> 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.
I always thought this was an obvious corrolary, which is why I was so surprised to hear not one, but numerous denials over the years. I'm glad to hear he's expressed the view you and William cite, but I wish he'd done so more consistently.
There's a third major position in linguistics -- aside from Chomsky's and the PoMos -- which bears on left-liberal politics, and that's the cognitive linguists approach epitomized by George Lakoff.
His book, *Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't* is an obvious expression of this. Lakoff's approach provides concepts that are, IMHO, better descriptors of conservative and liberal in terms of than standard polysci has to offer, but liberalism as he explains it can well include not just social democracy but democratic socialism.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"