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

bill fancher fancher at pacbell.net
Fri Sep 1 03:21:20 PDT 2000


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



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