> On Nov 20, 2015, at 12:50 PM, John Collier <colli...@ukzn.ac.za> wrote: > > I think it is questionable whether Chomsky was really a rationalist, since > he, like Pinker, often spoke of syntax as something that evolved, and > therefore contingent. Mark Bickhard has argued that given a rich enough form > of language we can derive Chomsky’s syntactic rules. The rules would still be > contingent, though. It gets a bit muddy from there, since there are various > views of law-like necessity available. >
I don’t claim to have read all of Chomsky (and a lot not since college) so I’m not at all qualified to say what his philosophy is. (I didn’t even know about the Peirce influence) That said I’ve read a lot of the debate between Pinker and him and he certainly doesn’t come off as a Rationalist to me. If anything I’d think both would be open to evolution selecting for rules precisely because of structures inherent in the universe. (Although I can’t remember if either said anything along those lines) That view of evolution might raise the question of what we mean by contingent. Certainly it’s contingent in certain ways but not in others. (Much like vision is contingent but what it’s selected for is to deal with phenomena that isn’t contingent in any straightforward way — ignoring the symmetry breaking in the early moments of the universe) > I would agree, but most rationalists would not, I think. I should have made > it clear that I was restricting to a priori truths. Synthetic a priori > truths, which rationalists accept the existence of, are typically taken by > rationalists to have only conventions as an alternative. But even then there > is a problem. The problem is that naturalist approaches make some a priori > truths consequences of the discoverable nature of things, and not a result of > reason alone. We don’t intuit them on this account, in the rationalist sense. Right. This to me is a problem with the Rationalists. It’s really that they want two epistemological capabilities: intuition and sense. I just think that that intuition is either unconscious judgements developed over time empirically or else are a result of genetics that developed evolutionarily in a similar way. I’m dubious of some absolute unmediated intuition ala how Plato saw mathematics. (Of course Plato at least had a satisfactory explanation for how this would work via recollections - it’s been a while but I don’t recall the Rationalists having good explanations along those lines)
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