social practice of speaking. Language (words, their perceived parts and combinations) does not correspond to anything physical or biological, and merely represents perceptual abstractions we form based on our experience of verbal behavior. Language and words do not demonstrate mass and energy which would be a necessary precondition for the postulation that they are material, that they exist (that they are). From this also follows that (the non-existing) words cannot possibly mean anything and that instead people mean by the words they pronounce.

In present linguistic theory, the necessity to distinguish between speech (the ability to speak) and language (the social practices of speaking) has not been recognized with great detriment to the science. In the misconceived practices of contemporary linguistics scholars also treat language and words as if they would be some kind of existing entities, the material properties of which the linguist studies. As this fallacious approach to linguistics is most prominently propagated by Chomsky, I have chosen to illustrate my paradigm of expressions and interpretations in contrast to Chomsky's theories. In addition to the aforementioned thingly fallacy, Chomsky also labors under a series of gross misconceptions as to the biology of "language." He should understand that not language is biological but speech, and then he should not any more conceive of the social practices of language being innate features of the human body/brain. - The ability to speak has evolved, whereas language and all other social phenomena are not subject to evolution.

To properly grasp these ideas, we need to drop the present conceptual method of science, and the related misconceived "scientific method," in favor of a descriptive process theory, by which we strive to depict the processes and the phenomena they give rise to instead, as it is presently done, of trying to match the received academic concepts to the underlying processes. Through this insight we understand, e.g., that 'mind' should not be treated as an existing entity and rather be seen as a manifestation of the biological processes of a body interpreting environmental stimuli (most prominently the stimuli in form of verbal symbols). By clearing the science from the conceptual debris, I complete the materialist paradigm and propose to conceive of human cognition in terms of a new dualism, the dualism between the body and environmental stimuli. This, whereas earlier materialistic explanations have ignored the necessity to include in the paradigm the external stimuli being mentally processed. Instead of the 'soul' the external influence is represented by the environmental stimuli. These mental processes yield the perpetual interactions between the material body and the immaterial expressions and interpretations of which all human cognition and culture are manifestations.