Thanks for the correction. In earlier incarnations he talked around the basis for the TG, I thought he was making a point but maybe in the context he just didn't think it was germane.
Anyway, the point is that what makes him Cartesian (he thinks) is his commitment to innate ideas. Although as a matter of fact he's really committed to innate capacities, which are not ideas in the sense that Descartes meant. And since the thinks these capacities are genetically based, if that's a materialist or physicist explanation (although he thinks that's not a coherent notion), then he's committed to a non-dualistic, materialist version of the doctrine of innate ideas. Actually I think he's about as Cartesian as Rawls is Kantian -- not very.
--- Arash <arash at riseup.net> wrote:
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> (I am carefully avoiding the term
> "genetic" here, as Chomsky also does usually in this
> context.)
>
> Arash:
>
> No, Chomsky is quite explicit in stating his belief
> that universal grammar
> is genetically specified as you can see in the
> snippet from an interview
> below. What he is averse to is the claim that this
> genetic specification
> necessarily implies natural selection.
>
> A cute story to go with this, I met a guy at a party
> once who had asked
> Chomsky what he thought was the most important thing
> someone needed when
> learning another language. Chomsky gave him a wry
> smile and replied,
> "genes."
>
> http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1984----.htm
>
> QUESTION: Do we genetically inherit this knowledge?
>
> CHOMSKY: Yes, we must. In fact, by universal grammar
> I mean just that
> system of principles and structures that are the
> prerequisites for
> acquisition of language, and to which every language
> necessarily conforms.
>
> QUESTION: Does it mean that this genetic basis of
> language is universal?
>
> CHOMSKY: Yes, that's right. But we are only one
> species. You can imagine a
> different world in which a number of species
> developed with different
> genetically determined linguistic systems. It hasn't
> happened in
> evolution. What has happened is that one species has
> developed, and the
> genetic structure of this species happens to involve
> a variety of
> intricate abstract principles of linguistic
> organization that, therefore,
> necessarily constrain every language, and, in fact,
> create the basis for
> learning language as a way of organizing experience
> rather than
> constituting something learned from experience.
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >But Chomsky sees his transformational grammar as a
> sort of innate idea, a structure to our language
> (all
> human language) that we come with without having to
> learn it from experience the way we learn to speak a
> particular language. (I am carefully avoiding the
> term
> "genetic" here, as Chomsky also does usually in this
> context.) That is why he calls himself "Cartesian."
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>
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