cultural imperialism

Charles Jannuzi jannuzi at edu00.f-edu.fukui-u.ac.jp
Wed Nov 14 21:06:31 PST 2001



>at least from a philosophical perspective, >it seems a bit of a stretch to
>relate chomsky to empiricism (innate >structures and so on...). there is an
>interesting book: challenges to >empiricism, with an essay by chomsky
>outlining some of his ideas, if i remember >right...

Exactly. Strict empiricism runs into all sorts of problems in linguistics, cognitive sciences and even social sciences (which is why sociologits and economystics dislike Chomsky after they read his philosophy of science). We ran into this point when discussing Russell and Wittgenstein. Chomsky follows in the tradition of Russell as well as American structuralist linguistics. Philosophically, his position contrasts with empiricism in that he is an extreme RATIONALIST (this is only a partial contrast, not a contradiction, you could be a rationalist and an empiricist at the same time) . OTOH, he is not into top-down superstructuralist social theory either. Please forgive any typos--I was in a hurry.

Charles Jannuzi



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