On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, William S. Lear wrote:
> On Wed, November 4, 1998 at 19:38:47 (-0800) Paul Henry Rosenberg writes:
> >Barbara Laurence wrote:
> >> I once read an article by Chomsky in a magazine in the dentist's office
> >> [sic] ...
> >> I've been looking for an account that links Chomsky's radical humanism in
> >> politics with his universal grammar and other scientific work. I guess that
> >> the former has something to do with the latter. Anyone know any discussion
> >> of this. Jim O'Connor
> >Chomsky has repeatedly denied that there's any connection between his
> >work in linguistics and his politics.
> This is not entirely true. He says that there are very tenuous
> connections, mostly at the level of hope, between the two...
And over against the PoMo pooh-pooh of any talk of human nature, his positing of a language faculty insists that there is a human nature available for examination. And that implies, as he has said, that "people are not plastic, so you can't just do anything you want with them."
He's also suggested that fundamental ethical notions are part of human biological endowment, similar to the basic semantic structures of language.
--C. G. Estabrook