I don't think anyone should feel any need to defend a writer s/he happens to like. For instance, Carrol's literary taste tends to run from conservative (e.g. Jane Austen) to reactionary authors (e.g. Ezra Pound), but I've never heard him apologize for his taste or the politics of his favorite authors. As a matter of likes and dislikes, there are many parts of Adorno I like. For instance, Adorno said: "Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying." "To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults." And other neat things.
> This makes me curious about a general question, though. Are theories
> of mind always suspect if they lack an historical element?
How about the biology of the brain, as Carrol argued, instead of theories
of the mind?:
>This is overtly and crudely religious. The *brain* is ahistorical (at
>least in the relative short run of the last 100,000 years) The mind
>doesn't "have" a history, it *is* its history. It is complex of social
>relations grounded in the physical structure of the brain.
And for the purpose of scientific inquiry into the brain, I think it best to dispense with psychoanalysis, especially since psychoanalysis is committed to the two-sex, two-gender model (however you deconstruct it or nominalize it).
> I may be
> opening up a very ugly can of worms, but what does this mean for
> Chomsky's ideas about the innateness of language? I know this is
> quite a swerve away from the original topic, but...
As for Chomsky, I don't know if his linguistic theory holds. I've never had much interest in his works in this discipline. What does it exactly mean to argue that language is innate? Chomsky (from what I have read of his linguistics) seems to say that each human being innately possesses an Ur-Structure of Language capable of generating languages, and if that's his theory, I don't find it interesting, but I may be misrepresenting him a great deal here. Perhaps this is a question that someone else can better address. It's indeed another can of worms.
Yoshie