Chomsky & Skinner (was RE: Freedom and equality?)

[bill fancher]

on 9/1/00 2:11 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi at furuhashi.1 at osu.edu wrote:

> Hi Ian:

>> Some scholars cite Noam Chomsky's 1957 Syntactic Structures and his 1959
>> review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, to which Skinner never replied, as the
>> death knell of behaviorism. An anarchist slam dunk on authoritarianism in
>> yet another neglected dimension of human affairs :-)
> 
> Whether Chomsky's hypothesis of innate ideas is a blow for anarchism,
> however, is far from clear.

Particularly in light of the fact that Skinner considered himself an
anarchist. I would suggest that Ian's appreciation of the situation is based
on a "Pinky and the Brain" view of what's at stake.

-- 
bill

Consciousness is a social product. - B.F. Skinner