[lbo-talk] Chomsky on sociobiology

Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
Tue Jun 6 05:47:12 PDT 2006


On Tuesday 06 June 2006 02:35, Luke Weiger wrote:
> It's worth noting that Chomsky's linguistic
> theories _are_ sociobiology.

This comment startled me a bit. I don't know how precisely defined the word "sociobiology" is, but you'd have to understand it pretty broadly to cover Chomsky's view of the language faculty.

Chomsky thinks there's a wired-in language capability that's general-purpose, in the sense that it can handle a wide variety of formally different languages -- languages with inflections and without, languages that put the verb first and languages that put the object first, languages with tense and languages with aspect, etc. General-purpose but not universal -- a language that always ordered words in a sentence by length, or alphabetically, wouldn't be handled by C's language capability (LC). The LC "constrains" the possible grammars of natural human languages, as C. puts it.

Chomsky's LC thus sounds to me more like an analogue of the visual system, or better, perhaps, of the wiring that enables us to recognize faces. Are those endowments considered to fall within the ambit of sociobiology? My own acquaintance with SB -- a shallow one, I admit -- has left me with the impression that it tries to explain more specific aspects of human behavior -- like the sexual double standard that seems to have kicked off this topic. Does SB address the anatomy of, say, the human hand?

(I don't want to be too contentious in my first 48 hours on the list, so somebody tell me offline if I'm being a pain-in-the-ass presumptuous newbie.)

-- --Michael J. Smith --mjs at smithbowen.net

http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org



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