It may help to explain your main complaints about Chomsky's NLR article, to read the very first footnote, which states that the article is the edited (by whom, Chomsky or the Editors?) transcripts of a public speech by Chomsky. this , if the references (which would not have been needed for the orignal delivry of the speech) would have had to be chased up and added in afterwards, plus deadline considerations. This would be true, especially if Chomsky's own note would have simply pointed to author, date and organ (all that he would have needed to assemble the speech). to look for deliberate shoddiness tehre is wrong.As to your otehr complaints. AFAIK Chomsky's main complaint about Behaviourism, is teh way in which it treats people as malleable objects, rather than as outright subjects, and it is this that at least gives it its totalitarian potential (lets not forget also that totalitarian regimes are based on behavioural compliance with the ruling power, rather than an internalised discipline (Foucualdian sense) or desire. Hence under feudalism you were expected to make public behavioural obiessances to the rulers, nor publically act or speak against them, no matter how you really felt. Hence the differences between Catholicism and protestantism, one based on public behaviour, the other on internalised beliefs and values. Likewise stalinism was about doing the right thing, rather than believing the right thing. Its a function of dictatorship, of the brutal sort, that it is more concrened with the way you behave than teh way you think. perhaps this leads Chomsky to an erroneus misconception of Behaviourism, or maybe not, I can't say.
BTW- did Skinner have anything to say about Mill's Panopticon, I'd be intereste to hear his view on that, or an extrapolated potential view of it...
Further, your own understanding of Chomsky (as evinced by your post on Langugae many moons ago) is severly eroneus. Chomsky would never imply that all meaning of langugae is based upon a universal genetic coding, rather that the Universal Generative Grammar provides teh structural (Deep structure) basis for all utterances (its in tiny things like teh positioning of 'both' in a sentence where it can be revealed, etc.). Almost all linguists believe that tehre must be a structure of meaning of some sort (after Suassure), and certainly teh individual is not teh source of all meaning. The accidents of understanding come from the immediate channel limitations of everyay life, and from the difference between active langugae (the I personally use) and passive language (the one's I understand others use).
I go with the line that signifiers gain their meaning through historical use, but each of use must be able to record and re-use that historical structure in each of our own speech acts. We must have a means, a set of rules to regulate the use of signifiers, and that is grammar. Certainly, things like H.P. Grice's Maxims of implicature hold out in all languages as demonstrating the means by which we communicate by not saying what we means.
BTW Can behaviourists believe in Irony? If internalised intentionality and thoughts are excluded from study, how can irony be understood, out of curiosity...
