You wrote:
> I think that what you describe above is a political
> conception of sorts. Chomsky seems to me to be
> committed to the idea that the essence of
> human nature is defined by creative freedom and that
> the political ideal for us should be to develop our
> capacity for creative freedom autonomously, so
> the goal is human self-realization.
Well, that's sure what he seems he hint at in the essay on Skinner (I'd provide a passage, but I'm goofing off at work now and don't have my books handy -- blasted expropriation of surplus labor!). He never comes right out and says it though. On the other hand, he explicitly disavows any connection between his linguistic work and his political work. More than anything else, his stance here reminds me of Nietzsche's quip that someones one only remains a philosopher by keeping silent.
> His objection to behaviorism, for instance, derives
> from the fact that he thinks that behaviorism -- or
> materialist determinism in general or only the crude
> reductionist varieties of it? -- makes human
autonomy
> non-existent or at least incomprehensible.
Caveat: I haven't read Skinner, so I don't know how far Chomsky goes in getting him right or misrepresenting him. There's no obvious incompatibility between infinite generative capability and materialism, but per Chomsky, there is one between infinite generative capability and behaviorism. Now, whether you derive infinite generative capability from generative grammar -- Chomsky's position -- or lexicalist arguments -- Scott's position -- either way it looks as though behaviorist accounts of language are in trouble.
Why doesn't he (or anybody else, I figure) make the leap from infinite generative capacity to asserting the reality of human autonomy and freedom? Because the first thing to happen would be that someone would step forward to object that merely because an entity is *capable* of infinitely many states, it does not follow that the entity is not deterministic. To use an example from computers, there are an infinite number of legitimate, i.e., syntacitcally correct, C programs. But a C compiler capable of turning them into machine code certainly isn't automous or free. This analogy isn't quite correct, since with infinite generative capacity in humans, we're talking about productive capacity for language, while in the case of the compiler we're talking about receptive capacity, but even given that flaw I hope the example is illuminating. -- Curtiss
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