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A_CHOMSKY_PROBLEM

                                             April     02, 2013
                                             September 01, 2013


http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1114177.ece


David Hawkes,
"How Noam Chomsky's world works"           David Hawkes: prof
_Times Literary Supplement_,               of English at
29 August 2012:                            Arizona State.

   "Anyone following the career of              (Funny: Hawkes indulges in
   Noam Chomsky is soon confronted              so much insulting, snide,
   with a problem. In fact, it has              condescension throughout,
   become known as the 'Chomsky                 I was thinking he must be
   problem'."                                   British...)


I've never heard this phrase, myself.
And if you try doing web searches on
"The Chomsky Problem", you're likely
to find people talking about whether        There is however this piece
Chomsky was hard enough on the Khmer        by Norbert Hornstein (U of
Rogue.                                      Maryland) making fun of David
                                            Hawkes for apparently having
                                            coined his own term:

                                            http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-chomsky-problem.html

                                                     Clearly, this is The
                                                     Hawkes Problem.

      David Hawkes continues:                                 Someday, *I'd*
                                                              like to have
      "Chomsky has achieved eminence in two very              a problem named
      different fields, theoretical linguistics and           after me.
      political commentary. The 'Chomsky problem' is
      that his approaches to these fields appear to              (The Silly
      contradict each other. In politics Chomsky is               Formatting
      a radical, but in linguistics he takes                      Problem.)
      positions that can easily be characterized as
      reactionary. He treats linguistics as a branch
      of biology. He traces language to a 'Universal
      Grammar' resident in the physical brain. He
      believes that our linguistic nature is
      hard-wired into our genes. Because they
      diminish the influence of environment on human
      behaviour, such claims can be used to suggest
      that certain modes of social organization are
      natural and immutable. As a result, they have
      often been associated with conservative politics."

So far so good...

Hawkes then goes on to repeatedly
insist (only proven by assertion,
as far as I can tell) that there        My version of this
are Big Problems here that Chomsky      "problem" is up here:
is dancing away from.
                                             QUESTION_FOR_CHOMSKY

There might "appear" to be a
contradiction, but it does indeed
just rest on an association, and
that might be mistaken.

      The idea that conservative
      doctrine is necessarily                  For example, consider
      supported by a belief in genetic         the case of homosexuality,
      inheritence is exaggerated:              where liberals like to
                                               believe it's genetically
           NATURE_OF_THE_WALLS                 inherited (something
                                               inevitable, not a matter
                                               of choice), and
   If one wanted to resolve                    conservatives seem to fear
   this apparent contradiction                 that it's a learned
   (instead of just intone some                behavior that, for
   nasal "tut tuts") one could                 example, a queer teacher
   come at it a number of ways.                might pass on to students.


   Norbert Hornstein calls it a
   slippery slope argument: just    And I see that Hornstein
   because one human capacity is    goes on to make arguments
   genetically inherited doesn't    similar to mine. (And he
   mean that all of them are.       got his remarks out back
                                    in 2012).
            I gather that this
            is not Chomsky's take,
            though:

                    ETHICAL_FACULTY

   The way I would resolve the
   apparent contradiction:

   We may have many tendecies,
   inherited or not, and they
   may be opposed to each other
   in practice.

   Maybe we are genetically inclined
   to be self-centered bastards in our
   foreign policy, but it does not
   follow that genes are destiny, and        As always, we talk about
   that there's no way we can learn to       the inheritence of very
   overcome that tendency.                   ellusive qualities: a
                                             tendency, a capablity.

   We may possess both tendencies toward
   aggression at defending the group,
   and tendencies toward reaching out
   with cooperative overtures, and
   whether there's something genetic
   about one or both of these, we might
   call upon our learning to decide
   which capability to deploy in a given
   situation.




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