Barry:2. Chomsky (as metaphor). Chomsky is a very popular leader of the Left today. One reason, I believe, is because he criticizes the many things about capitalism that are conspicuously indefensible while avoiding the less popular task of proposing specific policies to amend indefensible current practices. This is little more than traditionalopposition politics, and Chomsky is often on the lecture circuit telling people what they already think. (Consider Skinner's observation that 'it is probable that our enjoyment [of literature] comes in large measure from the fact that the literary work says what we, the reader, tend to say.'(1))
bill:
I have a minor criticism of Chomsky (see below) but I think your characterization is a bit unfair. What do you expect him to be - another Lenin? While he receives audiences around the world, his political views are rarely given coverage in the U.S. The fact that he has been on picket lines and in demonstrations (for which he has been arrested) are not the popular activities of scholars. Nor do I understand Skinner's observation. Certainly in the case of non-literature my views have undergone a considerable transformation in the past five years or so as a result of carefully re-reading material to which I formerly found considerable objection. To say that we 'enjoy' works that reinforce our self-conceptions may be true, but this is a rather narrow dimension of 'enjoy'.
Barry:
As far as 'principles being a priori part of human biology' goes, there is long tradition of asserting that 'man' is 'innately' selfish and aggressive, and Chomsky here suggests that certain aspects of 'human nature' are indeed immutable---without considering that phylogenic behaviors, like ontogenic behaviors, are shaped by contingent variables and without considering that 'some phylogenic behavior may have had an ontogenic origin.'(2) ('Black box' critics of behaviorism may find it odd that behaviorism posits that all behavior originates with the individual, not with groups...)
bill:
Where I disagree with you (and apparently Skinner) is on this notion of a "black box" or some such mystical "a priori" notions about human biology. It is certainly reasonable to assume that certain behaviors (ontogenic) may find a "fitness landscape" that results in phylogenic transmission. But what is being discussed in relation to Chomsky, I assume, is his positing of a Language Acquisition Device [LAD]. Now while I have not gone into the studies of linguistics (and this is not really the forum), I have been persuaded by enough material that the facility with which youngsters can pick up grammar convince me that it cannot occur through mere iteration of every possible combination of possible sentences.
"When children say hitted and cutted, they are distinguishing between past and nonpast forms in a manner that is unavailable to adults, who must use hit and cut across the board. Why do children eventually abandon this simple, logical, expressive system? They must be programmed so that the mere requirements of conformity to the adult code, as subtile and arbitrary as it is, wins over other desiderata." (The Adapted Mind p. 473)
Now Daniel Dennett objects to Chomsky's own conception of the origins and nature of his LAD.
"Chomsky suggest[s] that it is physics, not biology (or engineering), that will account for the structure of the language organ….I [Dennett] was assuming, as a good Spencerian adaptationist, that "genes are the channel through which the environment speaks" as Godfrey-Smith puts it, whereas Chomsky prefers to think of the genes' getting their messege from some intrinsic, ahistorical, nonenvironmental source of organization - "physics", we may call it." (Darwin's Dangerous Ideas p.395)
But there is No reason to suppose that such a language device ("black box") could not have evolved through natural selection processes completely compatible with neo-Darwinian theory. After all, other complex computational "black box" type organs exist in the animal kingdom to permit such things as: Dopplar-shift echolocation, steriopsis, dam building, pollen-source communication, face recognition, and celestial navigation.
Barry:
To claim that cooperation is 'innate' while aggression is 'learned,' or that aggression is 'learned' while cooperation is 'innate,' is to enter into speculative value judgments (language games) that have little bearing on the salient issue, which is: to change what human behavior can be (ontogenically and phylogenically) changed for the better.
bill
Such "claims", without some empirical evidence would indeed be speculative. Then again, there are those who would argue that Darwinian evolution is simply speculation. (But why do you call them value judgements?)
And when you say "changed for the better", on precisely what do you determine this "better" value?
bill
