Since the human capacity for language is unique to and universal in the species, it is difficult to see how it is not at some level biological. English or Kwaikiutl grammar are not inborn, but the capacity to rapidly and completely learn SOME grammar is not learned, but inborn.
Human nature is not like other animals natures because it is preserved and overcome by our culture. Human nature changes. Also, human culture has natural implications and effects, as demonstrated by ecological anthropology. This history of humans shaping their own natural aspects has not obliterated nature and especially natural limits on human beings. Such a claim is philosophical idealism and Marx was a philosophical materialist.
Charles Brown
>>> "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> 11/05 12:56 PM >>>
On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, Carrol Cox wrote:
> My main point (and perhaps I shouldn't have added to it as I did) was
> that dragging "pomos" into the debate over human nature was ridiculous.
I do think that much that passes under the name of Postmodernism is ridiculous, but I'm not sure that "dragging them into the debate" is, given that a good deal of noise (with reactionary political implications) is currently coming from self-styled PoMos about how statements about human nature are per se inadmissible. (See, e.g., the recent books by Terry Eagleton and Perry Anderson).
Chomsky has been attacked from early on by social-constructivists of various types (including some soi-disant Marxists) for his account of language: it can't be true, they said, because it was insufficiently social. ("`Biological endowment,' indeed!"). But the question is not whether his views are Marxist or PoMo, but whether they're correct.
--C. G. Estabrook