Perhaps my note here touches on too many nerves of friendship and admiration.
But it seems to me, there has not been a fully open discussion to date. If we are to evaluate Chomsky fully, we must go beyond his willingness to answer emails. FWIW I also had correspondence with him (about 1986-88), and yes he was indeed punctilious to reply - even to a Marxist-Leninist. But if it is true that “Noam's life work is in his writings and his willingness to speak publicly about touch issues” (Meeropol Feb 4 #40500 ), then his actual writing is surely relevant. If so, that presumably should include his linguistic writing as well as his political writing. I do not recall anyone here talking about throwing that political baby out with the bathwater of various more recent and publicised actions. Chaney ( William Chaney Feb 4 #40506 ) echoed by myself: “… He did as you say write and propagandise for us - & I am sure that helped many come over to us: "… writing those (very helpful) 100-page books that people can read”. ( hari kumar Feb 4 #40513 ) I think that Chomsky was not fully consistent in these political activities either as I read various accounts. His initial attempts to deny any military significance to MIT were quickly swept away by the student movement there. Maybe thereafter he was more consistently left wing. But what about his other persona? The complexities and many vintages of Chomsky’s linguistic theories (in the plural as he kept shifting ground as empirical errors of his reasoning were exposed) – often obscure his vision. What was the core concept he formulated? This was idealist and not materialist. So the body of his thinking was, says William Chaney as an “idealist philosopher”. I think this dimension is important in evaluating Chomsky as a whole. Chomsky confronted the difficulty of understanding the origins of language and plumps for a rejection of any manner of dialectics as it is a “kind of a ritual term”: “Chomsky rejects the ‘rather obscure’ Marxist notion of the dialectic, dismissing it as ‘a kind of ritual term which people use when they are talking about situations of conflict and so on’. Knight, Chris. Decoding Chomsky : Science and Revolutionary Politics, Yale University Press, 2016”; p.6 Given the bullshit that is often passed off as “dialectics’, this is semi-understandable. However, Chomsky instead heads off to Plato. As Chris Knight says: “He shows no appetite for dwelling on contradictions”. Knight, Chris. Decoding Chomsky, 2016; Ibid p. 6 What does this passage to Plato mean? Idealists propose that “a general development of the human mind” made the world. In doing this, idealists make the mind - or ‘thought’ – as the explanation of societal changes. Not the world itself, as materialists hold. Thus Plato (428-348 BC) in his work ‘The Sophist’: "Why this dispute about reality is a sort of Battle of Gods and Giants. One side drags everything down to earth, literally laying hands on rocks and trees, arguing that only what can be felt and touched is real, defining reality as body, and if anyone says that something without body is real they treat him with contempt and will not listen to another word... So their opponents in the heights of the unseen defend their position with great skill, maintaining forcibly that true existence consists in certain intelligible, incorporeal forms, describing the so-called truth of others as a mere flowing sort of becoming, not reality at all, and smashing their so called bodies to pieces. On this issue there is a terrific battle always going on.” Cited by George Thompson, ‘The First Philosophers. Studies in Ancient Greek Society London 1977;”; p,323. To return to Chomsky – how do Chomskyan linguistics fit into this attitude of Plato’s, of whichever of Chomsky’s various vintages? Chomsky: “‘Plato’s answer’, says Chomsky, was that the knowledge is ‘remembered ’ from an earlier existence. The answer calls for a mechanism ; perhaps the immortal soul . That may strike us as not very satisfactory, but it is worth bearing in mind that it is a more reasonable answer than those assumed as doctrine during the dark ages of Anglo-American empiricism and behavioral science – to put the matter tendentiously, but accurately.” Knight, Chris. Decoding Chomsky 2016 p.6; citing Chomsky ‘Linguistics and adjacent fields: a personal view”; in A.Kasher (ed) Oxford 1991. Chomsky makes this into modern speak - by discarding the dubious words like “ soul ”. Instead he substitutes words like “ Deep Structure ” and “ Universal Grammar ”. He subsumes all of that into a sort of biological determinism. That is to say that language is hard wired and the environment has little if anything to do with it. I would argue that if a Marxist hears the words “innate” about anything to do with human behaviour – they should hear at the same time a warning bell. How should we react to these following thoughts of Chomsky?: “ To summarize, we may think of a person’s knowledge of a particular language as a state of the mind, realized in some arrangement of physical mechanisms… generative grammar shifted the focus of attention… to the system of knowledge that under lies the use and understanding of language , and more deeply, to the innate endowment that makes it possible for humans to attain such knowledge… ‘It’s pretty clear that a child approaches the problem of language acquisition by having all possible languages in its head but doesn’t know which language it’s being exposed to. And, as data comes along, that class of possible languages reduces. So certain data comes along and the mind automatically says “OK, it ’ s not that language it’s some other language… nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts , and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities .’ cited by Knight, Chris. Decoding Chomsky : Science and Revolutionary Politics, Yale University Press, 2016; Ibid pp. 9-10. What this means ultimately for Chomsky, is that the child is hard wired with an innate understanding o compelx syntax, and words. Says Knight – even words that did not used to exist in Ancient times such as ‘carburettor’ – are somehow still hard-wired in. It thus of itself seems to suggest a ‘brain in itself’ untouched by external influences. And indeed Chomsky put this forward. Comments Knight: “Picturing himself as an observer from Mars, Chomsky sees people as ‘natural objects’, their language a ‘part of nature’. Linguistics as a discipline therefore falls naturally within the scope of ‘human biology’. This is not, however, biology as normally understood. Discussing the evolution of language, Chomsky denies that Darwinism is the relevant mechanism here. The properties characteristic of language, he suggests, may instead be ‘simply emergent physical properties of a brain that reaches a certain level of complexity under the specific conditions of human evolution’. Alternatively, it may be that ‘a mutation took place in the genetic instructions for the brain, which was then reorganized in accord with the laws of physics and chemistry to install a faculty of language’. Knight, Chris. Decoding Chomsky : Science and Revolutionary Politics, Yale University Press, 2016; p.21 I had earlier attached a review article form Sci American that argued that in practice - his theories are far from having helped child education. Ultimately I still agree with Stephen Robinson (Steven L. Robinson Feb 4 #40504 ), that: “Rather than glossing over Noam Chomsky's friendship with Epstein, I think it better to view that relationship in context with other behavior of Chomsky over the decades.” H -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40565): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40565 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117681931/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
