Free Noam Chomsky by Wolfgang B. Sperlich Page A

different ideas about language and mind, such as the
tabula rasa
notion that the mind is a blank slate at birth, to be filled only by experience. Chomsky’s more particular theory that language competency is based on Universal Grammar ( UG ) has been questioned more by fellow linguists than by philosophers, but the issue is the same. Various schools of thought, such as functional and pragmatic linguistics, take much more store in communication as the driving force of language. Cognitive linguistics, although closer to Chomskyan linguistics, claims that language competency derives more directly from general cognitive functions, thus not stipulating a separate interface such as Chomsky’s UG .
    In particular, Chomsky’s philosophy of language has made a great contribution to the age-old question as to how children acquire language and how they are able to use it creatively. No other theory has such an explanatory power. Chomsky has solved Plato’s Problem for language, namely how come we know so much, based on so little input.
    Hence, during the 1990s and up to 2005 Chomsky has merely reiterated his philosophical positions and has not contributed as such to the paradigm other than in his incarnation as a scientist
cum
linguist. In this respect he is very much like Russell, who, while popularly known as a philosopher, actually contributed very little to speculative philosophy. Russell’s main contribution was in mathematics and, while mathematics has never been a sub-field of philosophy, Russell succeeded in demonstrating – Wittgenstein notwithstanding – that mathematical logic is embedded in natural language. Russell’s popular philosophy – like that of Chomsky – is very much bound up in his political activism.

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Political Activist
    Anyone writing an essay on the rise of fascism and the fall of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War must have a certain political bent. If you are aged ten at the time of writing such an essay you must be destined for a career of political dissident. Chomsky remembers
    what it was about because I remember what struck me. This was right after the fall of Barcelona, the Fascist forces had conquered Barcelona, and that was essentially the end of the Spanish Civil War. And the article was about the spread of fascism around Europe. So it started off by talking about Munich and Barcelona, and the spread of the Nazi power, fascist power, which was extremely frightening. 1
    A few years later his political education took on an added dimension:
    by the time I was old enough to get on a train by myself, I would go to New York for a weekend and stay with my aunt and uncle, and hang around at anarchist bookstores down around Union Square and Fourth Avenue. There were little bookstores with émigrés, really interesting people. To my mind they looked about ninety; they were maybe in their forties or something, who were very interested in young people. They wanted young people to come along, so they spent a lot of attention. Talking to these people was a real education. 2
    The uncle in question ran a news-stand that was a meeting place for intellectuals and professionals involved in psychoanalysis. Their political theories as to the state of the world were far more varied than the spectrum between traditional Left and Right. New York, as the great melting pot and first port of call for those escaping a bleak Europe and Asia, is a hotbed of political intrigue. While mainstream American politics is preoccupied with the difficult question of whether or not to engage in the coming military conflagration, there are, on the Left in particular, widely differing opinions as to what should or shouldn’t be done. Young Chomsky’s lessons in politics in New York were from a wide variety of sources, including those of the Jewish anarcho-syndicalists. They had looked to Barcelona as the promised land where a truly participatory democracy was on the verge of being realized. Chomsky’s visits to the offices