[This] set of beliefs corresponds very well to the demands of the technocratic intelligentsia: it offers them a very important social role. And in order to justify such practices, it is very useful to believe that human beings are empty organisms, malleable, controllable, easy to govern, and so on, with no essential need to struggle to find their own way and to determine their own fate… It is plausible that statist ideologies and administrations are attracted by this doctrine because it is so convenient for them, in eliminating any barrier to manipulation and control. (pp. 28-29, “Language and Politics”)
(This should be an apt description about any country's “technocratic intelligentsia.")
The input-output situation is this: a child who initially does not have knowledge of a language constructs for himself knowledge of a language on the basis of a certain amount of data: the input is the data, the output – which of course is internally represented – is the knowledge of a language. It’s this relationship between the data available, and the knowledge of the language which results from the child’s mental activities, which constitutes the data of the study of learning – of how the transition takes place from the input data to the resulting knowledge.
When we analyze carefully the nature of the knowledge of language that a person has, once he has mastered the language, we discover that it simply does not have the properties which are implied by the stimulus-response concept of how learning takes place. The stimulus-response theory can only lead to a system of habits – a network of associations, or some structure of that sort. And it is quite impossible to formulate as a system of habits or as a network of associations the process which will account for the sound-meaning relation that all of us know intuitively when we’ve mastered English. Take a sentence such as “John kept the car in the garage.” If one thinks for a minute, it becomes clear that the sentence is ambiguous: it can mean either that John kept the car that happened to be in the garage and sold the other one, or that the place where John kept the car was in the garage.
On the other hand, if I form a question from that sentence, if I say, “What garage did John keep the car in?” it’s unambiguous. It can’t be referring any more to the car that was in the garage, and in fact from the sentence “John kept the car that was in the garage,” I can’t form that sort of question at all. You can’t say in English: “What garage did John keep the car that was in?” This kind of evidence relates to well-formedness of sentences, to the association of sound and meaning. Some sentences are ambiguous, some are unambiguous…
[The] creative aspect of language is quite incompatible with the idea that language is a habit-structure. Whatever a habit-structure is, it’s clear that you can’t innovate by habit, and the characteristic use of language, both by a speaker and by a hearer, is innovation. You’re constantly producing new sentences in your lifetime – that’s the normal use of language. When you read the newspapers or walk down the street you are constantly coming across new linguistic structures which you immediately understand, which have no feeling of lack of familiarity, but which are nevertheless not in any definable way similar to others that you’ve experienced before. So much for the notion of habit-structure. Of course there are elements of skill involved. (pp. 75-76, “Language and Politics”)
*
“Today” did it again, in its edition of July 12-13. There is a photo of J.B. Jeyaretnam at the inauguration of his new Reform Party. Right above the photo, as if obscuring it, is an article, “MM Lee’s challenge to foreign critics.” Some kind of (lop-sided) journalistic balancing, indeed.*
12日付のＮＮＡには「野党ら19人告訴、値上げ反対運動で」とある。この国のことを多少でも知っていれば、「野党（メンバー）ら19人が告訴された」で「告訴した」ではないことを類推できるが、この見出しだけではそれは明らかでない。「動作・行動の主体者」ではなく、「動作・行動の受け手」を見出しの主にするとわかりにくい場合が多い。「告訴」なのか「検挙」なのかもちょっと怪しいと思う。「19人を検挙、値上げ抗議で」の方がよくない？10日の朝日（電子版）は、「お見せしたいのは五輪誘致 皇太子さま施設見学にのぼり」。皇太子が見学のために施設に登ったのかと思った。
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